Gender in History

A few sources from women or nonelite men have survived from many of the world’s cultures, but they may be even more unrepresentative than those from elite men because of their singular status. We can compare the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle on the nature of women, for example, and set them within the context of laws and norms in Athens drawn up by male political leaders, but for the ideas of ancient Greek women, we have only a few poems by Sappho and even fewer fragments from a handful of other Greek female poets. These come from areas outside Athens about which we know far less, so that along with being rare, they are much more difficult to contextualize than Athenian works; there are no works by Athenian women at all, however, so Sappho becomes representative for all Greek women over several centuries.

Another interpretive problem arises when we turn to works that are clearly fictional to learn about notions of gender in any culture. Most of what was recorded as “history” until the past several centuries were the stories of rulers and battles; information about gender was sometimes embedded in these accounts, but it was never very extensive. These same cultures have left fascinating sources that focus on the relations between men and women, but these are fictional stories and poems that were often first told orally, then repeated with many variations, and eventually written down. They can tell us a great deal about the values of a culture, but their message can also be mixed or ambiguous, for they are designed both to teach a lesson and to entertain, and thus may both reinforce and subvert the values of the society in which they were produced. In One Thousand and One Nights, a group of stories apparently first written down in Persian and then in Arabic in the late ninth century, for example, the women are veiled and women who are not loyal to their husbands are always punished, but the main character, Shahrazad, is highly educated and saves herself from death by telling her royal husband enthralling stories with cliffhanger endings for 1,001 nights and thus changing his negative opinion of women. Some scholars read this as demonstrating that Arabian women could really be powerful and independent despite limitations, while others stress that Shahrazad is a fictional character meant to amuse people with her boldness and not a model for real women. Such differences of opinion lead some historians to reject stories and poems completely as a historical source, but because the information they contain often cannot be found in official histories or anywhere else, most scholars – particularly those of premodern societies in which all sources are scarce – use them carefully.

Ideas about women and men in any culture are not only expressed in works focusing specifically on gender issues, laws regulating marriage or other sorts of male/female interactions, or fictional descriptions of men and women, but in nearly everything produced by that culture. Notions of gender are often so self-evident to people that they make little comment about them directly and do not recognize where they have gotten their ideas. Intellectual constructs regarding gender and the formal laws that resulted from them both underlay and grew out of everything else considered in this book – work, politics, education, religion, sexuality, the family – for one of the key insights of gender history is how closely notions of gender are interwoven with other aspects of life.

The process through which ideas about gender became informal norms and conventions and then more formal rules and laws differed around the world. In many cultures the development of writing made gender structures more rigid and the differences between men and women greater, but some oral traditions were also extremely harsh and inegalitarian. You will need to keep this diversity among groups, along with the diversity within groups, in the back of your mind as you read this chapter, for there will always be a counterexample from somewhere in the world to each of its generalizations.

The Nature and Roles of Men and Women

Until the development of women’s history, the subjects of most historical studies were men, and the actions and thoughts of men were what made it into the historical record. One would think, then, that it would be easier to discover ideas about men as a group than women as a group, but the opposite is, in fact, the case. Educated men – the authors of most historical sources until very recently – saw women as an undifferentiated group about which they could easily make pronouncements and generalizations. They have thought and written about women since the beginning of recorded history, trying to determine what makes them different from men and creating ideals for female behavior and appearance. When they turned their attention to their own sex, however, they viewed men as too divided by differences of age, wealth, education, social standing, ability, and other factors to fall into a single category. As twentieth-century French feminist theorists put it, men saw women as a group as the Other, an object for their analyses, but saw themselves as the One, about whom generalizations that extended to the whole sex were either impossible or unnecessary.

The differences among men have often provided ways of conceptualizing societies and social or economic groups. In medieval Europe, for example, society was thought of as divided into three groups: those who fought (nobles), those who prayed (clergy), and those who worked (peasants). Women were in some ways part of all of these groups, though they were not technically members of the clergy and they generally did not fight, so that they did not fit this conceptualization exactly and they were rarely included in the many discussions about this tripartite social order. Instead a different tripartite structure was used to think about women, based on their relationship to men: virgin, wife, widow. Women also did not fit later Marxist distinctions between working class and middle class very well, either; married women in many European countries did not own any property independently, so had no direct control of the “means of production” so important in Marxist concepts of capitalism. Such differentiation among men was not limited to works of social or economic theory, but was often reflected (and reinforced) by activities, ceremonies, and practices. In early modern European cities, for example, residents might celebrate a visit by a ruler or a religious holiday with a procession, in which the men of the town marched in groups according to their political positions or occupation; women, if they marched at all, generally did so as an undifferentiated group at the end.

