Gender roles in small-scale horticultural societies

[Kit]

An interesting conflict is developing in my WIP. There are no gender roles. Everyone who is able-bodied hunts and fights. No one wants to be incapacitated for the later stages of a pregnancy. There's a rather high death rate, and low birth rate.... and they have some cultural responsibilities that they are now struggling to fulfill because the population is declining.

 

[Nameback]

The only concern I have is that you mentioned the creatures that live close by the communities are too dangerous to domesticate. ALL of them are dangerous? If you have a proper ecosystem in place, you should have herbivores toward the bottom of the food chain, without them, you don't generally have carnivores either. You can theoretically have smaller omnivores/carnivores taking the place of the herbivores if you don't have an excess of forage for them to have and still have a managable ecosystem. People eat ANYTHING really, including lizards, snakes, reptiles and the like and I find it difficult to believe there isn't even one creature they can domesticate.

Any of the aforementioned herbivores or even small carnivores/omnivores can be domesticated; even birds can be domesticated; there would almost have to be SOMETHING they could domesticate, even if it doesn't completely cover their consumption needs. Another thing to take into account is trade, breeding pairs of goats or sheep (or other smaller mammals) could be garnered from tribes that have them available.

Generally we have only ever domesticated mammals or birds -- if the creatures in this region were reptilian, or giant arthropods, say, then it follows that they would likely be poor candidates for domestication. Or perhaps they're magical.

As to the OP -- first, I say hats off to matrifocal societies! Since so few surviving cultures are matrifocal, we (as a society) seem to have forgotten that they ever existed at all, which constrains our ideas of what is possible. As to a division of labor, I would argue that you could go either way. On the one hand, many early agricultural societies had somewhat egalitarian labor standards (that is, if we are strictly considering farmers--obviously most specialized professions and leadership roles were gendered, and rights were typically restricted, but on the farm everyone had to contribute in all areas). On the other hand, most extant pre-ag societies demonstrate a roughly 70/30 split -- women spend 70% of their time gathering, 30% hunting (and usually smaller game), and for men vice versa. Since your society is half foraging and half agricultural, I figure you could plausibly argue either way.

Also magic, if you have much of it, makes any arrangement more plausible. If the hunters rely on supernatural powers in their pursuit of game, that would presumably be just as accessible to women as to men.

Edit: It's worth noting though that most of your readers probably don't know much about anthropology and will assume that all cultures throughout time have been aggressively patriarchal, and that there has been a linear progression towards equality, beginning from a universally patriarchal prehistory. Therefore, many of them will be skeptical, assume you are being "PC," or otherwise misinterpret your work should you include any society with gender parity exceeding Europe of the Late Middle Ages. With that in mind, you might as well go whole-hog and just have full gender equality.

 

[Jabrosky]

Generally we have only ever domesticated mammals or birds -- if the creatures in this region were reptilian, or giant arthropods, say, then it follows that they would likely be poor candidates for domestication. Or perhaps they're magical.

They're mostly reptilian. I've had a dinosaur obsession since before preschool.

It's worth noting though that most of your readers probably don't know much about anthropology and will assume that all cultures throughout time have been aggressively patriarchal, and that there has been a linear progression towards equality, beginning from a universally patriarchal prehistory. Therefore, many of them will be skeptical, assume you are being "PC," or otherwise misinterpret your work should you include any society with gender parity exceeding Europe of the Late Middle Ages. With that in mind, you might as well go whole-hog and just have full gender equality.

A lot of readers probably will have that reaction, but female warriors have featured in the fantasy genre for a long time now. At any rate, if readers cannot accept gender equality in a pre-industrial setting but can accept wizards and vampires running around, they are in no position to argue about plausibility.

Getting back to my world-building, this whole discussion on prehistoric gender roles has convinced me to take your "whole hog" approach and grant full gender equality to my upland societies. They don't really have a need for gender-based division of labor anyway.

 

[Kit]

At any rate, if readers cannot accept gender equality in a pre-industrial setting but can accept wizards and vampires running around, they are in no position to argue about plausibility.

:bounce: :biggrin:

 

[SeverinR]

I think it comes down to math and biology. A woman, once pregnant, is out of the arena of potential "new" pregnancies for around a year (to make things simple). The time frame alone means they are reproductively more valuable.
.

Technically a woman can become pregnant twice in the same year, I believe a woman can get pregnant 6 weeks after birth, which would be around 11 months since first conception. It would be very stressful to the mothers body, breast feeding does diminish the chances but it is possible. (hormones go crazy in alot of different ways)

Female role in society, I believe in most cultures woman are the last defense to protect the children. They are protected by the men, so they can survive to add to the numbers, ie replace the fallen warriors or make new baby makers.

In a battle;
The mightiest fight first, then the next strongest, the weakest or injured men are the last line before the women, the women sacrifice themselves for the children.

Also men injured in battle enough not to be able to hunt or fight, would be expected to drop into gatherer preparer roll.

In a situation where the women are few, and the men are many, culture usually dictates the best men gets the woman. The woman might get a choice in which best man, but they probably wouldn't get to chose someone deemed not worthy. Also the extra men will have drive to find more women, ie go to war to conquer so as to aquire women. Men go to war for a shortage of money, food/water, and women. The basic of necessities.

strange, I didn't think you could lead a horticulture? oh, wait you can, you just can't make them think.

