Gender in History

Another oppositional pair is that of nature/culture. In a very influential essay, the anthropologist Sherry Ortner asked, “Is female to male as nature is to culture?” She gathered together examples from many geographic areas of ways in which women’s physiology, social role, and psyche are viewed as closer to nature than men’s, and in which women are viewed as intermediaries between nature and culture, responsible for transforming natural products into food and clothing for their household, and for the early stages of transforming “uncivilized” children into members of society. The links between women and nature have also been explored by historians of science, who point out that nature is often described or portrayed as female (Figure 2.1), and that exploring nature or carrying out scientific research is often described in terms of masculine sexual conquest or domination.

Figure 2.1 Enea Vico, Nature, 1545–1550.

In this engraving by the Italian artist Enea Vico, Nature expresses her breast milk onto dead and dying men. The caption above reads: I, nurturing [Nature] restore to wholeness the fallen, I lead back those about to perish. Metropolitan Museum, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949.

As with the dichotomy between public and private, counterexamples to the woman/nature versus man/culture linkage exist, such as the mythical American West, where “cultured” women tamed “natural” men when they brought in schools and churches, or Nazi Germany, where women were praised as the bearers of culture and morality. There are also nature/culture divisions that are not especially gendered, such as the sharp contrast in many West African societies between a cultivated area associated with humans – in which all human activities, including sex and burial, had to take place – and the noncultivated bush. Ortner herself has modified her conceptualization somewhat, though she still asserts that the opposition between human agency (culture) and processes that proceed in the world apart from that agency (nature) is a central question for all societies, and in most of them gender provides a “powerful language” for talking about this opposition.

The nature/culture dichotomy is often related to one of order/disorder, though the way these correspond may be different, with nature sometimes representing order and sometimes disorder. This linkage is itself gendered: when nature is conceptualized as orderly, as in Confucian understandings of the cosmic order, it is usually linked to male superiority; when it is regarded as disorderly and capricious, it is linked to women. The order/disorder dichotomy is sometimes expressed in psychic terms, as an opposition between the rational and the emotional or passionate, with men generally representing the rational and women the emotional. As noted previously, this gender dichotomy was often qualified by class and racial hierarchies that limited the capacity for reason to one type of man, however, with certain types of men, like women, seen as closer to nature and less rational.

Along with binaries that split men and women, there were also binary categorizations within each sex that shaped ideas about gender and the norms and laws that resulted from them. One of these was that of purity and impurity. Women in many cultures were regarded as impure or polluting during their menstrual periods and during or after childbirth, and many taboos or actual laws limited women’s activities or contacts with others during these times. Women were sometimes secluded or sent to special places during menstruation and childbirth, and then went through rituals that reincorporated them back into the community once this period was over.

Menstrual and childbirth taboos have generally been regarded as representing a negative view of women, judging them as unclean or dangerously powerful simply as the result of natural bodily processes. This may have been the opinion of educated or prominent men, but both historians and anthropologists have discovered that women often developed their own meanings for such rituals. They regarded menstrual huts as special women’s communities, and demanded rituals of purification after childbirth (often termed “churching” in Christian areas), sometimes despite men’s efforts to end such rituals. Contemporary women have, in fact, devised new rituals to celebrate certain bodily events such as menarche (first menstruation) and menopause, arguing that in earlier societies these were important and positive markers of life changes.

In many cultures, men also went through periods of purity and impurity that shaped their abilities to undertake certain activities, particularly religious ones. Very often this was related to a discharge of bodily fluids or sexual activity, but in some religious traditions any contact with women also made male religious personnel impure.

Purity and impurity are closely related to one of the most studied cultural dichotomies, that of honor and dishonor or honor and shame. Honor is a highly gendered quality, with male honor generally associated with action of some type, while female honor is associated with inaction. Men gained honor by protecting their families, demonstrating physical prowess, exercising authority, and showing courage, while women simply maintained honor by preserving their sexual purity. Women were thus divided into two categories on the basis of sexual honor, sometimes labeled “the virgin” and “the whore,” while men’s honor was more variable. Honor was very often shared among the members of one’s family or clan group, so that the actions of any member reflected on the others. Loss of honor in some societies resulted in legal punishments, as did charging someone with being dishonorable if those charges proved to be untrue. Even more often, however, honor was affirmed or disputed through popular rituals – waving bloody sheets the morning after a wedding (which still continues in some areas) or throwing rotten food at husbands suspected of being cuckolds. Historians studying honor have emphasized that, as with all norms, care needs to be taken not to confuse ideals with reality. Even cultures that seem to be obsessed with female sexual honor sometimes offered ways for women to quietly regain their honor after it was lost; in early modern Spain, for example, women pregnant out of wedlock frequently sued the father of the child for damages, which then became a dowry and allowed them to marry.

