Author: Stephen Knight

Departments of History and Anthropology

Even cultures that are vastly different one from another have long touted similar themes and rules around gender. Those in power have used the existence of gendered behavior to enforce a hierarchy that is accepted as natural because of these consistent themes. Researchers can, in a way, test the theory of whether this hierarchy is natural or constructed by juxtaposing patriarchy with matriarchy and examining the similarities in gender roles and the differences in gender hierarchy. The Mosuo of China are one matriarchal culture that can be used in this crosscultural study. By comparing the cultural norms of Mosuo people to those of patriarchal cultures and even the Han ethnic majority of China, a researcher can imagine the difference between gender roles and hierarchy.

The Mosuo people are the only matriarchal culture in this study and will consequently be the most prominent. Therefore, it is important to offer some context as to who the Mosuo people are. This can be difficult since even naming the culture has proven challenging for researchers and the Chinese government.¹ Cai Hua referred to the Cuan people living in Lijiang and the bordering region of Sichuan as Mo-So.² His work states that the term Mo-So was applied to multiple ethnic groups: Na, Naxi, NaRu, and Nahing.³ Among these, Cai Hua documents that the approximately 30,000 Mo-So living in Yongning and its surrounding regions referred to themselves as the Na.⁴ As of 2006, Chuan-Kang Shih documents that 11,278 of the 30,870 people living in the greater Yongning area identified as Mosuo.⁵ Prior to 1997, they had requested multiple times to be distinguished from the Naxi as a separate ethnic group, but this listing would require ratification from the government that had not yet been granted.⁶ This is despite the fact that Chinese natives could recognize Mosuo people at a distance by their clothing.⁷ Chuan-Kang Shih describes a conversation with a government official in 1987 where he was told that the Mosuo people would be unhappy if they were called by any term other than Mosuo, while Chinese officials would be equally dissatisfied if the Mosuo people were referred to in any piece of academic literature as anything other than Naxi. He also points out that the Mosuo people refer to themselves as Na people in their native language, Naru. They prefer that other ethnic groups refer to them as Mosuo.⁸ The English pronunciation of Moso is closer to the Chinese word written in English most commonly as Mosuo. Therefore, Chuan-Kang elects to use the word Moso in his own writing.⁹ Since most resources written in or translated to the English language use the word Mosuo to describe these people, it is the term that will be used throughout this paper.

Information regarding Mosuo people is hard to come by, in the modern world. Cai Hua made a note of this in his research. Previous writers have described Mosuo culture from an ethnocentric point of view, going as far as mistaking the male chief of a Mosuo household for a husband.¹⁰ Cai noted in his work how Mosuo people were reluctant to work with anthropologists or journalists of any kind due to an attempt by China’s Cultural Revolution to forcefully change Mosuo culture. To their understanding, this attack on their way of life occurred because of previously published, poorly conducted research.¹¹ Chuan-Kang Shih references this reluctance; however, his work focuses on a very different consequence of the literature mentioned by Cai Hua. Chuan-Kang states that the Mosuo people were humiliated when they learned that their visitors saw the Mosuo as an underdeveloped culture of which they could take advantage. While they had initially been proud of the growing interest in their culture, it became repellent to them.¹²

Cai Hua described the geographical isolation of Yongning early in his work. Before the 1970s, the trip to Lijiang from Yongning took ten days and was undertaken entirely by foot. A single road to the South connected Yongning to Ninglang but was almost never traveled. He knew of a bus that took that route, and yet the road received less traffic than a single vehicle a day. Cai described more neglected roads leading to cities like Yanyuan in the North and a road that was still under construction. This unfinished road was meant to take travelers West, to the shores of the Jirangsha River.¹³ The personal account of a Mosuo woman also remarks how rare it was for the area to see visitors.¹⁴ The Himalayan mountains isolated the Mosuo. That is probably why their customs survived for so long. Their isolation raises some questions regarding the customs and standards that they seem to have shared with Western cultures who would not have had much opportunity to influence the Mosuo.

