New Sex Roles for Men, Women

Tracy Enns plans to be a mother someday.

“Yes, definitely,” she says. Her car is canted on a steep hill, out of sight of the cars rolling up to a stop sign on South Road in Farmington, Conn.

Never turning her eyes from the traffic, Enns says she won’t give up her work.

“No,” she says, adding deliberately, “I’m going to stay working, and I’m going to be a mother.”

As the last few words cross her lips, a white Fiero slithers past the sign without stopping. Enns, Farmington cop and future mother, shifts into drive, flips on lights and siren and zips down the hill in pursuit.

If there is any truth to the anthropological stereotype that, in a natural state, men are hunters and women are gatherers, Enns, 28, represents how completely it is deposed in modern life. In her job, she ranges around, pursues quarry, carries weapons--the modern analogue of the hunter.

“Line up for Mr. John.”

Eight or nine small snow-suited shapes oblige by arranging themselves in an array vaguely resembling a line. The 2-year-olds of Pooh’s Corner, an Avon, Conn., day-care center, are readying to go out in the snow under the supervision of John Ouvrier.

Ouvrier says a lot of people think of day care as a woman’s job.

“Sometimes even the parents are a little skeptical.”

A 6-foot-4 man with a deep voice is not what they are expecting to find, he says, but they usually relax once they get to know him.

Ouvrier, 27, is a filmmaker, but that does not pay the bills, so he started doing day-care.

Even though roles are changing on society’s surface, Ouvrier says, we still carry around a lot of deeply ingrained prejudices about what women and men should do.

“Those will be passed on for many centuries,” he says.

If anthropology were destiny, maybe Ouvrier and Enns would be somewhere else. Maybe.

Because men hunt and women gather, right? So went the argument for decades of anthropology. In primitive societies, men hunted because they were stronger and because they weren’t tied down by childbearing and suckling. Women gathered roots and berries because those jobs fit better with care-giving.

In the past 20 years, a new, less-publicized wave of anthropologists, many of them women, have argued that hunting and gathering aren’t always divided the same way.

Trinity College anthropology professor Jane Nadel-Klein says Eskimo communities are rigid about division of labor by sex. Mbuti pygmies are more flexible.

The old model also touted hunting as the primary sustaining activity, but Nadel-Klein and others argue that women in those communities often bring in 60% to 80% of the community’s diet.

Donna Wertenbach says women in business often have a more modern approach to sales, she says, “putting the customer--not the product--at the center of the universe.”

Wertenbach directs the Entrepreneurial Center for Women at the University of Hartford, Conn. She says women are less likely to take big risks and borrow a lot of money when starting a business.

Women therefore have lower failure rates, she says. And women are less likely to make money at any cost, she says.

Does that mean these women have a little more of the old gathering instinct, less of the old killer instinct?

“Culture allows us to be so plastic that it would be very hard to sort it all out and say this is part of our evolutionary heritage,” says Nadel-Klein. “I don’t think the basic (anthropological) template is that clear. . . . It’s hard to get away from the fact that people select models that tell them what they want to find.”