Entailment Theory and Method: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Sexual Division of Labor

White, Dougľas R.; Burton, Michael L.; Brudner, Lilyan A.

doi:10.1177/106939717701200101

Cited by 51 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The theory that women's labor specializations reflect their muscular capacities has already been effectively discredited in the existing literature (Brown 1970;White et al 1977). Athough hormonal differences dictate that capacities for muscular strength and endurance are greater among men, the values overlap substantially between the sexes.…”

Section: Hunting and Muscular Strengthmentioning

confidence: 96%

The Sexual Division of Foraging Labor: Biology, Taboo, and Gender Politics

Brightman

1996

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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If women's biology is their economic destiny, nowhere is this destiny more inexorable than in anthropological representations of the sexual division of foraging labor. Physically weak, immobilized by nursing children, engrossed in the provisioning of reliable plant foods, redolent with odors that drive away the game, and subject finally to the axiom that specialization everywhere increases productivity, the foraging woman who gathers but does not hunt seems multiply inevitable, the product at once of logistical necessity and evolutionary selection.This essay develops a contrasting perspective, one consonant with Claude Meillassoux's (1981:20-21) observation that "nothing in nature explains the sexual division of labor, nor such institutions as marriage, conjugality, or paternal filiation. All are imposed on women by constraint, all are therefore facts of civilization which must be explained, not used as explanations." The first section of the essay questions both the inevitability of the sexual division of foraging labor and the logical and empirical adequacy of the existing physiological theories of it. Although they account persuasively for the relative non-viability of an exclusively female labor force of hunters, such theories explain absolutely nothing about why categorial divisions of foraging labor exist at all, why they are predicated on gender, or why women's hunting is almost universally either marginalized or proscribed. The second section relates the exclusion of women's hunting to taboos on women's use of hunting weapons and to a more general ideology of metaphysical antipathy between femaleness and the hunting profession in foraging societies. The third section considers the effects of these taboos and of the division of labor in producing asymmetric distributions of prestige and authority between the sexes. The Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 1988 annual meeting of the American all provided valuable suggestions at different stages of production. My thanks also to anonymous referees. The usual disclaimers apply. 0010-4175/96/4401-9165 $7.50 + .10

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Section: Hunting and Muscular Strengthmentioning

confidence: 96%

The Sexual Division of Foraging Labor: Biology, Taboo, and Gender Politics

Brightman

1996

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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“…She predicted that women's work should be focused on low-risk activities close to home, which did not require her undivided attention and could easily be interrupted and resumed. Modifications of this hypothesis have stressed gender differences in strength (Murdock and Provost 1973) and the avoidance of danger and long-distance travel (White et al 1977). That women curtail or adjust their subsistence activities owing to child-care constraints has been adequately shown in several societies (Hames 1988;Hurtado et al 1985;Jarvenpa and Brumbach 1995;Kramer 2004), but recent literature has emphasized the range of strategies that women can pursue to manage the dual tasks of production and reproduction, rather than focusing on limitations to either their physical prowess or the range and difficulty of their tasks (Kramer 2005;Peacock 1991).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert

Scelza

Bird

2008

Hum Nat

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The division of labor has typically been portrayed as a complementary strategy in which men and women work on separate tasks to achieve a common goal of provisioning the family. In this paper, we propose that task specialization between female kin might also play an important role in women's social and economic strategies. We use historic group composition data from a population of Western Desert Martu Aborigines to show how women maintained access to same-sex kin over the lifespan. Our results show that adult women had more same-sex kin and more closely related kin present than adult men, and they retained these links after marriage. Maternal co-residence was more prevalent for married women than for married men, and there is evidence that mothers may be strategizing to live with daughters at critical intervals-early in their reproductive careers and when they do not have other close female kin in the group. The maintenance of female kin networks across the lifespan allows for the possibility of cooperative breeding as well as an all-female division of labor.

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“…Boserup's work coincided with an increased anthropological interest in studies of sexual division of labor and of women's status (Brown 1970a(Brown , 1970bBurton, Brudner and White 1977;Friedl 1975;Martin and Voorhies 1975;Murdock and Provost 1973;Quinn 1977;Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974;Sanday 1973;Schlegel 1977;White, Burton and Brudner 1977; Whyte 1978).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Plow, Female Contribution to Agricultural Subsistence and Polygyny: A Log Linear Analysis

Burton

Reitz

1981

Behavior Science Research

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Relationships among plow agriculture, female contributions to crop tending, and polygyny in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample are examined here. Without controlling for world regions, a log-linear analysis would suggest that each of these variables is related to the other two. Introducing a control for region with a four-way contingency table, we find significant relationships between region and each of the three variables. Furthermore, the control for region eliminates the relationship between plow agriculture and the female contribution to crop tending. Theorists such as Boserup have claimed that women do less agricultural labor with intensive agriculture. This relationship is apparently not a valid one, but simply a consequence of the joint diffusion of the three variables throughout the Old World.

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Entailment Theory and Method: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Sexual Division of Labor

Cited by 51 publications

References 10 publications

The Sexual Division of Foraging Labor: Biology, Taboo, and Gender Politics

The Sexual Division of Foraging Labor: Biology, Taboo, and Gender Politics

Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert

The Plow, Female Contribution to Agricultural Subsistence and Polygyny: A Log Linear Analysis

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