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Gender Complementarity and Parallelism in Mesoamerican Societies

12th May 2023

Mexicolore contributor Susan Kellogg

We are hugely grateful to Susan Kellogg, Professor Emerita of History, University of Houston, for writing for Mexicolore this enlightening article on the extent to which the Mexica (Aztecs) and other peoples from ancient Mesoamerica achieved a remarkable degree of balance - ‘complementarity’ - in the roles of women and men: a long tradition whose legacy is still felt in the modern world as Indigenous women struggle for more equitable policies today...

When describing the social position and roles of women in ancient Mesoamerican societies, particularly the Aztecs of the late Postclassic period, the linked concepts of gender complementarity and gender parallelism often appear. Olivia Harris in 1978 was among the first to discuss gender complementarity within indigenous Andean societies. Harris observed that Andean women and men often played different roles within households that led to productive economic and social relations. She noted, however, that gender-based hierarchies co-existed alongside such complementary forms of organization. John Monaghan pointed out that gender complementarity carries different meanings among Mesoamerican groups, even within them. He argued in his 2001 essay that gender complementarity could refer to:
’The sense of two halves “constituting the whole.”… The second sense in which the genders are said to be complementary is that of males and females mutually completing each other to achieve a certain status in society… Finally there is the sense that men and women complement each other in order to produce effects in concert that are different from those produced separately.’

Often appearing either with these notions of complementarity or in place of them is the concept of gender parallelism.
This idea was first used by Irene Silverblatt in her 1987 book Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru. She sees Andean gender parallelism as rooted in parallel lines of descent in which women descended from a line of women and men through a line of men, saying “[t]he values and tone of gender parallelism were continuously reinforced in the practical activities through they [women and men] constructed and experienced their lives” (1987: 5). This parallelism would influence labor patterns, access to resources, and religious beliefs and practices. While Inka imperialism converted “gender differences into gender hierarchies” (15), the Inka themselves employed parallel positions of authority rooted in the complementary kinship patterns of pre-Inka Andean societies, leadership patterns in which the ruler and his wife each played important roles - though to be clear Inka paramount rulers were male - and religious beliefs in which parallel lines of male and female deities descended from a gender-ambiguous deity, Viracocha. Scholars following upon Silverblatt have shown variety in the degree to which women rulers existed prior to the arrival of Europeans, with the northern-most Andean areas evidencing powerful women leaders. Susan Kellogg and others applied such ideas to indigenous Mesoamerican societies as described below.

In a 1999 review essay of the evolving literature on women’s and gender history, Steve Stern pointed out that the terms “gender complementarity” and “gender parallelism” were often used interchangeably and drew attention away from conflict and violence between individuals of different genders as well as cross-gender forms of organization and political action (1999: 618-620). A later essay by Miranda Stockett argues that discussions of complementarity assume binary biological divisions as well as binary divisions of labor that ignore gender fluidity and mask varying forms of hierarchy in ancient Mesoamerican societies. Both of these critiques make important points, yet the concepts of gender complementarity and gender parallelism still have utility in explaining how both women and men experienced daily life in Mesoamerica.

For Mesoamerican societies, especially the Aztecs, the idea of gender complementarity is closely related to an even more fundamental idea that is discussed widely by scholars of the Aztecs, dualism. Two ideas common to many Mesoamerican societies underlie this concept, one is that of alternation - dark and light, life and death, dry and wet seasons. While these can be seen as opposed forces, really they were cyclical and complementary forces that shaped environments, seasons, and daily life. These alternating forces showed that the universe was mutable, always changing and never static.

The other idea important to these societies is balance. Jill Furst explained the relationship between balance and duality this way: “In nature, Mesoamerican people saw (and still see) duality not as a duel of opposites but rather as a balance between forces or states that are not intrinsically positive or negative. If any natural element predominates at the expense of others, a catastrophe follows” (2001: 344). The Aztecs, in many aspects of their belief system and societal organizing structures, strove for balance in a universe that often threatened chaos in place of balance, a goal indeed, but never a steady state.

Two kinds of relationships especially showed the importance of balance, that between deities and humans and the relationship between women and men. Aztec divinities and human beings depended on each other; humans nourished the gods by providing offerings of plants, animals, incense, tobacco, and blood and hearts. Deities sustained human life on earth by providing rain at the times of year needed, food, especially corn, fire, precious stones such as jade, even knowledge about the calendar, medicine, and the nature of the universe. The goal of Aztecs was to maintain the divine-human relationship in balance, if the reciprocity inherent in the relationship became unbalanced, chaos in the form of natural disasters, famines, war, or illness and death could follow.

