Power and Gender

Many years ago I took a sociology course which really turned out to be about anthropology. Indeed the two disciplines are so close that Carleton U used to offer a 100 level course called “Introduction so SocioAnthropology” or something fairly similar to that.

Anthropologists roughly divide societies into basic groups by how they extract a living from the environment. The basic groups are hunter/gatherers, horticultural (take a stick, push it in the ground, drop a seed in), agricultural (plows) and industrial (nomads exist off to one side). What’s interesting about this is that that with very few exceptions (the Inuit are one) hunter gatherer bands are the most egalitarian societies, by far – even more egalitarian than modern industrial societies.

Agricultural societies, on the other hand, are the least egalitarian societies in general.

My Prof at the time posited the following: the more a gender contributes the more powerful they are. In typical hunter gatherer bands women account for 60% to 70% of the food – while the men are out hunting, they gather, and they gather, in fact, more food than the hunters bring in. In agricultural societies, on the other hand, men do the plowing, and women are generally relegated to the home.

But this begs an obvious question, one I immediately asked. If power is based on contribution, why aren’t hunter gatherer bands matriarchal? After all, the women are actually contributing not an equal amount of food – but much more than the men!

The answer was interesting, and I think, has a lot of truth to it. Gatherers don’t work in tight teams. Hunters, as a rule, did (remember, these guys didn’t have guns.) So the men had stronger social ties than the women.

And it is true, in general, that wherever you see women with low status, they are kept from interacting much – from forming ties with other women, or even more so, with men outside their families.

In our own society, it is striking that when things go really bad it is often with women who have become practically house bound. And it is also notable that the 50’s had women practically confined to the house.

None of this, really, should come as a surprise.

If you have the ability to produce more money, you’ll be more powerful. And who you know is one of the biggest determinants of how influential and powerful you are. Simply mentioning that you are friends with a noted lawyer, or being known to hang out with powerful people, can make you money or scare off potential predators. Not to mention give you leverage against an abusive spouse.

The housebound period then, that many modern women go through when they have their children, reduces their power both directly by reducing their earning power, and indirectly because it is often accompanied by a collapsing social circle. Likewise the tendency of many to lose friends once they become married is something to be guarded against.

The general principles, however, suggest hope for those who prefer more egalitarian societies. Because, in general information societies, should we manage to attain such, will increase the ability to maintain and extend social ties despite physical circumstances, and upper body strength will be even less necessary than it is now to earning a living. The hangover of old attitudes, the glass ceiling and so on will still be there, but there should be more cracks in that ceiling, and more power and influence to use in combating those attitudes.

Originally published at the Agonist, or maybe BopNews.