Gender Relations in Tribal Society: Status, Roles and Matrilineal Traditions

Walk into a Khasi household in Meghalaya and the first thing you will notice is that the house carries a woman’s name. Walk into a Gond village in central India and you will find women choosing their own husbands and walking out of unhappy marriages with relative ease. Tribal India does not have one template for gender roles. It has dozens, shaped by how each community gets its food, organises its kinship, and defines who controls property. Understanding these variations tells us something important: gender relations are not fixed by biology alone, they are built by economy, ecology, and culture working together.

Sex, gender and status in tribal societies
Gender division of labour in tribal economies
Foraging societies
Horticultural and agrarian economies
Matrilineal tribal societies of India: the Khasi and Garo
The Khasi system
The Garo system
How anthropologists read gender status differently
Status of women across different tribal communities
Gond women
Tharu women
Naga women: Sema, Angami and Ao compared
Polyandrous tribal groups

Sex, gender and status in tribal societies

Anthropologists separate sex, the biological differences between men and women, from gender, the social and cultural meanings attached to those differences. In most tribal economies, physical strength and mobility pushed men toward hunting, warfare, and working with hard materials like wood, bone, and metal, while women took on cooking, food processing, and child care. Because hunting and warfare often produced meat, hides, and other tradeable goods, men frequently ended up controlling the resources with the highest exchange value, even in societies where women worked just as hard, if not harder.

This has led some scholars to argue that early human societies once had matriarchal or woman-centred structures before patriarchal systems took over. Most contemporary anthropologists are cautious about this claim. As one review of matrilineal kinship in Meghalaya notes, researchers rarely find evidence of true matriarchy in the sense of women ruling over men; what does show up repeatedly is matriliny, descent and inheritance traced through the mother, which is a related but distinct arrangement. The takeaway is not that women once dominated men everywhere, but that multiple, genuinely different ways of organising gender have existed, and some gave women considerably more economic power than others.

Gender division of labour in tribal economies

Foraging societies

In hunting-gathering economies, food gathered by women, roots, fruits, insects, and small game, tends to be the most reliable, day-to-day source of nutrition, while hunting by men is riskier and less predictable. Because of this steady contribution, women in foraging societies often enjoy a status roughly equal to men, since their labour is visibly indispensable to group survival. Recent ethnographic surveys have also pushed back against the old “man the hunter” assumption, finding that women contribute directly to hunting in a majority of documented foraging societies, which further complicates any simple story of separate, unequal domains.

Horticultural and agrarian economies

Once societies shift to horticulture and settled agriculture, the picture becomes more layered. Women frequently do the bulk of planting, weeding, and harvesting, while men handle the heavier work of clearing land, and the household functions as a joint unit of both production and consumption. This shared economic stake tends to narrow, though rarely erase, the status gap between men and women. Not every subsistence pattern is equally favourable to women, though. Among pastoralist groups such as the Maasai, women perform almost all the daily labour of tending cattle, yet ownership of the herd itself rests with men, leaving women with only limited rights over the products of their own work. The lesson here is that labour contribution alone does not guarantee status; control over resources and inheritance rules matter just as much.

Matrilineal tribal societies of India: the Khasi and Garo

The Khasi system

The Khasi of Meghalaya are one of the world’s few surviving large matrilineal populations. Descent, clan identity, and property pass through women, and after marriage, husbands move into their wife’s household rather than the reverse. Within a Khasi family, the youngest daughter, known as Ka Khadduh, inherits the ancestral property and in return takes on the duty of caring for ageing parents and unmarried or vulnerable siblings. [Image: A traditional Khasi house in Meghalaya with women of the household] Women’s ritual and ceremonial roles in Khasi society are also considered a rightful, respected domain rather than a secondary one.

The Garo system

The Garo, who live largely in the western hills of Meghalaya, follow a broadly similar matrilineal and matrilocal pattern, with the youngest daughter, called Nokna, inheriting the family’s land and assets. But matriliny among the Garo does not automatically translate into female authority over decisions. Research on Garo inheritance shows that even though property legally belongs to women, it is often managed by male relatives from the mother’s clan, and women typically need their husband’s or maternal uncle’s approval before buying or selling land. This is sometimes described as a paradox of gendered authority: women are the custodians of lineage and property on paper, while men frequently continue to hold the practical, day-to-day decision-making power. It is a useful reminder that matriliny is a kinship system, not automatically a guarantee of full female autonomy.

