Cross-Cultural Codes on Contributions by Women to Subsistence

Cultures vary greatly in the degree to which women contribute to the production or procurement of food. A measure of percentage contribution by women to the subsistence economy has been reported (Sanday 1973). Cultural variations in this measure were related to cultural variations in social organization and customs thought to indicate the status of women in the society. A limitation of this study (Sanday 1973) was the single measure of female contribution, combining separate scores for female contribution to several different sources of food (agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, hunting, gather? ing). Sanday did not test whether a society with relatively high female contribu? tion tended to be high for each separate source, or high for only the most important source without being high for the other sources. If a society has an unusually high percentage female contribution to a particular source of food, opposite predictions can be made about the effect on female contribution to other sources. One prediction is that a social custom of high female contribution to the principal food source will be generalized to all the other sources. If any social or historical influences cause a society to develop a high degree of female contribution to subsistence, this effect might apply to all the food sources. The opposite prediction is that a society with high female contribution to one food source will have a compensatory low female contribu? tion to other sources. If females contribute preponderantly to one food source, they might have less time to contribute to the other sources. The present paper tests these alternative predictions by using separate mea? sures of the amount of female contribution for each of five food sources. These measures were obtained from codes applied to the Standard Sample of 186 societies (Barry and Schlegel 1980). These new Standard Sample (SS) codes were formulated in more detail and applied more systematically than the earlier Ethnographic Atlas (EA) codes (Murdock 1967) used by Sanday (1973).