ENGENDERING ORIGINS:
Theories of Gender in Sociology and Archaeology
Jane Balme and Chilla Bulbeck
Abstract
Feminist knowledge and its impact on other academic
disciplines arose in the 1970s, but it has had an uneven impact
in different disciplines. We argue that gender as a theoretical
concept has challenged both sociology and archaeology
but analyses of gender practices and embodiment which
challenge the homogenous categories of women and men
have made much less impact in archaeology particularly
the archaeology of deep time. The paper concludes by
suggesting that feminist archaeologys exploration of the
origins of gender offers critical insights concerning the ways
in which feminist sociologists define their theories with and
against the Western folk model of sex and gender.
Introduction
Feminist knowledge and its impact on other academic disciplines
is a recent phenomenon, arising in the 1970s when womens
studies courses were established in the USA, Britain, Australia
and elsewhere (e.g. Magarey et al. 1994 for Australia). Although
it has been claimed that feminist critical theory laid bare a
ubiquitously masculine bias in what counts as knowledge in
every social sciences discipline (Ruthven 1998:107), it is also
generally agreed that the impact of gender theories has been
variable. Stacey and Thornes (1985) influential article argued
that anthropology had been the most transformed by feminist
theory, economics the least, with sociology in between. Thorne
(2006:474), confirming this order 20 years later, suggests feminist
ideas have made considerable headway in sociology. Feminist
theories made more headway in disciplines with a hermeneutic
or humanities orientation and effected least change in those
with a positivist or natural scientific approach. Disciplines which
incorporated both approaches met the challenge of feminist
theory by quarantining gender issues and analyses to separate
and subordinated subject matter within the discipline (see
Stacey and Thorne 1985 for sociology; for studies of the impact
of gender on various disciplines see Conkey 2007; Nelson 1996;
Ritter and Mellow 2000; Strathern 1985).
The radical transformation proposed by gender studies, and
one that many theorists now take for granted, is that neither
gender nor sex constitute natural or biological pre-given
categories, which require no social theoretical analysis. Prior to
the 1970s, the different things men and women did received no
academic analysis (e.g. Wylie 1997 for archaeology) and most
academics in most disciplines held four basic precepts about
women in society. First, they accepted indeed assumed that
women and men did different things. Second, they presumed
that sex differences were biologically-determined and had not
changed across human history; sex was not a variable that
1
Archaeology, M405, School of Social and Cultural Studies, University
of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009,
Australia jbalme@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
Gender, Work and Social Inquiry, School of Social Sciences,
University of Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia chilla.bulbeck@adelaide.
edu.au
Number 67, December 2008
could explain cultural change. If any perceived sex differences
were subject to comment, academics unhesitatingly explained
them by drawing on their own experiences of the society in
which they lived. Third, they usually applied the idea of men
and women as homogenous categories, which meant that
white middle class experiences often stood in for all mens and
womens experiences (e.g. Conkey 2005:27-29 for archaeology).
Fourth, what women did was considered to be inferior to what
men did, indeed almost negligible in contributing to whatever
the discipline held to be important activities. In sociology, this
was the public world of work and politics rather than the private
world of familial intimacy. In archaeology, it was hunting rather
than gathering, stone tools rather than digging sticks: the
processes that led to us becoming human, including language,
were assumed to derive from the co-operation required to hunt
rather than the co-operation required to transform babies into
social members.
In the above paragraph we use the term sex where readers
might anticipate the term gender (in one definition, a term
used to refer to male-female relations, whether as a matter of
social relationships or symbolic construction; Strathern 1985:2-
3). This paper explores feminist transformation of both these
terms, and we generally deploy the changing meanings they
have across their genealogy. The main distinction used in the
social sciences is between sex as a biological given and gender
as a social construct, but we will challenge this construction.
Another related distinction used in this paper is between sex as
a variable, an untheorised aspect of social relations, and gender
as a concept developed by gender theorists.
The first two sections of this article explore the impact of
gender as a theoretical concept in sociology and archaeology
in two major phases. In the first phase, female sociologists,
archaeologists, historians and so on became aware that women
were largely absent from their discipline, both as theorists and
subjects of knowledge. Feminist researchers attempt to add
women and stir and find the women worthies to write
womens experiences into the story soon challenged the
assumptions by which disciplines operated. In short, gender, a
social construct, displaced sex, a biological given, as the category
of analysis. In the second phase, a mature feminist theory
challenged disciplines to consider gendered practices: how
masculinities and femininities are constructed and performed in
opposition to each other; how they intersect or are co-constituted
with practices of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and so on (Ray
2006:460-461; Stacey 2006:480). The first phase challenged both
disciplines, but archaeology has been much less transformed
by analyses of gendered practices. The explanation lies partly
in the greater ease with which gender can be explored at both
the material and symbolic levels in sociology as compared with
archaeology. Furthermore, because gender theories have been
developed by scholars whose standpoint is contemporary rather
than prehistoric societies, they appear to suit sociology better
than they fit archaeology.
