Gender in History

Ideologies of Egalitarianism

Norms and laws that restricted women’s activities or placed them in a position subservient to men were numbingly common throughout the world, which can make studying women’s or gender history often seem quite depressing. Along with individuals and groups that ignored or overcame these restrictions through their actions, however, there have also been many that developed ideas supporting greater gender egalitarianism or otherwise enhancing the situation of women; since the mid-nineteenth century, these ideas have slowly been translated into legal changes. Such ideashave generally been labeled “feminism,” a word developed first in French in the 1890s, though there are great disagreements about the limits, meaning, and implications of this word. Some advocates of women’s rights have used and continue to use other words to describe themselves, such as “womanist” or “mujerista,” while others note that feminism should always be used in the plural to emphasize its diversity.

Individuals and groups have challenged or rejected gender hierarchies for centuries. In Europe, Christine be Pizan (1364–1430), a well-educated Italian woman, wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in 1402, the first extended defense of women by a female author. Because her work challenged misogyny and extolled the achievements of women, Christine is often termed the “first feminist,” but she was soon followed by others. The Venetian poet Modesta Pozzo (1555–1592), writing under the pen name Moderata Fonte (“moderate fountain”), produced The Merits of Women: Wherein Is Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (first published 1600), the main point of which is captured in the title. In The Equality of Men and Women (1622), Marie le Jars de Gournay, the protégée of the French writer Michel de Montaigne and editor of his works, built on the arguments of Christine de Pizan to argue that the equality of men and women rested on divine law. In the seventeenth century, English women petitioned Parliament, arguing that they had an “equal interest with the men of this Nation” in the “good Laws of this Land.” In the late eighteenth century, women extended language about the rights of man that had been proclaimed in the American and French Revolutions to women. The English writer Mary Wollstonecraft asserted in 1792, “Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.”[5]

Women in some Native American groups already had political rights and responsibilities in the eighteenth century that European women sought to gain. In North America, Cherokee governing councils included women, as did those of other tribes. Cherokee women were part of the diplomatic missions sent to negotiate with Europeans and after the American Revolution with Americans. They were surprised to see no women among the Euro-American negotiators, and occasionally asked about this, or admonished them: “Let your Women hear our Words.”[6]

Much early research within women’s history involved finding and celebrating “feminist foremothers.” The works of women such as Christine de Pizan and Mary Wollstonecraft were reissued and translated, and the writings of other feminists – most, though not all, of them women – were discovered and analyzed. These investigations generally focused first on white European or American women whose ideas led directly to the nineteenth-century women’s rights movements, but by the 1980s research into pioneering advocates of women had broadened to include Buddhist and Catholic nuns, female Native American tribal leaders, Quaker missionaries, Black schoolteachers, and many other types of individuals and groups. White European feminism was also increasingly recognized as diverse: nineteenth-century English (and American) feminists emphasized equality of individual rights, while continental Europeans emphasized the equally important responsibilities of women and men. Socialist feminists focused on working conditions and class inequalities, while middle-class feminists called for expanded education and financial independence.

In both the past and the present, feminists have often been involved with other movements advocating social change, such as abolitionism, anticolonialism, or the civil rights movement, and have developed very diverse ideas about the intersection among their various aims. (For more on modern women’s rights movements, and women’s actions in reform and revolutionary movements, see Chapter 8.) The variety within both historical and contemporary feminism makes it a difficult word to define to everyone’s satisfaction, with the ideas of some types of feminists regarded by others as not especially positive for women. Some ecofeminists, for example, view women as more caring and environmentally conscious because they have the possibility of motherhood, while others see such ideas as dangerously close to the old notion that “biology is destiny,” which has often been harmful to women. The diversity within feminism has allowed its opponents to highlight the ideas and activities of more flamboyant groups, such as those women who allegedly burned their bras at a Miss America competition, in their criticisms. (This story was, in fact, invented by a reporter, but it has had a very long life.) Such characterizations have led some who oppose gender inequity to reject the label feminist while still advocating women’s rights, a position expressed in the phrase “I’m not a feminist, but . . .”

Feminism has also continued to change. The 1990s brought “third-wave” feminism, a word coined by the American writer Rebecca Walker (1969–) to describe the feminism of her own generation, which incorporated new currents. As part of their emphasis on women’s power to shape their own lives and the culture around them, third-wave feminists have reclaimed derogatory words for women. Riot grrrl punk bands and grrlzines, important parts of third-wave feminism, supported women’s music, art, and sexual expression. The editors of Bitch magazine, which began publication in 1996, provided (and continue to provide) feminist analysis of pop culture. At the time, some feminists wondered whether “girl” and “bitch” were not best left unreclaimed, but 20 years later in the 2017 Women’s March over seven million women around the world donned pink “pussy” hats, the name taken from the resemblance of the top corners of the hats to cat ears, and in reference to recently-elected US president Donald Trump’s widely reported 2005 remarks that because he was a “star,” women would let him “grab’em by the pussy.” It was the largest single-day protest in the history of the United States and perhaps the world. Third-wave feminism has emphasized intersectionality and diversity, with calls to “decolonize feminism,” and increasing attention to the ideas and actions of African, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous feminists, as well as those of nonwhite populations within North America, Australia, and Europe.

