ed, and the interpretations given (Slocum 37).
Harris considers one of the essential issues of gender-based ethnographic studies, the issue of whether male supremacy is universal. This question is at the heart of the gender-role shifts taking place in Western societies, with the view that the traditional social structure saw male supremacy as a given while contemporary Western society is at least questioning that idea if not becoming openly antithetical to it. Harris cautions that it is not possible to go from the statement that women are subordinate as regards political authority in most societies to the statement that women are subordinate in all respects in all societies (Harris 252).
One of the most important ethnographic researchers offering data on sex roles and gender socialization was Margaret Mead, who conducted research in Samoa in the 1930s and further research later in New Guinea. Mead carried her research over into Western civilization and could write in 1949:
There has long been a habit in Western civilization of men to have a picture of womanhood to which women reluctantly conformed, and for women to make demands on man to which men adjusted even more reluctantly. This has been an accurate picture of the way in which we have structured our society, with women as keepers of the house who insist that men wipe their feet on the door-mat, and men as keepers of women in the house who insist that their wives should stay modestly within-doors (Mead, Male and Female 296).
Mead in 1950 reported on three New Guinea tribes existing within a one-hundred-mile area. She found that the ideologies concerning sex roles were quite different among the three in spite of their relative proximity. The Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tschambuli showed in their attitudes that how people think about being masculine or feminine is highly variable and is determined by culture rather than by some absolute of biology. The Arapesh s...