3
Engendering Origins: Theories of Gender in Sociology and Archaeology
The other major insight offered by this paper is the
comparison of sociologys eschewal of gender origins in a fear
of biological essentialism with archaeologys preoccupation with
origins, but, until recently, not the origins of gender as a social
aspect of organisation. In the third section of this paper, we argue
that a mature feminist theory should now return to the debate
concerning the origins of gender rather than leaving the field to
the biological determinists, particularly given the contemporary
popularity of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, to ask questions
about origins adds to the claim that gender is not essential, even
if it is apparently universal in all known societies.
As an archaeologist and a sociologist both interested in the
impact of gender studies on our respective disciplines, it is not
surprising that we have chosen to focus on a comparison of
these two disciplines. We have been gratified by the productive
insights this comparison affords, although perhaps this should
not astonish us, given the research which suggests that the
most radical advances are made, not within the self-contained
boundaries of professional elites (Thorne 2006:476), but at
the borderlands between disciplines which are more open to
the challenges from outsiders (Ray 2006:462-463 and Thorne
2006:477 for sociology; Conkey 2005 for archaeology).
Sociology
A curiosity of sociology, according to Raewyn Connell, is its
adherence to a classical tradition or canon of master theorists in
which none of the elected fathers actually motivates the empirical
activities of post-1920 sociology (Connell 1997:1512, 1545). The
sociology of Marx, Weber and Durkheim was founded on difference
between the civilisation of the metropole and other cultures whose
main feature was their primitiveness (Connell 2007:7). Thus
issues of race, gender and sexuality were core issues in describing
the superiority of the European races, for example in a growing
fear of miscegenation and the colonisers growing contempt for
the sexuality or masculinity of the colonised (Connell 2007:10-
11). Between 1920 and 1950, academic sociology flourished in only
one place, the United States, where an epistemological break was
forged with the past. The new object of knowledge was society,
and especially social difference and social disorder, within the
metropole (Connell 2007:20, original emphasis). Metropolitan
sociology no longer concerned itself with the processes of
colonisation and decolonisation (Connell 2007:29-44). Gender,
sexuality, and race relations ... were pushed to the margins in the
process of canon formation (Connell 1997:1545), as was the work
of female and minority culture male academics, who were cast
as the mere retailers of the originality and creativity produced
by the favoured sons of the canonised founding fathers (Carroll
1990:138-147).
Adding Women; Adding Gender
Until feminist intervention into sociology, the public realm was
not only seen to be more important, but much of what was
thought to go on in the private feminine realm was considered
to be trivial or natural, or both, and therefore did not require
theorising. Dualisms such as public/private, mind/body,
rational/emotional, divided the sociological world into two (Ray
2006:463; Thorne 2006:476). Work did not occur in the home,
where housewives expressed relationships of love and emotional
attachment when they washed dishes or took children to school.
4 Number 67, December 2008
Sex did not occur in the public domain, which rendered sexual
harassment and sex work either incomprehensible or trivial, of
no research interest. Men in public spaces did not have bodies,
which meant there was no need for research into how men were
clothed, cleaned and fed to get them back to work the next day.
Men did not have emotions that got in the way of their rational
actions; thoughts of sex or feelings of rage rarely overtook them,
unless perhaps they were members of more disorganised social
classes or ethnic groups, prone to deviance.
Sociologists deployed sex as a variable, or an attribute of
the individual, rather than an explanatory category for analysis
or a concept to be theorised (Stacey and Thorne 1985:307).
While quantitative research sought and found sex differences,
the discipline was unable to reflect on these differences from
any theoretical perspective. For example Halls (1988:433)
review of text books in the mid-1980s found that gender was
usually addressed in the chapter on social stratification. Instead,
explanations for statistically discovered sex differences relied on
commonsense assumptions, generally applied by men.
