Good overview, bad editing, no answers

"Female Power, Male Dominance" by Peggy Reeves Sanday is an anthropological survey of gender roles, written from a feminist perspective. I sometimes credit this book for turning me towards feminism, but that's (of course) an overstatement, since I've always been for gender equality. Even so, I originally assumed that all "advanced" or "complex" societies were patriarchal, equality being a characteristic only of the most primitive and undifferentiated societies. Reeves Sanday shows that the true story is much more complicated.

Let me say at the outset that "Female Power, Male Dominance" could have needed better editing. It's a relatively hard read, not because its theses are difficult to understand, but because they are difficult to find! A large part of the book feels like a compilation of ethnographic material from societies around the world, often fascinating but ultimately bewildering. The chapter on Bible interpretation feels completely speculative and badly out of place. Thus, you will need a certain amount of patience to read this work.

There are certainly interesting trends in the research material cited by the author. There seems to be a correlation between animal husbandry and patriarchy, or between advanced agriculture and the same. Likewise, there's a correlation between gathering or fishing and gender equality. However, the correlations are weaker than I expected. The number of exceptions to the rule is sufficiently large to make you wonder whether a purely "materialist" explanation for gender equality is meaningful. Apparently, some pastoralist societies have gender equality, while some societies based on gathering are patriarchal. Nor does war seem to be necessarily connected to patriarchy. 50% of the equal societies in Reeves Sanday's study experienced chronic warfare!

The author doesn't really have a solid, across-the-board explanation for why certain societies develop patriarchy, while others remain equal. She spends a considerable time discussing religious symbolism and creation myths, and seems to believe that the cultural identity of a society explains if and when it changes gender roles. But where does the cultural system originally come from? Is it completely idiosyncratic, or what?

In the last chapter, the author suddenly introduces a biological (or pseudo-biological?) explanation. She claims that men always react to stress with aggression, often by competing with other men. This struggle will eventually come up against traditional female power. When this happens, two outcomes are possible. The first is that women respond by balancing male and female power, even letting the men think that they are wholly in command ("mythic male power"). The second is that women fight back. Reeves Sanday's assessment is worth quoting: "They succeed unless men kill a few token women to show that the battle for male domination is real. In these cases women acquiesce. (...) If there is a basic difference between the sexes, other than the differences associated with human reproductivity, it is that women as a group have not willingly faced death in violent conflict. This fact, perhaps more than any other, explains why men have sometimes become the dominating sex". This sounds like a sudden collapse into sociobiology by an author who otherwise stresses cultural (even religious) factors as paramount. Essentially, Reeves Sanday is suggesting that if men decide to play it rough, women will always loose, due to the latter's psychological make-up.

I'm not sure if this is a firm basis on which to build a modern, feminist movement. Love Conquers All, huh?

I'm more into Ms. Seattle Six-Gun and amazons, LOL.