>Miles:
>
>Okay, Woj has successfully jerked my chain on this. There are many
>hunting and gathering societies that have far less gender stratification
>
>[WS:] And what percent of the population live in hunting and gathering
>societies? I do not think there are many such societies left. Even the
>!Kung bushmen went out of business.
>
>
>
You made the claim that there are no non-Western societies that give
women the kind of opportunities that Western societies do. If I recall
my formal logic correctly, I need only provide one counterexample to
falsify your claim. It doesn't matter how many people currently live in
h & g societies; the fact remains that there have been a number of
non-Western societies throughout history with less gender inequality
than our society.
>Comparing complex societies to small hunting and gathering groups is
>comparing apples to oranges. First the internal structure of both kinds of
>groups is very much different, which makes a comparison of social distance
>between subsets of the societies very difficult if at all possible.
>Obviously, there is much more specialization in complex societies, and thus
>possibility for stratification, than in a small nomadic band. Second, there
>is a great diversity among hunting and gathering societies - some of them
>egalitarian other extremely stratified and male-dominant (cf. the Yanomamo).
>So which of these should we compare to more complex societies?
>
>
>
You're the one making the claim that there are no such gender
egalitarian non-Western societies, so even one example is enough to show
you're wrong.
>And then, there is the fundamental question. Suppose for the sake of the
>argument that hunting and gathering societies are, on average, more
>egalitarian than complex ones. Does that mean that we should do away with
>more complex social organization and all its vices and benefits, and return
>to the primitive form?
>
>
I disagree; that's not the fundamental question at all. I'm not
bringing this up to make an argument that we should all join h & g
tribes; I'm bringing this up to show that (a) there's nothing natural
and necessary about gender stratification in human society and (b) our
own society is not the epitome of gender equality in human history.
Here's what I propose as a fundamental question: "Why make claims about
patterns of gender stratification that are clearly inconsistent with data?"
>One more thing. Last time I took an anthro class some 20 years ago I read
>that the status of women depended not on the size of the society but on
>whether women did mainly in the housework or contributed the household by
>working outside the household. It was higher when the worked outside. With
>that in mind, capitalism transformed women from housewives and domestic
>workers to market producers - and that was the main factor that
>significantly narrowed the gender gap. Some may yearn for simpler and more
>bucolic times when men worked the land, but at that same time women stayed
>home, served their husbands, and dying while producing babies from, oh well,
>the lack of specialized health care.
>
>
>
>
There's a difference between hunting and gathering societies and
horticultural/agricultural societies. You're right, gender
stratification tends to be extreme in horticultural/agric societies,
because of women "home" role. This pattern does not really exist in
hunting and gathering societies: women don't "stay home" while men do
the work; both men and women "work the land" in different ways, and both
men and women's contributions are recognized and respected.
Miles