Earth's Children: Gender Roles

So, in my last post I mentioned how much I enjoyed the fact that Ayla carved out her own life long before she ever fell in love. The romantic plot of this series actually didn't show up until well into the second book.

 Book one is about Ayla's childhood. Orphaned in a natural disaster at age 5, she is adopted by a Neanderthal woman. Ayla spends the rest of her childhood in that Neanderthal tribe (who refer to themselves as The Clan) without any further contact with other Cro-Magnon people. Without giving away too many spoilers, Ayla ends up living completely on her own as a young adult at the end of the first book.

The second book in the series, The Valley of Horses, describes how Ayla finds shelter and stockpiles enough food and medicinal plants to keep her alive through the upcoming winter. A single mistake, a few minutes of not paying attention to her surroundings could easily prove deadly.

The Valley of Horses is my favourite book in this series.  Ayla was raised in a society in which there were strict rules about the roles of men and women. Rules isn't even the right word to describe them. In this universe, Clan men are born with all of the knowledge they need in order to become successful hunters. They aren't taught how to hunt or to make tools, they are simply reminded of their ancestral memories on the topic.

Clan women are born with all of the knowledge they need to preserve food, make clothing, etc. It would be unthinkable in that society for a woman to make a spear tip, a man to turned some spices and dehydrated meat and vegetables into a nourishing stew. They simply don't have the memories for those tasks.

The gender roles that our church believed in were, of course, not at strict as the roles that Ayla grew up with,  but I was taught that there were still certain things that men were suppose to do and certain things that women were suppose to do. Quietly, vehemently, I disagreed with my parents when they told me that God intended wives to submit to their husbands. That I, and every other woman in the world, was created for this purpose.  Instinctively, I knew that gender had nothing at all to do with whether an individual would make a good church leader. I loved my parents and church family, but I had a bone-deep conviction that they were wrong about these things.


Ayla defies many gender roles from the beginning of her adoption. Even when she tries to be a good woman, to stay within the boundaries of Clan femininity there is always a part of her that pushes beyond those boundaries.

 In order to survive on her own as a teenager, she has to hunt (and cook...and clean up...and go hunting again a few days or weeks later.) Ayla longs for human companionship in this book. When she finds it, though, she loses some of the freedom that she really loved at that time in her life.

While I definitely didn't want to live in a world without grocery stores (or other people), I was jealous of Ayla's ability to carve a life out for herself that did not rely upon gender to determine what she was allowed to do.

The next entry will talk about my biggest reason for believing that Mom wouldn't approve of these books: the plethora of sex scenes.

 (First photo credit.

Second photo credit. )