If the sole purpose was to just ensure there are some healers around, he, or the tribe, could have easily made it so that each bender that comes of age could be a healer or a fighter (or maybe an architect or smth, considering everything is made out of ice)
Hell, you could even limit the spots for fighters and healers for each generation and make a sort of skill based selection.
(Like, if there are 100 water benders that need to choose, you can give 50 fighter spots and 50 healer spots. Each bender chooses and whichever side has more candidates than spots, you could host some sort of exam or tournament to decide who gets accepted and who gets rejected and moved to the other class)
true, but we often forget modern day womans rights and woman in the army are a very new thing. Sociaties at their techonoligical lvl usually had such segregation as part of the norm, and the idea of woman learning how to heal and becoming masters of that art might actually have been a great thing for them, giving woman an importand possition in the tribe especially during war time.
Sexism = bad
but from a people who are stil living in a tribal society with rigid roles, the discussion might not have even come up yet. So projecting on them with our modern view and getting angry at their ways makes little sense in my mind.
Patriarchal society wasn’t established until the Bronze Age. Tribal societies couldn’t afford to be sexist. You did what your tribe needed, as a collective, or you all died. It wasn’t until we had agrarian societies and the earliest cities that we could even afford to be sexist as a species.
this very much isnt true, Even in tribal sociaties gender roles existed. for example tribes in australia while migrating had female members carry most of the burden allowing the men to be ready with their weapon if they needed to defend them from other tribes or preditors. In other modern day tribes that have mostly been left alone and studied we also see the role of leadership often falling on men, with hunting being a predomintly more male occupied role.
I have a lot of problems with this study, Its based on literary findings but the way its worded is very misleading especially the way this article presents it. The study itself only looked if they could find any references to woman hunting, this creates the problem where even if the divide wasnt 50/50 but 99/1 It would still be counted. In all intense and purposes this studie only proves more then 50% of tribes at one time had female hunters. But that is not something i denied in my post, only claiming it is predominantly a male occupied role, which to be fair you can chose not agree with seeing as its still something people studie and argue over to this day. My opinion comes from the fact even in the animal kingdom you have animals like lions, gorillas and chimps where there are clear differences between the roles of the male and female members of groups, As such i believe its no weird thing to come to the conclusion that we as humans like most other animals would have also such group dynamics based on gender.
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u/suffering_addict May 07 '25
True, the main issue is the segregation by sex.
If the sole purpose was to just ensure there are some healers around, he, or the tribe, could have easily made it so that each bender that comes of age could be a healer or a fighter (or maybe an architect or smth, considering everything is made out of ice)
Hell, you could even limit the spots for fighters and healers for each generation and make a sort of skill based selection.
(Like, if there are 100 water benders that need to choose, you can give 50 fighter spots and 50 healer spots. Each bender chooses and whichever side has more candidates than spots, you could host some sort of exam or tournament to decide who gets accepted and who gets rejected and moved to the other class)