Subarctic Women

A woman had a busy domestic life. A woman played the role of wife, mother, teacher and manager. She had to please her husband, bear and raise children, educate her children, and manage all daily household activities. In the home, the woman was the jack of all trades. Part of the role of the female was to take raw goods, and turn them into useful items, such as food, candles, and clothing. Women had to clean, butcher and prepare all game brought home to the family. A woman was a household factory. Many items in the home were created by women. All clothing was made by spinning, weaving and stitching. All cloth was washed by hand without the aid of any machines. Candles were made at home by weaving a wick and pouring hot wax into a mold. A woman had to be educated enough to teach her sons and daughters the skills of life. Women spent the majority of their time performing daily tasks, but still were able to have leisure activities such as painting, embroidery, and charity work. Women had very few legal rights. In the majority of colonies, women had no legal control over their lives. It was the consensus among society that

This article from “The Real Truth about the Female” by Barbara Ehrenreich targets many beliefs that women were underestimated. The main theory suggested in this document is that, women had to follow the traditional duties. Early theories are being questioned as a result to women proving many things over the years that were often overlooked. Ehrenreich states in his article, “it does strongly suggest that in the Stone Age family, Dad-the-hunter was not the only provider.” There is a great amount of evidence that suggest the theory that women worked as hard as men. Adrienne Zihlman and Nancy Tanner stated “among surviving “hunting” peoples, most of the community’s calories—up to 70%—come from plant food patiently gathered by women.” This fact

The family life of Native Americans today is defined as a nuclear family. This consists of the mother, father, and offspring. The parents are the leaders of the household and work together in making all major decisions. This leaves both the mother and father equally in charge especially when it comes to their offspring. As the child is growing up the parents take primary responsibility in directing their child’s life. When they become a young adult they are presumed to become independent and are expected to leave home. Overall Native American families are nuclear, with both parents having equal input in decisions as well as with regard to their children.

In the reading “A Little Commonwealth”, John Demos writes about the life, norms, and misconceptions of early colonial families. He gets his information mainly through censuses found from that time period. Many people today believe that the colonial family consisted of a large extended family with several generations under the same roof. However, standard colonial families were actually made up of small nuclear families (Demos, 62). Nuclear families contain a married couple and their children. Their modest homes were simply not large enough to house many generations and censuses show that 4 to 6 family households were very common (Demos, 64). This is very similar to families today with households that contain the nuclear family. However, today it is not uncommon to hear about extended families. In fact, it can be quite common.

Women gathered food in groups; they had their own societies for ceremonial activity. They raised their children together until the children were about six or seven, at which point boys generally were sent to spend time with male relatives to be taught their roles in life. Girls remained with their mothers, learning the roles that they would eventually endeavor (Finch 44).

While the war was going on many families only had one parent at this time which was the women. The women had to maintain the farm’s, houses, and their family business. This is a lot of work for women also because women back in the times that the war was going on didn’t get to do very much they were kind of isolated from the men. The new tasks at home for the women were getting rough without another parent in the home. The women were not used to all the work and were getting stressed out.

The earliest period, Paleolithic, was revolved around the use of hunting and gathering to produce a food supply that would sustain them and the few other nomads the hunters would travel with. It was normal for the nomad group to have both men and women. The role of hunting was completed by males mostly but women may have helped, If the women weren't hunting they were gathering which the food they found accounted for majority of their diet. As the periods switched into the Neolithic era which was now dependent on farming and the use of domesticated animals It allowed the population to grow majorly. While women were becoming pregnant and raising children it became socially acceptable for them to be given the

In that time, women were known to stay home and take care of their children, cook and clean. So having an opportunity

Many women were able to do things like getting jobs that they had never been able to do before. A member of the Australian Women’s Army Service talks about how with no one to stop them, “young women without domestic responsibilities who were free to enlist did so”. Before the war, women were kept in their place as housewives, their main purposes being to please their husbands and to raise children. They were constantly taught that they were nothing without a man, and how only he was smart enough to make decisions. Dorothy Hewett even notes, “Many marriages broke down because the women just couldn’t take this man coming back and telling them what to do, as he’d always done in the past.”

Women were traditionally seen as the weaker sex – second-class citizens with a lower social status than men. A woman’s place was in the home. Men did the “heavier” labor, like plowing and hunting.

Then in society, men were portrayed as “dominant figures” and women were the “nurturers”. Men not only filled the fatherly role but they also usually earned the “breadwinning”, went to work all day, and financially provided for the wives and

As civilizations emerged in six different regions with greater human population and better agricultural technologies, a patriarchy came to existence. Agriculture during the First Civilization required intense work since agriculture required large mammals, such as cows. Heavier work such as keeping a large herd of animals required more energy, and men, who were more compatible with such labors, started to take over women’s roles. Women became pregnant more often and started to concentrate on child-rearing, instead of working in the fields; therefore, men took a smaller role in a household, and women’s status declined. As men did not have to be a household, men were able to take specialized jobs, and shape and construct the societies according

Anthropologists primarily hypothesised that a family should contain blood and marital ties. It was also believed that a family with no husband or manly income producer was not regarded as a real family. In order to reproduce a couple, mainly a woman and a man, had to be married else the child would be born out of wedlock and would be considered a “bastard”. In general anthropologists would describe a nuclear family where a husband, a wife and kids would live together in a house with only two generations. The children would rely upon their parents for affection and their upbringing. When a child is born up until late infancy it entirely relies on its mother for food and nutrition, love and affection, cleaning, bathing etc. After this stage the

Amongst societies, there is a great variety of means of survival, all of which are dependent upon factors influencing the community—geographical location and structure of authority, to name a few. Such factors and the community’s ways of survival create the underlying basis of other complex issues, including the relationship between the sexes. Many anthropological papers that concentrate on the modes of production of specific groups of people have shown a connection between the modes of production and the presence or absence of gender inequality. Futhermore, there is also evidence of a further causality between the two: as a society adopts a more complex mode of

Cultural anthropologists have identified two fundamentally different types of family structure: nuclear family and extended family. Nuclear family is based on marital ties which consists of a husband, wife and their children. Nuclear families are often found in societies with greatest amount of reproduction and child rearing and common residence. It included both female and male adults who maintain geographic mobility. Nuclear family patterns were encouraged by industrialization and technology but also have remained evident in foraging societies. Nuclear family is a two-generation family formed around the conjugal / marital union. Although to some degree nuclear families are part of a larger family structure, nuclear families remain an autonomous and independent unit. Which means the everyday needs of economic support, childcare and social interaction are met within the nuclear family itself. In societies based on the nuclear family, it is customary for married couples to live apart from both sets of parents-neolocal residence. The married couple is not particularly obliged to care for their aging parents in their own home. The nuclear family is the basic food-collecting unit. Nuclear families remain highly independent foraging groups that fend for themselves. The nuclear family is also apt to be prominent in societies such as the Inuit, which live in harsh environments. In the winter, the Inuit husband and wife with their children roam the vast Arctic wilderness in search of food. The husband hunts and makes shelters. The wife cooks, cares for the children, makes, and keeps the clothing in good repair. One of her chores is to chew her husband’s boots to soften the leather for the next day so he can resume his search for game. The wife and children cannot survive without a male in the house being the father and husband and neither can the