Cai Hua referred to the structure of Mosuo families as the lignée.¹⁵ The lignée was a group of people from different generations, but descending from a common ancestor, living under one roof.¹⁶ In this family structure, the passing generation left its inheritance to the next collective generation of the lignée.¹⁷ Each generation of a lignée worked, ate, and raised the sisters’ children together. This process lasted for up to ten generations as the lignée expanded, and sometimes even longer. Two chiefs of opposite gender took on a leadership role in the Mosuo lignée. The female chief oversaw operations within the home, such as the distribution of clothing, management of finances, and preparation of meals. Male chiefs took charge of the lignée’s duties in the outside world. This involved the care of livestock and the lignée’s relationship with neighbors and other villagers. While the male chief acted as the provider for the family, Cai Hua remarked that the female chief often organized the work done in the fields.¹⁸ Yang Erche confirms in her memoir that families traditionally lived under the household of a maternal ancestor, and that decisions regarding the family were not made without consulting the other adults of the household.¹⁹

The dynamic in which a female chief oversaw work outside her own household was not limited to the matriarchal Mosuo; there have been patriarchal cultures where women could manage the outside work of men from the home. In 18th century Latin American culture, upperclass widows experienced work like the female Mosuo chiefs. While these women were metaphorically incapable of leaving their home alone without causing a scandal, they often managed business from inside the home. This involved using male surrogates whenever possible: brothers, children, and other kinsmen.²⁰ Despite living in a patriarchal culture, and despite being unable to provide for herself, the Latin American woman was able to experience a kind of matriarchy through organizing the work of the men in her family.

Gender roles could be seen in the roles of the household chiefs and in the initiation ceremonies of the Mosuo people. Children typically wore gender-neutral garments until this rite, when they either received their skirt from their mother or their pants from one of their mother’s brothers. During her initiation ceremony, a Mosuo girl may have held flax and jewelry. A boy’s ceremony would replace these with items such as a silver ingot and a sword. The girl’s jewelry and flax symbolized her beauty and her duty to provide the family with clothing. The boy’s silver and weapon were a reminder of his duty to support the household with money and act as a guardian.²¹ Yang Erche Namu leaves a personal account of her own Skirt Ceremony in her memoir. She says that Skirt and Trousers Ceremonies always occurred during the New Year Festival. She describes how Mosuo women would braid their hair with long extensions so that it stretched below their hips, and how mothers typically took the role of changing their daughters into their girl clothes. In Yang Erche’s case, neither of these events occurred according to tradition. To avoid lice while living with her uncle, Yang Erche’s hair had been cut too short to braid. Instead of her mother changing Yang Erche’s clothes, that role was passed to a friend of the family that the memoir names Cilatsuo. According to Yang Erche’s mother, this was acceptable because Cilatsuo had a pleasant face and had been born during the year of the horse.²² It is clarified the beauty of the woman initiating the skirt ceremony was important, but Yang Erche does not explicitly state why it was important that Cilatsuo had been born during the year of the horse. It is stated much earlier in her memoir that Yang Erche was born during the year of the horse, which may be the reason that her birth year made her more suitable.²³

The work done in Mosuo fields was not divided by a gendered barrier. Typically, Han Chinese men were responsible for manual labor such as plowing and carrying crops. Meanwhile, women transplanted seedlings to the rice fields. Chuan-Kang Shih states that Mosuo men and women performed the duties of pulling up, rinsing, and binding seedlings to be transplanted in the morning. They would then go out into the rice fields and plant them as a collective group, rather than dividing the labor in the manner of their Han Chinese neighbors.²⁴ Yang Erche describes this system as well. She points out how her mother’s sisters helped run the house and worked in the fields with their brothers: plowing fields, chopping wood, sewing clothes, and butchering animals.²⁵ Despite the clearly established and culturally encouraged gender roles, boys and girls were offered the same opportunities and were treated as equally valuable when providing for their household.

Even though the two heads of the Mosuo household were male and female members of the same lignée, meaning that they were usually siblings or closely related cousins, the Mosuo people observed what anthropologists refer to as the incest taboo. It was their belief that two mouths eating from the same bowls should not engage in sexual congress and should not bear children.²⁶ One reason for this was to avoid the strain of economic bonds between romantic partners.²⁷ Yang Erche describes married women as miserable. She says that love outside her country seemed overly complicated, and that all Mosuo people seemed to share the same opinion of marriage.²⁸ Another reason for this distance between family members was the presence of apparent defects in children born of incest. The Mosuo believed that incest was an animalistic act and that children born of such would perish early. They even believed that the effects of incest acted like a curse, taking cattle along with the child. To avoid implications of incest or emotional bonds that might have led to incest, Mosuo Mothers discouraged their children from discussing emotional issues with their siblings of the opposite sex. Mosuo culture was so strict in their avoidance of such bonds that it was even considered inappropriate for an uncle to discuss something emotional with his niece. When such subjects arose, he was to find a passerby and convey his messages to this person so that they might relate his message to his niece. Mosuo mothers, on the other hand, had the right to share such conversations with their sons so long as they did so discreetly.²⁹