Those who sought to overcome social and status differences also spoke of bringing together different groups of men. Thomas Jefferson’s words in the American Declaration of Independence expresses this as “all men are created equal,” and seventeenth-century English writers wanting to encompass all of society described their audience as “all men and both sexes.” (It is clear from Jefferson’s own writings and from this latter phrase that “all men” did not mean women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory, just as it is clear from Jefferson’s writings elsewhere as well as his actions that he did not really mean “all men” when he used that phrase.)

Although they were very attuned to other sorts of differences, until very recently most discussions of men ignored gender. In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, for example, women were often described as “the Sex,” as if men did not have any. This sense that one group is an unmarked or default category (i.e., that in the case of gender one is always talking about a man unless noted otherwise, as in “woman doctor”) has also been noted by scholars of other subordinate groups. In terms of race, whiteness is the unmarked category, appearing much less often in discussions of an individual or group than does blackness. (Thus there are “authors” and “Black authors.”) These tendencies, along with the tendency of economic and labor history to focus on men, led scholars to quip: “Women have more gender, Blacks have more race, but men have more class.” Books with titles like Woman in Western Philosophy analyzed gender, while those with titles like Man in Western Philosophy generally did not, although as women’s history developed authors who continued to use “man” tried to argue that this was somehow gender-neutral.

Within the past several decades this situation has changed dramatically, and the study of men as gendered beings has exploded in many academic fields, including history, literature, psychology, sociology, religion, and many others. Because of the long tradition of viewing men as differentiated, and because diversity of experience is such a strong emphasis in current gender scholarship, these studies generally use the plural “masculinities” rather than the singular “masculinity.” They emphasize that all men construct their masculinity in relation not only to women, but also in relation to other men, and that groups of men also vary widely in their ability to shape their own masculinity depending on their position in racial, class, and other power structures. Men who were leaders in modern Ghana, for example, developed notions of masculinity shaped by local community standards, but also by the ideas of missionaries and colonial officials. The new scholarship on masculinity is thus innovative in its recognition that men have and do gender, but traditional in its emphasis on difference. Although it is the exact counterpart to masculinity, “femininity” has generally not caught on as a term of scholarly study, perhaps because it is still seen as more restrictive and less open to variation than masculinity. “Femininities” is even less common, unless it is paired with “masculinities.”

Though studies of ideas about men have only recently been labeled as such – rather than as studies of a gender-neutral “man” or simply as “intellectual history” or “philosophy” – the fact that the male experience has been normative has often skewed the way that women have been viewed. This can be seen most dramatically in scientific and medical works. In ancient Greece, almost all philosophers and scientists agreed that men were superior, and that heat was the most powerful force in the body and a source of gender difference; women’s lack of heat was seen as the reason they menstruated (men “burned up” unneeded blood internally) and did not go bald (men “burned up” their hair from the inside). But they differed among themselves as to the reasons for gender differences and the role of each sex in conception and reproduction, differences that continued over the many centuries in which their ideas were viewed as authoritative. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and his followers generally held that women produce no semen or anything comparable, and so contribute nothing to the form, intellect, or spirit of a fetus; their menstrual blood simply produces the matter out of which the fetus is formed. Aristotelians tended to view human anatomy and physiology on a single scale, describing women as imperfect or misbegotten males, whose lack of body heat had kept their sex organs inside rather than pushing them out as they were in the more perfect male. The historian Thomas Laqueur has labeled this the “one-sex model” and noted that as late as the anatomies of Andreas Vesalius in the sixteenth century, female sex organs were depicted as the male turned inside out. In this view, females were born when something was less than perfect during conception and pregnancy, but could occasionally become male later in life through strenuous exercise or unusual heat; males never became female, however, for nature, according to Aristotle, always strives for perfection. Because both women and men were located along the same continuum, certain women could be more “manly” than some men, and exhibit the qualities that were expected of men such as authority or self-control.

The later philosopher and physician Galen (129 CE–c. 216 CE) and his followers believed that women also produce semen that contributes to the form of the fetus, though they thought this was colder and less active than that of the male and that the father was still the more important parent. Galen is credited with more than 500 works, and his ideas and writings were copied, translated, and taught within the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and later the Islamic world. His idea that both men and women produce seed became part of what historians have labeled the “two-sex” model, which held that men and women were equally perfect in their sex, distinct and complementary.