Along with purity and honor, physical attractiveness is another dichotomous category that has been intimately shaped by, and in turn shapes, ideas and norms of gender. What characteristics make a woman or man attractive are, of course, highly variable both among cultures and among subgroups within a culture; some people would argue that beauty is so subjective that it is truly “in the eye of the beholder” and cannot be discussed at a more general level. This argument appears to be countered by the remarkable lengths to which people have gone throughout history to make themselves appear more desirable to themselves and others, or to conform to hegemonic standards of beauty. Cosmetics were common in many of the world’s earliest societies, and products that were thought to increase beauty or sexual appeal were traded across vast distances because they could bring a high profit. Cosmetics have been enhanced more recently by cosmetic surgery, with both of these in the modern world more often associated with women than with men, although this is changing. Particularly for women, purity, honor, and beauty have been linked in various ways; the directors of women’s protective shelters in early modern Italy, for example, explicitly limited the women they took in to those who were attractive, for, in their minds, ugly women did not need to fear a loss of honor and so did not merit protection.

Motherhood and Fatherhood

Just as it is easier to find information about women as a conceptual and legal category than about men, it is easier to find information about mothers and motherhood than about fathers. Many psychological theorists view one’s relation with one’s mother as the central factor in early psychological development, with some arguing that this is not culturally specific but innate. (Psychology has been criticized as a field, of course, for just this type of assertion.) Whether one accepts this view or not, the fact that women can become mothers has certainly shaped many of the laws and norms regulating women’s activities and behavior; what is usually referred to as the “sexual double standard” could more accurately be labeled the “parenthood double standard” (a phrase that might also be used to describe the realities of parenting in many households).

Though the possibility of motherhood has led to restrictions on women, motherhood has also been a source of great power, a much stronger and more positive role for a woman than being a wife. Many of the world’s religious traditions, including Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islam, view strong relations between mothers and sons as ideal, and interviews with contemporary people in societies as disparate as Jamaica, the Solomon Islands, and Japan have found that mothers are viewed as central to people’s lives while fathers are perceived as indifferent or distant. The power associated with the role of mothers has also been disturbing, however. Legal sources often refer to “wife of so-and-so” rather than “mother of so-and-so,” even in cases involving a woman’s relations with her own children, thus emphasizing a clearly dependent relationship rather than the one in which the woman has power over others. Stories and myths from many areas revolve around bad mothers, though because criticizing mothers directly is often viewed as unacceptable, the evil character is generally a stepmother or mother-in-law. Sometimes these myths affect the way real women are treated; in the witch trials of early modern Europe, for example, witches were often portrayed as bad mothers, killing or injuring children instead of nurturing them.

Nazi Germany and other European fascist regimes in the twentieth century provide excellent examples of the ambiguities of motherhood, and also of the ways in which motherhood has been used and manipulated symbolically. Nazi Germany itself was extolled as the “fatherland,” and Nazi leaders used hypermasculine imagery; their pronatalist movements were directed at fathers, not mothers, so as not to appear to grant women authority. “Motherhood” was celebrated in the abstract and medals awarded to women of the approved racial groups who had many children, but the power of husbands over their wives was also strengthened through various legal changes. Authoritarian regimes in Italy and Spain also passed pronatalist measures such as maternity or paternity bonuses and issued extensive propaganda seeking to make motherhood women’s only calling. The actual impact of these measures on birth rates and women’s employment rates was limited, however, and the regimes themselves toned them down by the 1940s when they needed women’s labor to carry out the war effort. More recent pronatalist measures such as tax preferences, cash grants, loan subsidies, and campaigns glorifying motherhood that various countries have adopted to try to increase their birth rates and reverse population decline have also not had much effect.

Similar disjunctures between the rhetoric and reality of motherhood can be found in many other places. Nineteenth-century Britain is often viewed as a high point of emphasis on maternity and domesticity for women; on closer investigation this turns out to have been an ideal limited only to middle-class women. In a country with two million nannies, few upper-class women actually mothered (or were expected to mother) their own children, while few lower-class women had the ability to spend much time on child care, as their lives were filled with factory or in-home labor. In colonial and more recent Latin America, women were encouraged to follow an ideal of seclusion, modesty, and devotion to their families termed marianismo after the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, but poverty made this impossible for most women. Official propaganda in the Stalinist Soviet Union exalted motherhood as a patriotic duty and used motherhood as a metaphor for nationhood, but women were also expected to have full-time jobs and earlier institutions that had made their mothering easier such as communal kitchens were no longer supported by the state.

