Warfare and Women in a Set of Prehistoric Kin Based Societies: Lenapean (Algonquian)

In populous kin-based societies, intense competition for scarce resources may lead to very high rates of male mortality, making men unreliable as links in a living social network. This favors the step by step replacement of men by women as links through which vital relationships are traced, and marriages which maintain links to a person's uterine relatives (mother's or sister's family). In such circumstances, men attempt to assert control over women in the domestic sphere in order to manipulate affinal male kinship loyalties, but in other respects the status of women tends to remain high, evidently due to the importance of women as links in the social organization, their roles as substitutes for dead men, and their roles in matridominant subsistence agriculture. These developments are exemplified in one or more of three late prehistoric Algonquian societies of the Lenapean group located on the Eastern seabord: Medial, Coastal, and Subboreal.