Gender in History

Structure of the Book

The dominance of English-language scholarship is both a blessing and a curse for the purposes of this book. Because of the book’s intended audience of students as well as scholars, I decided to include only English-language materials in the suggestion for further reading that follow each chapter, and to make these brief. You can trust that these works contain much of the newest and best research available, and they point to materials in other languages, but they represent only a small fraction of what is there. To explore any topic fully, you will need to go far beyond them, and in many cases, as with any historical topic, to read source materials, analyses, and theoretical discussions in other languages as well.

Organizing a brief book on a subject this huge was a challenge, made even greater by the fact that a key theme in women’s and gender history has been the arbitrary and artificial nature of all boundaries – chronological, national, methodological, sexual. Thus for the first two editions of this book, I decided to organize the book topically rather than geographically or chronologically, in order to highlight the specific connections between gender and other structures and institutions. Each topical chapter investigated the ways in which what it meant to be male and female was shaped by such aspects of society as economic or religious structures, and also explored the reverse – how gender in turn shaped work, for example, or religious institutions.

For this third edition, I decided to reorganize the book completely, and, beginning with Chapter 3, present the material chronologically, with each chapter covering a shorter time frame than its predecessor. This decision was in part a response to comments from faculty who have used the book that a chronological organization would better meet their needs and those of their students. Each chapter incorporates material that was in the topical chapters, including discussion of the family, religion, politics, economic issues, culture, and sexuality, as well as new information based on the scholarship of the past decade. Each chapter discusses many of the world’s cultures, notes both distinctions among them and links between them, and suggests possible reasons for variations among cultures and among different social, ethnic, and racial groups within one culture.

Chapter 2 is an update of what was Chapter 4 in the previous editions, and looks at key ideas and ideals that emerged in a number of cultures and then shaped the informal norms and more formalized laws regulating every realm of life. This is not to say that these concepts were the same everywhere or that they did not change over time, but that there have been significant similarities, parallels, and continuities across time and space. These include: ideas about the nature and proper roles of men and women, what is often termed masculinity and femininity or manhood and womanhood; binaries related to male/female binaries, including nature/culture, public/private, inner/outer, order/disorder, rational/passionate; norms and laws regarding motherhood and fatherhood; ideas and laws prescribing male dominance and female subservience and dependence; ideas and laws promoting gender egalitarianism.

The chronological chapters begin with Chapter 3. Just as they have de-emphasized the nation as the most significant geographic unit, most global historians have also de-emphasized the invention of writing as a sharp dividing line in human history. With this the border between archaeology and history disappears, and the Paleolithic (2,000,000–9500 BCE) and Neolithic (9500 BCE–3000 BCE) become part of history rather than “prehistory.” Chapter 3 covers these eras. It begins with the evolution of hominids, looks at Paleolithic society and culture, examines the impact of domestication and the development of agriculture in the Neolithic on gender roles and relationships, and ends with a discussion of debates over the origins of patriarchy.

Chapter 4 examines the growth of cities and larger-scale political structures in the period from roughly 3000 BCE to roughly 500 BCE. It explores the more complex gender hierarchies that developed in cities and states and the ways writing facilitated this process; looks at work and family life; analyzes the religious traditions of the ancient Near East, including Judaism; and considers the growth of hereditary dynasties, which transmitted power through lineages of elites. Chapter 5 focuses on the classical cultures of Eurasia in the period from 500 BCE to 500 CE. It begins with the family and sexuality, examines the growth and spread of religious traditions, including Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, and the ways these shaped family life and social practices, and ends with a discussion of education and culture. Chapter 6 investigates the thousand years between 500 CE and 1500 CE. It examines patterns in family life and religious traditions that endured for a long time in Africa, the Americas and the Pacific, the growth of large-scale states in the Americas, and the development of courtly societies across much of the world. It traces the origin and spread of Islam, developments in Europe and the Mediterranean, and the way growing cities created opportunities that were shaped by gender.

Chapter 7 focuses on the early modern period, from 1500 to 1800. It examines economic transformations, especially the growth of capitalism; the Renaissance, Reformation, and spread of Christianity around the world; how colonialism shaped families and gendered ideas of race; and connections between gender and political life. Chapter 8 explores the modern world, from 1800 to today. It begins with industrialization, tracing its spread around the world and the way it facilitated imperial conquests, which simultaneously challenged and reinforced existing gender hierarchies and social patterns. It then looks at movements for social change, and the development of what has been called “modern” sexuality. Moving into the twentieth century, it examines wars, revolutions, and political change, further developments in the industrial and postindustrial economy, changes in family life and structures, and cultural shifts. The still-short twenty-first century is part of all of these, and the book ends where we are now, in the midst of a global pandemic, with implications for issues related to gender that have already been recognized but whose scope is still unknown. The instructor’s companion site to this book has links to original sources, both textual and visual, along with extended suggestions for further reading. It can be accessed here: www.wiley.com/go/wiesner-hanks/genderinhistory3e

