Aztec Women Roles and Society

The roles of women are useful to historians because they provide an insight into the life experiences, cultures, thoughts, and every day life of a historical period. Similarly this essay will examine the roles of women, which provide insight into the Aztec civilization’s many strengths. The Aztec child bearer/warrior, priestess and sexual being will be analyzed to display that gender relations were complementary that produced equality. The midwife and weaver reveal that the Aztec’s specialization proved successful through fields like medicine and the market. Finally the Aztec daughter and mother will be examined to show that the Aztec’s had a strong socialization system established through education and the family. For these reasons women’s roles allow historians to look at the greater picture and see that Aztec society was advanced ad possessed three particular strengths being that its gender complementarity structure, a successful specialization of labour, as well as a highly efficiency in socialization that allowed Aztec culture to retransmit itself.
Gender relations in Aztec culture were based on a gender complementarity structure. This structure, “Defines males and females as distinctive but equal and interdependent parts of a larger productive whole.” The Aztec society was fairly gender divided however women’s tasks were usually “in the heart of the home,” taking care of the family and bearing children, whilst men’s domain was outside and involved hunting, fishing, fighting etc. A clear illustration of how roles were interdependent is seen through food production where men hunted and women cooked the catch. Each role accompanied the other because without one another there would be no sustenance. This cultural ideology could have developed because both sexes may have understood that each had a specific labour/role to fulfill ultimately for God which is supported through an admonition in the Codex of Mendoza, “This is the wish of our master and his decision