MERRY E. WIESNER-HANKS
GENDER IN HISTORY
Global Perspectives

Third Edition

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI

This third edition first published 2022

© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Names: Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., 1952- author.

Title: Gender in history : global perspectives / Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI.

Description: Third edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021138 (print) | LCCN 2021021139 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119719205 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119719274 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119719236 (epub)

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Acknowledgments

Each book that I have written has encouraged me to range wider chronologically and geographically from my original home base in early modern Germany, which has meant that I have entered territories in which I know less and less. Fortunately I have found my scholarly colleagues to be uniformly gracious in sharing their expertise, providing assistance and advice, often in the process turning from colleagues to friends. For this book I would like to thank Constantin Fasolt, who asked me to write the first edition, Tessa Harvey, the development editor at Wiley-Blackwell in the 2000s, who encouraged its progress and suggested I write a second edition, and Jennifer Manias, Sophie Bradwell, and Andrew Minton at Wiley-Blackwell, with whom I worked on this third edition. My graduate student Brice Smith combed the library and the web for new materials as I set out to write the second edition; the results of his labors, along with many original sources, can be found on the instructor companion website. My thoughts on the issues discussed here have been influenced over the years by a great many people; my list could go on for pages, but I would particularly like to thank: Barbara Andaya, Judith Bennett, Jodi Bilinkoff, Renate Bridenthal, David Christian, Elizabeth Cohen, Natalie Zemon Davis, Mary Delgado, Lisa DiCaprio, Candice Goucher, Anne Hansen, Scott Hendrix, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Grethe Jacobsen, Margaret Jolly, Susan Karant-Nunn, Deirdre Keenan, Gwynne Kennedy, Susan Kingsley Kent, JoAnn McNamara, Teresa Meade, Jeffrey Merrick, Pavla Miller, Laura Mitchell, Susanne Mrozik, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Allyson Poska, Diana Robin, Lyndal Roper, Ulinka Rublack, Anne Schutte, Bonnie Smith, Hilda Smith, Ulrike Strasser, Susan Stuard, Larissa Taylor, Gerhild Scholz Williams, and Heide Wunder.

About the Companion Website

This book is accompanied by an instructor companion website.

www.wiley.com/go/wiesner-hanks/genderinhistory3e

This website includes

Original Sources

Further Readings

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

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.

As has been true with the women’s and gay-rights movements, people involved in the trans movement also study people in the past they identify as sharing their experiences, as do scholars interested in gender and sexuality more broadly. Some use gender-neutral pronouns when a historic figure engages in actions that suggest they saw themselves as somehow outside the gender binary or whose gender identity changed over their life.

Finding individuals who were outside a dichotomous gender system has not been difficult, as many of the world’s cultures have a third or even a fourth and fifth gender, often with specialized religious or ceremonial roles. In some cultures, gender is determined by one’s relationship to reproduction, so that adults are gendered male and female, but children and old people are regarded as different genders; in such cultures there are thus four genders, with linguistic, clothing, and behavioral distinctions for each one. In a number of areas throughout the world, including Alaska, the Amazon region, North America, Australia, Siberia, Central and South Asia, Oceania, and the Sudan, individuals who were originally viewed as male or female assume (or assumed, for in many areas such practices have ended) the gender identity of the other sex or combine the tasks, behavior, and clothing of men and women. Some of these individuals are intersex and occasionally they are eunuchs (castrated males), but more commonly they are morphologically male or female. For them, gender attribution is not based on genitals, and may change throughout their life. The best known of these third-gender individuals are found among several Native American peoples, and the Europeans who first encountered them regarded them as homosexuals and called them “berdaches,” from an Arabic word for male prostitute. Now most scholars and the individuals themselves choose to use the term “two-spirit people,” and note that they are distinguished from other men or women by their work or religious roles than by their sexual activities; they are usually thought of as a third gender rather than effeminate males or masculine women. (For more on two-spirit people in the Americas, see the section “Religious Traditions Transmitted Orally” in Chapter 6.)

Both historical and contemporary examples of third (or fourth or fifth) genders and categories of sexual orientation are receiving a great deal of study today, and are often used by people within the LGBTQ+ community to demonstrate both the extent of nondichotomous understandings and the socially constructed and historically variable nature of all notions of gender and sexual difference. In some areas, there has been a blending of older third gender categories and more recent forms of expressing LGBTQ+ identity, as contemporary groups assert their connections with older traditions within their own culture. For example, beginning in the 1990s, two-spirit societies were formed throughout much of the United States and Canada, and in the early 2000s, the Asian and Pacific Islander LGBT student organization at the University of California at Los Angeles chose the name “Mahu” for their group, in reference to the traditional Polynesian third gender category.

Thus for a number of reasons, the border between “biological” sex and “cultural” gender carefully created by gender scholarship in the 1980s had by several decades later become increasingly permeable, unstable, and murky, and has remained so. The same has been true for the boundaries between the physical body and cultural forces on the issue of sexual orientation and other aspects of sexuality. Some scientists have attempted to find a “gay gene,” while others see this as a futile search for something that is completely socially constructed. And some condemn all such research as efforts to legitimize an immoral “lifestyle choice.” The complexities of gender and sexuality are threatening to some, but research in many disciplines continues to provide evidence for them.

Difference and Intersectionality

Historians of women were key voices in debates about the distinction between gender and sex and about categories of sexual and gender identity. They also put increasing emphasis on differences among women, noting that women’s experiences differed because of class, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other factors, and they varied over time. Because of these differences, some wondered, did it make sense to talk about “women” at all? If, for example, women were thought to be delicate guardians of the home, as was true in the nineteenth-century United States, then were Black women, who worked in fields alongside men, really “women”? If women were thought to be inferior and irrational (as they were in many cultures) then was Queen Elizabeth I of England a “woman”? Was “woman” a valid category, the meaning of which is self-evident and unchanging over time, or is arguing for any biological base for gender difference naïve “essentialism”? These historians noted that not only in the present is gender “performative,” that is, a role that can be taken on or changed at will, but it was so at many points in the past, as individuals “did gender” and conformed to or challenged gender roles. Thus it is misguided to think that we are studying women (or men, for that matter) as a sex, they argued, for the only thing that is in the historical record is gender. In the 2000s, some scholars and activists advocated using “woman-identified” or “female-identified” instead of “woman,” as these seemed to better include trans women. (“Woman-identified” had a different meaning in the 1970s, when early feminists used it to mean women who did not look to men for affirmation.) Patriarchy largely disappeared as an analytical framework as well, as it, too, seemed essentialist and falsely universalizing.

Recognizing difference was not enough, asserted some scholars, who stressed that these categories were not simply matters of identity, but also oppression. They noted that feminist scholarship had sometimes taken the experiences of heterosexual white women as normative, and argued that the experiences of women of color must be recognized as distinctive. The nature of oppression is multiplicative rather than additive, and no one identity – race, class, gender, religion, ability, sexual orientation, and so on – should be considered apart from other identities, but is always materialized in terms of and by means of them. The idea that multiple forms of oppression interact and combine was part of the thinking of feminist groups that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, which is not surprising, as so many founders of women’s liberation had been active in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the latter both anti-racist and anti-imperialist. Socialist feminists expanded Marxist analysis of labor exploitation in production to examine paid and unpaid household labor, through which working-class as well as wealthier men benefited from the unpaid work of their female family members. In addition, prosperous women benefited when they could hire poorer women – usually women of color and foreign born – for child care and housecleaning.