I certainly could not cover every topic everywhere, so I have chosen to highlight specific developments and issues within certain cultures that have proven to be especially significant. World historians emphasize that variations in both chronological and geographic scale are important tools of understanding, and I have used this insight here. The book is based on my own research and that of many people who examine what the (incomplete) written and material record reveals about the past. Much of that record is the story of women’s subordination, which may make you, as the reader, feel angry, depressed, or defensive. If you do, please remember that this is not a book about what might have been, what should be, or what could happen in the future; that I leave to philosophers, ethicists, theologians, and you.

Further Reading

Major collections of articles on the history of women and gender around the world include Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds., A Companion to Global Gender History (2nd edn., Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2021) and Bonnie G. Smith, ed., Women’s History in Global Perspective (3 vols., Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004). On the history of sexuality, see Mathew Kuefler, ed., The History of Sexuality Sourcebook (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

Joan Scott’s widely reprinted article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91:5 (1986), 1053–75, remains essential reading, as evidenced by the recent AHR Forum: “Revisiting ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,’” American Historical Review, 113:5 (2008), 1344–430, which has articles by six historians about gender history around the world and a response by Scott. An important study of the relationship between gender hierarchies and other systems of power is Raewyn W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1987).

Much thinking about gender is undertaken by feminist scholars in many disciplines. An excellent overview of feminist thought is Rosemarie Tong and Tina Fernandes Botts, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction (5th edn., New York: Routledge, 2018). Collections with essays from a wide range of authors include Carole McCann and Sueng-Kyung Kim, eds., Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (4th edn., New York: Routledge, 2016) and Susan Bordo, ed., Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015).

On the development of world and global history, see Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward, eds., The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016) and R. Charles Weller, 21st Century Narratives of World History: Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018). My information on the Maasai comes from Dorothy L. Hodgson, The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005).

For thinking about the complex relationships between gender, sex, and sexuality, Judith Butler’s works, especially Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (2nd edn., New York: Routledge, 2000), are central, though they can be challenging to read. Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (revised edn., New York: Basic Books, 2020) is equally significant.

For thorough discussions that include the latest biological research on sex differences, see Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography (updated edn., New York: Anchor, 2014) and David C. Geary, Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (3rd edn., New York: American Psychological Association, 2020). Gilbert Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1994) and Sabrina Petra Ramet, ed., Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1996) contain essays about gender crossing, blending, inverting, and transcending, past and present. For trans issues, see Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2006).

Doubts about the value of “women” as an analytical category were conveyed most forcefully in Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), though they have primarily been associated with the work of Joan Scott, such as Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

On intersectionality, Frances Beal’s “Double Jeopardy: To Be Both Black and Female” was originally published as a pamphlet in 1969, and was then included in Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Random House, 1970). The Combahee River Collective Statement is in Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983). Kimberlé Crenshaw’s original article is “De-marginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989), 139–66. Recent surveys of intersectional scholarship, including transnational, include: “Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory,” special issue of Signs, 38:4 (2013), 785–1055 and Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (London: Polity, 2016). On gender in Africa, see Oyèrónké Oyewùmi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) offers a broad survey of debates about the linguistic turn. On the spatial turn, see: Jo Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?” at Spatial Humanities: A Project of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, University of Virginia Library, http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn. On the emotional turn, see Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What Is the History of the Emotions? (London: Polity, 2018). On the material turn, see: “AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture,” with Leora Auslander, Amy Bentley, Leor Halevi, H. Otto Sibum, and Christopher Witmore, AHR, 114:5 (2009), 1355–404.

For queer theory, good places to begin are Riki Wilchens, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (New York: Alyson Books, 2004), which incorporates the author’s experiences as an activist, or Hannah McGann and Whitney Monaghan, Queer Theory Now: Foundations and Futures (London: Red Globe Press, 2020), designed for students. For analyses of the development of queer theory, see the special issue of The GLQ Forum, “Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender,” 10:2 (2004), 211–313.

On critical race theory, see Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (3rd edn., New York: NYU Press, 2017). Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (3rd edn., London: Routledge, 2015) both provide good introductory surveys of the main ideas in postcolonial theory. A solid introduction to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony is Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

The best introduction to critical race feminism is provided in two books edited by Adrien Katherine Wing, Critical Race Feminism: A Reader (2nd edn., New York: New York University Press, 2003) and Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000). On feminist postcolonial theory, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Reina Lewis and Sarah Mills, Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2003); Margaret A. McLaren, ed., Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). The interdisciplinary journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, which began publication in 2000, is the best place to see the newest directions in global feminist scholarship.

