Anthropological Perspective on Gender: From Margaret Mead to Feminist Anthropology

For most of the twentieth century, Western science treated gender as biology’s verdict, something fixed at birth and expressed the same way everywhere. Anthropology quietly dismantled that assumption. By living inside other cultures instead of theorising about them from a distance, anthropologists showed that what counts as “masculine” or “feminine” shifts dramatically from one society to the next. This piece traces that intellectual journey, from Margaret Mead’s controversial fieldwork to the feminist anthropologists who rebuilt the discipline from within, and finally to the global recognition that gender was never really a binary to begin with.

Margaret Mead and the cultural construction of gender 🔗

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) is usually the starting point in any discussion of anthropology and gender, and for good reason. In 1925, at just 23 years old, she travelled to American Samoa to answer a specific question: was adolescent turmoil a biological inevitability, or a product of culture? She spent several months living among Samoan girls, observing their daily lives, courtship customs, and transitions into adulthood.

What her fieldwork revealed 🔗

Mead’s resulting book, Coming of Age in Samoa, argued that the emotional strain Western psychologists assumed was hardwired into puberty was largely absent in Samoan society, where sexuality and gender roles were handled with far less anxiety. Her broader claim went beyond adolescence. She proposed that gender-linked traits like aggression, nurturing, or emotional restraint were not fixed sex characteristics but were shaped by what each culture expected of its men and women. This was a direct challenge to biological determinism, the idea that anatomy alone dictates behaviour and social role.

Why this mattered for the discipline 🔗

Mead’s work has been debated for decades, most famously by anthropologist Derek Freeman, who argued her Samoan informants may have exaggerated or misled her. Regardless of where that debate lands, her core contribution held up: gender is variable across societies, and that variability is worth studying on its own terms rather than dismissing as an exception to a Western norm.

When anthropology overlooked women 🔗

Even as Mead’s work gained public attention, mainstream anthropology in the early twentieth century remained largely indifferent to women’s lives and experiences. Two towering figures of the discipline illustrate this gap clearly.

Malinowski’s incomplete picture 🔗

Bronisław Malinowski, celebrated for his immersive fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders and in Melanesia, wrote extensively about kinship, exchange, and ritual, but paid comparatively little attention to women’s rituals, labour, and social authority. His ethnographies captured male-dominated public life in vivid detail while women’s spheres of activity were often sidelined or treated as secondary.

Levi-Strauss and the exchange of women 🔗

Claude Levi-Strauss’s influential theory of marriage as a system of exchange treated women largely as objects circulated between kinship groups to build alliances, rather than as active participants shaping those very systems. Feminist scholars later pointed out that this framing erased women’s agency even while claiming to explain the structures that governed their lives.

Freud’s theories meet the ethnographic record 🔗

Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual framework, including his ideas about female sexuality and the Oedipus complex, was presented as universal human psychology. But ethnographers working in societies with very different family structures and child-rearing arrangements found that Freud’s stages simply did not map onto the lives they observed. This mismatch became one of several cracks that eventually opened space for a more critical, gender-aware anthropology.

The rise of feminist anthropology 🔗

Feminist anthropology emerged as an organised force in the early 1970s, partly as a corrective to these blind spots and partly as an extension of the broader women’s movement into academic disciplines. Anthropologists began asking new questions: What do women actually do in this society? How is power distributed between genders? What happens to prevailing theories once women’s experiences are placed at the centre rather than the margins?

From rigid categories to a continuum 🔗

Comparative ethnographic work played a central role in this shift. Studies of premarital sexual freedom among Samoans, alongside documentation of same-sex marriage practices among the Azande and Dahomey peoples of Africa, forced anthropologists to reconsider gender not as two fixed, opposite categories but as a flexible continuum. Sexual and gender expression, it turned out, had never fit neatly into a simple male-female box in the first place; anthropology had just been slow to notice.

Explaining a persistent pattern: theories of gender inequality 🔗

One puzzle feminist anthropologists returned to repeatedly was why some degree of male dominance appeared, in varying forms, across so many societies. Several influential theories tried to answer this.