In 1972, Ann Oakley distinguished between sex as the
biological distinction between men and women and gender as a
social construction or elaboration built on differently sexed bodies
(e.g. review in Edwards 1989; Ingraham 1994:213). The distinction
was seized by feminist scholars across the disciplines and applied
to question the taken-for-granted assumptions concerning natural
sex differences. Concepts such as housework, body politic, sex
work and volunteer work challenged former understandings of
the public/private divide. Where Oakleys (1975) thesis supervisor
had discouraged her from pursuing her path-breaking analysis of
housework as work, deeming the topic too trivial, housework is now
understood to be work. Indeed, the contribution of housework and
childcare to gross domestic product is substantial, even if almost
never measured and included in the national accounts (Waring
1988). Calculating the monetary value of housework and childcare
supported arguments that primary carers of children, usually
women, should receive government assistance, and resulted in
a transfer of social security payments from the wallet (taxation
deductions) to the purse (direct payments to primary care-givers).
The intimate interconnections of housework and childcare
with paid work and public life became increasingly obvious as
sociologists studied the triple burden and work-family balance
(for a discussion of the impact of gender research on public policy,
see Bulbeck 2005).
To limit the contagion of gender, many disciplines, including
sociology, responded with internal hierarchies, fortifications
and barricades which sought to quarantine the impact of gender
issues into particular, usually less-valued, areas of enquiry.
Research on the public domain (economics, politics, the nation)
is privileged over research on the private domain (family,
community, private life); the national and international over the
domestic; the activities and worth of men over those of women
(e.g. Beasley 1994; Farganis 1989; Nelson 1996; Olsen 1985;
Thornton 1991; Waring 1988). In sociology, women and feminist-
informed research were consigned to areas closer to nature and
the body: family, community and demography. A focus on
malestream approaches was retained in the public realm: formal
organisations, social change and politics (Stacey and Thorne
1985), these reaches largely unaffected by the feminist revolution
to this day (Stacey 2006:480; see also Acker 2006:445).

Feminist Sociological Theory?
Meanwhile, those working in the discipline of gender or womens
studies had moved on from the sex/gender distinction, which
had spawned terms like gender order, structure of gender
(Connell 2000:24-26) and gender regime (Walby 2004). These
concepts were increasingly criticised as implying that gender
relations are immutable: that social determinism had replaced
biological determinism in sociological analysis. West and
Zimmermans (1987) concept of doing gender pointed to the
need to explore how individuals resist as well as reproduce the
gender order, in other words how being a male or female changes
over time. Sexuality is an embodied performance that, while
not arbitrary, is not foreordained. Masculinity and femininity
must be understood as gender projects in that they are dynamic
processes ... which transform their starting points in gender
structures (Connell 2000:28, original emphasis). Judith Butlers
(1990) notion of the performance of gender applied these ideas
within a post-structuralist framework and seized the imagination
of feminist scholars across the disciplines.
Furthermore, the very distinction between sex and gender
was challenged, as early as 1975. Gayle Rubin (1975:178-179)
argued that both sex and gender were socially constructed
through kinship systems and associated taboos which divided
the sexes into two mutually exclusive social categories connected
via obligatory heterosexuality. Laqueurs (1990) analysis of the
historically changing understandings of male and female bodies
also fuelled growing awareness that the sex-gender dualism
derived from uncritical application of the Western folk model of
sex-gender differences (Moore 1993:194). Feminist philosophers,
such as Gatens (1989) and Grosz (1987), argued that the role of
the body in doing gender also has to be theorised. For example,
men possess on the whole a greater quantity of masculinity
than women and vice versa, but masculinity is rewarded when
performed by male bodies and not generally when performed
by female bodies (Gatens 1989:34). Thus, our understanding of
sex is as much a social artefact as is our performance of gender
(see contributors to MacCormack and Strathern 1980; Oywm
1997; Strathern 1985:221 on different notions of male/female
differences in non-Western societies).
Not only was the sex-gender distinction interrogated and
found wanting, but deconstruction, or a critical eye, was also
applied to the heterosexual imaginary (the imaginary relations
of individuals to their real conditions of existence; Ingraham
1994:203). As Henrietta Moore (1994:200-201) suggests, in
Western societies sex/gender is at the core of personhood,
both the sex-gender and heterosexual-homosexual binary
are simplistic Western folk dualisms. Hermaphrodites are
surgically corrected at birth to be one sex or another and those
trapped in the wrong body have access to transsexual surgery.
In some other cultures, gender ambiguity is tolerated and can
be expressed in the performance of third genders, neither male
nor female (e.g. Bhaiya et al. 2007 for Asia; Nanda 1990 for
India; Roscoe 1998 for the plains Native Americans).