Ideas similar to Aristotle’s developed in India, though with a more religious cast. In the body of religious texts known as the Vedas, composed between 1500 and 500 BCE, the idea developed that all fetuses are male until malignant spirits turn some of them into females. Male-producing ceremonies were introduced (which are sometimes still performed), held during the third month of pregnancy.

In China, the Huangdi Neijing (translated as “The Yellow Emperor’s Manual of Corporal Medicine” or “The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon”), a collection of medical treatises compiled perhaps as early as the second century BCE, divided the life force (qi) that flowed through the body along with blood into two basic principles of operation, yin and yang. Yin generally represents darkness, cold, wetness, night, passivity, the moon, contraction, and the female, and yang light, heat, the sun, activity, expansion, day, and the male. These two are not completely dichotomous, however, for, to be complete, each yin must contain some yang, and vice versa. The Huangdi Neijing views the organ system (zang) Kidney as controlling reproduction, as it was associated with water and various watery substances were involved in conception and reproduction. It viewed the male contribution to conception as Essence, which was materially identified with semen, but also seen as a life-giving vitality and linked to cosmological processes. The female contribution is Blood, which encompasses not simply the blood that nourishes the fetus but also breast milk and other fluids. Both were essential, but Essence was what gave life, a position similar to that of Galen: “at fourteen a girl’s Kidney qi is flourishing . . . her menses flow regularly and she can bear young . . . at sixteen a boy’s Kidney qi is abundant, and he comes into his reproductive capacities; his seminal essence overflows and drains; he can unite yin and yang and so beget young.”[4] Like the ideas of Galen, the Huangdi Neijing became the fundamental source for medical ideas and treatments over a huge area for thousands of years, including not only China but also Korea, Japan, and southeast Asia.

In some parts of the world, such as several indigenous North American groups, a stress on the complementarity of the sexes led to fairly egalitarian economic and social arrangements. Similarly, at some points in pre-Columbian Mayan history, ideas about gender complementarity appear to have led to power and privileges being inherited bilaterally. In Europe, however, the spread of the Galenic model after 1600 led instead to the idea that gender differences pervaded every aspect of human experience, biological, intellectual, and moral. This occurred at the same time that physicians and scientists began exploring the reasons for differences among humans, and, not surprisingly, shaped the results of their experiments and measurements. Male brains were discovered to be larger than female, male bones to be stronger. When it was pointed out that female brains were actually larger in proportion to body size, female brains were determined to be more child-like, for children’s brains are proportionately larger still. In the nineteenth century, new fields of knowledge such as psychology and anthropology often gave professionals and officials new languages to describe and discuss gender distinctions. They located gender differences much more clearly in the body than had earlier thinkers, for whom the differences between men and women derived primarily from their social role or place in a divinely created order.

Ideas about gender differences based in the body were interwoven with those about racial differences as European countries developed colonial empires: white women were viewed as most likely to incorporate female qualities viewed as positive, such as piety and purity, while nonwhite (especially Black) women were seen as incorporating negative female traits, such as disobedience and sensuality. White men, in this view, were more rational because of their sex and their race, while nonwhite men were more likely to demonstrate negative or ambiguous male qualities such as anger or physical prowess. The relations between gender and racial – and also class – hierarchies were worrisome, however. It was clear to most Europeans who stood at the top of the hierarchy – white men – and who at the bottom – nonwhite women – but the middle was more ambiguous. Were hierarchies of race easier to overcome than those based on gender, that is, was it easier for a woman to be “manly” or for a nonwhite man? If social class could outweigh gender as a determinant of social role for a woman like Queen Elizabeth I of England, could gender outweigh race for a man like Shakespeare’s Othello?

To address such questions, by the eighteenth century medical and scientific measurements were applied to ethnic and racial differences as well as those of gender, and it was “proven” that various groups had smaller brains or other markers of inferiority. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), often referred to as the “father of sociology,” linked racial and gender measurements by noting that “although the average cranium of Parisian men ranks among the greatest known crania, the average of Parisian women ranks among the smallest observed, even below the crania of the Chinese, and hardly above those of the women of New Caledonia.” Such dichotomous crania were, in Durkheim’s view, a sign of French superiority, for they marked the greatest gender distinctions. Debates about gender, race, and class differences continued well into the twentieth century, with arguments for both inequality and equality couched in scientific language and the body used as evidence.