In Ancient Rome, Cato expressed a similar sentiment in the case of Manilius. Manilius had simply kissed his wife in the presence of his daughter in daylight and was expelled from the senate for his indiscretion.³⁰ This sets the Roman standard for public behavior in an odd light, since it is unclear whether Manilius was expelled for being intimate with his wife in the presence of his daughter or for being intimate with his wife in public. However, it relates well to the discretion expected of Mosuo adults. The right of a Mosuo mother to have intimate conversations with her son in private extended the role of the mother and the importance of her body and the bond that she had with her children.

Since both the male and female chief had a certain degree of control over their household, one of the factors that defined the Mosuo as matriarchal was matriliny. During Cai Hua’s ethnographic research, he said that he never discovered a word that even related to the concept of a father in Mosuo culture. Children were considered the offspring of the mother rather than of the two parents.³¹ In some cases, the child’s genitor was not even known, because furtive visits were carried out in such a way that a Mosuo woman’s family was unaware of her lover’s presence.³² Mosuo people considered the ong to be the carrier of hereditary and racial characteristics. They saw the ong as a product of the mother.³³ This is the reason that mothers were allowed to engage in intimate conversations with their sons; the bond between mother and child was linked to the very foundation of the human body. This connection was emphasized by the Mosuo creation story. Chuan-Kang points out that the Mosuo creation story claims all human beings descend from a celestial mother and a monkey who conned her into thinking she had lost her human lover. When her lover returned, he chose to raise her children by her side rather than neglecting her.³⁴ Just as they were in Mosuo culture, the mother’s children were raised by her and received her name. Their genitor’s importance in the creation story ended with the act of giving the mother her children.

Cai Hua says that the Mosuo did observe marriage, but not often. Even those that chose to cohabit still often engaged in furtive visits.³⁵ Mosuo people engaging in marriage and cohabitation found their children affected by their decision. While the children of an unmarried Mosuo woman would be considered of the same social class as their mother, children of a married couple inherited the status of the father. In the case of cohabitation between a common man and a woman of the upper class, the children were considered commoners. In the case of cohabitation between a man of the upper class and a common woman, the children of such a marriage experienced the upper-class advantages of their fathers.³⁶ In cases where a household faced extinction or lacked an heir of either gender, Chuang-Kang Shih notes that children could be adopted by their genitors’ family.³⁷ Since this was meant to maintain the family line, this meant that even adopted children would be considered the offspring of the family matriarch rather than their genitor.

Mosuo people engaged in a form of courtship that Cai Hua initially found peculiar. Younger people would make it known to their family that they wanted to visit one of the spaces set aside for dating. Because of the incest taboo, the Mosuo family ensured that relatives of the opposite sex were never present in the same dating space at the same time. At the time that Cai Hua conducted research in Yongning, this dating space was the theater. While a film was playing, young men would sit next to a woman and flirt with her. If she accepted a young man’s advances, then he would take her in his arms. These rituals were more discreet in enclosed theaters, but they were largely the same with the young men almost always taking the initiative.³⁸ The tendency to view initiative as a masculine trait can be traced back to the Mosuo creation story, where the last human being professed his love to a celestial being and completed a series of tests to gain her parents’ favor. Although she was depicted as intelligent and resilient, the mother of all living things in this story seemed to take on a very passive role, much like the girls in the theater.³⁹

The idea that initiative was a masculine trait could also be seen in western cultures. Patricia Simons stated how a case in Germany was conducted regarding the sex of a crossdressed woman or hermaphrodite. In Simons’ own words, only men were allowed to be, “…roguish, assertive, insistent, and heated in character.”⁴⁰ Socolow wrote, in her book on the lives of women in Latin America, that Iberian families cloistered their women from sexuality by never allowing them to leave the home without a man present. This was because of a belief that women were slaves to their carnal urges. The purity of a woman was related directly to the purity and honor of her father’s or husband’s house. In other words, Iberian societies judged the value of a household by the purity of its most vulnerable members. Socolow attributes this perspective to the alternating Muslim and Christian conquest of Spain in previous centuries.⁴¹ The unique position of Iberian and Latin American women makes an even greater divide between Western culture and the behavior exhibited by Mosuo boys and girls at these theaters.