Even before the 1960s, Black left feminists such as Louise Thompson Patterson wrote about the “triple exploitation” of race, gender, and class. Feminists of color analyzed what Fran Beal of the Third World Women’s Alliance termed the “double jeopardy” of being both Black and female. In 1977, the Black lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective asserted in a statement mostly written by Barbara Smith: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based on the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.”[2] In 1989, the critical race theorist and feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw called this synthesis of oppression “intersectionality,” a concept and word that slowly spread into other academic fields.

Just as gender had earlier, intersectionality moved from academia and feminist activism into ordinary speech. By the 2010s it had itself become a category of identity, with people using “intersectional feminist” to describe themselves on their blogs, Facebook pages, protest signs, T-shirts, and Twitter or Tumblr posts. Many sport a quotation from Flavia Dzodan, a writer who lives and works in Amsterdam, taken from her 2011 blog post on Tiger Beatdown: “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.” “Patriarchy” has returned on some of those signs as well: On Wednesdays We Smash the Patriarchy; Destroy the Patriarchy, Not the Planet.

Along with moving from academia into popular culture, the concept of intersectionality has also become increasingly dynamic and global, analyzing (and critiquing) structures of power and oppression that arise from a variety of situations. Scholars have not simply used social groupings drawn from the Western past and present, but have elaborated social categories taken from local understandings as well. To Smith’s Big Four (race, class, gender, and sexuality), scholars have added religion, age grades, ethnicity, and other factors as key social structures operating in the societies they study, past and present. They have also subtracted one or more of the Big Four, arguing, for example, that gender as it is understood in the West was not an important category of analysis or oppression in many sub-Saharan African societies. Sometimes this analysis has been explicitly intersectional – that is, situating itself theoretically within the development of the concept – but more often it has been implicitly so, investigating the ways in which two or more of these social systems operate together in the shaping of individual and group experience, but not necessarily describing this as intersectional.

Theory in History

Debates within women’s, gender, and sexuality history in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century were both a reflection and cause of broader debates about the methods and function of history itself. Historians have long recognized that documents and other types of evidence are produced by individuals or groups with particular interests that consciously and unconsciously shape the content of such sources. During the 1980s, some historians began to assert that because historical sources always present a biased and partial picture, we can never fully determine what happened or why; to try to do so is foolish or misguided. What historians should do instead is to analyze the written and visual materials of the past – what is often termed “discourse” – to determine the way various things are “represented” in them and their possible meanings. This heightened interest in discourse among historians, usually labeled the “linguistic/cultural turn,” drew on the ideas of literary and linguistic theory – often loosely termed “deconstruction” or “poststructuralism” – about the power of language. Language is so powerful, argued some theorists, that it determines, rather than simply describes, our understanding of the world; knowledge is passed down through language, and knowledge is power.

This emphasis on the relationship of knowledge to power, and on the power of language, made poststructuralism attractive to feminist scholars in many disciplines, who themselves already emphasized the ways language and other structures of knowledge excluded women. The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s insight that power comes from everywhere fit with feminist recognition that misogyny and other forces that limited women’s lives could be found in many places: in fashion magazines, fairy tales, and jokes told at work, as well as overt job discrimination and domestic violence. Historians of gender were thus prominent exponents of the linguistic turn, and many analyzed representations of women, men, the body, sexual actions, and related topics within different types of discourses.

The linguistic/cultural turn – which happened in other fields along with history – elicited harsh responses from other historians, however, including many who focused on women and gender. They asserted that it denied women the ability to shape their world – what is usually termed “agency” – in both past and present by positing unchangeable linguistic structures. Wasn’t it ironic, they noted, that just as women were learning they had a history and asserting they were part of history, “history” became just a text? They wondered whether the ideas that gender – and perhaps even “women” – were simply historical constructs denied the very real oppression that many women in the past (and present) experienced. Such doubts were extended to other groups as well. If gender, sexuality, race, and other categories are all simply unstable and changing historical or social constructs, how do we understand intersectional oppression, and use this knowledge as a basis for engaged scholarship or activism? Advocates of the linguistic turn argued that their work was politically engaged because it critically examined the dynamics and cultural practices of power. Disagreements were sharp and sometimes personal, but by the 2010s, that debate seemed to have run its course. As Lynn Hunt – a powerful force in the cultural turn – commented, “most historians have simply moved on, incorporating insights from postmodern positions but not feeling obliged to take a stand on its epistemological claims.”[3]

The linguistic/cultural turn was only one of many “turns” that have shaped historical scholarship on gender and influenced history as a whole over the past several decades. For example, the “spatial turn” has led scholars to more closely examine borders and their permeability, connections and interactions, frontiers, actual and imagined spatial crossings, migration and displacement, and the natural and built environment. They have argued that space is both a geopolitical formation and a way of perceiving, producing, and organizing knowledge, and as such is deeply gendered. The “emotional turn” has led historians to seek to understand the changing meanings and consequences of emotional concepts, expression, and regulation. They have studied norms and standards that societies and groups maintained toward emotions, investigated anger, sadness, jealousy, desire, and other specific emotions, and looked at the interplay between emotions and other aspects of society. The “material turn” has brought a greater emphasis on material culture along with written texts as sources of historical knowledge. Material culture studies, an interdisciplinary field with roots in art history, archaeology, anthropology, and history, is both a method by which one can evaluate and analyze objects and a theory able to assess the role of objects and the relationships between things and people in the creation and transformation of society and culture. It was originally mainly androcentric, and either oblivious or hostile to using gender as a category of analysis, but the critiques and research of feminist art historians, archaeologists, and historians have begun to change this.

New theoretical perspectives are adding additional complexity and bringing in still more questions. One of these is queer theory, which was developed in the early 1990s – a period of intense HIV-AIDS activism – by scholars in several different fields who combined elements of gay and lesbian studies with other concepts originating in literary and feminist analysis. Queer theorists argued that sexual notions were central to all aspects of culture, and called for greater attention to sexuality that was at odds with whatever was defined as “normal.” They asserted that the line between “normal” and “abnormal” was always socially constructed, however, and that, in fact, all gender and sexual categories were artificial and changing. Some theorists celebrated all efforts at blurring or bending categories, viewing any sort of identity as both false and oppressive and celebrating hybridity and performance. Others had doubts about this, wondering whether one can work to end discrimination against women, African Americans, gay people, or any other group, if one denies that the group has an essential identity, something that makes its members clearly women or African American or gay. In the past several decades, queer theory has been widely applied, as scholars have “queered” – that is, called into question the categories used to describe and analyze – the nation, race, religion, and other topics along with gender and sexuality. This broadening has led some – including a few of the founders of the field – to wonder whether queer theory loses its punch when everything is queer, but it continues to be an influential theoretical perspective.