Rosaldo: public versus private 🔗

Michelle Rosaldo argued that gender inequality was linked to a divide between public, political life, typically dominated by men, and private, domestic life, typically assigned to women. Importantly, in her later work she cautioned against treating this divide as a universal, unchanging fact of nature. She showed that what counts as “public” and “domestic” actually varies a great deal across history and culture, and urged anthropologists to examine how these categories get constructed rather than assuming they simply exist.

Chodorow: socialisation and mothering 🔗

Nancy Chodorow approached the question through psychology and child-rearing patterns. Because women across most cultures bore primary responsibility for raising young children, she argued, this shaped a distinct feminine psychic structure oriented toward relationships and caregiving, while boys were pushed toward independence and public achievement. This socialisation, she suggested, quietly reproduced women’s exclusion from public power generation after generation.

Ortner: nature and culture 🔗

Sherry Ortner offered a more symbolic explanation. She proposed that women were often culturally associated with nature, through childbirth, breastfeeding, and bodily processes, while men were associated with culture, the domain of transformation and control. Because culture is generally valued as superior to raw nature in most symbolic systems, this association placed women in a subordinate position by default, regardless of their actual contributions to society.

The Marxist-feminist lens 🔗

A separate strand of thought, drawing on Marxist theory, connected gender inequality to economic structures. These anthropologists argued that capitalism and earlier modes of production relied on women’s unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, extracting value from childbearing, child-rearing, and household maintenance while denying it recognition as “real” work. Inequality, in this view, was less about symbolism and more about who controlled resources and labour.

Three waves, three shifts in feminist thought 🔗

Feminist anthropology did not develop in isolation. It moved in step with the broader feminist movement, which is usually described in terms of three waves.

First wave: rights and recognition 🔗

Before the 1960s, first-wave feminism was largely driven by educated white women in the United States and Europe. Its central demands were formal ones: the right to vote, property rights, and equal wages, aimed at securing basic legal standing for women within existing political systems.

Second wave: class, race, and civil rights 🔗

The 1970s saw a broader and more diverse second wave, with women of colour playing an active role in shaping its agenda. This period pushed beyond formal legal rights to address discrimination in everyday life, connecting gender struggles to civil rights, class inequality, and the fight against racial discrimination.

Third wave: intersectionality 🔗

By the 1990s, a third wave had emerged, shaped heavily by post-colonial thought. This wave challenged singular definitions of femininity and insisted on examining how race, ethnicity, class, religion, and nationality intersect with gender to produce very different lived experiences for different women. A woman’s experience of gender, third-wave thinkers argued, could never be separated from her position on these other axes.

Beyond the binary: gender recognition around the world 🔗

One of feminist anthropology’s lasting contributions has been documenting how many societies have long recognised gender categories beyond simple male and female. The Philippines has the bakla, the Native American context includes categories now broadly termed Two-Spirit, and Albania has historically recognised sworn virgins, women who take on a male social role and lifelong vow of chastity in exchange for male privileges within the household.

Hijra and India’s official recognition 🔗

India’s most widely recognised non-binary category is the hijra community. Hijras are documented in Hindu religious texts and throughout South Asian history, occupying a distinct social role that is neither strictly male nor female. This long social presence eventually received formal legal backing. In 2014, the Supreme Court of India, ruling on a petition filed by the National Legal Services Authority, legally recognised transgender persons as a third gender and directed the government to extend reservations in education and employment to this community. The judgment marked a significant shift, treating gender identity as a matter of dignity and self-determination rather than something to be medically or socially dictated from outside.

What this global pattern tells us 🔗

Taken together, these examples make one thing clear: the strict male-female binary that much of the modern world treats as natural is, in fact, a relatively narrow cultural position. Societies as different as the Philippines, Hawaii, and India have long made room for more categories than two, often assigning these groups distinct social, ritual, or spiritual roles rather than treating them as anomalies.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? Given how differently gender roles have been organised across cultures and eras, does it still make sense to describe any single arrangement of gender relations as the “natural” one? And how might Rosaldo’s caution about the public-private divide change the way we read gender roles within our own families and communities today?

References

1. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-samoa.html
2. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/capitalism-and-the-private-public-division
3. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/feminist-anthropology
4. https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism/The-third-wave-of-feminism
5. https://www.britannica.com/list/6-cultures-that-recognize-more-than-two-genders
6. https://translaw.clpr.org.in/case-law/nalsa-third-gender-identity/