In this post-structural turn, feminist theory subjects its
foundational terms, women, gender, liberation, to ongoing
interrogation and thus maintains its critical edge and inspiration
for scholarship and social movements (Ray 2006:461; see
also Ahmed 2004:174-187). Post-structuralist feminist theory
challenged a further dualism that distinguishing material relations
Number 67, December 2008
Jane Balme and Chilla Bulbeck
between men and women from the symbolic representations of
these relations, arguing that constructions of gender differences
in biology, psychology, literature, the mass media and so on are all
representations of gender relations. Instead of the homogenous
category of women (often rendered as white and middle class),
feminist theorists particularised and contextualised womens
experiences and explored the co-constitution of gender, race,
sexuality and class which take their meaning and form as they
interact with each other in different contexts (Ray 2006:460-461).
The quest for gender performance in sociology led to small-scale
research on how people negotiate the material and symbolic realms
as they do gender in both an acceptance of and resistance to the
messages and opportunities around them (Acker 2006:446).
By the late 1990s, feminist theory and gender studies were
described as areas of special strength in Australian sociology,
which then had seven feminist researchers in sociology chairs
(Western 1998:226). The largest research concentration among
the Australian Sociological Associations members was the
cluster defined as gender/medical/family, accounting for
almost a quarter of the Associations members (Alexander
1999). Similarly, the section on sex and gender has become
the largest research division of the American Sociological
Association (Thorne 2006:475). There is general agreement
that the subdiscipline of the sociology of gender (Acker
2006:446; Thorne 2006:475) now thrives in sociology, gender
being mainstreamed (Ingraham 1994:203) or canonised (Ray
2006:460) to a considerable extent.
Nonetheless, there is continuing resistance by general
sociological theory to acknowledging the input of feminist
theorising (Acker 2006:446; Ray 2006:459; Roseneil 1995:199;
Stacey 2006:480; Thorne 2006:474). Furthermore, supposedly
objective, rational and value-free (quantitative) research
methods are still hailed in some sociological quarters as more
scientific than qualitative methods or politically-engaged
analysis (e.g. Thorne 2006:477 and Wagenaar 2004:9 for US
sociology). Pioneered by Donna Haraway (1988) and Sandra
Harding (1991), feminist epistemologists claim that all
knowledge is situated and partial and is accumulated into better
versions of reality (Alway 1995:224-225) through dialogue with
those within and beyond the academy (e.g. Thorne 2006:475,
477). This feminist critique of objective knowledge challenges
social scientists belief that they undertake impartial research
in the same manner as their colleagues in the more prestigious
natural sciences. This challenge undercuts the social sciences
in more profound ways than seeking to include women, gender
or even sexualities does. In archaeology, also, arguments that
all knowledge is positional and partial, not objectively arising
from the material traces (Conkey 2005:14, 32; Conkey and Gero
1997:424), challenges archaeologys claim to scientific status,
academic rigour and professional inclusion. It is to the story of
archaeology we now turn.
Archaeology
The long time depth that is the subject of archaeological studies
has meant that there has been much concern with how we can
know the past and the limitations of what information can be
recovered from archaeological materials, particularly for deep
time before text-recorded experience. Whether or not symbolic
behaviour in these early periods could be identified from
5
Engendering Origins: Theories of Gender in Sociology and Archaeology
material evidence (perhaps most famously explicated by Hawkes
1954) and then how they might be identified (e.g. Hodder 1982)
has been a much debated topic. It is little wonder then that
archaeologists in the discipline, particularly before the post-
processual movement, drew on their own experience to explain
sex-differentiated behaviours as natural, associated with biology
and requiring no explanation.
The many sources on the history of the archaeology of gender
or of feminist scholarship in archaeology (e.g. Gilchrist 1999;
Hays-Gilpin 2000; various papers in Nelson 2006) all record that
there was very little archaeology explicitly on the topic of gender
before the 1980s. Archaeologists simply assumed that there
was always a rigid division of labour organised along sex lines
(Conkey and Spector 1984) and they attributed activities to each
sex according to commonsense assumptions or observations
of sex roles in present-day societies. Thus, for example, animal
bones found on early east African hominin sites represented
food hunted by males who had developed suitable stone tools
(Laughlin 1968; Washburn and Lancaster 1968). Hunting meat
was important because males could then become provisioners
leading to the development of human families (e.g. Lovejoy
1981) which set our ancestors on their course to modern
humans. The androcentric bias of such interpretations has
been extensively reviewed (Balme and Beck 1993; Conkey and
Spector 1984; Fedigan 1986), but undoubtedly it is linked to the
preponderance of males in the discipline (Claassen 1992; Gero
1993) and reliance on ethnographic anthropology recorded by
male researchers who observed, for example, men making stone
tools, but not women (despite the fact that women do make
stone tools) (e.g. Bird 1993).