Related questions about identity, subjectivity, and the cultural construction of difference have also emerged from postcolonial theory and critical race theory. Postcolonial history and theory were initially associated with South Asian scholars and the book series Subaltern Studies, and focused on people who have been subordinated (the meaning of subaltern) by virtue of their race, class, culture, or language as part of the process of colonization and imperialism in the modern world. Critical race theory developed in the 1980s as an outgrowth (and critique) of the civil rights movement combined with ideas derived from critical legal studies, a radical group of legal scholars who argued that supposedly neutral legal concepts such as the individual or meritocracy actually masked power relationships. Historians of Europe and the United States are increasingly applying insights from both of these theoretical schools to their own work, particularly as they investigate subordinate groups such as racial and ethnic minorities. World historians also now often use ideas developed by postcolonial theorists to analyze relationships of power in all chronological periods, not simply eras of imperialism.

An important concept in much postcolonial and critical race theory has been the notion of hegemony, initially developed by the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci. Today hegemony and domination are often used interchangeably, but in Gramsci’s view, they are not the same. Hegemony involves convincing dominated groups to acquiesce to the desires and systems of the dominators through cultural as well as military and political means. Generally this was accomplished by granting special powers and privileges to some individuals and groups from among the subordinated population, or by convincing them through education or other forms of socialization that the new system was beneficial or preferable. The notion of hegemony explains why small groups of people have been able to maintain control over much larger populations without constant rebellion and protest, though some scholars have argued that the emphasis on hegemony downplays the ability of subjugated peoples to recognize the power realities in which they are enmeshed and to shape their own history. Many historians have used the concept of hegemony to examine the role of high-status women, who gained power over subordinate men and women through their relationships with high-status men, and thus paid little attention to or chose not to protest their own subordination to men. The Australian sociologist R. W. Connell has also applied the idea of hegemony to studies of masculinity, noting that in every culture one form of masculinity is hegemonic, but men who are excluded from that particular form still benefit from male privilege, which they exploit rather than opposing the men who have power over them.

Both postcolonial and critical race theory point out that racial, ethnic, and other hierarchies are deeply rooted social and cultural principles, not simply aberrations that can be remedied by laws protecting individuals from discriminaton. They note that along with disenfranchising certain groups, such hierarchies privilege certain groups, a phenomenon that is analyzed under the rubric of critical white studies. (This is a pattern similar to the growth of men’s studies out of women’s studies, and there is a parallel development in the historical study of heterosexuality, which has grown out of LGBT history.) Unsurprisingly, such explorations of white privilege and structural racism have proven threatening to some, with conservative political and media figures, especially in the United States, stoking white rage with broad attacks on critical race theory, and state legislatures passing bans on anti-racism instruction or even any discussion of systemic racism in the schools.

Queer theory, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory have all been criticized from both inside and outside for falling into the pattern set by traditional history, that is, regarding the male experience as normative and paying insufficient attention to gender differences. These criticisms led to theoretical perspectives that attempt to recognize multiple lines of difference and their intersections, such as critical race feminism and Third World and transnational feminism. Both Third World feminism, which developed in the 1970s, and transnational feminism, which developed in the 1990s, critique the underpinnings of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism, including those that contributed to the rise of Western feminism in its various waves. Drawing on postcolonial history and theory, transnational feminist scholars have focused on processes of subordination, relations between gender and power across boundaries defined by nations, individual and institutional cross-border networks and dynamics, the impact of global migration on family life, gendered and sexualized nationality, affective and intimate relationships in imperial contexts, and many other topics. Such scholarship has begun to influence many areas of gender studies, even those that do not deal explicitly with race or colonialism. It appears that this cross-fertilization will continue, as issues of difference and identity are clearly key topics for historians in the ever more connected twenty-first-century world.

Gender History as a Field

This discussion of scholarly trends may make it appear as if using gender as a category of analysis has swept the discipline of history, with scholars simply choosing the approach or topic they prefer. This is far from the actual situation. There are still many historians who continue to view focusing on gender as a new-fangled fad, or, conversely, as an old-fashioned approach no longer needed in postfeminist world. As noted above, until very recently, books that explicitly take a world, global, or transnational perspective have focused largely on economic and political developments without examining their gendered nature. Other historians invoke “gender” without really thinking through its implications for their interpretations of the past. Though titles like “man the artist” have largely disappeared, as most authors – or their editors – have recognized their false universality, books still divide their subjects into “artists” and “women artists” or “rulers” and “women rulers.”

Studies of women and gender are also very unevenly distributed geographically and chronologically. Books on women’s experience or that use gender as a category of analysis in the twentieth-century United States or early modern England, for example, number in the hundreds, while those that focus on Kiribati or Kazakhstan may be counted on one hand. This unevenness is related, not surprisingly, to uneven growth in women’s and gender studies programs, which is in turn related to the structure of higher education around the world and the ability or willingness of institutions of higher education to include new perspectives and programs. By the late 1970s, hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada offered courses in women’s history, and many had separate programs in women’s history or women’s studies. Universities in Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries added courses and programs a bit more slowly, and other developed countries were slower still, though by the 1990s courses in women’s history were introduced in India, China, Korea, and elsewhere, especially at women’s universities. In Japan and elsewhere, much of the research on women has been done by people outside the universities involved with local history societies or women’s groups, so has not been regarded as scholarly.

Scholars and students in some countries in the early twenty-first century still report that investigating the history of women, gender, or sexuality can get them pegged as less than serious and be detrimental to their future careers as historians. Added to this is backlash against women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, and sometimes to the entire concept of gender, in countries headed by authoritarian men who advocate traditional gender roles. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, for example, elected in 2018, has attacked what he terms “gender ideology,” by which he means policies aimed at improving gender equality and lessening homophobia. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán offered tax benefits and subsidies to women who had at least four children and banned gender studies from Hungarian universities. In 2020 the Hungarian Parliament voted to stop transgender and intersex people from legally changing their gender. Gender- and sexuality-based violence has increased in Brazil and Hungary, as well as in other countries with right-wing populists in charge.

The history done in any country, not simply Brazil and Hungary, is shaped by regional and world politics, and issues other than gender have often seemed more pressing to historians in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the world where political and economic struggles have been intense. Universities and researchers in developing countries also have far fewer resources, which has hampered all historical research and limited opportunities for any new direction. Thus an inordinate amount of the work in the history of women, gender, and sexuality, including that which focuses on the continent of Europe and many other parts of the world, has been done by English-speaking historians, and the amount of research on English-speaking areas far outweighs that on the rest of the world. There is also imbalance within English-speaking areas, for studies of the United States vastly outnumber those of anywhere else.

There are signs that this imbalance is changing somewhat, as organizations to promote the history of women, gender and sexuality, and academic women’s/gender/sexuality studies programs are gradually being established in more countries, sometimes at great risk to those who organize them. Yet the head start of English-language scholarship, combined with the ability of many students and scholars throughout the world to read English – and the inability of many English-speaking students and scholars to read anything but English – have meant that the exchange of theoretical insights and research results has to this point been largely a one-way street.

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.