The difference in these interactions was little more than a nuance. Mosuo women came to the theater expecting and inviting sexual advances from Mosuo men. A young Mosuo woman had already taken the initiative by entering the theater. Mosuo boys entered the theater with the understanding that Mosuo girls in this space were seeking male attention. Therefore, the very act of entering the theater was equal to consent. When Cai asked about the practice, Mosuo boys informed him that the girls would be uncomfortable if such advances were not made.⁴² This was a feature of Mosuo culture that related to the way that the genders experienced sex. The man’s role in sex was to simply enjoy himself. The act of intercourse was seen as a gift from him to the household of the woman, watering a seed in the woman’s belly.⁴³ This was a stark contrast to Latin America, where sexual relations were restricted even in the confines of marriage. Sexual contact that did not lead to childbearing was prohibited, and certain sexual positions were considered animalistic because they were too carnally pleasing.⁴⁴ While the Mosuo people traded pleasure for new life, Latin Americans were denied pleasure for the sake of purity.

Like the Mosuo, most Europeans believed that sexual pleasure was a masculine trait. Men were meant to assert their dominance through sex acts, sexual pleasure, and the presence of healthy male features.⁴⁵ These features included the growth of a beard, aggression, and the ejaculation of seminal discharge.⁴⁶ This brand of masculinity had its roots in ancient Rome, where everything penetrative or simply associated with the phallus was considered masculine.⁴⁷ The Romans viewed penetration during homosexual acts as an act reserved for a fully grown, bearded, masculine man. Boys who had not yet grown their full beard were considered less than men and were therefore on the receiving end of penetrative sex. These homosexual acts were only considered a danger to the giver’s masculinity when the receiver was allowed to stimulate their own phallus.⁴⁸ The importance of a phallus and sexual pleasure to the Roman’s masculinity is most clearly seen in the case of eunuchs. Roman writers often attributed eunuchs with Mollitia: a word for softness that was associated with feminine characteristics.⁴⁹ The fact that Romans and the Mosuo had both connected the importance of the male orgasm and sexual pleasure in childbearing to masculinity might cause researchers to wonder whether the two cultures had somehow mingled and shared this part of their culture one with the other, or if these two cultures separated by time and physical distance had somehow arrived at similar conclusions regarding the sex of men. Such a statement could be used in an argument that gender roles are natural, rather than socially constructed. It could also be a simple coincidence.

The Mosuo practiced another form of courtship outside of dating spaces like the theater. Going about their daily lives, a man or woman might have taken an interest in a person of the opposite sex. When this happened, the interested party would snatch away some object belonging to the person who had caught their attention. If a woman was approached in this manner: she could simply smile in agreement and allow the man to return her object later that night, or she could demand the immediate return of the stolen object. A man approached in this manner would either come into the woman’s home later that night to retrieve his object or find some way to steal it back from her. The man also had the option of simply saying that he did not wish to visit her because she did not please him. Meanwhile, Cai Hua noted how the Mosuo women had crafted a standard response to men they did not want to entertain. This response involved the woman claiming that some other man had already spoken for her on that night.⁵⁰ The implication here was that men were more likely to leave a woman be out of respect for another man, rather than out of respect for her wishes. While this arrangement seems patriarchal, this further implies man’s animalistic nature and his inability to control himself. This is reminiscent of how Latin American culture viewed women as the carnal and roguish gender.⁵¹ The purposes woven into this interaction denote the ideals set down in the Mosuo creation story The celestial mother is depicted as the more clever and steadfast of the characters, while her lover is depicted as wanting her so badly that he undertakes great labors to impress her family and raises another creature’s children just to be with her.⁵² The Mosuo belief that women are inherently more rational and less prone to either throwing tantrums or arguing about such matters is a matriarchal nuance.

There were two other ways to reject an unwanted man, but they required that the woman let an unknown man into her home before rejecting him. The first was for her to retire to her mother’s room. The second option was that she could scream in defense, telling the rest of the house that a thief had come into her room. Women did not tend to observe this option according to Cai’s knowledge.⁵³ Once again, the fact that the woman would retire to her mother’s room rather than trust the man to keep to himself implies that Mosuo women view men as the same roguish beings that Patricia Simons described.⁵⁴ In contrast, Latin American men faced a similar struggle in breaking off engagements. Once a promise had been made, a woman retained the right to break off an engagement because betrothal was not considered an obligation on her part . She could simply change her mind because she wanted to change her mind. On the man’s part, betrothal was considered an obligation. In Latin America, it was unacceptable for a man to break off an engagement, unless his bride-to-be was not a virgin. While the man had the power to propose engagement, he was near powerless to stop it in the same way that a Mosuo woman was near powerless to stop a man she had already allowed into her home.⁵⁵