Complementarity and balance also were fundamental to the relationships between women and men. In creating new life, the father provided warmth that allowed development in and balanced the cold and wet environment of the mother’s womb. During the early parts of the life cycle, boys and girls would experience parallel ceremonies in which their gender identity as male and female would be fostered and they would learn the tasks of adult women and men, tasks that often were complementary. While early to mid-sixteenth century colonial sources such as the Codex Mendoza and the Florentine Codex suggest that male-defined tasks took men out of the home to farm, fish, or perform craft or commercial activities and women cooked, cleaned, and wove in the home, in reality many tasks such as farming, craft production, marketing, healing, and religious rituals were done in complementary, interdependent ways in homes, fields, temples, and markets.

Both young men and women received instruction in work, values, and religious beliefs, instruction that resulted in partnerships organized around marriages in which a leading couple together carried out work tasks, inculcated the Aztec belief system in children, and connected that household to the larger community. Together the couple reinforced the social order rooted in the balance and complementarity that Aztecs prized.

Aztecs also expressed gender complementarity through institutionalized parallel roles played by women and men. In the marketplaces of Aztec altepetl (city-states), women and men bought and sold, and in the largest markets both served as marketplace judges known as tianquizpan tlayacanque. Among merchants and craft workers, like men, women could play supervisory roles. In the schools, song houses, and temples, male teachers and supervisors of young men had female counterparts who taught, disciplined, and carried out ceremonies with young women. Local governance in the neighborhoods of altepetl included both male and female officials. While women only rarely served as rulers, generally on the occasion of the absence or young age of a male successor, terms for women leaders are parallel to those of male leaders of high status (teuctli, cihuateuctli; leader, female leader; tlatoani, tlatocacihuatl; ruler, female ruler). These parallel terms suggest that rulers shared responsibilities with their partners. Aztec women held positions of authority, ones that appear to have been organized in parallel fashion to those of men. Such positions illustrate ways women accessed influence, authority, and prestige based on their own activities, resources, and achievements.

Further bolstering the status of Aztec women was that in the genealogies of the ruling families of many altepetl, we can see two features of how Aztecs traced the kinship relationships within those ruling groups. First, many such dynasties traced their origins back to founding couples, a male and female partner who together served as the origin points for a particular Aztec ethnic group. Second, the role the woman played in a founding couple was often as the individual who brought noble blood to a particular relationship, enhancing the status of an early male leader, thereby ensuring their children would be recognized as being of legitimate noble descent.

Many codices and histories, indigenous- or Spanish-authored, describe or show founding couples. They are often pictured in or near caves or mountains that depict the founding place and couple of an altepetl or kingdom. Such images could even imply shared rule of that community. A number of visual texts from late Postclassic Tetzcoco - the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and the Mapa Tlotzin - depict such couples as does Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s narrative of altepetl foundings contained in his political histories of Tetzcoco. For the Mexica of Tenochitlan, Chimalpahin’s relaciones as well as the Crónica mexicayotl provide similar narrative information, and two illustrations from Durán’s texts illustrate founding couples in the seven caves of Chicomoztoc. In addition to the role of founding couples, ancestors and rulers could be conceptualized as “fathers-mothers,” embodying both genders. Proper governance among the Aztecs relied upon the idea that ruling, like parenting, embodied the gender complementarity that both parents together provided, nourishing, sheltering, and teaching the young.

An important area of Aztec life in which women’s and men’s roles seem neither complementary nor parallel is that of war. Training to participate in warfare constituted an important area of masculine endeavors in numerous Aztec altepetl through the schools known as telpochcalli. The military machine of the Triple Alliance was sophisticated and powerful, and war represented an important arena of male activity. Status and prestige could be obtained through participation in the highly structured military units of the alliance or in the armies of the numerous altepetl imperial armies sought to conquer.

Women do not appear to have participated in this kind of structured warfare, though one wonders whether some Aztec played a role similar to that of the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution in feeding and nursing fighters. Nonetheless, accounts of women fighting in extraordinary circumstances exist. For example, women of Tlatelolco were said to fight in a final effort to ward off conquest by the Tenochca Mexica.

Beyond battlefields, men’s success in warfare depended, as Louise Burkhart showed, on women’s home front ritual and practical activities, praying, sweeping, preparing foods to be taken on journeys to distant lands, and producing enormous amounts of textiles, many of which were used to cloth and protect fighters. If women’s activities were often home-centered, keeping them away from combat (though fighting within altepetl did affect them), the birthing of children was seen by Aztecs as equivalent to fighting. Dying while giving birth was seen as equivalent to being captured or killed.

These forms of parallelism - being part of a founding couple, safeguarding the home front and producing food and textiles needed for war, giving birth - are not examples of the institutionalized roles played by women and men in Aztec schools, markets, craft production, or leadership. Rather they represent forms of gender complementarity enacted by men and women who together brought about needed effects that neither could achieve completely on their own.