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

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

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

The Nature and Roles of Men and Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Binaries

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

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

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

Feminist political theory and activism often argued that the public and the private were never really separate (an idea captured in the slogan “the personal is political”), and historians have more recently explored the various ways these arenas have been linked. They have also pointed out that although men are usually associated with the public realm, with a common ideal for men being one of active participation in all aspects of public life, in some instances this was not the case. In classical India and in Judaism for much of its history, the ideal for men was one of renunciation of worldly things for a life that concentrated on study and piety. In Judaism, this ideal often meant that women were quite active in the “public” realm of work and trade to support the family, though this was not the case in classical India, where the work to support scholarly men was carried out by lower-caste men rather than the scholar’s wife and daughters.

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.

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).

Almost every book in this list, as well as most of those suggested in the other chapters, refers to ideologies prescribing difference or inequality. Some recent overviews include Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice (London: Robinson, 2019) and Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

On feminism, good places to start are Estelle B. Freedman, The Essential Feminist Reader (New York: Modern Library, 2007); Lucy Delap, Feminisms: A Global History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020); or Bonnie G. Smith, ed., Routledge Global History of Feminism (London: Routledge, 2021). More detailed studies include: Chilla Bulbeck, Re-orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Post-colonial World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, UK: South End Press, 2000); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd edn., New York: Routledge, 2000); Bonnie Smith, ed., Global Feminisms since 1945: Rewriting Histories (New York: Routledge, 2000); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Valentine M. Moghadam, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin, eds., The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (New York: Anchor Books, 2004); Joyce Green, ed., Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (New York: Zed Books, 2007); Karen Offen, ed., Globalizing Feminisms, 1789–1945 (London: Routledge, 2010); Amanda Lock Swarr and Riacha Nagar, eds., Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (New York: SUNY Press, 2010).

For some of the newest currents in feminism, see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (New York: Anchor Books, 2015); Amrita Basu, Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms (2nd edn., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2017); Nicola Rivers, Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Lynn Fugiwara and Shireen Roshanravan, eds., Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2018); June Eric-Udorie, ed., Can We All Be Feminists?: New Writing from Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 Others on Intersectionality, Identity, and the Way Forward for Feminism (London: Penguin Books, 2018); Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman, eds., Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (2nd edn., London: Seal Press, 2019).

CHAPTER THREE
Early Human History (to 3000 BCE)

Studying early human history on any topic means relying primarily on material remains: tools made from hard materials; fossilized bones, teeth, and other body parts; evidence of food preparation, such as fossilized animal bones with cutmarks or charring; holes where corner-posts of houses once stood; rock art and pigments; bits of pottery and metals. To this, scholars add evidence from linguistics, primatology, ethnography, neurology, and other fields, reports from ethnographers and missionaries, and written sources from cultures that existed centuries later in the same area. Physical remains gave the earliest human era its name – the Stone Age. Nineteenth-century scholars divided this further, into the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic Era (to about 9500 BCE), during which food was gained largely by foraging, followed by the New Stone Age, or Neolithic Era (about 9500 to 3000 BCE), which saw the beginning of plant and animal domestication.

Using material evidence to analyze gender is difficult. By themselves, tools and other objects generally do not reveal who made or used them (though sometimes this can be determined from the location in which they were found), nor do they indicate what they meant to their creators or users. Tools made of hard materials survive far longer than those made from softer materials such as plant fibers, sinew, and leather, or from organic materials that generally decay such as wood, which gives us a skewed picture of early technology and lifeways. Evidence gets rarer and more accidental in its preservation the further back one goes, so interpreting the partial and scattered remains of the early human past involves speculation. This is particularly true for gender and other social and cultural issues.

This chapter reviews the basic outline archaeologists, paleontologists, and other scholars have developed about early human history, although just as in physics or astronomy, new finds spur rethinking. It surveys some generally accepted ideas about gender roles and relationships, as well as key controversies about them, beginning with the evolution of hominids and ending with debates over the origins of patriarchy.

Early Hominids

The eighteenth-century European scientists who invented the system we now use to classify living things placed humans in the animal kingdom, the order of Primates, the family Hominidae, and the genus homo. The other surviving members of the hominid family are the great apes – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans – and the family includes a number of species that have become extinct.

Between seven and six million years ago some hominids in Africa began to walk upright at least some of the time, and over many millennia the skeletal and muscular structures of some of them evolved to make upright walking easier. About 3.4 million years ago, some of these hominids – who paleontologists place in the genus Australopithecus – began to use naturally occurring objects as tools to deflesh animals, as evidenced by cutmarks and scrapes on fossilized animal bones. This gave them greater choice about when and where they would eat, as they could cut meat into portable portions. At some point, certain groups in East Africa began to make tools as well as to use them; the earliest now identified are 2.6 million years old, but archaeologists suspect that older ones will be found. Hominids struck one stone against another to break off sharp flakes that contemporary archaeologists have found are capable of butchering (though not killing) an elephant, and carried the rocks from one place to another to make these stone tools.

Like making anything, making these stone flakes required intent, skill, and physical capability, the latter provided by a hand that was able to hold the “hammer” stone precisely, with an opposable thumb and delicate muscles that could manipulate objects. Why austrolopiths developed this hand that was very different from the less flexible (but much stronger) hands of other primates is not clear, but what is clear is that they already had it when they began making tools. The human hand did not evolve to use or make tools, but used tools because it had already evolved. It is thus what paleontologists call an “exaptation”: something that evolved randomly or for a reason that we do not yet understand, but was then used for a specific purpose. Other structures within the body that became essential in later developments – such as the larynx, which allowed more complex speech – were also exaptations. (Many social structures and cultural forms were exaptations as well – they developed for reasons that are unknown, or perhaps simply as experiments, but then became traditions; explanations for how they originated were invented later that probably have little to do with how they had actually developed, as we will see with patriarchy shortly.)

Australopiths seem to have eaten anything available, and to have lived in larger groups than just a few closely related individuals. Living in larger groups would have enabled them to avoid predators more effectively – for hominids were prey as well as predators – and may have encouraged more complex communications and behaviors.

Around two million years ago, one of branch of australopiths evolved into different types of hominids that later paleontologists judged to be in the genus homo, including homo ergaster (“working human”). They made multipurpose sharpened stone tools generally called handaxes and then slightly specialized versions of these, which they used for a variety of purposes, including chopping plants as well as meat. This suggests greater intelligence, and the skeletal remains support this, for these early members of the genus homo had a larger brain than did the australopiths. They also had narrow hips, longer legs, and feet that indicate they were fully bipedal, but here there is an irony: the slender upright pelvis made giving birth to a larger-brained infant difficult. Large brains also take more energy to run than other parts of the body, so that large-brained animals have to eat more calories than small-brained ones.

This disjuncture between brain and pelvis had many consequences, including gendered ones. The pelvis puts a limit on how much the brain can expand before birth, which means that among modern humans, much brain expansion occurs after birth; humans are born with brains that are only one-quarter the size they will be at adulthood. Humans thus have a far longer period than do other animals when they are completely dependent on their parents or others around them. Those parents also have a long period during which they must tend an infant or it will die. Judging by brain size, that period was shorter in homo ergaster than in modern homo sapiens, but it may still have been long enough that groups developed multigenerational social structures for the care of infants and children. Perhaps homo ergaster mothers might have even helped one another to give birth, just as they (and the males as well) helped one another gather, hunt, and prepare food, activities that are clearly evident in the fossil record.

