Gender Ideology Research Paper

1. The Historical Context For Studies Of Gender Ideology

The Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, which started in the United States and then spread to Europe and other parts of the world, was an important stimulus for cross-cultural research on gender ideologies, and the politics of the movement significantly influenced this research as it emerged in the early 1970s. The most general political position of the Women’s Liberation Movement that shaped the study of gender ideologies was the view that women are not equal to men in American society. They do not have the same control over their own lives and the lives of others that men have. They are dominated by men in their family life, in the workplace, and in other social domains as well, particularly religion and politics. This domination, it was argued, is bolstered by patriarchal gender ideologies that provided justification for men’s domination of women. The term ‘patriarchal’ was used to refer to ideologies that either assumed or asserted that the correct social order was one in which men dominate women, have authority over them, and tell them what to do. The patriarchal ideology that received the greatest attention in the Women’s Liberation Movement was the American view that women are biologically inferior to men—less intelligent, physically weaker, less aggressive, and more emotional—in ways ultimately explained by differences in their biological makeup. The political theorists of this social movement actively criticized this patriarchal ideology. They acknowledged that there were biological differences between women and men, but argued that these were exaggerated by cultural processes and were in themselves not sufficient to be a basis for men’s political and social domination. Instead, differences in women’s and men’s socialization experiences explained cultural differences between women and men that were used to justify men’s authority. Academic disciplines that had contributed to the development of biological patriarchal ideology, also came under attack from the women’s movement.

‘Science’ in general was conceptualized as a form of ideology, that is as a framework promulgated by people in power to help them maintain their power, rather than as objective factual truth. There was evidence that scientists who had studied sex differences between humans had indeed been influenced by the patriarchal ideologies of European cultures. For example, nineteenth century physical anthropologists found that women’s brains were smaller than men’s and argued that this was the reason women were less intelligent. Yet by the early twentieth century, physical anthropologists were arguing that intelligence was a reflection of the size of an animal’s brain in proportion to its body, and women and men did not differ in this proportional relationship.

Patriarchal gender ideology was also apparent in the way women were largely absent from scholarly representations of human activity in the social sciences and humanities of the 1960s. For example, in anthropological theory about early human societies, considerable attention had been given to the importance of men’s collaborative hunting for human evolution. But women’s gathering of plant foods, which provided the bulk of foodstuffs eaten by early humans, was almost completely ignored. Feminist theorists argued that both biological theories which denigrated women and representations of humans that rendered women invisible conveyed gender ideologies which were psychologically harmful to girls and young women. These scholarly visions of gender undermined young women’s self-confidence, encouraging them to believe that they were incapable of much in life that they were in fact quite capable of, and providing perspectives that suggested male domination was indeed an appropriate state of affairs.

This vision of the role of gender ideology in US women’s subordination was projected to the world as a whole in early feminist anthropological comparative research on the topic. In the early 1970s, Rosaldo (1974) argued that the cross-cultural evidence on gender relations available at that time indicated that in all societies of the present and past men have had greater power and authority than women. In all societies, although both men and women have culturally legitimated authority in the domestic or household sphere, it is overwhelmingly men who have had culturally legitimated authority in public spheres, due to women’s greater involvement in childcare. Rosaldo suggested that this arrangement was supported everywhere and reinforced by gender ideologies in which men were held to be superior to women by virtue of their greater involvement in culture and their lesser involvement in nature. Women were held to be more involved in nature than men because of their role in the natural process of giving birth to and caring for children. This argument was appealing in part because of its scope: it was a theory about women and men in all times and places. It was also appealing because it resonated with the views of feminists involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement of that time.

In many ways, Rosaldo’s position set the agenda for comparative research on gender ideology for the next several decades. Her position was challenged as well as embraced and the research it stimulated showed that there is far more diversity in gender ideologies than was initially envisioned. The rest of this discussion focuses on the nature of this diversity in gender ideologies. Consideration will first be given to how many gender categories there are in gender ideologies. Early work assumed two—woman and man—but this view has been questioned. Then the discussion will shift to the nature of cross-cultural similarities and differences in fundamental features of gender ideologies that are predominantly dualistic in organization. Finally, the extent to which patriarchal gender ideologies sustain male domination cross-culturally will be considered.

2. How Many Genders Are There?

One key source of cultural and historical variation in gender ideologies is the extent to which gender systems are thought of as fundamentally dualistic, or binary. Much contemporary Western scholarship assumes that binary gender systems are universal: sexual females become women and sexual males become men. However, research on sex and gender ideologies suggests that this is itself a culturally specific gender ideology. To begin with, binary biological sex is itself a cultural construct. Laqueur (1990) argues that until the nineteenth century, Europeans conceived of only one sex, that of male, with female as a lesser version of him. It was only in the late eighteenth century that a two-sex model of human biology began to emerge in which the differences between males and females were rhetorically elaborated. Today, although it is common to assume that all babies will be obviously biologically male or female, sex is sometimes ambiguous. In such cases an infant will still be assigned to one category or the other and surgery may be performed to alter the body in a manner consistent with that assignment. Adults sometimes decide that they want to have the physical characteristics of the ‘opposite’ sex. To achieve this they engage in cultural activities that will either create this impression, as when women bind their breasts, or bring about sex changes as a physical reality through surgery and hormonal treatments.

