A gender role, or sex role, is a set of socially accepted behaviors and attitudes deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their sex. Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity.
A housewife is a woman whose role is running or managing her family's home—housekeeping, which may include caring for her children; cleaning and maintaining the home; making, buying and/or mending clothes for the family; buying, cooking, and storing food for the family; buying goods that the family needs for everyday life; partially or solely managing the family budget—and who is not employed outside the home. The male equivalent is the househusband.
Gender roles existed in Mesoamerica, with a sexual division of labour meaning that women took on many domestic tasks including child-rearing and food preparation while only men were typically allowed to use weapons and assume positions of leadership. Both men and women farmed, but in some societies, women were not permitted to plough the fields because it was believed to symbolise men's role in the reproductive cycle.
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began teaching at Wellesley College in 1973 and at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1974 until 1986. She was a Sociology and Clinical Psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, until 1986. Subsequently, she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance.
Sociology of the family is a subfield of sociology in which researchers and academics study family structure as a social institution and unit of socialization from various sociological perspectives. It can be seen as an example of patterned social relations and group dynamics.
In social anthropology, patrilocal residence or patrilocality, also known as virilocal residence or virilocality, are terms referring to the social system in which a married couple resides with or near the husband's parents. The concept of location may extend to a larger area such as a village, town or clan territory. The practice has been found in around 70 percent of the world's modern human cultures that have been described ethnographically. Archaeological evidence for patrilocality has also been found among Neanderthal remains in Spain and for ancient hominids in Africa.
Sociology of gender is a subfield of sociology. As one of the most important social structures is status. One of the most important statuses an individual claims is gender. Public discourse and the academic literature generally use the term gender for the perceived or projected (self-identified) masculinity or femininity of a person.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
In gender studies, hegemonic masculinity is part of R. W. Connell's gender order theory, which recognizes multiple masculinities that vary across time, society, culture, and the individual. Hegemonic masculinity is defined as a practice that legitimizes men's dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of the common male population and women, and other marginalized ways of being a man. Conceptually, hegemonic masculinity proposes to explain how and why men maintain dominant social roles over women, and other gender identities, which are perceived as "feminine" in a given society.
Ancient Maya women had an important role in society: beyond propagating the culture through bearing and raising children, Maya women participated in economic, governmental, and farming activities. The lives of women in ancient Mesoamerica are not well documented: "Of the three elite founding area tombs discovered to date within the Copan Acropolis, two contain the remains of women, and yet there is not a single reference to a woman in either known contemporary texts or later retrospective accounts of Early Classic events and personages at Copan," writes a scholar.
Terms such as separate spheres and domestic–public dichotomy refer to a social phenomenon within modern societies that feature, to some degree, an empirical separation between a domestic or private sphere and a public or social sphere. This observation may be controversial and is often also seen as supporting patriarchal ideologies that seek to create or strengthen any such separation between spheres and to confine women to the domestic/private sphere.
Patriarchy is a social system in which men typically hold authority and responsibility while also excluding women from it. In anthropology, it refers to a family or clan structure where the father or eldest male holds supremacy within the family, while in feminist theory, it encompasses a broader social structure where men collectively dominate societal norms and institutions.
Sexual division of labour (SDL) is the delegation of different tasks between the male and female members of a species. Among human hunter-gatherer societies, males and females are responsible for the acquisition of different types of foods and shared them with each other for a mutual or familial benefit. In some species, males and females eat slightly different foods, while in other species, males and females will routinely share food; but only in humans are these two attributes combined. The few remaining hunter-gatherer populations in the world serve as evolutionary models that can help explain the origin of the sexual division of labour. Many studies on the sexual division of labour have been conducted on hunter-gatherer populations, such as the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania. In modern day society, sex differences in occupation is seen across cultures, with the tendency that men do technical work and women tend to do work related to care.
Strength theory, the strength hypothesis or strength differences is an idea in anthropology and gender studies. Scholars use it to explain why some cultures assign some forms of work to women and other forms of work to men. In a strength theory model, cultures give certain tasks to men because men are stronger.
Ernestine Friedl was an American anthropologist, author, and professor. She served as the president of both the American Ethnological Society (1967) and the American Anthropological Association (1974–1975). Friedl was also the first Dean of Arts and Sciences and Trinity College at Duke University, and was a James B. Duke Professor Emerita. A building on Duke's campus, housing the departments of African and African American Studies, Cultural Anthropology, the Latino/Latina Studies program, and Literature was named in her honor in 2008. Her major interests included gender roles, rural life in modern Greece, and the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin.
Reproductive labor or work is often associated with care giving and domestic housework roles including cleaning, cooking, child care, and the unpaid domestic labor force. The term has taken on a role in feminist philosophy and discourse as a way of calling attention to how women in particular are assigned to the domestic sphere, where the labor is reproductive and thus uncompensated and unrecognized in a capitalist system. These theories have evolved as a parallel of histories focusing on the entrance of women into the labor force in the 1970s, providing an intersectionalist approach that recognizes that women have been a part of the labor force since before their incorporation into mainstream industry if reproductive labor is considered.
Male expendability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis, is the idea that the lives of male humans are of less concern to a population than those of female humans because they are less necessary for population replacement. Anthropologists have used the concept of male expendibility in their research since the 1970s to study such things as polygyny, matrilinearity, and division of labor by gender role.
Feminist urbanism is a theory and social movement concerning the impact of the built environment on women. The theory aims to understand what it means to be a woman in an urban space and what struggles and opportunities women encounter in these environments.
The economy-of-effort theory is an idea in anthropology and gender studies. Scholars use it to explain why some cultures assign some forms of work to women and other forms of work to men. In an economy-of-effort scenario, a given task is assigned to men or women not because of differences in their physical bodies but because other things about that culture's gender roles make it more efficient than otherwise.
A large amount of research on prehistory has been dedicated to the role of women in prehistoric society. Tasks typically undertaken by women are thought to have formed a major sexual division of labor in relation to child-rearing, gathering, and other everyday occupations. More recent research has however suggested women also played an active role in hunting and other physical activities in place of the exclusively domestic roles traditionally occupied by women in literary civilizations.