Adding Women; Adding Gender
As in most disciplines, feminisms first intervention was to add
women notice what women did and add it to the story as
being just as valuable as what men did. Not surprisingly this
was a reaction to the origin stories of human evolution and was
introduced by experts in primatology such as Zihlman. Early
articles such as Linton (1971), Tanner and Zihlman (1976) and
Zihlman (1978) put women into the story of human evolution
in which, instead of hunting tools driving the course to
modern humans, it was womens gathering activities. Womens
equipment such as digging sticks and bags associated with
gathering, and not stone hunting tools, were the first material
culture. Using the same ethnographies that earlier archaeologists
had used to suggest the importance of hunting (particularly the
influential Man the Hunter volume (Lee 1979; Lee and De Vore
1968), feminist-inspired researchers pointed out the greater
contribution to the diet resulting from womens activities. While
these revisionist articles drew attention to male bias of previous
work, conceptually there was no change, the assumption
remaining that women and men did different things. Often
the things they did were based on what women and men did in
gender-differentiated societies of the present, presumably linked
to biological reproductive function.
Despite this, human origins research, and some work on early
state societies (Nash 1978) in the 1970s, there was little other work
on gender archaeology. The exception was Scandinavia, especially
Norway (see Dommasnes 1992; Engelstad 2007), but this work
had little impact on the discipline outside Europe, probably
6 Number 67, December 2008
because few archaeologists beyond Scandinavia understood the
Nordic languages (Srensen 2000). It was in this time period
that Bowdler produced her germinal piece Hook, line and dilly
bag (Bowdler 1976). This paper is important because it not only
made women visible but also suggested a new explanation for a
dramatic change in shell and fish species represented in middens
on the Australian New South Wales coast through the social
practices of agentive people. Whereas previous explanations
for this change had mainly relied on changing environmental
conditions, Bowdler linked the changes to the introduction
of shell fish hooks. She used early European observations that
recorded a division of labour in Aboriginal groups living in the
area whereby men fished with spears and women with hooks
and lines to suggest that when this new technology began to be
used in the region, womens economic role changed and they
contributed more fish. They then spent less time collecting
shellfish, confining themselves to species that could be collected
in the upper tidal zone.
In summary then, the 1970s work on gender archaeology
improved the location of women in the story by making them
visible, identifying their contribution to the main food supply,
and demonstrating that they also invent. Bowdlers paper showed
that archaeologists were more ready to resort to environmental
change as an explanation for change in the archaeological record
than to imagine womens agency or even that of men (see also
Brumfiel 1992).
Gender archaeology took off in the mid-1980s. In Scandinavia
a conference held in 1985 initiated the birth of Kvinner I
arkeologi I Norge (Women in Archaeology in Norway) and
a journal by the same name (Engelstad et al. 1994). In North
America the inception of gender archaeology is often attributed to
Conkey and Spectors (1984) feminist critique of androcentrism
in archaeology, thereby suggesting the study of gender in
archaeology using an approach that builds on ethnarchaeological
and ethnohistorical observations about womens and mens task
differences. Their paper certainly instigated a flurry of activity
with a great many edited volumes, usually associated with
conferences, following quickly (Claassen 1992; du Cros and
Smith 1993; Gero and Conkey 1991; Walde and Willows 1991)
as well as the production of monographs such as Gilchrist (1999)
and Srensen (2000).
Once at least some areas of the discipline accepted that
women also made a contribution, more attention could be
paid to asking the question about gender difference. Was it
universal in societies? What explained it? How did it both persist
and change? Since the 1990s, although making women visible
continues to be a major theme in gender archaeology, there has
been a greater interest in gender differences between men and
women (Gilchrist 1999) than in differences within each group
(see Moore 1993).
Feminist Archaeological Theory?
Despite the reluctance to associate the term feminism with
archaeology of gender (see Hanen and Kelly 1992; Srensen
2000; Wylie 1997), there is no doubt that feminism and feminist
theory have greatly influenced the archaeology of gender. The
1970s feminist concerns with equity and raising consciousness
about the contribution of women are clearly present in
archaeology of that period whether or not the writers were overt

about their sources. However, although much work on gender
in archaeology since that time has made women visible in the
past, there has been little engagement in what it means to make
women visible gender as a concept. This may be a result of the
overall lack of theory, particularly feminist theory (e.g. Conkey
2003; Conkey and Gero 1997; Englestad 2007; Hanen and Kelly
1992), in gender archaeology.
