Still thinking about what the archetypal feminine characteristics would be.
Donovan's model of the gang as the matrix of the masculine fits well with Antony Stevens' description of rank or hierarchy as essential to masculinity. Stevens named affiliation as femininity's heartland.
My corollary to that insight has been that men use hierarchy to create affiliation and women use affiliation to create hierarchy.
The masculine virtues --and virtue comes from vir, adult male-- are mostly about actions and deeds: strength, courage, competency and honor need to be shown in doing. The root of this is the threefold role of men in our hunter-gatherer origins: to father, to fight and to feed. The individual male needs to prove himself, but the context is the eyes of other men first of all.
If femininity is about affiliation, about connective relationships, then...what?
Jung traced a fourfold grid of the feminine. He liked things in fours. The mother, obvious enough. The hetaira, the animating companion of men. The amazon, the more "masculine" outdoorsy and professional type. And the medium, who lives on the border between conscious and unconscious.
But are there commonalities here?
If, archetypally, the man is a hunter, a hunter in a gang, is woman a gatherer in a familial and local community? Certainly mothering is central to the feminine archetype, although there are outstanding mythological exceptions: Athena and Artemis are the first that come to mind, a hetaira and an amazon.
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