There is no doubt that binary biological sex is partly a material reality. It is not something that we as humans have imagined completely. But it is also partly a cultural construct. Scholars agree that binary gender ideologies, as well as binary sex ideologies, are ideological constructs. They also agree that the gender ideologies articulated by people do not capture for any society the range of gender identities expressed in that society. But they disagree about how to conceptualize nonbinary models of gender. Some researchers assert the existence of societies in which there are three rather than two salient genders, where the third gender is most commonly a named category referring to a man who is womanly in dress, occupation, sexual preference, or some combination of these aspects of gender identity. For example, Europeans who first contacted North American Indian societies reported that many of them had a third gender category of men who dressed like women and carried out women’s work roles, the name for which was sometimes glossed into English as ‘manly hearted woman.’ Other scholars argue that even in cultures with three or more named gender categories, gender as an ideological system is still and always about cultural transformations of a biological difference between males and females. In any case, gender dualism, or the idea of two genders, woman and man, is very strongly developed and salient in gender ideologies around the world and through time, and most scholars working on gender ideologies have focused on the nature, causes, and consequences of gender ideologies that posit woman and man as central categories.

3. Cross-Cultural Similarities And Differences In Dualistic Gender Ideologies

Dualistic or two-category gender ideologies are concerned with how women and men are similar and different, with the emphasis on difference. The widespread presence of ideologies of difference indicates the importance of culture and ideology in creating women and men as unalike. Anthropologists have found that cross-culturally, people are concerned with similar aspects of human experience in their production of gender ideologies. People also engage in similar cognitive and symbolic processes as they talk about and otherwise represent women. At the same time, there are also differences from society to society and within societies in the nature of dualistic gender ideologies, so that similarities and differences across cultures are intertwined.

There are at least four aspects of human experience that regularly enter into gender ideologies. These include work, appearance, sexuality, and reproduction. People constitute themselves and are socially constituted by others as women and men through their behavior in these areas and the meanings attached to those behaviors. At the same time, societies vary in the emphasis that is given to each of these four aspects and in the extent and kind of variation tolerated in behavior relative to canonical expectations about gender.

It is very common cross-culturally for women and men to be expected to do different kinds of work, and for girls and boys to be socialized into different kinds of labor. So, for example, in hunting and gathering societies, which no longer exist in isolation from other economic types of societies, it is common for women to be expected and trained to gather plants and for men to be expected and trained to hunt for game. Among European agriculturalists, large-scale cultivation has been associated strongly with men. Consequently, where women were largely responsible for cultivation in places that have been colonized by Europeans over the last 500 years, strong pressure was often exerted to get men to replace women in these activities as, for example, with the Seneca Indians in New York state.

After about the age of 3 years, girls and boys and women and men are also commonly expected to look different from each other in ways that are specific to individual cultures. They are expected to dress differently, to wear their hair differently, to differ in the presence and nature of body decor such as jewelry and tattoos, and to differ in patterns of nonverbal behavior such as gesture and facial expression.

Sexually, binary gender ideologies entail the expectation that men’s sexual object choices will be women and women’s sexual object choices will be men. But whether or not and how departure from these expectations leads to the view that a male is not a man or a female is not a woman varies greatly cross-culturally.

Finally, binary gender ideologies commonly entail expectations of women and men regarding the roles they will play in the reproduction of human communities, through giving birth to, taking care of, and socializing children. It is well documented that failure to meet cultural expectations in these areas can often have major consequences in the lives of the people involved. However, a worldwide decrease in emphasis on this aspect of gender identity may be ongoing as changes in global economic processes bring about changes in family size.

Cognitively and symbolically, it is common for these substantive areas of gender ideology to be elaborated around specific gender dyads (Mathews 1992). Typically these dyads are drawn from cross-gender relationships within the family, reflecting the fundamental centrality of the family for both the maintenance of and changes in gender ideologies. Some key nuclear family dyads that are frequently ideologically elaborated cross-culturally include wife–husband, sister–brother, mother–son, and father–daughter.

However, societies differ in which gender dyads get selected for ideological elaboration. For example, in many European societies, the husband–wife relationship is the primary relationship that is ideologically elaborated, and the mother–child relationship is also the focus of a great deal of cultural production. But in the South Pacific, in Polynesian cultures such as those of Samoa, Tonga, and Tokelau, it is the sister–brother relationship that is most celebrated and discussed, and the husband–wife relationship is simply not developed explicitly or represented to the same extent in public events. So, for example, stories and plays depict the kind of work the sister should do and the kind of work the brother should do, but not what husbands and wives do, though one may infer that the division of labor will be similar for them.