In part the marginality of feminist theory results from
a tendency still to exclude women from theory writing, so
that gender remains an add-on, quarantined away from
contamination of mainstream archaeological theory. Conkeys
(2007) review of four readers in archaeological theory published
between 1996 and 2001 found that the work of female
archaeologists is represented in proportions well below that of
womens archaeological publication. As is the case in sociology,
when women authors are included, their chapters are often about
gender and separated from other aspects of theory; the work
of female archaeologists on topics apart from gender is rarely
represented (Conkey 2007:295). This quarantining of female
academics work means that they are less frequently used by
other scholars (e.g. Hutsons 2002 analysis of the lack of citations
to womens research).
A second reason for the lack of engagement with feminist
theory may be the apparent lack of compatibility between
current feminist theory and the kinds of materials available for
archaeologists to study, particularly archaeologists researching
periods deeper in time. The most recent feminist concerns
with difference have produced two main theoretical lines: (1)
understanding the way in which gender identities are created
through performance and repetition of cultural acts associated
with gender and (2) embodiment written on the body and lived
through the body. Both Gilchrist (1999:6) and Conkey (2003,
2007) have suggested that these theoretical influences, at least
until the early twenty-first century, have been much stronger in
European than North American archaeology. In North America,
they suggest, researchers have retained the early focus of gender
studies on the sexual division of labour, gender roles, womens
agency and their contributions to change and innovation; there
was more commonly an integration of a wider range of evidence
such as environmental and osteological. In Europe, on the other
hand, gender archaeology has engaged with more post-structural
feminist concerns, the symbolic and cultural manifestations of
gender, a concern for the individual manifested through the
study of gender identity, sexuality and the body and with the
representations of gender through forms such as art, space and
grave goods.
According to Gilchrist (1999), the distinctions between
European and American archaeology resulted from several
factors, including the longer legacy of second wave feminism
in America. She attributes the difference also to the more self-
contained teaching and research networks in North America,
Scandinavia and Australia as opposed to the greater diversity
of political objectives among European archaeologists and
their greater receptivity to structuralist, contextual and post-
processual archaeology, including recent feminist contributions
to these theories. Conkey (2003, 2007) adds to these explanations
the greater influence of the scientific legacy in North America.
We suggest that the difference identified by Gilchrist and
Conkey may be more about the archaeological context of the
Number 67, December 2008
Jane Balme and Chilla Bulbeck
material being studied than the geographical context of the
archaeologists doing the work, and that this has become clearer
in recent years. While the archaeologists engaging with recent
feminist theory on gender performance and embodiment
come from a variety of professional backgrounds, they
generally share a research engagement with the archaeology of
economically and socially stratified societies (Joyce 2005:142),
study embodiment through the application of archaeological
interest in symbolic communication of identity through
ornaments and costume (Joyce 2005:140), and study periods
for which literature is available such as the medieval period.
Thus the marginal impact of recent feminist theorising in North
American and Australian hunter-gatherer archaeology may
result, not from the professional structure of the discipline, but
from the lack of material traces in ornaments, costume, rock art
and figurines as well as literature of the kind which is available
to historical archaeologists studying gender performance. The
deeper in time the more difficult it is to trace the relationship
between the material and the symbolic: to assume the position
of people who inhabited areas. On the other hand, gender
archaeology had its first major impact in origins research
and this is a key question for archaeologists studying hunter-
gatherer behaviour.
Feminist Archaeologys Contribution to Feminist
Theory: Origins Research
Feminists rejected the search for the origins of gender because the
answer they found in anthropology, archaeology and psychology
was that gender differences are natural and non-transmutable:
they lie in our genes, or our muscles, or our reproductive strategies,
or our left versus right brains in other words in our biology.
Early feminists rejected womens different biology because it
spelled womens subordination, instead arguing for women to
overcome their biology, their reproductive capacities, and join
the intellectual world of men. Early feminists like de Beauvoir
and Firestone reproduced the same denigration of the body and
elevation of the mind that characterised Western philosophy
(e.g. analysis by OBrien 1981, who retrieves reproduction as a
social activity).
From the 1970s, sociobiology responded to second wave
feminisms claim that gender was mutable by affirming
biological explanations for human gendered behaviour.
