Women in Hunting and Gathering Period - Essay Example

Topic: Women in Hunting and Gathering Period Economics of Race and Gender" In economic terms, to be gainfully employed is when a person is paid wages according to the prevailing market rates for the productive work done by him/her. The labor is a resource necessary to complete the conditions of demand, supply and market economics.The roles of men and women in economic and social terms would depend on the type of society and its stratification. While in a majority of developing countries, the men go out to earn a living and the women take care of household chores, in some African and Asian matriarchal communities, the women have a bigger say in the finances of the household.

Thus while the men are engaged in productive labor, the women are engaged in unproductive household work that does not command the same amount of respect.Traditionally, the role of an individual in society has been defined and characterized by the person’s contribution to home and society in monetary terms. Being tied down by the responsibility of childbearing, women in traditional, patriarchal societies have been viewed as an inferior race. Women have been confined to homes due to their traditional roles of cooking, cleaning and child rearing.

However, a study of Paleolithic and Neolithic times has proved that this was not always the case. In the hunting and gathering societies, it has been noticed that women had a greater role in gathering food around their homes.Wermuth et al have defined womens economic power as being shaped by womens level of control over surplus and the relative importance of what they produce. They have also quoted womens economic control as being influenced by importance of womens labor, organization of labor and the gender ratio in the population.

Wermuth et al have also referred to hunting and gathering societies as small bands of loosely associated families with low surplus and low inequality. Men have little power over women in these societies. Mutual cooperation is necessary for survival, and the division of labor between men and women is functionally and materially based. Despite their hunting role, men often interact closely with women and even with small children.Draper, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard observes that in the hunting and gathering society, women are more independent and powerful.

They are not considered as subordinate to men and generally both the genders enjoy an equal status. As women in such societies contribute to gathering food for the families’ subsistence, they have greater control over the food (produce in this case) and enjoy an equal position. However, the same women start enjoying less independence as they move towards more sedentary life-styles, giving rise to major differences in gender roles from childhood itself and stereotyping roles on the basis of gender, she opines.

To conclude, probably, when primitive man evolved from an unbiased society, he changed the roles and equations and started treating women as subordinates and completely ignored the contribution made by women to society in terms of household work and child bearing and rearing and instilling in them discipline and values, for which there can be no monetary compensation.References: 1. Wermuth Laurie, MaAt-Ka-Re Miriam & Monges. Gender Stratification: A Structural Model for Examining Case Examples of Women in Less-Developed Countries.

Frontiers - A Journal of Womens Studies, Vol. 23, 2002.http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=LH4YQkmn3DyLJbXv5t9vYtm1TTt8hVs1JnZQD3zWG9qGpJJxd28H!609501035!-797291915?docId=50024925112. http://www.customessaymeister.com/customessays/Anthropology/12824.htm3. Draper, Patricia. “Kung Women: Contrasts in Sexual Egalitarianism in Foraging and Sedentary Contexts"