From: hitzeman@cs.rochester.edu (Janet Hitzeman)
Newsgroups: alt.feminism
Subject: Re: Looking for "women's" rpg
Date: 14 Sep 92 22:36:34 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Computer Science Department University of Rochester

%%
%In article <wefZM6G00Vok8X5ldb@andrew.cmu.edu> k+@CMU.EDU (Karl Frederik Fischer) writes:
%>I saw some kind of documentary on PBS a few years ago that described a
%>strongly matriarchal society.  It's been a while so details are hazy. 
%>Here's what I recall:
%>
%>This tribe of people lives in Africa near a jungle and some kind of
%>lake.  They both farm and fish.
%>
%>Women are regarded as fundamentally superior to men because it is the
%>women who bear children and carry on the race.  Women may choose any man
%>they like as their mate, and they may change mates any time they please.
%> Men consequently spend a lot of their time decorating their bodies and
%>trying to attract the attention of women.  Men without mates (typically
%>the old, sick, and lazy)  are pretty much left to fend for themselves
%>without much support from the tribe.  I don't remember so much about
%>leadership and property rights, but I think it is usually the women who
%>have the final say.  The women are organized into some kind of hierarchy
%>while the men are pretty much loners who are expected to serve and
%>revere the women.
%>
%>As far as work roles, men are mainly responsible for hunting and
%>fishing, but get some help from the women.  Women are in charge of
%>farming (farming is connected with birth) but men are expected to help
%>out a lot.  I think women are mostly responsible for cooking and child
%>care but I'm not sure about this.
%>
%>Sorry I don't remember key details like the name of the tribe or where
%>they live in Africa.  Anyway I thought it was a pretty fascinating
%>instance of a culture with rather different gender roles from our own.
%>
%>- Karl
%
%Odds are that this tribe is either the Tchambuli or the Effete.  These 
%are the two tribes studied by Margaret Mead and used by many as evidence 
%that masculine and feminine roles are results of nurture not nature.  In 
%a review of _The Inevitability of Patriarchy_, Margaret Mead writes:
%
%"It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out, that all the claims so 
%glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense.  We have no 
%reason to believe that they ever existed....  Men have always been the 
%leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home."
%
%Ted

Right, right.  Margaret Mead was a wonderful woman, a pioneer.
But she was trapped in a society that saw women as necessarily
underlings, and that was what she'd been taught her whole life.
She made the mistake of interpreting what she'd seen in terms
of the rules her own society had taught her instead of considering
that there might be a society based on completely different rules.
Seriously-- Look back at the last few sentences from the quote above--
She says, well, I have the impression that women are ruling these
societies I've found, but that must be wrong because in MY society
men have always ruled.

Friedan's review of Mead expresses the following:
 ``For when sexual differences become the basis of your
approach to culture and personality, and when you assume that sexuality is the
driving force of human personality (an assumption that you took from Freud),
and when, moreover, as an anthropologist, you know that there are no
true-for-every-culture sexual differences except those involved in the act of
procreation, you will inevitably give that one biological difference, the
differnce in reproductive role, increasing importance in the determination of
woman's personality.''

So let's rethink this.  We've got societies where the women hold
the power-- Mead describes societies both where the women and men are equals
and where women dominate the men.  Why do we have to stick to this
man-over-women idea necessarily if it's possible for women to
have power in spite of (or because of, perhaps) their ability to bear
children or their level of strength?

Hitzeman
hitzeman@cs.rochester.edu
Newsgroups: alt.feminism