Along with a larger brain and narrower pelvis than austrolopiths, homo ergaster also had other physiological features with social implications. Their internal organs were small, including those for digestion. Thus in order to obtain enough energy to survive, they had to eat a diet high in fat and protein, most easily obtainable by eating animals and animal products – insects, reptiles, fish, eggs, and birds along with mammals. Catching some of those animals may have necessitated walking or running significant distances in the hot sun, which is difficult for most mammals because they only lose body heat through panting. Homo ergaster probably had the ability to cool down by sweating, a process made easier by the fact that they were relatively hairless.

This lack of body hair facilitated cooling (and thus hunting), but it also meant that infants could not cling as easily to their mothers as could those of other primate species. How homo ergaster mothers handled this problem is not evident in the fossil record. Perhaps they did not hunt when they had small children or they left their children briefly, as sites indicate that groups sometimes had a home base to which they returned. Perhaps they devised slings made of plant or animal material to help carry their children, though like any tool made from soft materials, these have left no trace.

Another solution to the problem of a short digestive tract is to transfer some digestion outside the body, through cooking. Raw meat is hard to chew and digest, as are many raw plant products; other primates spend many hours a day chewing. Cooking allows an outside source of energy – fire – to do much of this work, breaking down complex carbohydrates and proteins to increase the energy yield of food; it also detoxifies many things that would otherwise be dangerous to eat. There are a few shreds of evidence of fire at early homo ergaster sites, and some scholars, including Richard Wrangham, argue that even without fossil evidence of actual cooking, the larger brains, smaller and less pointed teeth, and shorter guts that developed about two million years ago would only have been possible with cooked food. Other scholars see cooking as a more recent invention, perhaps as late as 400,000 years ago, when hearths become a common part of the archaeological evidence in many areas.

Wherever and whenever it occurred, cooking had enormous social and cultural consequences. Cooking causes chemical and physical reactions that produce thousands of new compounds and make cooked foods more aromatic and more complex in their flavors than raw foods. As descriptions of roasted coffee or chocolate put it, they develop “overtones” or “flavor notes” of completely different things. Because members of the genus homo were omnivores, they may have been genetically predispositioned to prefer complex flavors, so that cooked food tasted (and smelled, which is essential in taste) better. Thus cooking led to eating together in a group at a specific time and place, which increased sociability. Cooking may also have encouraged symbolic thought, as cooked foods often make us think about something else, and both cooking and eating can be highly ritualized activities – plus cooking involved fire, which itself has deep meaning in later human cultures.

The evidence for cooking among homo ergaster is thin, but the evidence for migration is unequivocal. Gradually small groups migrated out of East Africa into Central and Northern Africa, and into Asia by about 1.5 million years ago. They reached what is now Spain by at least 800,000 years ago, and then further north in Europe.

Some groups evolved into slightly different species of hominids, the most famous of which are the Neanderthals (homo Neanderthalis), named after the Neander Valley in Germany, where their remains were first discovered. Neanderthals lived throughout Europe, Western Asia, and Siberia between about 130,000 and 30,000 years ago, the era of the last ice age. They had brains as large as those of modern humans and made and used complex tools that enabled them to survive in the diverse environments and climates in which their bones have been found. They built freestanding houses, and controlled fire in hearths, where they cooked animals, including large mammals and many kinds of plants. They lived in small communities, and cared for their young, old, and injured. They sometimes buried their dead carefully, and occasionally decorated objects and themselves with red ochre, a form of colored clay.

Neanderthals most likely understood biological sex differences, but what cultural significance they gave to these and thus how they understood gender is difficult to determine. Judging by wear and tear on skeletal remains, both males and females engaged in the same type of hard physical labor, and died at similar ages, so there was little behavioral differentiation. Males and females were buried in the same way and with similar types of grave goods.

Evidence from one 50,000-year-old Neanderthal site in Spain has yielded intriguing suggestions about some aspects of gender and family relations. Here 12 individuals of various ages appear to have been killed and eaten by another group, during a period – judging by the tooth enamel of the victims – of food scarcity. DNA evidence shows that these 12 individuals were related, and that the adult males were more closely related than the females. Thus the men had most likely stayed with their birth family, while the women had come from other families, a pattern that would be replicated later among homo sapiens of many eras and places. Two of the children were offspring of the same woman, and were about three years apart in age; this birth interval, perhaps the result of long breastfeeding, is also something that would be replicated among many later foragers. Extrapolating from a single site to all of Neanderthal society is dangerous, but this provides a glimpse of Neanderthal social relationships, both hostile and caring.

What archaeologists term anatomically modern humans (AMHs or homo sapiens) spread from Africa into areas in Europe and Western Asia where Neanderthals lived, and the two groups lived side by side for millennia, hunting the same types of animals and gathering the same types of plants. Eventually Neanderthals became extinct, killed by humans or diseases they had brought in, or simply losing out in a competition for food as the climate worsened in a period of increasing glaciation that began around 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals and homo sapiens also had sex with one another, at least sometimes, for between 1.5 and 2.1 percent of the DNA in humans living today outside of sub-Saharan Africa comes from Neanderthals. Since 2010, genetic studies of Neanderthals have taken off. Scientists have found, for example, that the exchange of genes between Neanderthals and AMHs provided resistance to some viruses, but also increased the genetic risk to others, including COVID-19. They have also found sex-based differences. Neanderthal-derived DNA does not include the mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to child, which means that the children who passed on their genes came from Neanderthal males and AMH females. This does not mean that there was no sex involving Neanderthal females and AMH males, but simply that this did not produce offspring that survived. Similarly, no modern man to date has been found with a Neanderthal Y chromosome, which suggests that the male offspring of Neanderthal males and AMH females were not viable. Genetic research is also beginning to include various other recently discovered extinct members of the homo genus, such as the Denisovans, who also interbred with homo sapiens. All of this indicates that the human evolutionary path is more complex and multibranched than we used to recognize, more of a bush than a tree.

Homo Sapiens

Archaeologists distinguish anatomically modern humans (homo sapiens) from other members of the genus homo by a number of anatomical features, most notably a relatively slender build, a head with a large cranium (and forebrain) with a face tucked underneath it, small teeth and jaws, and a larynx situated lower in the throat. The earliest fossilized remains showing these features come from Ethiopia, and have been most recently dated as about 195,000 and 160,000 years old. What archaeologists term “behavioral modernity” developed after anatomical modernity, though whether this was gradual or the result of a sudden “cognitive revolution” about 50,000 years ago is hotly disputed. Behavioral modernity includes long-range planning, development of new technologies such as the bow and arrow, the wide use of symbols in burials and personal adornment, more complex speech, and broad networks of social and economic exchange.