The development of women’s and gender history as a field has been examined in Laura Lee Downs, Writing Gender History (2nd edn., London: Hodder/Arnold, 2010) and Sonya O. Rose, What Is Gender History? (London: Polity, 2010). Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) analyzes trends in women’s and gender history over the past several decades and calls for historicizing the study of patriarchy. Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) and Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug, eds., Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders (London: Berghahn Books, 2014) look at the impact of gender history.

For a survey of trends in women’s and gender history around the world, see Leonore Davidoff, Keith McClelland, and Eleni Varikas, eds., Gender and History: Retrospect and Prospect (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). For a collection of the writings of feminist historians, see Sue Morgan, ed., The Feminist History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006).

The Instructor’s Companion site for this book has more suggested readings, plus many links to original sources, and can be found here: www.wiley.com/go/wiesner-hanks/genderinhistory3e

CHAPTER TWO

Ideas, Ideals, Norms, and Laws

Difference has been a key concept in gender history over the past decades. Historians have emphasized that women’s experiences differed because of class, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other factors, and they varied over time. Every key aspect of gender relations – the relationship between the family and the state, the relationship between gender and sexuality, and so on – is historically and culturally specific. Today historians of masculinity speak of their subject only in plurals, as “multiple masculinities” appear to have emerged everywhere, just as have multiple sexualities in the works by historians of sexuality.

Despite this variety, certain ideas that are similar to one another have emerged in a wide variety of cultures, and have come to shape many aspects of life. This is not to say that these concepts were the same everywhere or that they did not change over time, but that there were significant parallels and continuities across time and space that can be compared. This chapter explores the ways these concepts developed and how they shaped the informal norms and more formalized laws regulating people’s lives. It looks at five areas: ideas about the nature and proper roles of men and women, what is often termed masculinity and femininity or manhood and womanhood; binaries related to male/female binaries, including nature/culture, public/private, inner/outer, order/disorder, rational/passionate; ideas, norms, and laws regarding motherhood and fatherhood; ideas and laws prescribing male dominance and female subservience and dependence; ideas and laws promoting gender egalitarianism.

In many ways, the topics covered in this chapter are the easiest ones to research when looking at gender, at least for those cultures that had written records. Among the earliest of the world’s written records, whether in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, or elsewhere, were laws specifying how husbands and wives were to treat each other, religious literature setting out the proper conduct for men and women, or stories and myths that described relations between men and women, or gods and goddesses. Slightly later came more formal considerations of the nature of women and men, and speculations – couched in the language of religion, medicine, or philosophy – about the reasons for the differences between them. Early visual sources also provide extensive evidence about ideals and norms, as the individuals depicted often represented idealized heroes, gods, and goddesses rather than actual men and women. Because of the relative availability of materials, much of the earliest work in women’s history focused on ideas about women or laws regarding women, and for some of the world’s early cultures this is as far as the written historical record can take us. The code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, for example, dating from roughly 1750 BCE, includes many laws that regulate marriage and divorce, but we have no way of knowing the extent to which these were enforced, or the degree to which, as is common with law codes, they were only selectively enforced.

It is important to keep in mind that although ideas, norms, and laws shaped many aspects of gender, they were not the same as lived experience; they represent the way people conceptualized their world, hoped things would be, or tried to make them. Sometimes historians have confused these realms, a problem that occurs not only in considerations of gender, but also in discussions of other historical issues; laws about tax collection have sometimes been read as if they described actual revenue streams, for example, or regulations about guilds or labor unions as if they described the actual workplace. Normative sources about gender are particularly easy to misread in this way, as writers often used phrases such as “women are . . .” or “marriage is . . .” or “fathers are . . .” and may have thought they were describing an objective reality rather than an idealized one. Particularly influential ideas and opinions were also often no longer recognized as such, but came to be regarded as religious truth or scientific fact. Ideals, particularly those for women, were often viewed as descriptions of historical individuals, and laws were developed that attempted to recreate this golden age. The character traits set out in the biographies of ideal women by the Chinese philosopher Liu Hsiang in the first century BCE, for example, later became the basis for social and legal restrictions.

It is also important to remember that normative and intellectual records contain the ideas of only a small share of any population, skewed in most cultures toward elite men. Their ideas were the most significant, because they led to the formal laws and institutions that structured societies, but not everyone necessarily agreed with the powerful and prominent. Some historians argue that women (and in some cases other subordinate groups) had a separate value system in many societies, a special women’s culture and counterdiscourse shared among themselves and transmitted orally. Through this culture they communicated ideas about matters particularly important to them, such as methods of birth control or the treatment of illnesses common in women. This notion of a hidden women’s culture is very attractive to many contemporary women, who may tie it to a search for nonpatriarchal religious traditions; its oral and secret nature makes it impossible either to verify or disprove its existence.

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.