Gender in History

The title of this book would have made little sense to me when I chose to be a history major nearly five decades ago. I might perhaps have thought it an analysis of linguistic developments, as gender was something I considered (and bemoaned) largely when learning German nouns. The women’s movement changed that, as it changed so much else. The feminist movement that began in the 1960s – often termed the “second wave” to set it apart from the “first wave” of feminism that began in the nineteenth century – included a wide range of political beliefs, with various groups working for a broad spectrum of goals, one of which was to understand more about the lives of women in the past. This paralleled a similar rise of interest in women’s history that accompanied the first wave of feminism.

Women’s and Gender History

Advocates of women’s rights in the present, myself included, looked at what we had been taught about the past – as well as what we had been taught about literature, psychology, religion, biology, and most other disciplines – and realized we were hearing only half the story. Most of the studies we read or heard described the male experience – “man the artist,” “man the hunter,” “man and his environment” – though they often portrayed it as universal. We began to investigate the lives of women in the past, asserting that any investigation of past power relationships had to include discussion of patriarchy, that predominant social system in which men have more power and access to resources than women of thesame group, and in which some men are privileged over other men and some women over other women.

Women’s historians often began by fitting women into familiar historical categories – nations, historical periods, social classes, religious allegiance – and then realized that this approach, sarcastically labeled “add women and stir,” was unsatisfying. Focusing on women often disrupted the familiar categories and forced a rethinking of the way that history was organized and structured. The European Renaissance and Enlightenment lost some of their luster once women were included, as did the democracy of ancient Athens or Jacksonian America.

This disruption of well-known categories and paradigms ultimately included the topic that had long been considered the proper focus of all history – man. Viewing the male experience as universal had not only hidden women’s history, but it had also prevented analysis of men’s experiences as those of men. The very words used to describe individuals – “artist” and “woman artist,” for example, or “scientist” and “woman scientist” – encouraged one to think about how being female affected Georgia O’Keeffe or Marie Curie while overlooking the ways that being male shaped the experiences of Michelangelo or Picasso or Isaac Newton. Historians familiar with studying women increasingly began to discuss the ways in which systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men, and by the early 1980s to use the word “gender” to describe these systems. (“Gender” derives from the Latin word genus, meaning “kind” or “type,” and originally referred to types of nouns, of which there were three in Latin: masculine, feminine, and neuter.) At that point, they differentiated primarily between “sex,” by which they meant physical, morphological, and anatomical differences (what are often called “biological differences”) and “gender,” by which they meant a culturally constructed, historically changing, and often unstable system of differences. Most of the studies with “gender” in the title still focused on women – and women’s history continued as its own field – but a few looked equally at both sexes or concentrated on the male experience, calling their work “men’s history” or the “new men’s studies.”

Historians interested in this new perspective asserted that gender was an appropriate category of analysis when looking at all historical developments, not simply those involving women or the family. Every political, intellectual, religious, economic, social, and even military change had an impact on the actions and roles of men and women, and, conversely, a culture’s gender structures influenced every other structure or development. People’s notions of gender shaped not only the way they thought about men and women, but the way they thought about their society in general. As the historian Joan Scott put it in an extremely influential 1986 article, “Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”[1] Thus hierarchies in other realms of life were often expressed in terms of gender, with dominant individuals or groups described in masculine terms and dependent ones in feminine. These ideas in turn affected the way people acted, though explicit and symbolic ideas of gender could also conflict with the way men and women chose or were forced to operate in the world.

Historians were not the only ones to begin using the concept and word “gender.” It spread in other academic fields and then into ordinary speech, becoming the accepted replacement for “sex” in many common phrases – “gender roles,” “gender distinctions,” and so on.

Along with a focus on the gendered nature of both women’s and men’s experiences, some historians turned their attention more fully in the 1980s to the history of sexuality. “Sexuality” is a modern word used to describe the range of acts related to erotic desire, romance, and reproduction, and the meanings attached to them, and some scholars choose to avoid it for earlier periods, arguing that it is anachronistic. But investigations of the past are always informed by more recent understandings and concerns, and using modern concepts can often provide great insights. Thus most scholars use “sexuality,” while recognizing the enormous diversity on all matters relating to sex across time and space.

