Women at Work in the Deuteronomistic History - International Voices ...

THE CHALLENGE OF STUDYING WORKING WOMEN | 43
differentiated roles did not automatically mean different value perceptions for
women in their society. Naomi Steinberg states that
men and women in ancient Israelite society performed as social actors in a
much more complicated and interdependent fashion than has heretofore been
suggested....
Our Western prejudices may actually limit the data that is collected
because the questions asked in cross-cultural studies on women reflect our
ideological biases.... The public/political world of men is deemed more
meritorious and status-laden than the private/domestic world of women. 61
Steinberg goes directly to the point when she speaks of the public or
political world, the man’s world, as the only one worthy of notice, while the
domestic or private one, more connected to women, goes unnoticed, or if it is
noticed, it is not considered “work” even today. As long as record of events, past
and present, is only made from an androcentric perspective, the picture will be
incomplete and distorted, because it will value events and occupations only
according to one segment of society, wrongly taking their view as representative
of the whole, ignoring other segments.
Scholars are trained to ask “the right questions.” But right or wrong is
determined by the tradition of the particular discipline, a tradition still largely
shaped by males. Reflecting on issues of feminism and research in
Mesopotamian studies, Julia Asher-Greve sees a false dichotomy male-female as
part of the incomplete picture created by looking only at males from a male
point of view. On the basis that “feminist philosophers attack paradigmatic
dualism and either/or categorization, claiming that those are neither normative
nor universal,” Asher-Greve started to review her own scholarly assumptions.
My study of women in ancient Sumer was based on the either/or model, that is,
if it is not male then it must be female. Depictions of persons whose dress and
features were apparently ambiguous were still pressed into a two-gendered
system, or the visual object was interpreted as of low artistic quality, perhaps of
provincial origin. The implication that (provincial) artists were gender blind
never occurred ....
The evidence led to new interpretations. An analysis of gender in mass
produced seals in the late Uruk period (c. 3100-2900 BCE) revealed that,
although there is a division of gender and work or tasks, this gender division is
not very rigid; women occasionally do men’s work, like herding, and occupy
positions as overseers of groups. But it was not always important to the
Sumerians to specify gender. The tasks or roles of a group (and, occasionally,
of an individual) are sometimes more important than gender differentiation. In
61 Naomi Steinberg, “Gender Roles in the Rebekah Cycle” USQR 39 (1984): 175–76.