Some analysts see a fourth wave of activism starting in the 2010s, again with a wide variety of concerns: sexual harassment, gender violence, reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, rape culture. The #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment, begun by activist Tarana Burke, has sought to empower women to come forward by demonstrating just how widespread the problem was; it spread internationally, prompting survivors to share their stories and in some cases leading to high-profile firings of abusive men or those who enabled a hostile work environment. In Latin America, highly visible movements emerged from Mexico to Argentina raising awareness about gender violence; spreading access to social media mobilized regionwide support for the anti-feminicidio campaign and protests such as the #NiUnaMenos women’s strikes and demonstrations (Figure 2.2). Much of this activism was intersectional, such as the March for Black Trans Lives in Brooklyn in June 2020, which drew 15,000 people, all wearing white, to protest violence and harassment of transgender people. Around the world, feminists now use digital and social media to organize, share ideas, and accomplish their aims (sometimes derisively termed “hashtag feminism”), but also protest the widespread misogyny of online culture.

Figure 2.2 #NiUnaMenos March in Lima, Peru, 2016.

This march in Lima, reportedly the largest protest in Peruvian history, was one of many demonstrations organized as part of #NiUnaMenos (not one less), a Latin American feminist campaign against gender-based violence. Wikimedia Commons. Source, Lorena Flores Agüero.

However they have chosen to label their ideas, and whatever wave they happen to be in, over the past century and a half many people have worked to transform ideals of greater gender equity into laws. These have allowed women to keep their wages and own property, vote and hold office, obtain divorce on an equal basis with men, and receive equal pay for equal work. Laws have allowed gay and trans people to marry and adopt children, join the military, and not lose their jobs because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Such laws sometimes resulted from changes in widely held attitudes, but sometimes they anticipated widespread social change and were the result of changes in ideas among elites or conquerors. Laws were passed against veiling in Turkey in the 1920s and Iran and Uzbekistan in the 1930s, for example, because the leadership of these countries came to view unveiled women as a symbol of modernity, not because of popular pressure. The Soviets forced through laws against veiling and polygamy when they took over Islamic areas in Central Asia.

When the impetus for legal change came from outside an area or from an elite group, laws were often difficult to enforce. The 1931 Civil Code in China, for example, outlawed arranged marriages and concubinage, but it was not followed in rural areas for decades. Though such lack of compliance comes in some instances from entrenched norms of gender hierarchy, in other places laws were (and are) ignored because women did not view them as beneficial. The 1956 Hindu Succession Act in India, for example, theoretically gave women equal rights to the inheritance of any property their parents themselves had acquired. Its provisions have been scarcely followed, and women have not taken cases to court to assert their rights to property. This is not because they do not know about the law, are too passive, or are too guided by older notions of propriety, but because they seek to optimize their own economic and emotional needs and promote family stability and affections. When they do seek their rights in the courts, the decisions follow the law, but are often expressed in terms of older customary provisions regarding the protection of women and not the newer language of rights.

Sometimes the introduction of new norms can have contradictory results. In post-Soviet Russia, increased interaction with the West has led to greater awareness of egalitarian ideals and practices, but also greater sexism, especially in terms of pornography and the exploitation of the female body in advertising and popular culture that had been forbidden in restrictive and puritanical Soviet culture.

In many parts of the world, the emphasis on the individual in Anglo-American feminism is seen as misguided or even destructive; advocates for women, such as the scholar Ifi Amadiume in Nigeria, point to high levels of poverty and isolation among Western women, especially after divorce. Activists for women’s causes in these areas express their goals in terms of the needs of women and men rather than their rights, and stress the benefits gained by the family and community when women are given greater opportunities.

Because of these differences in emphasis, international measures promoting greater gender equality are always worded very carefully. The 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) did describe discrimination against women as a violation of “the principles of equality of rights and respect for human dignity,” but it was also careful to stress the effects of such discrimination on families, society, women’s countries, and all humanity, and not simply on the women as individuals. As of 2021, CEDAW has been ratified by 189 countries, though not Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Tonga, and the United States; some of those that have ratified it have exempted customary, family, and religious law, however, which lessens its impact considerably.

In the first part of the new millennium, ideas, norms, and laws regarding gender appear by some measures to be very resistant to change: a majority of people in India approve parent-controlled marriages; a majority of people in South America have negative views of women taking jobs outside the home; a majority of people (and judges) in North America and Europe regard mothers as “naturally” better parents than fathers, and the list could go on and on. Laws that proclaim gender equality are supported in the abstract, but are often not enforced, and may even be counteracted by other laws – especially those regarding marriage, divorce, and inheritance – which have a much greater impact in terms of day-to-day opportunities than abstract statements. On some issues it is clearly easier to make laws than to change longstanding attitudes and ideas about the proper roles and nature of women and men. Change also produces stress. Some studies of psychological and physical health indicate, for example, that people with more conservative notions of gender are healthier than those who are more open to change,for the uncertainty of change can lead to stress. Thus in times of rapid change, people may hang on to what they see as more “traditional” notions of gender and sexuality as an anchor of stability, and support leaders who promise a return to these.

