5 - Women's status

Summary

Recent analyses have made differing assessments of women's status in south New Guinea. Gilbert Herdt (1984a:66) suggests that female status was particularly low where ritualized homosexuality was practiced, and Harriet Whitehead (1986:286f.) suggests that variations in New Guinea fertility cults illustrate different cultural forms of male dominance. Daryl Feil (1987:ch.7), on the other hand, argues that the status of women was quite high in the “homosexual societies” of south New Guinea. Shirley Lindenbaum (1987:226) suggests for these societies that relations of production were roughly egalitarian, with men having a slight edge, but that men were dominant in cultural practice, since “the production and exchange of semen … creates status differences between older and younger men and especially between men and women.”

Moving beyond a logical configuration of gender and exchange, there is a large and interesting range of variation in female status, both within the central portion of south New Guinea where ritualized homosexuality was practiced and more widely along the south coast.

Female status is a notoriously difficult concept, but for heuristic purposes in the present context, I follow Herdt (1984a:66) and Feil (1987:170) and consider high female status to be reflected in (a) women's sexual and marital choice; (b) female acquisition of and control over culturally valued property; (c) female participation in public affairs and ritual celebrations – to which one might add recognition of women's role in cosmological fertility; and (d) low incidence of female pollution beliefs and of generally disparaging images of women.