The Virgin And The State Summary

In another essay, The Virgin and the State, Ortner tackles the background and evolution of the pureness ideology of women held within many cultures. While the idea of purity had been around any many societies, the biggest surge in the idea of women having purity begins with the formation of stations and stratifications in society. When states begin to form from hunter-gatherer societies, distinct roles and ranks in society start to emerge. People are divided by wealth, power, and ranks. To rise in the ranks of these societies, there had to be a bargaining chip, or a reason for someone to step into another rank from a lower one. This is where the women come in. Since the men had become the leaders of the household and of the city, the women …show more content…
These factors are what lead up to the need for women to be “pure” in order to lead her family and herself into a better life. These factors are diffusion, divisions of labor, religion, structure of the family, and the changes in marriage system. The first factor, Diffusion, is the idea that certain ideologies started out in a more confined area and then branch out through different societies via the act of trading and other similar mechanisms. So, if one culture actively participates in the idea of purity of their women, it would slowly seep into other societies it comes into contact with. While diffusion doesn’t account for much of the emergence of purity in women, it does provide the basic backbone for the idea. The second point is the division of labor. Ortner explains how there is a standard view that men must have picked up more power in labor with the introduction of agriculture while the women held their value at home with reproduction. Yet, the data she gathered was quite different: Women were just as hardworking as the men in agricultural societies. She believes that this idea of women in the home must have come later and did not have a huge impact on the idea of female purity …show more content…
She argues that the purity could have started in either upper or lower class, but she puts more emphasis on how both classes interacted with each other as playing the biggest part in that development. The idea of hypergamy may be the strongest explanation, that being the act of marrying into a higher caste. The use of hypergamy would have been so the family could gain upward mobility to rise in the social ranks of their society to gain better resources or power. To create value in a women to appear to a man of a higher caste, her virginity would be a large symbol of her alliance to her family and then to her