When discussing archetypal gender roles and their types before (oddly enough, I have) I've gone back to nature to decide. I say men are ISTx, while women are ENFx (not "undeterminable type X", but "variable x"). My reasons: In hunter-gatherer societies, women are social creatures. They do all of the things that require sitting around in groups: weaving, foraging, looking after the children, preparing meals for the tribe, that sort of thing; while men do the solo activities: hunting (even when in groups, the activity requires silence and focus on the task at hand), making tools, building shelters, skinning, and all that. It seems a natural extension of this E/I divide that women would go more towards dominant extraverted feeling (ENFJ - the function most associated with social interaction and keeping people happy) and extraverted intuition (ENFP - the function most associated with understanding relationships, between people as well as between things) while men would go more towards introverted thinking (ISTP, which has Se as its auxiliary function - the combination of which enable the quick formation of strategies, useful for hunting, war, and other trivial practical things) and introverted sensing (ISTJ, the function most associated with an understanding, or belief, that things should be a certain way - very much required by a pragmatic handyman who has no time to embellish and experiment). In a non-functional analysis, the men require S to do all the practical things they're expected to do, and the women require N to understand and manage all the intricate social complexities of the tribe. For the reasons stated above (that two types of each gender are "archetypal") I don't say that P or J are particularly associated with either gender. It's that dichotomy that would have led to conflict within the two gender groups, after all.
I think to say that a warrior needs to be commanding and a woman needs to be passive in our picture of the raw, tribal society is both overestimating the man and underestimating the woman. Not every warrior is a general - most need to be focused on the task at hand, they need to know how they themselves are going to survive this battle, they need to be focused on their own actions at any particular moment - it's not their job to decide or even to be aware of what everyone else is doing at a given moment, they just need to execute their orders. Women can't be passive, either. The matriarch of such a society would probably hold more sway over it than the male chief - after all, she's raised everyone in the village from infancy and everyone comes to her, their mother figure, with their problems. The latter is observable even in the modern world. How many of you have had male school nurses? If you were at school recently enough to have some sort of guidance department, how many of you had a male head of guidance? If not, think of a teacher you might have gone to when you needed support; or even a relative if you couldn't go to your mother - I imagine they'll be female. Women are called upon to be understanding and helpful and motherly - and a mother who keeps to herself and ignores her children gets called neglectful.
The ESTJ/INFP interpretation applies to the '50s, perhaps, but I'm looking for something more primal and natural than that.