The rhetoric of motherhood itself has also been used in very different ways. Most often it has been used to urge women to stay out of the workplace and concentrate on family concerns, to become, as conservative Japanese authors recommended, “good wives, wise mothers.” Nineteenth-century reformers often used motherhood to argue for an expansion of women’s public role, however, stressing that education would make women better mothers. They asserted that having the vote would allow mothers to assure the well-being of their families and children, and to clean up corrupt politics in the same way that they cleaned up their households. Since the 1960s women in Latin America have protested the abduction and murder of their sons and husbands by various military dictatorships through public protests. The most famous of these, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, gathered weekly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, wearing white headscarves embroidered with the names of the “disappeared” and painting their silhouettes on walls. During Armenia’s 2018 “Velvet Revolution,” a largely peaceful protest that forced the resignation of the president, mothers took to the streets pushing baby strollers. In 2020, middle-aged women in Portland, Oregon wearing yellow shirts formed a “Wall of Moms,” linking arms to protest police violence in one of the many Black Lives Matter protests of that summer. Most of the women were white, but neither their privileged racial status nor their motherhood protected them, as federal agents fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades at them, just as they did at other groups of marchers.

Fatherhood has also been linked to politics and the exercise of power in both real and metaphorical terms. The words for “father” and “leader” are etymologically related in many languages, and the male originators of institutions and structures were often labeled “fathers” – the Church Fathers, the Founding Fathers. Hereditary monarchs such as kings, emperors, and czars were praised as the fathers of their people and used paternal language in their attempts to build or maintain their own power. They employed ideologies of kinship to mask their control over others, and hoped such language would encourage respect and obedience. Paternal rhetoric was also used, however, to criticize leaders for not living up to what was expected of a good father and could, in fact, become part of the language of revolution. Criticism of the French kings in the period leading up to the French Revolution often described them as bad fathers, not caring properly for their people; in the case of Louis XVI, the last king, he was also seen as too influenced by his queen Marie Antoinette, the archetypal bad mother whose lack of concern for her subjects was expressed in her (probably invented) comment to hungry people clamoring for bread – “let them eat cake.”

In most conceptualizations of the stages of life for a man, fatherhood did not mark a clear break the way motherhood did for a woman, but in many societies it did bring real differences. In some Muslim areas, a man gained (and continues to gain) a new name once his first son was born – usually beginning with “abu,” meaning protector of or father of – and no longer uses his original first name. In some parts of the world, a husband restricted his ordinary activities while his wife was pregnant or giving birth, or even mimicked her pregnancy with special clothing or rituals, practices labeled “couvade.” Certain positions of authority in groups and institutions in many cultures were limited to men who were fathers, for this was a sign both of their potency and their stake in the future. Fatherhood played a particularly strong role in areas where society was conceptualized as an amalgam of families or households rather than as individuals, for the adult male head of household was both in charge of the smallest political unit and the representative of that unit to the wider world.

Ideologies, Norms, and Laws Prescribing Gender Inequity

The historical record provides countless examples of calls for male dominance and female dependence or other types of gender inequity; every chapter of this book will discuss some of these. Religious literature urged women to be subservient, and described the divine plan as one of patriarchal gender inequality. Medical and philosophical works noted that women were physically, mentally, and morally weaker than men, clearly in need of male guidance and protection. Popular rituals and norms transmitted orally from generation to generation established sharp gender boundaries, generally limiting the ability of women to move or act and criticizing or punishing those who did. Sexist and misogynistic stories, songs, jokes, jests, and images reinforced these ideas, often in ways that were malicious and cruel, as in vicious songs and jokes about wife beating and rape, or woodcuts and cartoons showing such acts. The gender inequity in most written norms and laws has been so striking, in fact, that much early women’s history involved pointing out ways in which women transcended, subverted, or ignored such restrictions, and attempting to convince readers that the situation for women in many societies of the past was not as dreadful as the laws made it seem.

