A better understanding of the role of women remote societies contributed to the emancipation of women today
International women’s day owes more to ethnology and anthropology than most people think. Indeed, studies of primitive societies have contributed to our current vision of the role of women in society. What is remarkable is that these studies have brought into perspective our own cultural evolution. This is true of women’s emancipation movement in Western countries. Feminists have gathered inspiration from the work of anthropologists and ethnologists from the 19th century until today. Better understanding the role of women in diverse human societies from a broad spectrum of cultures has helped Western women draw helpful comparison to assert their own rights.
Voting rights
Take, for example, the case of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States at the end of 19th century. It has been heavily influenced by ethnologists and anthropologists. Indeed, early feminist activists mentioned in their books the emancipated condition of Native American women. In the second half of the 19th century, Alice Fletcher related experience after she was sent on a mission in a Sioux tribe by the Peabody Museum, in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. The ethnologist suffragette claimed that Indian women enjoyed greater freedom that their more recently arrived Western counterparts. She pointed out that their rights to make children or not, to divorce, vote or have access to property were recognised in their societies.
This kind of knowledge also influenced her contemporary feminists, which include Susan B. Anthony, who was the founder of the New York newspaper The Revolution, in 1868. Its motto was: ‘The True Republic : men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.’ Another notorious author supporting the cause of women was Matilda Joslyn Gage, author of Women, Church and State, a book published in 1893, which took every opportunity to blast every fatherly image in her writings.
Sexual equality and freedom
Going one step beyond the battle to acquire the right to vote, women also relied on anthropology to gain greater sexual equality. Towards the beginning of the 20th century, two American ethnologists were particularly involved in such a debate. The first is Ruth Benedict, a theoretician of cultural relativism in anthropology, who focused on Native Americans. The second is Margaret Mead , a cultural anthropologist, who published controversial studies of sexuality in Oceania. They both contributed much to the advance of equality among sexes in their own culture.
Download a free PDF version of the article and spread it!Further to the work of anthropologists and ethnologists, historians too brought some depth to the understanding of occidental women’s sexual status. For example, 19th century historian, Jane Ellen Harrison was one of the founders of modern studies of antic Greek religion. She would, for example, have looked into the practices of the devouts of the god Dionysos, who were the menads, a group of very liberated women. Another defender of the importance of women’s sexual freedom was one of Harrison’s contemporaries, Margaret Murray. In a book called The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, she looked at the level of freedom women enjoyed in pagan pre-Christian religion, which help fuel feminists’ resistance to church oppression.