The role of women in religion was also comparable between Mosuo culture and western cultures. It was common for women to become Daba, the religious leaders of a practice that is unique to the Himalayas, before 1940.⁵⁶ This was before World War II and long before the Cultural Revolution came to Yongning.⁵⁷ Cai Hua described the people of Yongning as devout Buddhists and said that Lignées always raised at least one of their boys to practice Tibetan Buddhism as a monk. This almost completely removed women from a position of religious leadership.⁵⁸ Chuang-Kang Shih relates the increasing importance of men in religion to the introduction of Tibetan Buddhist principles and beliefs into Mosuo society. One instance of Tibetan Buddhism’s influence that he refers to is the common use of the Tibetan words that relate sun and moon to father and mother. This was in opposition to the traditional Mosuo view of the sun as a female: warm and capable of giving and sustaining life.⁵⁹ He blames the subtle and patient influence of the Tibetan Buddhists, the introduction of television in the 1980s, and the growing acceptance of consumer goods among Mosuo people for the rapid and dramatic changes that have occurred in Mosuo culture since his study began. Chuan-Kang even claims that these influences are causing the complete oncoming erasure of Mosuo culture.⁶⁰ The lack of female religious leaders was also noted in studies conducted by a team of researchers in 2015.⁶¹ However, the female chief of a lignée was the one to offer sacrifices to the ancestors.⁶² This implies that she had a closer relationship to the ancestors and was connected to her role as a matriarch and all of the past matriarchs of her lignée.

Carrie Chapman Catt remarks, in her diaries, that Chinese women near Macao were quite important in religious places because they served more gods than their husbands. However, she never clarifies whether these women belonged to the Han Chinese ethnic group. This put women in a place of religious leadership, but also put them in a position of greater discipline. What’s more, their prayers were often meant to aid their husbands in acts such as the dispatching of enemies.⁶³ Chinese society expected women to use their power and their standing with the gods to aid their men. Their position in religion was used to further remove agency from them. Religion had also been used to confine women in Latin America as late as the 19th century. Elite women were encouraged to either marry a man or marry God. Society saw the moving of an elite woman to the lifestyle of a convent as relieving society from the burden of sustaining one more woman.⁶⁴ Per these examples, the presence of women in religious leadership is not synonymous with religious liberation and can be a method of restraint.

Despite the numerous common themes in the gender roles of the Mosuo people when compared to patriarchal civilizations, evidence exists that Mosuo women experienced a higher quality of life than their Han Chinese neighbors. A woman living in China during the early 21st century remarked how she had never heard of rape among the Mosuo people. Meanwhile, it was a pervading issue among the other minorities of China in the Yunnan province where she lived.⁶⁵ This does not mean that rape was nonexistent in Mosuo culture, but at the very least it was not reported as often as in other Chinese minorities. It is likely that rape was far less common in a culture where women were not made prisoners of their own bodies and were free to engage in sexuality with male suitors. There was also an understanding that women would receive much more respect in a matrilineal culture than in a culture where they were seen more as a vehicle for the birth of a man’s children.

A team of researchers set out to compare the quality of life of Mosuo women and Han Chinese women in a paper that was published in 2015. This study found that the climacteric symptoms, physiological symptoms that were often associated with menopause, in Mosuo women were more connected to the physical changes occurring within a woman’s body. Meanwhile, Han women complained more consistently of anxiety, physical and mental exhaustion, and irritability than their Mosuo neighbors. The same study found that all the Mosuo women studied actively practiced Daba and Buddhism, while the Han Chinese women studied claimed to not observe any religious practice. Approximately 11% of the Mosuo women identified as part of labor force, in contrast to approximately 2% of the Han Chinese women. This greater presence in religion and the labor force offered women greater sense of agency and community, especially during the period in which they lost their ability to give birth. The researchers’ hypothesis connected the reduced symptoms of anxiety, mental exhaustion, and irritability with the presence of strong social support from other women. In the conclusion of their research, the team found that Mosuo women experienced less severe climacteric symptoms, significantly higher self-esteem, and more social support. The consensus among these researchers was that these changes came from the tendency of Mosuo women to engage in more taxing work than Han Chinese women and the support of the blood-related Mosuo lignée during a woman’s climacteric period rather than the family of the Han woman’s husband.⁶⁶ In other words, they were simply in better shape and lived in a household of blood kin that understood and empathized with the changes their bodies were going through. The alleviation of psychological symptoms may have also been connected to the value placed on a woman’s body after her climacteric period rendered her incapable of bearing children, but Cai Hua seems to argue that a human body’s value declined after passing a certain age at which men and women were expected to cease sexual activity. In one case; a young man very loudly pronounced shame on his own genitor for attempting what he referred to as raising a corpse.⁶⁷

