Comparing Ortner And Gender Roles

The anthropologists Margaret Mead and Sherry Ortner both wrote extensively about gender. Ortner’s approach to the topic was influenced by the need to understand the roots of female subordination, while Mead’s approach was influenced by a need to explore the influence of culture on gender roles. While their motivations might have differed, their analyses shared some common ground, such as the belief in gender as a cultural construct, and the need to broaden our ideas about its capabilities in the interest of maximizing human potential. Both anthropologists have important things to say about gender, but Mead’s analysis is more convincing, due to the breadth of research she draws her conclusions from. In “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture,”
She writes of gender as being culturally specific, and offers evidence of this in her work, “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies,” which examines gender roles among three tribes in New Guinea. She also asserts that gender interpretations are changeable, and that a cross-cultural examination of them would reveal their arbitrariness: “Whether we deal with small matters or with large, with the frivolities of ornament and cosmetics or the sanctities of man’s place in the universe, we find this great variety of ways, often flatly contradictory one to the other, in which the roles of the two sexes have been patterned.” (Male and Female, p.8) While Mead was a strong believer in the primacy of culture in shaping gender roles, she also acknowledged the role of biology. She was interested in the influence of common childhood physical experiences upon the formation of gender identity and sexual expression, stating that “…there are certain biological regularities that cannot fail to play a part in these interpretations.” (Male and Female,
She draws upon a wide range of data to support her ideas, from her observations of New Guinea tribes in “Sex and Temperament,” to her observations on the influence of early child-rearing experiences upon gender identity formation in “Male and Female.” In comparison, Ortner’s analysis seems less concrete. Ortner’s theory that woman is symbolically aligned with nature is compelling, but her claim that “… we find women subordinated to men in every known society. The search for a genuinely egalitarian, let alone matriarchal, culture has proved fruitless” (Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? p.70) is both sweeping and inaccurate. Mead’s “Sex and Temperament” features societies without male supremacy, such as the Tchambuli and the Mundugumor. The matrilineal Crow tribe, mentioned in Ortner’s piece, is another example of a society where women can assume powerful roles. To dismiss them, as Ortner did, as a “fairly typical case” of a society that is insufficiently egalitarian, suggests that Ortner’s metric of gender equality is inflexible, and arguably Eurocentric. Ortner’s analysis makes an ambitious claim- global female inequality- and supports it with a neatly constructed, but highly abstract, argument. The thrust of Mead’s analysis is no less ambitious- gender roles are taught, not innate- but it is richly supported with data, which results in a more satisfying