Abstract
Women’s equality and freedom of choice have become identified with modernism and oppressive patriarchy with traditionalism because greater societal differentiation and complexity increase the individualism and autonomy of women. Since 1970 a unified, if still largely implicit, sociological theory of women’s equality has emerged. Social scientists have argued that societies vary in gender equality because of key elements in their social structures. Beginning around 1970, however, scholars who were studying women’s actual experience in development discovered a more complex pattern than the rising line of gradual progress that had been implied by classical sociological theory. Women’s roles in production were very important in family farming systems such as those found in West Africa, Oceania, or Central and South America, whereas their roles were fairly limited in the male farming systems of China or India. Women’s empowerment presumably results in a reordering of rewards to give relatively more compensation and value to reproductive work.