How anthropologists read gender status differently

Anthropologists do not agree on how to measure or interpret gender status in tribal societies, which is exactly why this remains a live area of debate rather than settled fact. Some scholars argue that even in supposedly egalitarian tribal contexts, women still carry disproportionate domestic burdens and face real constraints on their freedom. Others counter that many so-called “primitive” societies actually grant women a higher social standing than industrialised, class-stratified societies do.

Bronisław Malinowski approached the question through the idea of reciprocal duties, arguing that gender relations function as a system of mutual obligations, where each sex is expected to protect and provide for the other in specific ways, rather than one sex simply dominating the other. Robert H. Lowie offered a more structured framework, suggesting that a woman’s status in any society should be judged along four separate dimensions: how she is actually treated day to day, her formal legal standing, her opportunities to participate in public and social life, and the extent and value of the work she performs. Applying these four lenses to the same tribe can produce very different verdicts, which is part of why generalisations about “tribal women” as a single category tend to break down quickly.

Status of women across different tribal communities

Gond women

Among the Gond, one of India’s largest tribal groups, women generally move about freely and have a meaningful say in choosing their own marriage partners. Divorce is also socially accepted and considerably easier to obtain than in many caste Hindu communities, and widow remarriage carries no stigma. At the same time, inheritance of land among the Gond typically follows the male line, so the freedom women enjoy in marriage and personal choice does not extend fully into property rights.

Tharu women

The Tharu, who live in the Terai belt bordering Nepal, follow a patrilineal system, yet Tharu women hold property rights that go well beyond what is typical in surrounding Hindu communities. Tharu women are also known for their roles in traditional ritual and healing practices within the community, spaces that carry real social respect rather than being treated as marginal.

Naga women: Sema, Angami and Ao compared

Even within the broad Naga family of tribes in Nagaland, status varies sub-tribe by sub-tribe. Studies of Naga customary law describe women in several Naga communities as occupying a position secondary to men, since customary ideology has historically privileged men in decision-making roles. Yet the details differ across sub-tribes: Angami women, for instance, are entitled to a one-third share of joint property on divorce, and are free to choose their own marriage partners, even though they cannot inherit ancestral land outright. Comparing Sema, Angami, and Ao women side by side shows that social respect, legal entitlement, and property rights do not always move together, which is exactly the kind of nuance Lowie’s four dimensions were designed to capture.

Polyandrous tribal groups

A small number of Indian tribal and hill communities, most notably the Toda of the Nilgiri hills, have historically practised polyandry, where one woman is married to more than one husband, often brothers. While this arrangement kept family land and livestock undivided, it also placed considerable physical and emotional strain on women, who were expected to manage relationships with multiple husbands and their combined households simultaneously. The practice has declined sharply in recent decades as monogamous marriage has become the norm even in these communities.

Across most of these examples, tribal women’s status tends to be closely tied to their economic contribution and to child-bearing and child-rearing roles, both of which are broadly respected across tribal India even when other freedoms remain restricted.

What do you think? If matrilineal inheritance among the Khasi and Garo does not always translate into women holding decision-making power, does the label “matriarchal” still capture anything meaningful about these societies? And when a tribe like the Gond gives women real freedom in marriage but denies them land rights, which of Lowie’s four dimensions would you weigh most heavily in judging that tribe’s overall gender status?

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Table of Contents

Sex, gender and status in tribal societies 🔗

Gender division of labour in tribal economies 🔗

Foraging societies 🔗

Horticultural and agrarian economies 🔗

Matrilineal tribal societies of India: the Khasi and Garo 🔗

The Khasi system 🔗

The Garo system 🔗

How anthropologists read gender status differently 🔗

Status of women across different tribal communities 🔗

Gond women 🔗

Tharu women 🔗

Naga women: Sema, Angami and Ao compared 🔗

Polyandrous tribal groups 🔗