In comparing Mosuo culture to patriarchal societies, researchers can see various common themes. The only truly outstanding difference between what is described as matriarchy and patriarchy existed within the unit of the family. This was especially true in matters of religion and community, where Mosuo men seemed to maintain most of the power. This should serve as a reminder that matriarchy, even when it is a cultural norm, only refers to the power of the woman within the home. Perhaps the most obvious factor that separated Mosuo matriarchy from outside patriarchy was the freedom that women had to engage in and experiment with sex. Even though they also had the opportunity to join the labor force, Cai Hua and the study of Climacteric symptoms in Mosuo culture both state how women rarely worked outside the home. These were examples of equality rather than examples of women exerting power over men. Even the structure of the home distributed power equally between the male and female chiefs. The only factor that made Mosuo culture overtly matriarchal was matriliny. Taking on a passive role in sexuality did not exclude the Mosuo woman from power. Taking on a nurturing and empathetic role towards the family was seen as an expression of power, rather than submission to a patriarchal figure. Most importantly, being a mother was seen as a Mosuo woman’s duty to herself and her own lineage, rather than to a patriarch. The roles and characteristics associated with the female gender were not so different from those in patriarchal culture. It was the lens through which those roles were viewed that made Mosuo culture matriarchal.

1. Chuan-Kang Shih, Quest for Harmony (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010) 21
2. Cai Hua, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 20
3. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 35
4. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 20
5. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 1
6. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 37
7. Anna Hill in conversation with the author, September 2022
8. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 21-23
9. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 27-28
10. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 24
11. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 28
12. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010), 11
13. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 39-40
14. Yang Erche Namu, Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003), 139
15. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 20
16. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 496
17. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 20
18. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 121-123
19. Yang, Leaving Mother Lake, 17
20. Susan Migden Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 122
21. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 249-250
22. Yang, Leaving Mother Lake, 112-119
23. Yang, Leaving Mother Lake, 9
24. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 234
25. Yang, Leaving Mother Lake, 18
26. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 125-126
27. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 20
28. Yang, Leaving Mother Lake, 176
29. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 125-128
30. Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17-18
31. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 20
32. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 186
33. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 120
34. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 228-230
35. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 20
36. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 50-51
37. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 154-157
38. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 188-190
39. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 228-230
40. Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 36
41. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 5-9
42. Cai Hua, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 189-190
43. Cai Hua, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 119
44. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 71
45. Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe, 37
46. Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe, 30
47. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 20
48. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 273
49. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 139
50. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 187
51. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 6
52. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 228-230
53. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 192
54. Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe, 36
55. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 68
56. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 99
57. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 29
58. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 104
59. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 231-233
60. Chuan-Kang, Quest for Harmony, 4-5
61. Ying Zhang et al. “A Cross Cultural Comparison of Climacteric Symptoms, Self-Esteem, and Perceived Social Support Between Mosuo Women and Han Chinese Women.” Menopause 23 no. 7 (2016): 785
62. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 123
63. The Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt, August 21 to September 27, 1912, reel 2-138
64. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 98
65. Anna Hill in conversation with the author
66. Ying et al. “A Cross Cultural Comparison,” 784-790
67. Cai, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, 219

References

• Anna Hill in conversation with the author, September 19, 2022
• Diary of Carrie Chapman Catt, August 21 to September 27, 1918, file #25. 79-11, Box 2, Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, Birmingham Public Library, Department of Archives and Manuscripts.
• Hua, Cai. A Society Without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China. New York: Zone Books, 2001.
• Shih, Chuan-Kang. Quest for Harmony: The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010.
• Simons, Patricia. The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Socolow, Susan M. The Women of Colonial Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Williams, Craig A. Roman Homosexuality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Yang Erche Namu and Mathieu, Christine. Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003.
• Zhang, Ying, Xudong Zhao, Rainer Leonhart, Maya Nadig, Annette Hasenburg, Michael Wirsching, and Kurt Fritzsche. “A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Climacteric Symptoms, Self-Esteem, and Perceived Social Support Between Mosuo Women and Han Chinese Women.” Menopause 23, no. 7 (2016): 784–791.