If one takes a long view, however, even in areas where traditions are very strong, there are clear signs of change in norms and laws. Though laws prohibiting gender discrimination are not always enforced, they are at least part of most constitutions and legal codes developed in the twentieth century, which would have been unthinkable (or regarded as laughable) several centuries earlier. Though some young women hesitate to call themselves feminists, many of the demands of the feminist movement are now accepted as self-evident, at least in theory: equal pay for equal work, access to education, legal equality. And voices proclaiming “we should all be feminists” come from many parts of the world. Grassroots women’s groups are using local and village courts to curtail domestic violence, and exploring religious and cultural traditions for teachings that support greater opportunities for women. They have made it clear that many sources of ideas and norms are ambiguous, and that what really matters is how prescriptive statements play out in the real world.

Further Reading

It is hard to know where to begin with suggestions, for the amount of materials is vast, and the works mentioned in the Further Reading for every chapter all contain information about ideas and norms.

Analyses of ideas in Asia include Lisa Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 1998); Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Mandakranta Bose, ed., Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia (New York: Routledge, 2001); Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Helen Creese, Women of the Kakawin World: Marriage and Sexuality in the Indic Courts of Java and Bali (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004); Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Miyako Inoue, Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).

On ideas in Europe, see: Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Elaine Fantham et al., Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff, eds., Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain (Syracuse, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees, eds., Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Ulrike Gleixner and Marion Gray, eds., Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe, 1750–1830 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2006).

On Latin America, see Lowell S. Gustafson and Amelia M. Trevelyan, eds., Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relations (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2002); Sylvia Chant with Nikki Craske, Gender in Latin America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Erin O’Connor, Mothers Making Latin America: Gender, Households, and Politics since 1825 (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014).

On Africa, see Karen Armstrong, Shifting Ground and Cultural Bodies: Postcolonial Gender Relations in Africa and India (New York: University Press of America, 1999); Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl A. McCurdy, eds., “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001); Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes, and Gary Minkley, eds., Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (New York: Rodopi, 2002). Interesting comments on recent changes in gender norms globally are provided in Sylvia Chant and Cathy McIlwaine, Three Generations, Two Genders, One World: Women and Men in a Changing Century (London: Zed Books, 1998).

Works that look at law as well as ideas include Mary Ann Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law: State, Law, and Family in the United States and Western Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Erin P. Moore, Gender, Law, and Resistance in India (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Srimati Basu, She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property, and Propriety (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); Kimberly Gauderman, Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003); Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, Women of Jordan: Islam, Labor, and the Law (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003); Elisabeth Meier Tetlow, Women, Crime and Punishment in Ancient Law and Society: The Ancient Near East (New York: Continuum International, 2004); Judith Tucker, Women, Family and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Sara L. Kimble and Marion Röwekamp, eds., New Perspectives of European Women’s Legal History (London: Routledge, 2016); Xiaoping Cong, Marriage, Law and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Ilan Peled, Law and Gender in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible (London: Routledge, 2019).

Sherry Ortner’s essay about nature and culture has been reprinted in her The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996). Further discussions about the links between gender and nature include Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980) and Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (2nd edn., Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993); Vera Norwood, Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Virginia Scharff, ed., Seeing Nature through Gender (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Douglas A. Vacoch, ed., Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature (London: Routledge, 2020).

More general analyses of the role of gender in science historically include Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); David Noble, A World without Women: The Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Knopf, 1992); Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Differences in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman, eds., Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2006); Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-modern Gynaecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). A good overview of ideas about menstruation is provided in Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), and of contraception in Lara Marks, Sexual Chemistry: An International History of the Pill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

For the history of masculinities, Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (2nd edn., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005) is essential, as is Judith Kegan Gardiner, Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Regional studies include: Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, eds., A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); Matthew C. Gutmann, ed., Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Lisa A Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher, eds., Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and Anna Clark, eds., Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (4th edn., New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2019). There is a good review of many studies in Robert A. Nye, “Western Masculinities in War and Peace,” American Historical Review, 112 (Apr. 2007), 417–38.

Studies of the social construction of beauty and its links to gender include Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Susan R. Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (2nd edn., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

For discussions of motherhood and fatherhood, see Clarissa W. Alkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden, eds., Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1997); Ralph LaRossa, The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Heléna Ragoné and France Winddance Twine, eds., Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, and Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 2000); Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (New York: SR Books, 2002); Lynn Trev Broughton and Helen Rogers, eds., Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Marian van der Klein et al., eds., Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare and Policy in the Twentieth Century (London: Berghahn, 2012); Rhiannon Stephens, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Oyeronke Oyewumi, What Gender Is Motherhood?: Changing Yoruba Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jodi Vandenburg-Daves, Modern Motherhood: An American History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014); Jürgen Martschukat, American Fatherhood: A History (New York: NYU Press, 2019).