Pierre van den Berghe, for example, stated in 1979 that he
set out to disprove feminisms challenges to the biological
bedrock of asymmetrical parental investment (in Sperling
1991:17). Sociobiology claimed that men are prone to
philandering because their sperm are multitudinous and
cheap to produce vis--vis womens costly ova and investment
in nursing their offspring (Wilson 1975). Today HBE (human
behaviour and evolution) scholars argue that mens modern
sexual misbehavior can be explained in terms of evolutionary
adaptation to our ancestral environment (Wade 2008:263,
reviewing McCaugheys 2007 analysis of the debate). Feminist
biologists retort by identifying the complex interaction
of physiology and environment (e.g. Rogers 1999) and the
engagement of female animals in changing male caring
behaviour, for example with the bribe of female arousal and
its promise of sex (e.g. Hrdy 1999). Animal mothers can bias
sex ratios prior to conception, selectively abort foetuses, and
7
Engendering Origins: Theories of Gender in Sociology and Archaeology
differentially nurture sons and daughters strategies which
respond to environmental changes which make male or female
infants more likely to thrive (Hrdy 1999:326-345).
Famously, female primatologists rewrote male primatologists
scripts which focused on male aggression and control of females.
Evidence accumulated that there was little association between
dominance rank and reproductive success for males (Sperling
1991:18-21). Women primatologists discovered co-operative
primate troops or noticed baboon mothers juggling time just
when (white) human mothers were increasingly required to
combine work and home duties (Haraway 1992:313). As this
example suggests, it was not so much that female primatologists
told more accurate stories than had male primatologists, but that
all primate stories were really about human social issues. Facts
are theory-laden; theories are value-laden; values are history-
laden (Haraway 1991:77) and non-white non-Western female
primatologists might draw quite different lessons from their
studies (Haraway 1992:248-251; Sperling 1991:24).
One retort to feminist biologists revision of the book of nature
was the claim that female dominance or shared parenting is more
common among the lower species and that evolution produces
sexual dimorphism and differential investment in reproduction
(e.g. Elia 1988). Another origins debate, that concerning the
origins of patriarchy, also locates female dominance in a primitive
past. Scholars such as Engels (1972[1884]) in The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State, following anthropologists
of his time, consigned matriarchy to the time before social
development and technological change. Patriarchy is necessary
for social evolution, as Paglia (1990) flamboyantly claimed to
the great rage of feminists. In this narrative of origins, not only
are gender differences immutable because of physiology, but
also they justify the subordination and devaluation of women
and the activities they perform. One feminist response has been
that women are no longer prisoners of either their biology or
primitive social structures. Rubin (1975) argued that cultural
evolution means women can now seize control of the means
of sexuality, reproduction and so on. Inglehart and Norris
(2003:149, 154) link capitalist and democratic expansion with
womens rights, claiming that secularism, individualism and
modernization bring systematic, predictable improvements
in womens position. However, these models return us to the
imperialism and evolutionism with which pioneer sociologists
discussed sex, an approach which most feminist sociologists
reject (see critiques of the parochialism of northern sociological
theory by Connell 2007 and Ray 2006:462-463).
There has also been opposition to research on the origins
of the sexual division of labour in archaeology as essentialising
gender roles (e.g. Dobres 1988). Conkey and Williams
(1991:113), for example, warn that there is nothing essentialist
about gender or womens experience so there is no origin
to be found. Essentialism is a hex word in womens studies,
apparently disallowing exploration of perhaps the most obvious
historically-recorded human universal: all human societies have
gender categories. As feminist anthropologists, archaeologists
and historians have made patently clear, the organisation of
gender difference varies widely across time and space. Surely it
will contribute to understanding both the prevalence and variety
of gendered social behaviour to ask, not only when but also why
did gender begin, and to ask this from a feminist rather than
8 Number 67, December 2008
a masculinist sociobiological or evolutionary psychological
perspective. To reject an origin of gendered behaviour seems
to be the ultimate in essentialism because it continues to feed
the assumption that gender has always been and is unchanging.
Thus, rather than suppressing imagination about the way things
might have been (Conkey and Williams 1991:122), origins
research requires us to imagine a time in human society before
gender and the circumstances in which gender might be created.
This project emphasises how much we continue to take gender
for granted as an organising category and how difficult we find
it to think of gender differences outside those operating in our
own society.
One feminist archaeological approach to the origins of the
gender puzzle works with a second universal, that is, the division
of labour in modern hunter-gatherer societies. Although there
is some small variation, a general pattern has been observed in
which men hunt large game and women hunt small animals
and provide most of the plant foods (Balme and Bowdler 2006).
To recognise such universals neither implies that they have a
biological basis as some people have suggested (e.g. Hayden
1992), nor that the behaviour has always been so. Although there
is always a danger of a search for origins producing a single
evolutionary narrative (Conkey and Williams 1991; Moore
1995), it does not have to be written as such. Origins can occur
in different places in different ways, but if we are to understand
the concept of gender we need to think about how gender
organisation might have come into being and to understand the
circumstances in which such a division might arise.