Some scholars see the development of cognition and brain complexity as a social and cultural as well as a physical process. Some of this operated at the individual level: individuals who had better social skills were more likely to mate than those who did not – this has been observed in chimpanzees and, of course, in humans from more recent periods – and thus to pass on their genetic material, creating what biologists term “selective pressure” that favored the more socially adept. For humans, being socially adept includes being able to understand the motivations of others – that is, recognizing that they have internal lives that drive their actions. Such social skills were particularly important for females: because the period when human infants are dependent on others is so long, mothers with good social networks to assist them were more likely to have infants who survived. Cooperative child rearing required social skills and adaptability, and may itself have been an impetus to increasing complexity in the brain. Selective pressure may have also operated in the realm of language. As we know from contemporary research on the brain, learning language promotes the development of specific areas of the brain. Neurological research thus supports the argument of paleolinguists that gradually increasing complexity in language led to more complex thought processes, as well as the other way around.

Some of these social and cultural factors operated at the group level: as it developed, speech and other forms of communication allowed for stronger networks of cooperation among kin groups and the formation of larger social groupings. Family bands that were more socially adept had more contacts with other bands, and developed patterns of exchange over longer distances, which, as with trade in later periods, gave them access to a wider range of products and ways of using them and thus greater flexibility to meet any challenges to survival, including dramatic changes in climate. This was also the case with less utilitarian products, such as pigments and beads, which might have stimulated better forms of communication and higher levels of creativity as well as reflecting them. As Marcia-Anne Dobres and others have pointed out, new technologies and ways of using them were (and are) not simply invented to solve problems or address material needs, but also to foster social activities, convey world views, gain prestige, and express the makers’ ideas and sense of identity.

However and whenever behaviorally modern humans emerged, they did what homo ergaster did before them and what humans have done ever since: moved. First across Africa, and then into Eurasia, initially sporadically and then more regularly. They used rafts or boats to reach what is now Australia by at least 50,000 years ago and perhaps earlier, which required traveling across nearly 40 miles of ocean. During the last ice age, when much of the world’s water was in glaciers, a wide land bridge connected Northeast Asia and North America across what is now the Bering Strait. Humans moved to this area, Beringia, 20–25,000 years ago, and then stopped. New DNA analysis indicates that a human population lived in genetic isolation here for 5,000 years or so, and then some continued on to North America and others migrated back to Eastern Asia. Those in the Americas moved quickly, because by 15,000 years ago humans were already in southern South America, 10,000 miles from Beringia. Some scholars think that people came to the Americas much earlier, using rafts or boats along the coasts, but finding evidence for this is extremely difficult because ancient coastlines were submerged with the final melting of the glaciers between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. Rising seas did not end migration, however, as humans responded by building boats, sailing to increasingly remote islands, including those in the Pacific, the last parts of the globe to be settled.

Eventually human cultures became widely diverse, but in the Paleolithic period people throughout the world lived in ways that were similar to one another, in small groups of related individuals – what anthropologists often refer to as “bands” – who moved through the landscape in search of food. Paleolithic peoples have often been called hunter-gatherers, but recent archaeological and anthropological research indicates that both historical and contemporary hunter-gatherers have depended much more on gathered foods than on hunted meat. Thus it would be more accurate to call them gatherer-hunters, and most scholars now call them foragers, a term that highlights the flexibility and adaptability in their search for food. Most of what foragers ate were plants, and although they did hunt large game, much of the animal protein in their diet came from foods scavenged or gathered, such as animals killed by other predators, insects, shellfish, small animals caught in traps, and fish and other sea creatures caught in weirs and nets. Paleolithic knotted and woven nets and baskets disintegrated long ago, but evidence of of them survives as impressions on fired clay fragments of storage containers from around 30,000 years ago, and knotting is probably much older than that.

Most foraging societies that exist today or did so until recently have some type of division of labor by sex, and also by age, with children and older people responsible for different tasks than adult men and women. Men are more often responsible for hunting, through which they gain prestige as well as meat, and women for gathering plant and animal products. This led earlier scholars to assume that in Paleolithic society men were also responsible for hunting, and women for gathering, an assumption that led to the familiar “man the hunter/woman the gatherer” dichotomy. Human remains provide some evidence for this, as skeletons and teeth indicate the type of tasks the person performed while they were alive, and in some places there are gender differences. But in many Paleolithic sites male and female skeletons show little evidence of sexually differentiated work. Archaeologists studying human remains often assumed that those buried with hunting tools such as projectile points and blades were male, but recently developed techniques that analyze tooth enamel have determined that many of these were female. (This is a good example of the way assumptions about gender can shape research findings.) In some of the world’s more recent foraging peoples, such as the Agta of the Philippines, women hunt large game, and in numerous others women are involved in certain types of hunting, such as driving herds of animals toward a cliff or compound or throwing nets over them. Where women hunt, they either carry their children in slings or leave them with other family members, suggesting that cultural norms, rather than the biology of lactation, is the basis for male hunting. The gender division of labor was most likely flexible, particularly during periods of scarcity, and also changed over time.

Both hunted and gathered foods were cooked, a task made easier in many cultures with the invention of clay pots, themselves “roasted” in a fire at a temperature high enough to make them watertight. Because organic materials from the Paleolithic survive only very rarely, it is difficult to speculate about clothing and other soft material goods, although bone needles for sewing and awls for punching holes in leather can give us some indications. Clothing and headgear were often decorated with beads made from shells, ivory, animal teeth, and other hard materials, and from the placement of these in undisturbed burials archaeologists can see that the clothing of men and women was often different, as was clothing in some places at different stages of life. Thus gender and age had a social meaning.

Paleolithic Society and Spirituality

Small bands of humans – 20 or 30 people was a standard size for foragers in harsh environments – were scattered across broad areas, but this did not mean that each group lived in isolation. Their travels in search of food brought them into contact with one another, not simply for talking, celebrating, and feasting, but also for providing opportunities for the exchange of sexual partners, which was essential to group survival. Today we understand that having sexual relations with close relatives is disadvantageous because it creates a greater risk of genetic disorders. Earlier societies did not have knowledge of genetics, but most of them developed rules against sexual relations among immediate family members, and sometimes very complex rules about allowable partners among more distant relatives. Some natural scientists argue that incest taboos have a biological or instinctual basis, while most anthropologists see them as cultural, arising from desires to lessen intergroup rivalries or increase opportunities for alliances with other lineages. Whatever the reasons, people sought mates outside their own band, and bands became linked by bonds of kinship, which in a few places has been traced through the study of bone chemistry and DNA. Mating arrangements varied in their permanence, but many groups seem to have developed a somewhat permanent arrangement whereby a person – more often a woman than a man – left her or his original group and joined the group of a mate, what would later be termed marriage.

Stereotypical representations of Paleolithic people often portray a powerful fur-clad man holding a club and dragging off a (usually attractive) fur-clad woman by her hair, or men going off to hunt while women and children crouch around a fire, waiting for the men to bring back great slabs of meat. Studies of the relative importance of gathering to hunting, women’s participation in hunting, and gender relations among contemporary foraging peoples have led some analysts to turn these stereotypes on their heads. They see Paleolithic bands as egalitarian groups in which the contributions of men and women to survival were recognized and valued, and in which both men and women had equal access to the limited amount of resources held by the group. This may also be a stereotype, overly romanticizing Paleolithic society as a sort of vegetarian commune. Social relations among foragers were not as hierarchical as they were in other types of societies, but many foraging groups from more recent periods had one person who held more power than others, and that person was almost always a man. In fact, anthropologists who study such groups call them “Big Man” societies. This debate about gender relations is often part of larger discussions about whether Paleolithic society – and by implication “human nature” – was primarily peaceful and nurturing or violent and brutal, and whether these qualities are gender-related. (See the later section on the origins of patriarchy for more on this debate.) Like much else about the Paleolithic, sources about gender and about violence are fragmentary and difficult to interpret; there may simply have been a diversity of patterns, as there is among more modern foragers.

