Gender Separation and Social Integration

Abstract Gender separation can provide women with their own sphere in which to func tion independently or it can mean that women are excluded from arenas of power and prestige. Although a great deal has been written about the implications of gender separation, sometimes stressing the positive implications for women and sometimes the negative (cf. Reiter 1975), anthropologists are lacking a cross culturally applicable schema for evaluating when and why gender separation is an expression and a tool of male dominance and when and why it is an expression and a tool of true gender complementarity and women’s autonomy. In sorting out the ramifications of gender separation, I see four key issues that need to be addressed. The first issue is that of control. In some gender-separated cultural settings, women do not exercise autonomy over their own sphere; although men and women are separate, men supervise women’s activities. This model is well-known to Orthodox Jewish women, who, in their highly gender-segregated culture, are in charge of cooking, but whose cooking laws (kashrut) are supervised by male rabbis. The second issue concerns ideology. In some cultural settings, gender separation is grounded in ideologies of male and female essential difference. Ideologies of essential difference are typically phrased in biological (naturalized) terms; not surprisingly, the ideologies that underpin gender separation often make reference to women’s menstrual impurity or to their uncontrollable sexuality. As a corollary, women and the women’s sphere tend to be culturally defined as inferior to men and the men’s sphere, and women and their sphere tend to be seen as in need of male control. A third and somewhat related issue concerns enforcement. In the wake of a potent ideology of essential difference and “proper” gender domains, gender separation in some societies is total and enforced. An individual whose personal inclinations would lead him or her to seek, for example, professional fulfillment in the other gender’s sphere cannot do so without incurring social condemnation. The final issue has to do with access to the public sphere. In some cultural settings, gender separation means that women are denied admittance to the public sphere—- even in the form of all-women gatherings. The result is that women’s ability to make or influence decisions that affect the society at large is extremely limited.