Just as interest in women’s history has been part of feminist political movements, interest in the history of sexuality has been part of the gay liberation movement that began in the 1970s. The gay liberation movement encouraged the study of homosexuality in the past and present and the development of gay and lesbian studies programs, and it also made both public and academic discussions of sexual matters more acceptable. Historians have attempted to trace the history of men’s and women’s sexual experiences in the past and, as in women’s history, to find new sources that will allow fuller understanding. For example, they realized that the idea that everyone has a “sexual orientation” as a part of their identity developed historically and was culturally constructed. (For more on this, see the section “Modern Sexuality” in Chapter 8.) The history of sexuality has contributed to a new interest in the history of the body, with historians investigating how cultural understandings of the body shaped people’s experiences of their own bodies and also studying the ways in which religious, medical, and political authorities exerted control over those bodies.

World and Global History

The subtitle of this book, “global perspectives,” highlights another development in history over the past half century: the growth of world, global, and other types of history that use a wide spatial lens. Until the last half of the twentieth century, most professional history – that is, history written by people trained at universities – focused on nation-states, and especially their political and military history. But during the 1960s, scholars and teachers began to challenge nationally organized histories. In North America, area studies programs at universities increasingly trained people to study many parts of the world, some professional historians began to write works with a broad scope, and college instructors and high school teachers created courses in world history. In Europe, the study of diplomacy gradually widened into imperial, international, and what was termed “overseas” history. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America critiqued much existing world and international history as overly centered on Europe, and posited different centers or called for a more polycentric world history. The 1990s brought other new directions, including transnational history, Atlantic World history, borderlands histories, connected history, world systems history, diasporic history, and many others. Some historians began to describe their field as global history, to reflect the increasing integration of world regions into a single system through globalization, though other historians (including me) see world and global history as largely the same.

Like women’s and gender history, world and global history have had their own debates and controversies about conceptualizations, inclusion, and scope. Courses often began as ones on various “civilizations” around the world considered separately, which tended to promote a binary model of “the West and the rest,” with an overemphasis on the West that in the 1980s came to be labeled “Eurocentrism.” Gradually many of those teaching world history rejected that model in favor of one that emphasized connections, interactions, and multipronged comparisons. Today world historians tend to de-emphasize individual nations or civilizations, and focus instead on regions defined differently, including zones of interaction, or on the ways in which people, goods, and ideas moved across regions through migration, conquest, and trade. Most world historians think that history should be studied on a range of chronological and spatial scales, including, but not limited to, very large ones.

Until about 2000, there was little connection between the history of women, gender, and sexuality and world/global history. In part this was because both of these fields developed at the same time as revisionist interpretations arguing that the standard story needed to be made broader and much more complex. Each disrupted a topic that was seen as the natural and proper focus of historical scholarship: heterosexual man on the one hand, and the nation on the other. Thus both have been viewed by those hostile or uninterested as “having an agenda.” Both concentrated on their own lines of revision, so did not pay much attention to what is going on in the other. In addition, world/global history tended to focus on large-scale political and economic processes carried out by governments and commercial elites. Most of the people involved were men, but how gender shaped their experience was not evaluated, as the emphasis was on material rather than cultural factors: ships, guns, trade goods, factories, railroads, satellites. Women’s history also initially had a strong materialist wing, with many studies of work and political movements, but over the past several decades it has paid more attention to cultural issues, representation, and meaning, which has also characterized the history of sexuality. Historians of women, gender, and sexuality have tended to have a narrower range of focus, choosing to study individuals, families, circles of friends, and other small groups, and have been worried that these would get lost in narratives that emphasize impersonal processes. Their analyses have generally stayed within one nation, and many within one region or city.

This lack of intersection is beginning to change, however, which is what makes this book possible. It is based on hundreds of articles and books that focus on gender and related topics in different parts of the world, and increasing numbers that make comparisons, evaluate exchange and interaction, study borderlands and migration, and otherwise incorporate theory and methods that also characterize world/global history. There was very little of this when I published the first edition of this book 20 years ago, but the amount of scholarship that is both gendered and global grows steadily. This scholarship is based on new research, and also on reevaluating older research with an eye to assumptions about gender that are incorrect or misleading. For example, the Supreme Being in the Maa language of the Maasai and other groups in East Africa is known as Enkai, a feminine singular noun, and envisioned as a woman. Christian missionaries and European colonial officials generally referred to Enkai instead as “he” when writing in English, as this fit with Christian understandings of what Supreme Beings should be. Doing comparative or world history often means relying on translations – there is simply no way to know all the languages of even a part of the world – but translation always involves choice, and in this case the choice was wrong. So newer scholarship about the Maasai, and about encounters between the Maasai and Europeans, corrects Enkai’s gender. Feminist world historians emphasize the importance of finding translations and using secondary studies that are more accurate and thus culturally sensitive, especially for things as central as gender (or Supreme Beings).

