Gender Roles
Men and women performed separate but equal tasks: "males produce food by agricultural labor, but females process the products of the field to make them edible."
In addition to raising deer when necessary, the duties of women were embedded in the culture’s rich tradition, including its religion. Women held important everyday roles in this aspect of life. While young boys were being taught hunting skills, "the girl was trained in the household, and she was taught how to keep the domestic religious shrines."
Women were associated with the ritual practice of religion, as well as the actual beliefs themselves. The Moon Goddess is one of the most prominent gods in the Maya pantheon. Through her relations with the other gods, she was able to produce the Maya population. The local rulers would then claim descent from the Moon Goddess.
Gender in ancient Maya art is ambiguous; it is difficult to ascertain the gender of some figures simply because one couldn’t survive without the other. In some images of heir recognition, this duality is explicit: there is a male figure on one side of the newly-anointed, and a female figure on the other side.
Read more about this topic: Gender In Maya Society
Famous quotes containing the words gender and/or roles:
“But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Modern women are squeezed between the devil and the deep blue sea, and there are no lifeboats out there in the form of public policies designed to help these women combine their roles as mothers and as workers.”
—Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)