Despite widespread ideas of duality and gender complementarity among many Mesoamerican peoples, the complex of institutionalized parallel roles seems to have reached its apex among the Aztecs. Nonetheless, if complementarity did not guarantee gender equality across Mesoamerica, many societies manifested cooperative gender divisions of labor, authoritative roles for women in healing and ritual, and sometimes even in the political realm. Lisa Sousa provides multiple examples of women’s and men’s cooperative labor in farming, weaving and other crafts, and healing and spiritual activities among Aztecs, Mixtecs (Ñudzahui), and Zapotecs (Bènizàa) in her book The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar. The Mixtec and Zapotec especially emphasized a complementary organization of tasks, even in tasks like getting water, carrying firewood, sweeping, and laundry, tasks usually defined as household-based and therefore women’s work

Class, age, and date of birth appear to have been just as important in shaping the activities and life course of both women and men so that gender played a role but was not the only or even primary determinant of an individual’s activities and life course. Among the Mixtec, female rulers were not at all unusual, in fact joint rulerships were common when male and female rulers married because they together ruled the polities each had brought to the marriage. The Otomi (Hñahñu) also may well have featured gender leadership patterns in which men and women shared political authority and an ability to distribute resources. Mayas appear to have emphasized less gender complementarity in social roles than did societies of central and northern Mesoamerica. Women undoubtedly occasionally took the throne among Classic- and Postclassic period Maya groups, but across a long span of time, while Maya art and writings suggest a recognition of the need for interdependence of female and male roles in production and reproduction, the parallelism of Aztec institutions does not appear to have existed. Maya women often carried out work tasks with other women in cooperative ways, but less so with men because of a more rigid gender division of labor than existed among many other Mesoamerican groups.

Did complementarity and parallelism lead to equality for women? And do these concepts apply to contemporary Mesoamerican societies? The answer to the first question is probably no. There is no doubt that in many late Postclassic Mesoamerican societies, women had political, economic, and social power within their families and communities. In the more hierarchical societies, especially the Aztecs, as war and imperialism began to play a greater role in the political culture of much of Mesoamerica, women’s status declined in certain ways. Violence begat abuse, loss, and death. But the increasing militarization of society, marked by many men’s absences as they went off to fight, created spaces for women to play important economic and social roles. The Mexica in particular associated defeat with femininity and depicted that in their art, yet other Aztecs and other Mesoamerican ethnicities emphasized images of complementarity. Contemporary Aztecs (known more commonly as Nahuas during the colonial and later periods) have experienced hundreds of years of transformative influences due to colonial rule, the war for independence and nineteenth century political upheaval and change, and the many political, economic, and social changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Nonetheless, core features of Aztec language, religion, sociopolitical organization, and ethnic identity have survived. Are gender complementarity and parallelism among those features?

A prominent ethnographer of Nahuas, Alan Sandstrom, has found men and women to operate in somewhat separate domains but as husbands and wives to cooperate often and easily, with each gender having authority in the areas of work and family life in which they operate. In many Mesoamerican communities, including among Nahuas, women continue to play roles relating to birth, curing, and marriage that echo those they played in the prehispanic era. Nonetheless, rather than speaking of complementarity and parallelism, in large part because the influence of the Spanish legal system and Catholicism undermined women’s political and legal standing, it is more appropriate to speak of autonomy.

‘Aztec Women: Capable Partners and Cosmic Enemies’“‘The view from the metate’ - women and the Aztec world”

Comments (4)

Erik

4th Jan 2025

Greetings Mexicolore, I’m interested in Professor Kellogg’s response to Katia’s question as well. Could you please forward it to me? Many thanks!

Mexicolore

Happy New Year. We’ve just emailed it to you. Cheers.

10th Jun 2024

I am also interested in reading more. Can it be sent to me as well?

Mexicolore

Sure. We’ve just emailed you her answer. Thanks for writing in.

Thomas

29th Apr 2024

hello, I would like to read Professor Kellogg’s answer to Katia Hougaard’s question about non-binary gender identities in Aztec society, could you please forward it to me? Thank you so much :)

Mexicolore

No problem. We’ve just emailed it to you now. Good wishes.

Katia Hougaard

6th Jun 2023

Great article with a balanced view of gender identity and roles in Indigenous societies. Did the Mexica have any concept of other gender identities beyond this binary? I’m curious because other Native American groups like the Ojibwe have a whole spectrum of gender identities. Are there any records of transgender people in Mexica society?

Mexicolore

Thanks for writing in, and for your interesting question.
Professor Kellogg has kindly answered this for us. The good news is, the answer to your question is assuredly Yes! The bad news is that her answer is detailed and contains terms/material that could be sensitive for younger readers. If anyone would like to read her answer (which we’ve already forwarded to Katia), please contact us and we will gladly send it on.

Mexicolore contributor Susan Kellogg