Before delving into what the new scholarship on gender in world history reveals, it is valuable to look at some of the key issues that gender historians have wrestled with in more detail. These have shaped the path historians and scholars in other fields have taken as they approach the past.

Gender, Sex, and Sexuality

Just at the point that historians and their students were gradually beginning to see the distinction between sex and gender (and an increasing number accepting the importance of gender as a category of analysis), that distinction became contested. Not only were there great debates about where the line should be drawn – were women “biologically” more peaceful and men “biologically” more skillful at math, or were such tendencies the result solely of their upbringing? – but some scholars wondered whether social gender and biological sex are so interrelated that any distinction between the two is meaningless.

For example, although most people are born with external genitalia through which they are categorized “male” or “female” at birth, some are not. Their external genitalia may be ambiguous, a condition now generally termed “intersex,” though earlier termed “hermaphroditism.” Closer physical examination may also reveal internal sexual and reproductive anatomy that do match those usually defined as “male” or “female.” In earlier times most intersex people were simply assigned to the sex they most closely resembled, with their condition only becoming a matter of historical record if they came to the attention of religious, medical, or legal authorities. Since the nineteenth century this gender assignment was sometimes reinforced by surgical procedures modifying or removing the body parts that did not fit with the chosen gender. Thus in these cases “gender” determined “sex” rather than the other way around.

Because the physical body could be ambiguous, scientists began to stress the importance of other indicators of sex difference. By the 1970s chromosomes were the favored marker, and quickly became part of popular as well as scientific understandings. In 1972, for example, the International Olympic Committee determined that simply “looking like” a woman was not enough, but that athletes would have to prove their “femaleness” through a chromosome test; an individual with certain types of chromosomal abnormalities would be judged “male” even if that person had been regarded as “female” since birth, and had breasts and a vagina but no penis. The problem with chromosomes is that they are also not perfectly dichotomous, but may involve ambiguous intermediate categories, so that more recently the source of sex differences has also been sought in prenatal hormones, including androgen and testosterone. Tests came to evaluate all of these factors: in 2009, the International Association of Athletics Federations required South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya to undergo an examination of her external genitals, internal reproductive organs (through ultrasound), chromosomes, and hormones before it would allow her to compete as female.

Given the uncertainties in most “biological” markers, the intensity of the search for an infallible marker of sex difference suggests that cultural norms about gender (that everyone should be a man or a woman) are influencing science. Preexisting ideas about gender shape many other scientific fields as well; the uniting of sperm and egg, for example, was long described as the “vigorous, powerful” sperm “defeating all others” and attaching itself to a “passive, receptive” egg. (The egg is now known to be active in this process.)

The arbitrary and culturally produced nature of gender has been challenged by transgender as well as intersex individuals. Transgender, or simply “trans,” is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex they are assigned at birth. “Transsexual” is often used for those transgender people who decide to transition to the gender with which they identify through sex reassignment surgery, now often called gender confirmation surgery, which has been available since the 1950s. (In this, the word “sex” refers to the physical aspects of a sexed body, not sexual orientation, as being transgender is not related to sexual orientation.) Transgender individuals may also understand themselves to be a third gender that is neither male nor female, both male and female, moving between male and female, or in some other way outside a dichotomous gender system. Because in English and many other languages pronouns are gendered, new pronouns have been developed. These have included “ze” and “hir,” and since 2010 the singular “they” has become increasingly common, chosen by people whose gender identity is nonbinary or by those who don’t want to go by pronouns with a traditional gender association.

Over the past several decades, the trans rights movement has advocated worldwide for legal recognition and other rights. Both activists and scholars often linked gender and sexual categories into an ever-lengthening list, which settled in the 2010s into LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) or LGBTQ+, with the “+” representing all other possible categories.