Many of the customs and norms now perceived as the most extreme involved a restriction of women’s mobility. Of these, the Chinese practice of footbinding has received the most attention, a practice that began in the period about 1000 among entertainers at the imperial court and was firmly entrenched among the elite and middle classes in northern China by about 1200. In order to bind a girl’s feet, her toes are forced down and under her heel until the bones in the arch eventually break; this generally began when she was about six, though a woman’s feet needed to remain bound all her life to maintain their desirable small size and pointed “golden lotus” shape. Explanations of footbinding have involved a wide range of factors: fantasies among male poets and literati that eroticized small feet and a swaying walk and linked these with nostalgia for the past; a change in the ideal of masculinity in Song China from warrior to scholar, which meant that the ideal woman had to be even more sedentary and refined; a desire to hide the actual importance of women’s labor by families eager to prove they were rising socially and economically; Chinese sexual ideas that linked bound feet with improved reproductive capacity and stronger infants. Dorothy Ko has emphasized that no one explanation suffices, and that the reasons for footbinding changed over its thousand-year history and were different for men and women. She notes that women were not simply its victims; they internalized Confucian notions of the importance of self-sacrifice and discipline, and the connections between bound feet, reputation, domesticity, beauty, and self-respect. Thus it was mothers who generally bound their daughters’ feet in what became a female rite of passage, and women worked together to make the exquisite embroidered shoes that further represented their high status. Because of its centrality to core social values, footbinding was tenacious in northern China; some families were still binding their daughters’ feet in the 1930s, despite efforts by government officials, missionaries, and eventually the Communist leadership under Mao Zedong to end the practice. Footbinding was not accepted by other East Asian societies, although the importation of Confucian ideas from China later restricted women’s capacities to perform ceremonies of ancestor worship and to inherit family land in Korea and Vietnam.

Footbinding tied women physically to the household and thus kept them out of public view, as did other practices found in a great many cultures around the world. In many areas, women have been secluded by law or custom, either in particular parts of the house – the gyneceum in ancient Athens or the harim in the Ottoman Empire – or by veiling. The first records of veiling come from the ancient Near East in about 3000 BCE, where the links between this practice and household seclusion were already recognized, for the ancient Akkadian word for veiling is the same as that for shutting a door. However it was accomplished, secluding women generally involved or at least began with the elites in any society, for the vast majority of cultures could not afford to lose the labor power of half of their workers; slave and peasant women were generally not secluded, and their activities made the enclosure of elite women possible. Sometimes seclusion was more clearly an issue of status than gender. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, elite males rarely left their households, conducting their business through agents and obtaining their education through tutors; as the pinnacle of Ottoman society, the sultan never left his palace, but required all those who had business with him to meet him there. (This is another example of the complex interplay between “public” and “private.”)

Other than very elite men in some cultures, however, and one or two groups around the world such as the Tuareg of northern Africa in which men were veiled, attempts to restrict visual and physical contact between men and women have led to the seclusion of women. As we will see in later chapters, women in some areas have developed their own interpretation and understanding of the meaning of veiling, viewing it as empowerment rather than restriction and a means of asserting cultural or national identity. This is a good example of the way in which practices originally based on one idea about the nature of men and women can be reinterpreted when the social or political context changes, or be understood differently by various individuals or groups.

Many cultures that did not practice seclusion or veiling developed norms of conduct for women that were demonstrations of their dependent status. Women in some parts of India were expected to adopt a deferential posture when speaking with men, and in Japan were expected to drop their eyes when in public to avoid making eye contact with men. Restrictive norms have often been justified with reference to “tradition,” but may, in fact, have been recent innovations. In India, for example, the British government expanded upper-caste Brahmanic customs into Hindu law, which put greater limitations on the mobility and independence of lower-caste married women than they had experienced earlier. The 1898 Civil Code in Japan limited women’s civil rights sharply, denying them existence as legal persons and requiring inheritance to pass through the male line, a break with earlier customs. Women in Japan today generally use a form of deferential and softer speech commonly called “women’s language” claimed to be an ancient tradition but which may actually have been invented during the early twentieth century, the period in which this Civil Code was enacted.

Women’s lack of legal status as persons was actually a common feature in many of the world’s written law codes, which have sometimes regarded women as a form of property. In most cultures until the nineteenth or twentieth century (or until today), marriage explicitly established a relationship of husbandly authority and wifely obedience. This relationship was often enshrined or symbolized in wedding ceremonies in which the wife vowed to obey her husband, or put a body part such as a hand, foot, or head, under the husband’s foot or within his hands. In many areas, a married woman was generally legally subject to her husband in all things; she could not sue, make contracts, or go to court for any reason without his approval. In Europe and European colonies, this principle was supported by the Christian view of marriage as a union through which husband and wife became “one flesh.” In England and later in the British Empire (and after the American Revolution, the United States) this legal doctrine was known as “coverture,” a word derived from the idea that a married woman’s legal identity was “covered” by that of her husband. All goods or property that a wife brought into a marriage – termed her dowry – and all wages she earned during the marriage were considered the property of her husband. Only when women’s rights activists in the nineteenth century campaigned for them were married women’s property acts gradually enacted, allowing married women to control property, inherit, write wills, and keep their earnings. In the United States, the last laws giving a husband control over all family property – what were known as “head and master laws” – were repealed in Louisiana only in 1979, after they had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and only in 1981 were laws passed in France that allowed a married woman to sell any of her own property without her husband’s permission.