rationalskepticism.org

I think it was an interview with Margaret Atwood the other day where she said that research suggests that tribal societies tend to be more equal between men and women. I'm not sure how true that is, but she's definitely a writer known for her high levels of research. I guess the less organised and therefore less powerful a society, they less scope there is to control women's lives in the way that we see in some of the more misogynist societies in the world. Basically in these societies, the patriarchy is going to be weaker, therefore the need for a highly organised feminism will be less, which isn't to say that there aren't obvious gender divides. But perhaps small-scale tribal societies are communities in which exploitation and subjugation of any members of the group is less common out of necessity. You're probably not going to survive long if you have less than 100 people and you don't include everyone on a vaguely equal footing.

Having said that, you have to be careful about the romanticising of tribal communities, because it's happened a lot in the past on all sorts of issues. When I watch a documentary about tribal groups, I rarely see any examples without clearly defined gender roles, and I wonder how many of them would, for example, allow a woman to join a hunting party or feel about a man who wanted to stay behind and do the sorts of things that the women more commonly do.