 

[Steerpike]

Technically a woman can become pregnant twice in the same year, I believe a woman can get pregnant 6 weeks after birth, which would be around 11 months since first conception. It would be very stressful to the mothers body, breast feeding does diminish the chances but it is possible. (hormones go crazy in alot of different ways).

Yes. Which is why I said "around" a year and "to make it simple." The general point didn't rely on the specific number, just that it is lengthy and a much different situation than the availability of males for reproduction.

 

[Shockley]

This is making me think of a passage from Plutarch's Life of Marius, describing the immediate moment in time after a battle between the Germanic (possibly) Cimbri tribe and the Roman legions under Gaius Marius:

The fugitives, however, were driven back to their entrenchments, where the Romans beheld a most tragic spectacle. The women, in black garments, stood at the wagons and slew the fugitives — their husbands or brothers or fathers, then strangled their little children and cast them beneath the wheels of the wagons or the feet of the cattle, and then cut their own throats. It is said that one woman hung dangling from the tip of a wagon-pole, with her children tied to either ankle; 3 while the men, for lack of trees, fastened themselves by the neck to the horns of the cattle, or to their legs, then plied the goad, and were dragged or trampled to death as the cattle dashed away. Nevertheless, in spite of such self-destruction, more than sixty thousand were taken prisoners; and those who fell were said to have been twice that number.

I point this out just to make a point - whenever we say something like 'well pregnancy would have made them more valuable' or 'they would have been protected' we're still applying modern day ideas of the role of the female backwards on a tribal or pre-tribal society. In that way, we have to be very careful.

 

[Steerpike]

You do have to be careful, but at the same time people make the mistake in the other direction, assuming that somehow a tribal or pre-tribal society is composed of members unsophisticated or unintelligent enough to recognize the basics of biology and what is important to keep the population sustainable.

 

[Jabrosky]

You do have to be careful, but at the same time people make the mistake in the other direction, assuming that somehow a tribal or pre-tribal society is composed of members unsophisticated or unintelligent enough to recognize the basics of biology and what is important to keep the population sustainable.

It's not a matter of intelligence so much as a matter of whether or not these people wanted to keep a population going. I seriously doubt most people, tribal or not, consciously have children simply to increase or sustain any collective entity outside their own families. At most they want their own personal economic security in an agricultural, socially stratified society. That would have been much less of an issue for prehistoric societies which may not have valued reproductive productivity so much.

Of course prehistoric people would have noticed that sexual intercourse led to babies, but who knows, they may have had some kind of birth control.

 

[Shockley]

You do have to be careful, but at the same time people make the mistake in the other direction, assuming that somehow a tribal or pre-tribal society is composed of members unsophisticated or unintelligent enough to recognize the basics of biology and what is important to keep the population sustainable.

I would never, ever suggest that they were unsophisticated or unintelligent. I've spent, well, a good deal of my life up to this point trying to argue the case that the Germanic 'barbarians' were an incredibly intelligent, progressive people - even in comparison to the Greeks and the Romans.

But at the same time, there is this massive difference between man-in-the-city (which is us) and man-in-primal-nature (which is closer to what we're discussing). As intelligent as (for example) the Cimbri probably were, they still brought their entire female population on campaign with them (And, just while we're on the topic of intelligent people doing bizarre things - they also fought in the snow while nude. Most of us can't comprehend walking outside nude, these people fought a battle in THE ALPS nude).

It's not that they're unintelligent or unsophisticated - just different to the point of being nearly alien, and our constructs of gender relations don't always apply. The Cimbri certainly understood that women gave birth to children and thus had that value - they still dragged them along to battle and prepared for mass suicide.

 

[Steerpike]

It's not that they're unintelligent or unsophisticated - just different to the point of being nearly alien, and our constructs of gender relations don't always apply. The Cimbri certainly understood that women gave birth to children and thus had that value - they still dragged them along to battle and prepared for mass suicide.

Doesn't sound like a representative group, does it? Or is there any such thing as a representative group? I wonder, when you end up getting to roughly the same place across so many societies, whether there isn't some underlying commonality that explains it, even if you have individual groups here and there that don't fit the pattern.

 

[Shockley]

Actually, the mass suicide/slaughter of retreating males by female camp followers is a thing within Germanic culture. You see it again and again, right up until they began to establish kingdoms and principalities. It's not so much an exception, just that the Germanic cultures are one of the few where we can actually see them at this point in cultural evolution.

 

[Ankari]

Actually, the mass suicide/slaughter of retreating males by female camp followers is a thing within Germanic culture. You see it again and again, right up until they began to establish kingdoms and principalities. It's not so much an exception, just that the Germanic cultures are one of the few where we can actually see them at this point in cultural evolution.

It's like the ultimate show of defiance. A statement that "none shall possess or master my body. I am born free and die free."

I think I've seen this theme in many movies. In Game of Thrones (TV), you have the female nobles gathered in a room during the siege of King's landing. They were getting drunk in case the city fell and they would succumb to the killer in the room.

What Shockley is talking about is on a much grander scale, but the theme is common enough.