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.