Girl Power

Female power in traditional societies

It’s a truism that traditional societies are male-dominated. In a classic 1975 article in American Ethnologist, Susan Carol Rogers argues that this particular truism ain’t true. Her essay, “Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance,” examines male-female interaction in peasant society. The two parts of her title highlight two of her primary themes.

First, female power.

Anthropologists typically work with an implicit theory that formal and public power is the most significant kind of power. Wherever men have more formal power, society is male-dominated. Female power in peasant society is typically indirect. Since women aren’t involved in formal political institutions, they’re powerless.

Rogers observes that this is a truncated notion of power that has “no room for the input of informal power” (728). Her solution: If the net of theory is too porous to catch the fish of female power, it’s time for a finer-meshed net.

In peasant societies, female power is usually confined to the domestic sphere, but within that sphere they have considerable control. Even though men have legal rights over economic transactions, women manage the economy of the household. Females market bread and other farm produce, primary sources of household income. They purchase goods on the market. “Much of the family’s income passes in this way through the woman’s hands . . . . Women are thus the primary handlers of the family’s financial resources” (734). Women “bring land to the household as dowry” and continue to control that property, “participating (behind a facade of male dominance) in decisions regarding its use, as well as other household economic matters and marriage arrangements for their children” (735).