ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The female condition refers to the complex of rules, customs and visions of the world that concern the role of women in society.

Many different cultures have recognized women skills and roles limited to procreation and care of the offspring and family. Women's emancipation has represented, in the last centuries, the search for a formal and substantial equality between women and men.

Prehistory

In the prehistory of Homo sapiens the situation was definitely varied and diversified according to cultures, eras and geographical places. Starting from 200 000 years ago, the company presented variable models, from the hunter of small prey and collector of the middle Paleolithic organized in small social units, through the most numerous societies dedicated to the hunt for the big mammals such as mammoth and ungulate, up to the seasonal cultures devoted to agriculture and breeding of the copper age.

Through the various epochs, various social patterns were hypothesized, and according to some theories also matriarched or society with gender equality as in the case of the six nations, formed by peoples ascribable to Neolithic, but in North America reached European culture in historical times, in Melanesian populations, and others.

In the imaginary, surely supported by several tests, but not exhausting all situations, while the man devoted himself to hunting women specialized in the collection of edible berries, roots and fruits. It is believed, in some situations, that they were engaged for much of their life by pregnancy, nursing and care of the offspring, were less mobile and dedicated to the collection of edible vegetables and small animals.

At the end of the upper paleolithic it is believed that the woman had as primary task to procreate, as it would be deduced from the fact that in some sculptures (of the magdalenian era), the organs connected to reproduction are highlighted: at the expense of the other parts of the body, the belly and the hips are decidedly prominent, the voluminous breast. In other artefacts, however, always afferent to paleolithic veins are evidenced longiline invoices.

In some periods when part of humanity lived in the nomadic state, it is assumed that they were subjected to the male. According to other theories, at least some primitive societies were matriarchal and, only at a later time, the male supremacy developed. There is not enough archaeological data to fully validate or refute theories.

Ancient age
At first in Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization (Persia, Assyria, Babylon) the woman had a very high position within society. In these civilizations there was also the matriarchate but then, with the rise of military monarchies, women lost in prestige and also formed, in some Middle Eastern civilizations, the first gynaecologists, from whom women could not leave and where they could not