What then does a search in the archaeological record for the
origins of gender, indeed possibly even gender inequality, tell
us about the non-essential albeit universal nature of gender
difference? First, despite patterns in hunter-gatherer subsistence
roles, ethnographic observations show that there is no biological
reason for such divisions. Females and males are both capable of
hunting different sized animals (Balme and Bowdler 2006:382;
Owen 2005). In addition, if strength was the most important
criterion to explain hunting being done by men (as was argued,
for example, in many papers in Lee and DeVore 1968), then
it would make more sense to form social categories based on
strength rather than genitalia. Second, if there is no biological
basis for a gender division of labour at some time in our past, the
time in which gender does emerge, when our ancestors decided to
concentrate on a particular aspect of biology, genitalia, to create
a major social division, might have been different in different
places. This means that, before gender divisions can be created,
biological divisions (man and woman) have to be recognised.
Thus, gender categories may be an adaptation to biology but, if
they are, they are a social adaptation. Gender is then a social
human construct and not an inevitable biological given. While
gender categories may not have been the first social categories,
they have persisted in human societies, suggesting that they are
an adaptive success. For example Kuhn and Stiner (2006:462-463)
apply Wrights (1932) concept of fitness landscapes to argue
that the division of labour along the lines of sex, age and aptitude
forms a peak, or rather a mountain range arising from varying
local conditions, towards which populations adaptively move as
they operationalise sexual difference as gendered organisation.
Before the construction of social categories, our ancestors
work was constrained simply by individual capabilities, as

primatologists have also consistently found (although male
primatologists give this scant attention). There is little or no
sexual division of subsistence labor among nonhuman primates:
they forage for themselves and there is little sharing of food
(Sperling 1991:20). The creation of social categories implies
cooperation and sharing between the categories. This does not
have to be along male/female lines. It could well be that old
shared with young or tall with short. Older, post-reproductive
females, for example, could have been the first gender, marked by
their specific childcare role, while the other category consisted
of everyone else who was out gathering food. These questions
concerning the origins of gender are about much more than
finding women or men: as Conkey (2008:49) notes, archaeology
has been saturated with gender but it now needs to be regendered
by questioning the notions of gender which have been applied.
Archaeologys contribution to gender studies in this respect
poses anew the familiar question, What are women and men
and how have these categories and the relations between them
arisen and changed over time?, by applying the query to human
sociality prior to the historical record. This question is as useful
for challenging our continuing gender presumptions within
feminist theory as it is in archaeology.
Conclusion
Across the social sciences feminist theories have exposed the
male bias male researchers brought to their theorising. Male
scholars generally focused on what men did and applied an
understanding of gender that reflected gender assumptions in
their own society. Second wave feminism challenged the Western
understanding that women belonged in the domestic sphere and
displaced sex as a natural pre-given variable with gender as a
social construct under constant revision. In sociology, more
than anthropology, feminist theorists took a post-structural turn,
exploring the dazzling array of gender performances and their
meanings which upturned both the sex-gender and heterosexual-
homosexual divides. That feminist archaeologists could not
proceed so far down this path can be explained in terms of the
evidence with which they work: material traces more than textual
or visual representations.
However, our exploration of feminist sociologys leeriness of the
origins debate points to feminist sociologys trenchant failure to
interrogate its own standpoint: grounded in a sex-gender dualism
expressing a nature-culture dichotomy. Many feminist scholars
have, perhaps unwittingly, rejected the devalued term (nature/
biology) in their desire to join the male-dominated academy.
More recently some, like Stacey (2006:481), dare to reconsider
many feminists antipathy to the suggestion that there might be
biological contributions to social differences, instead claiming
feminists should expose how sexual difference becomes gender
inequality. While male archaeologists have always been interested
in origins, it has been the origins of human culture or society but
not of sex or gender, this being taken for granted as an essential
universal. A feminist archaeological lens which asks when did
gender begin, suggests, amazingly, that there may have been a time
in human history when we did not recognise sex differences as a
social category of organisation, when we did not value males above
females (or vice versa), when we did not link certain activities with
male bodies and others (often less valued) with female bodies.
Clearly these human societies contained biological males and
Number 67, December 2008
Jane Balme and Chilla Bulbeck
females and the conjunction of this with the absence of gendered
organisation reveals how truly embedded is our Western folk model
of sex-gender differences. As Haraway puts it, gender as sexual
identity ... a dichotomous natural difference biologically conceived
might not be global identity after all (in Strathern 1988:40).
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for comments on a draft of this paper by Meg
Conkey, Margaret Jolly and a third, anonymous, referee.
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