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Women's access to power : a continuous area study

University of British Columbia

This thesis tests empirically three hypotheses advanced in the anthropological literature on women; differences in men's and women's access to power and autonomy in various spheres are associated with 1) the degree of stratification in a society, 2) the type of descent in a society, and 3) the final postmarital residence pattern in a society. I compare the access of men and women across thirty aspects of power - a multidimensional approach -rather than comparing the power of men and women - a unidimensional approach. The hypotheses are tested using ethnographic data from thirty-nine contiguous cultural units. I use a continuous area sample rather than a cross-cultural one because a continuous area sample reduces the number of confounding variables; contiguous cultures have less variety in terms of ecology, subsistence base, language, customs, and history. The results of the analysis indicate that differences in men's and women's access to power and autonomy are associated with each of the three independent variables: degree of stratification, type of descent, and final postmarital residence. The degree of stratification is the most important of these variables. The directions of the associations between women's access to power and the degree of stratification are not always those predicted in the literature, however. For some aspects of power, greater stratification is associated with relatively less access for women across cultures; for other aspects of power, greater stratification is associated with relatively greater access for women. Descent appears to be less important than degree of stratification for women's access to power; there are fewer significant relationships between the dependent variables and descent. Nevertheless, matrilineal descent is linked with equal or greater access for women in two areas. The results also demonstrate that matrilineal descent tends to dampen or work against the associations between degree of stratification and women's access to power in various spheres. In cultures with other (non-matrilineal) descent, the degree of stratification remains correlated with the dependent variables while in cultures with matrilineal descent, the relationships tend to be weaker or to disappear. The findings show that the final postmarital residence pattern in a society is associated with certain dependent variables although it also is less important than the degree of stratification. Matrilocal residence is associated with women's relatively greater access. In the literature, avunculocal residence is predicted to have a negative effect on women's power. The results demonstrate that in some cases, avunculocal residence is positively associated with women's power. From these results, I conclude that women's access to power does indeed vary across cultures; women are not invariably barred from wielding power in the community or kin group. Thus, this study indicates that there are differences in women's and men's access to power and autonomy, and this variation across cultures is related to the three independent variables tested in the thesis. Some of the relationships found are in accord with those postulated in the anthropological literature; others are not. In fact, some surprising results emerge from this analysis.

Text

2010-07-16

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26553

Sociology

University of British Columbia

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