Maya women
Encyclopedia
Ancient Maya
Maya civilization
The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period The Maya is a Mesoamerican...

 women had an important role in society: beyond just propagating culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

 through the bearing and raising of children, Maya women involved themselves in economic, governmental and farming activities. Yet the lives of women in ancient Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...

 were not well documented: “of the three elite founding area tombs discovered to date within the Copan Acropolis
Copán
Copán is an archaeological site of the Maya civilization located in the Copán Department of western Honduras, not far from the border with Guatemala. It was the capital city of a major Classic period kingdom from the 5th to 9th centuries AD...

," writes one scholar, "two contain the remains of women, and yet there is not a single reference to a woman in either known contemporary texts or later retrospective accounts of Early Classis events and personages at Copan.” The status of women in pre-Columbian Maya society
Women in Maya society
The roles and representation of women in Maya society has been a comparatively little-studied subfield of Mayanist research, which nonetheless has benefited from an increasing scholarly attention in the latter-half of the 20th century and into the present...

 can be inferred only from their elaborate burial sites.

Matrilineal societies

Matrilineal Maya societies include Tonina
Tonina
Tonina is a pre-Columbian archaeological site and ruined city of the Maya civilization located in what is now the Mexican state of Chiapas, some 13 km east of the town of Ocosingo....

, a city which became matrilineal after the death of the powerful leader Lady K’awil. She is proof that women were involved in politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...

 in ancient Mesoamerica. She assumed the mantle of power after the failure of two male leaders. Lady K'awil's reign is documented by murals which depict her seated on a throne
Throne
A throne is the official chair or seat upon which a monarch is seated on state or ceremonial occasions. "Throne" in an abstract sense can also refer to the monarchy or the Crown itself, an instance of metonymy, and is also used in many expressions such as "the power behind the...

 with captives at her feet.

Food

Aside from political involvement, women also participated in the Maya food economy. Deer
Deer
Deer are the ruminant mammals forming the family Cervidae. Species in the Cervidae family include white-tailed deer, elk, moose, red deer, reindeer, fallow deer, roe deer and chital. Male deer of all species and female reindeer grow and shed new antlers each year...

 played an essential part of the Mesoamerican diet; most of the meat
Meat
Meat is animal flesh that is used as food. Most often, this means the skeletal muscle and associated fat and other tissues, but it may also describe other edible tissues such as organs and offal...

 consumed by the ancient Maya was venison
Venison
Venison is the meat of a game animal, especially a deer but also other animals such as antelope, wild boar, etc.-Etymology:The word derives from the Latin vēnor...

. Society depended on deer meat, and women played a large role in making sure there was an abundant supply of deer. Evidence shows that deer sometimes lived inside Maya households. “there is also ample evidence that deer may have been nurtured in the household, much as children were.” While it was the man’s responsibility to hunt and kill deer, it was necessary for the women to make sure there would be enough deer to kill. Women raised deer due to the dwindling area of graze-worthy savanna.

Art

The importance of the moon goddess is seen through her depiction in the codices and in ancient murals. However, these were not the only forms of art for the ancient Maya. Textiles were an important aspect of ancient Mayan life, and while it is not known whether all women produced textiles, those textiles that were produced were created by women. The objects that women used in the spinning and weaving processes were different, depending on the social class of the women. Noble women had the good fortune to use dye in their textiles. Also, the products that were used in the spinning were different; the noble women used higher quality fibers. Craft and fiber evidence from the city of Ceren, which was buried by volcanic ash
Volcanic ash
Volcanic ash consists of small tephra, which are bits of pulverized rock and glass created by volcanic eruptions, less than in diameter. There are three mechanisms of volcanic ash formation: gas release under decompression causing magmatic eruptions; thermal contraction from chilling on contact...

 in 600 C.E., indicates that women's textile work was no longer considered a mundane task. The tapestries being woven at the time of the city’s destruction were works of art, no longer simply constructed for a specific household purpose. The fact that these works of art were being created suggests that there was a market for them. Women thus held power in their ability to work thread and to create something that retained a value because someone outside of their own home desired it . This means that for women to know what was desired by the public they must have had contact with the outside world. Women were not merely relegated to their own homes.

