Gender Roles In Native American Society

Gender roles have changed with the times; women have worked to strip themselves of the house wife ideal too become independent working women. Though the way we see women now didn’t just happen overnight, it came from years and years of challenging gender ideals. That’s why to truly understand genders roles of women in modern day society we have to go back into the past and examine what really shaped gender and how we have come to see gender today. To answer those questions, we will look back at hunter gatherer and Native American society’s all the way through to World War I and the Cold war. In early native American society’s their gender roles were defined on how each individual could help the community. Since they were hunter gathering society’s
The switch to agriculture and stationary living changed women’s roles in the new communities that were forming.(Phoenix,2016) Instead of contributing to the community by going out and finding food women were now more home ridden, they were having more kids and were taking care of the homestead while their husbands were out in the fields. This kind of domestic living led to a more governmental and patriarchal kind of society which put the position of a man and his sons higher than a
Within the Jewish religion women are secluded from religious practices and are positioned in domestic roles where their primary job is keeping the men kosher.(Phoenix,2016) In Christianity women roles are based of the old testament of the story of Adam and eve which dictates women as being sinful and lesser than men. In the Islamic faith women are seen as lesser than the men and are house bound where they do domestic work and take care of their children. In all of these religions marriage was important and dictated the rules of men and women’s domestic coexistence. In Judaism there was a contract called the Ketubah, this contract binded the men to the women and stated what each individual duties were in the marriage for example, Men would honor and support marriage and set aside money for the women if there ever divorced while the women would honor and be faithful to the man.(Phoenix,2016) Though in Islam they didn’t have the Ketubah, they did have their own set of rules when it came to marriage for example, men have the right to divorce their wife whenever they wanted where the woman cannot.( Keddie,2005) .The inequality that each religion and culture has created shows their influence in dictating women’s roles as well as influencing them as being seen as lesser than men and having less