Gender Roles and Time

When thinking about gender roles in society, the common debate is whether they are inherent in biology or socially constructed. This is the common debate for many topics in anthropology, such as the popular debate of whether biology or the culture around a person leads them to become the way they are. People question how biology and physical traits connect to societal constructs such as race. While gender is based on a biological concept, all the roles and associations with gender have formed based on social constructs. Across cultures and time periods, gender roles have varied in how they have been expressed. The most well-known examples have been the transition of gender roles across time periods. For example, with gender associations of color, pink and blue used to have different connotations. Pink was seen as the stronger color for boys and blue as a dainty color for girls. Similar examples arise in clothing and beauty choices across time periods, with high heels, wigs, and makeup all being seen as appropriate for men at various periods throughout history. Even our interpretations of gender roles in hunter-gatherer times are tainted by the expectations we hold today. It used to be a widely held belief that men did most of the hunter and women did most of the gathering and farming chores. While this is usually justified by biological differences in men and women, this can’t justify the belief that women were mostly excluded from hunting. Looking at recent reports, archaeologists have been reevaluating this belief, especially after finding female remains buried with a wide variety of hunting tools. This discovery indicates that women have been apart of big-game huntings. Overall, recent discoveries indicate just how much weight the social construct of gender holds.