Science was used in many eras to make discussions of the nature of men and women appear objective and irrefutable, but it is clear that basic ideas about gender were influenced by political factors. For example, elite masculinity became more closely linked to war in Japan during the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) because of the civil wars that immediately preceded this era; those civil wars made a “code of the warrior” the ideal for upper-class men, in which dying for one’s leader was highly praised. These links to politics may shape something as basic as the words one uses. In China, for example, the words used for female persons in the twentieth century had political implications and purposes. The most common word in imperial China was funü, which originally implied “female family member” and linked women with their kin groups. In the 1920s, Chinese middle-class intellectuals adopted the word nuxing to signify a more “modern” type of woman, more sexualized and commercial and less linked to her family. In their rejection of middle-class values, the Communists went back to funü, but reinterpreted it to link women with the state rather than the family. In the post-Mao period, some writers have gone back to nuxing to downplay the association between women and the state, and others have adopted nuren, a word influenced by social science terminology that downplays the link with both family and state. There is thus no word for female person in Chinese that does not have some political and social implications.

Many scholars have noted similar situations, though perhaps less dramatic, in other cultures and languages, noting that when people use the word “woman” or “women” categorically in descriptions and generalizations (“women are . . .”) they are only rarely really thinking about all women. They often cite the words ascribed to the African-American ex-slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883), who is reported to have responded at a women’s rights convention to the notion that women were too weak to vote by pointing out the hard physical labor she had carried out throughout her life and asking “Ar’n’t I a woman?” The historian Nell Irvin Painter has demonstrated that though Truth did make many speeches and published pamphlets in favor of women’s rights and abolition, this phrase was added in a later account of her speech by the woman chairing the convention. The phrase is so effective at highlighting ways in which the category and even the word “woman” are socially constructed and linked to power relationships, however, that it is hard to stop using it.

“Man” and even “person” are similarly variable, particularly when used in formal legal documents. Jurists in sixteenth-century Europe debated whether the laws regarding homicide applied equally to men and women, leading one to remark that “a woman, categorically speaking, is not a human being.” Laws extending voting rights to broader groups of men in the nineteenth century began to add the word “male” for the first time because women had attempted to interpret the existing word “person” to include women and to vote as long as they had the required amount of property.

Binaries

Though we can recognize the historical and social nature of the categories “woman” and “man,” and increasingly view gender as a continuum, for most of the world’s cultures woman/man is a fundamental binary and often linked with other dichotomous conceptualizations. Some linguistic and sociological theorists argue, in fact, that gender opposition is the root of the very common tendency to divide things into binary oppositions, viewing this almost as “natural” because it is found in so many cultures. In some cases, these conceptualizations are complementary, with “male” and “female” categories regarded as equally important; in others, the categories are clearly hierarchical, with “male” categories always valued more highly than “female.” In others, the categories may vary in their asymmetry, or not be completely dichotomous. Yin and yang are an example of the latter, for yin is understood to contain some yang, and vice versa.

Cultures vary in the sharpness of their dichotomies, with the categories sometimes sharply divided and sometimes interpenetrable. Some scholars see Western binaries as more dichotomous than those in non-Western cultures, though anthropologists point out that sharp social binaries based on kin group – which they term moieties – were also widely present in indigenous South America and Oceania. Cultures also vary in the degree to which differences are enforced; in some areas male/female distinctions are quite loose, while in others men or women risk severe punishment or death simply by being present in a space assigned to the other sex. People, especially women, may vary in their association with certain categories throughout the life-cycle: postmenopausal women sometimes come to be associated with conceptual categories and work or ritual activities usually viewed as “male,” and very old people with qualities usually regarded as “female,” such as dependence.

One of the dichotomies frequently associated with gender is that of the household and the world beyond the household. This is described in different ways in different places: in China as a split between inner and outer (nei-wai), in ancient Greece as a split between public and domestic, among the Bun people of Papua New Guinea as a split between internal and external. This division is often described as one between public and private, and much of the earliest work in women’s history explored the ways in which men in many cultures have been associated with the public world of work, politics, and culture and women the private world of home and family. These studies traced the differing degrees of separation between public and private, generally viewing points when the household and the political realm were less separated, such as the early Middle Ages in Europe or colonial North America, as times of greater gender egalitarianism, and those when they were more separated, such as Song China or the nineteenth-century United States, as points of greater hierarchy.