Whether peaceful and egalitarian, violent and hierarchical, or somewhere in between, heterosexual relations produced children, who were fed as infants by their mothers or by another woman who had recently given birth. Breast milk was the only food available that infants could easily digest, so mothers nursed their children for several years. Along with providing food for infants, extended nursing brings a side benefit: it suppresses ovulation and thus acts as a contraceptive. Foraging groups needed children to survive, but too many could tax scarce food resources. Many groups may have practiced selective infanticide or abandonment. They may also have exchanged children of different ages with other groups, which further deepened kinship connections between groups. Other than for feeding, children were most likely cared for by other male and female members of the group as well as by their mothers, as they are in modern foraging cultures.

Within each band, and within the larger kin group, individuals had a variety of identities; they were simultaneously fathers, sons, brothers, and mates, or mothers, daughters, sisters, and mates. Each of these identities was relational (parent to child, sibling to sibling, mate to mate), and some of them, especially parent to child, gave one power over others. The interweaving of these relationships and their meaning varied from culture to culture, but one’s status in one relationship affected one’s status in the others, and often changed throughout one’s life. A woman’s situation as daughter or sister in a specific kin group, for example, shaped her relationship with her mate; her becoming a mother often further altered her status vis-à-vis the father of her child or other kin group members. A man’s relationship with his father and his status in the kin group often changed when he took a mate, and in some areas changed again if he became the father of a son. Judging by later ethnographic parallels, how kin groups were defined and understood varied tremendously, but they remained significant power structures for millennia, and in some areas still have influence over major aspects of life, such as an individual’s job or marital partner.

Burials provide evidence of social differentiation and social connections. The people who buried a young adult woman near Bordeaux in southern France about 19,000 years ago, for example, dressed her in clothing, covered her with ochre pigment, and placed her in a container made of stone slabs, along with a few perforated shells, a bead, some tools made of bone and stone, bones of antelope and reindeer, and 71 red deer canine teeth that had holes drilled in them for stringing and may have been on a necklace. Red deer did not live near Bordeaux at this time of worsening climate, so the teeth had most likely been brought there over many years through networks of exchange, perhaps given as gifts in marriages or in trade for other goods. Something about this young woman or her death led those who buried her to decide to include so many valuable grave goods; through this they referenced both her individual identity (and perhaps high social position) and her links to a social network that ranged across time and space.

Bands of foragers may have been exogamous, but as humans spread out over much of the globe, kin groups and larger networks of interrelated people often became isolated from one another, and people mated only within this larger group. Thus local exogamy was accompanied by endogamy at a larger scale, and over many generations humans came to develop differences in physical features, including skin and hair color, eye and body shape, and amount of body hair, although genetically there is less variety among them than among chimpanzees. Language also changed over generations, so that thousands of different languages were eventually spoken. Groups created widely varying cultures and passed them on to their children, further increasing diversity among humans.

Over time, groups of various sizes came to understand themselves as linked by shared kinship and culture, and as different from other groups. Words were devised to describe such groups, which in English include people, ethnic group, tribe, race, and nation. Shared culture included language, religion, foodways, rituals, clothing styles, and many other factors, whose importance in defining membership in the group changed over time (though language was almost always important). Because of extensive intermarriage within the group over many generations, the differences between groups were (and are) sometimes evident in the body, and were (and are) often conceptualized as blood, a substance with deep meaning. Kinship ties included perceived and invented ones, however, as adoption and other methods were devised to bring someone into the group, or traditions developed of descent from a common ancestor. At the heart of all such groups was a conscious common identity, which itself enhanced endogamy as people chose (or were required) to marry within the group. These groups came into being, died out, morphed into other groups, split, combined, lost and gained in significance, and in other ways changed, but their fluidity and the fact that they were constructed through culture as well as genetics does not make them any less real. They came to have enormous significance later in world history, but developed before the invention of writing and appear to have been everywhere.

The burial of the young woman in southern France was a social occasion, and it was also a way to express ideas and beliefs about the material world and perhaps an unseen world beyond. Paleolithic mortuary rituals created social and political messages, and conveyed (and possibly distorted) cultural meaning (as have funerals ever since). They marked membership in a group, which might have been understood to continue after death took one from the realm of the living. Together with paintings and decorated objects, burials suggest that people thought of their world as extending beyond the visible. People, animals, plants, natural occurrences, and other things around them had spirits, an animistic understanding of the spiritual nature and interdependence of all things. The unseen world regularly intervened in the visible world, for good and ill, and the actions of dead ancestors and the spirits could be shaped by living people.

Rock art from around the world and a wide array of ethnographic evidence suggests that ordinary people were thought to learn about the unseen world through dreams and portents, while messages and revelations were also sent more regularly to shamans, spiritually adept people who communicated with or traveled to the unseen world. Shamans created complex rituals through which they sought to ensure the health and prosperity of an individual, family, or group. These included rituals with gender and sexual imagery, and shamans in some places may have constructed a transgender role through which they harnessed power that crossed gender boundaries, just as they crossed the boundary between the seen and unseen world. Many cave paintings show groups of prey or predator animals, and several include a masked human figure usually judged to be a shaman in a gesture or pose assumed to be some sort of ritual. Sometimes the shaman is shown with what looks like a penis, and such figures used to be invariably described as men. More recently the suggestion has been made that these figures may have been gendered male, but could have been a woman wearing a costume, as gender inversions are often part of many types of rituals and performances. Or the figure – and the actual shaman who it may have represented – was understood as a third gender, neither male nor female, or both at the same time. Shamans in many cultures wore masks that gave them added power, and were understood to take on the qualities of the animal, creature, or spirit represented by the mask; transcending boundaries was thus their role.

Interpreting what certain objects that appear to have had ritual purposes might have meant to those who made or possessed them is just as contentious as other aspects of early human history. For example, small stone, ivory, bone, or clay figures of women, often with enlarged breasts, buttocks, and/or stomach, dating from the later Paleolithic period (roughly 33,000–9,000 BCE) have been found in many parts of Europe. These were dubbed “Venus figures” by nineteenth-century archaeologists, who thought they represented Paleolithic standards of female beauty just as the goddess Venus represented classical standards (Figure 3.1). Some scholars have interpreted them, as well as later Neolithic figurines of women, as fertility goddesses, evidence of people’s beliefs in a powerful female deity. Others view them as aids to fertility, carried around by women hoping to have children – or perhaps hoping not to have more. Perhaps they were made by women looking at their own bodies in mid-life, with the rounded form of most women who have given birth, and represent hopes for good health during aging. Or they were sexualized images of women carried around by men, a sort of Paleolithic version of the centerfold in a men’s magazine. Or perhaps they might have represented different things to different people. Small clay figurines of women from Mesoamerica and coastal Ecuador in the second millennium BCE have been similarly interpreted in a range of ways: as fertility emblems, ritual objects, models of sexuality, and aids to pregnancy.