Gender roles

Men and women performed separate but equal tasks: “males produce[d] food by agricultural labor, but females process[ed] the products of the field to make them edible.”

In addition to raising deer when necessary, the duties of women were embedded in the culture’s rich tradition, including its religion. Women held important everyday roles in this aspect of life. While young boys were being taught hunting skills, “the girl was trained in the household, and she was taught how to keep the domestic religious shrines.”

Women were associated with the ritual practice of religion, as well as the actual beliefs themselves. The Moon Goddess is one of the most prominent gods in the Maya pantheon. Through her relations with the other gods, she was able to produce the Maya population. The local rulers would then claim descent from the Moon Goddess.

Gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...

 in ancient Maya art is ambiguous; it is difficult to ascertain the gender of some figures simply because one couldn’t survive without the other. In some images of heir recognition, this duality is explicit: there is a male figure on one side of the newly-anointed, and a female figure on the other side.

Child bearing

Although women were important in aspects other than those associated with the ability to bear children, the latter remained a very important part of their lives. The mythology and power associated with the ability to create was one which men tried to emulate. Men would participate in the act of bloodletting
Bloodletting
Bloodletting is the withdrawal of often little quantities of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease. Bloodletting was based on an ancient system of medicine in which blood and other bodily fluid were considered to be "humors" the proper balance of which maintained health...

 their own genitals to create something new from their blood. Instead of giving birth to life they would give birth to new eras through the symbolic gesture of menstruation
Menstruation
Menstruation is the shedding of the uterine lining . It occurs on a regular basis in sexually reproductive-age females of certain mammal species. This article focuses on human menstruation.-Overview:...

. This act was highly ritualized; the objects used to pierce the skin were “stingray
Stingray
The stingrays are a group of rays, which are cartilaginous fishes related to sharks. They are classified in the suborder Myliobatoidei of the order Myliobatiformes, and consist of eight families: Hexatrygonidae , Plesiobatidae , Urolophidae , Urotrygonidae , Dasyatidae , Potamotrygonidae The...

 spines, obsidian
Obsidian
Obsidian is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an extrusive igneous rock.It is produced when felsic lava extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimum crystal growth...

 blades, or other sharp instruments.” The blood was allowed to drip on cloth, which was then burned.

See also

  • Women in Maya society
    Women in Maya society
    The roles and representation of women in Maya society has been a comparatively little-studied subfield of Mayanist research, which nonetheless has benefited from an increasing scholarly attention in the latter-half of the 20th century and into the present...

  • Women rulers in Maya society
    Women rulers in Maya society
    During the 7th and 8th centuries in Mesoamerica, there is an evident shift in the roles women played in ancient Maya society as compared with the previous two centuries. It is during this time that there was a great deal of political complexity seen both in Maya royal houses as well as in the Maya...

  • Gender in Mesoamerican cultures
  • Goddess I
    Goddess I
    Goddess I is the Schellhas-Zimmermann-Taube letter designation for one of the most important Maya deities: a youthful woman to whom considerable parts of the post-Classic codices are dedicated, and who equally figures in Classic Period scenes...

  • Maya moon goddess
    Maya moon goddess
    The traditional Mayas generally assume the moon to be female, and the moon's phases are accordingly conceived as the stages of a woman's life. The Maya moon goddess wields great influence in many areas. Being in the image of a woman, she is naturally associated with sexuality and procreation,...

  • Ixchel
    Ixchel
    Ixchel or Ix Chel is the 16th-century name of the aged jaguar goddess of midwifery and medicine in the ancient Maya culture. She corresponds, more or less, to Toci Yoalticitl ‘Our Grandmother the Nocturnal Physician’, an Aztec earth goddess inhabiting the sweatbath, and is related to another...

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