Women in Hunting and Gathering Period Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Women in Hunting and Gathering Period - Essay ExampleThus while the men be engage in productive labor, the women are engaged in unproductive household work that does not ask the same amount of respect.Traditionally, the role of an individual in society has been defined and characterized by the persons contribution to home and society in monetary terms. Being tied down by the responsibility of childbearing, women in traditional, patriarchal societies become been viewed as an inferior race.Women have been confined to homes due to their traditional roles of cooking, clean 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 slightly their homes.Wermuth et al have defined womens economic power as being shaped by womens train of control over surplus and the relative importance of what they produce. They have als o 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. hands have little power over women in these societies. Mutual cooperation is necessary for survival, and the division of labor surrounded by men and women is functionally and materially based. Despite their hunting role, men often interact closely with women and make up 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