Figure 3.1 Venus of Willendorf, c. 23,000 BCE.

This small limestone figurine of a woman, made about 25,000 years ago, was unearthed at an archaeological site at Willendorf, Austria. Its large breasts and stomach, and the plaited hair that continues across the face, have given rise to many theories, but like all “Venus figures,” who made it and for what purposes are unknown. Wikimedia Commons. Source, Bjørn Christian Tørrissen.

The painted, carved, and otherwise decorated objects and locations from the later Paleolithic may have had ritual purposes, but they are also products of imagination, reason, pride, mischeviousness, and a range of emotions (including boredom). Objects modified in a particular way or by talented individuals – what we might now call “luxuries” or “art” – conveyed status and prestige, which is why they show up in burials, including those of women.

Domestication

Foraging remained the basic way of life for most of human history, and for groups living in extreme environments, such as tundras or deserts, it was the only possible way to survive. In some places, however, the natural environment provided enough food that people could become more settled. About 15,000 years ago, as the earth’s climate entered a warming phase, more parts of the world were able to support sedentary or semi-sedentary groups of foragers. Archaeological sites in many places begin to include storage pits, bins, and other sorts of containers, as well as grindstones. They show evidence that people were intensifying their work to get more food from the surrounding area, preparing a wide range of foods out of hundreds of different ingredients, acquiring more objects, and building more permanent housing.

Sedentism used to be seen as a result of the plant and animal domestication that scholars use to separate the Neolithic from the Paleolithic, but in many places it preceded intentional crop-raising by thousands of years, so the primary line of causation runs the other way: people began to raise crops because they were living in permanent communities. Thus people were “domesticated” before plants and animals were. They developed socioeconomic and sociopolitical structures for village life, such as ways to handle disputes or to make decisions about community resources.

Sedentary villages grew first in an area archaeologists call the Fertile Crescent, which runs from present-day Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan north to Turkey and then south to the Iran–Iraq border. Here beginning about 10,000 BCE, people built houses and larger buildings, and used digging sticks, hoes, and other tools to gather wild wheat, barley, and legumes, along with flax, with which they made linen cloth. The population grew, but when they needed more food, instead of moving to a new area – the solution that foragers relied on when faced with the problem of food scarcity – people chose to stay put, with the physical and social structures of the sedentary villages they had built. They developed a different way to increase the food supply to keep up with population growth – plant and animal domestication – thus beginning cycles of expanding population and intensification of land use that have continued to today. They saved some seeds for planting, selecting certain ones in order to get crops that had favorable characteristics, such as larger edible parts or kernels clustered together that ripened all at one time and did not just fall on the ground, qualities that made harvesting more efficient. Through this human intervention, certain crops became domesticated, modified by selective breeding so as to serve human needs.

A similar process – first sedentism, then domestication – happened elsewhere as well. By about 8000 BCE, people were growing sorghum and millet in parts of the Nile River Valley, and perhaps yams in western Africa. By about 7000 BCE, they were growing domesticated rice, millet, and legumes in China, yams and taro in Papua New Guinea, and perhaps squash in Mesoamerica. Crop-raising spread out from areas in which it was first developed, and slowly larger and larger parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas became home to farming villages. Domesticated foods often included cereals or other crops that could be ground and cooked into a mush soft enough for babies to eat. This mush – for which there is widespread archaeological evidence – allowed women to stop nursing their children at a younger age. By doing this, women lost the contraceptive effects of breastfeeding, and children were born at more frequent intervals, which contributed to population growth.

A field of planted and weeded crops yields 10 to 100 times as much food – measured in calories – as the same area of naturally occurring plants, a benefit that would have been evident to early crop-planters. It also requires more labor, however, which was provided both by the greater number of people in the community and by those people working longer hours. In contrast to the 20 hours a week foragers spent on obtaining food, farming peoples were often in the fields from dawn to dusk, particularly during planting and harvest time, but also during the rest of the growing year because weeding was a constant task. Farming increased the division of labor within communities, as families and households became increasingly interdependent, trading food products for other commodities or services.

At roughly the same time as plant domestication, certain animals were domesticated in parts of the world where they occurred naturally, and then, like crops, taken elsewhere. Dogs were the first, then sheep and goats, and somewhat after this cattle, water buffalo, horses, llamas, and poultry. People learned from observation and experimentation that traits are passed down from generation to generation, and they began to breed animals for qualities they wanted, including larger size, greater strength, better coats, increased milk or egg production, and more even temperaments. Animal domestication shaped human evolution; groups that relied on animal milk and milk products for a significant part of their diet tended to develop the ability to digest milk as adults, while those who did not remained lactose intolerant as adults, the normal condition for mammals.

Where terrain or climate made crop-planting difficult, animal domestication became the primary means of obtaining food; people raised flocks of domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, reindeer, or other grazing animals, a system termed pastoralism. In some areas pastoralism can be relatively sedentary, and so easily combined with crop-raising, while in others flocks need to travel long distances from season to season to obtain enough food, so pastoralists became nomadic, sometimes using horses to travel further. In Eastern and Southern Africa, many groups were pastoralists, with the men typically caring for cattle (the higher-status animals), and the women caring for smaller animals such as goats. In later periods, cattle often formed the bridewealth that husbands presented to their wives’ families on marriage, with fathers and male elders retaining control over young men’s marriages through their control of the cattle. (The introduction of wage labor with colonialism would later upset this control as then the young men could buy cattle for bridewealth or present this in some other form.)

Nowhere do archaeological remains alone answer the question of who within any group first began to cultivate crops, but the fact that, among many foragers, women have been primarily responsible for gathering and processing plant products suggests that they may also have been the first to plant seeds in the ground. In many parts of the world, crops continued to be planted with hoes and digging sticks for millennia, and crop-raising remained primarily women’s work, while men hunted or later raised animals. In these places, which include large parts of North America and Africa, women appear to have retained some control of the crops they planted, sharing them with group members or giving them as gifts. They developed means of storing and transporting the harvested seeds, including skin bags, carved wooden vessels, baskets, and pottery. Women in these areas occasionally inherited land or the rights to farm certain pieces of land directly, or boys inherited land through their mother’s brothers, both of which are termed matrilineal systems of inheritance. This division of labor and these systems of inheritance were often misunderstood by colonial conquerors, who then tried to enforce their own division of labor. In North America and Africa, for example, Europeans assumed men were the primary agricultural producers, and developed various plans to make indigenous men better farmers; they often introduced patrilineal inheritance laws at the same time, through which land passed from father to son. Such schemes generally failed to convince men that they should farm, though male elites generally welcomed patrilineal inheritance systems.

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Notes

1

Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91:5 (1986), 1053–75; citation 1067.

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2

In Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), pp. 264–74; citation 264.

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3

Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2015), p. 39.

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4

Translated and quoted in Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 45.

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5

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 293.

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6

Nancy Ward (Nanye’hi), “Speech to the U.S. Treaty Commissioners,” in Lisa L. Moore, Joanna Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton, eds., Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 180.

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