While a good deal of gender ideology develops around nuclear family dyads, it also receives expression in representations of culturally idealized individual men and women, who usually represent the good, but can also represent the bad. For example, in Mexico, there are three key female icons: the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Malinche, an Indian woman who betrayed her people by consorting with the Spanish conqueror, and La Llorona, a ghostly figure who wanders riverbanks weeping over the loss of her dead children and luring men to death by drowning (Limon 1986).

The use of simple cross-gendered dyads from the family and the use of individual icons to convey gender ideology are, then, common cross-cultural cognitive and symbolic strategies. An additional such strategy is to metaphorically project gendered family dyads and individual gendered prototypes outside the family onto other more encompassing levels of social organization. For example, George Washington is referred to as the father of his country. And entire nations may be gendered, often as women, as in the expression, ‘India is the mother of her people’ and the term ‘Mother Russia.’

The processes involved in cross-cultural similarities and differences in gender representation that have been described so far also provide resources for the production of intrasocietal as well as intersocietal similarities and differences in gender ideologies. Different segments of a society—e.g., classes, ethnic groups, or religious groups—may emphasize different aspects of gender identity in their gender ideologies. Diversity in gender ideologies within a society can consequently become the basis for criticism and conflict between groups over how women and men should be expected to behave and should treat one another. This can lead to the imposition of the gender ideology of one group on another, and to changes over time in gender ideologies.

For all of these reasons it can be problematic to talk about ‘the’ gender ideology of a given society or culture. It is true that some ideas about gender may be ‘dominant’ in a given society, in that they are represented widely or represented by those in power. But diverse views on gender are held in all societies, if only by virtue of role differentiation within the family, so that what is expected of a sister is not what is expected of a wife or mother.

4. Gender Ideologies and Male Domination Over Women

The final important and controversial aspect of gender ideologies to be considered here is the extent to which they provide justification for men’s control of women and contribute to its perpetuation. Patriarchal gender ideologies are very widespread, but not all of them are alike. The political critique of the Women’s Liberation Movement concentrated on the American and European patriarchal ideology that gender differences are rooted in biologically based sex differences which render women inferior to men. But this was and is not the only patriarchal gender ideology in the United States or elsewhere. Biological differences between women and men are not always involved. Nor is women’s inferiority always asserted. Neither is necessary for a patriarchal gender ideology. What is necessary is that there be a cultural understanding that men should have power and authority over women that women should not have over themselves or men. Two important bases for patriarchal gender ideologies besides biology are tradition and religion.

Adhering to tradition means continuing to do something because it has been done in the past, often a highly valued past that itself defines who people are in the present. In religious ideologies, in contrast, patriarchal gender ideologies are often conceptualized as supernaturally ordained. This is true of gender ideology in the three world religions that originated in the Middle East and spread around the world: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In all these religions, gender roles and the greater authority of men is interpreted as the will of God.

Although patriarchal gender ideologies are very widespread, nonpatriarchal gender ideologies and gender ideologies that do not denigrate women but value them and represent them in positive ways are also very widespread. Quite often they co-exist with patriarchal gender ideologies. In Tonga, for example, gender ideologies reveal different attitudes toward and expectations for sisters and wives. Women are conceptualized as below their husbands, but above their brothers, so husbands can tell wives what to do and sisters can tell brothers what to do, but brothers are not supposed to boss their sisters and wives are not supposed to boss their husbands. A good deal of comparative research on gender ideologies assumes or asserts a close relationship between the amount of power women have and the extent to which gender ideology portrays women positively in a given society. Both women’s power and gender ideology about them are in turn affected by aspects of cultural systems other than the gender frameworks themselves. The idea that gender ideologies and power relations between women and men vary in ways shaped by other social forces is important. It raises the possibility that women’s positions can be enhanced by human transformation of social systems through identification of processes in them that favor gender equality. Various aspects of social systems have been put forward as influencing gender ideologies and power relations. For example, many scholars have argued that women have more power and more positive images in societies where they make significant visible contribution to the economic well-being of the groups they belong to. Others argue that although present day societies may all have patriarchal gender systems, this has not always been the case. Some argue that ‘states’ as a type of political system entail a concentration of power in men’s hands that was not true of prestate political systems in the evolution of human societies. Others focus on European colonialism over the last several centuries as a cultural influence that has made many societies patriarchal which were not patriarchal before. However, these ideas have been criticized for romanticizing past societies whose gender ideologies and power relations may never be completely reliably retrieved. Since the 1990s, there have also been changes in the way the power of gender ideologies has come to be conceived. It is increasingly common for anthropologists and others to write of the ‘gendering’ of very large-scale social processes, particularly colonialism, the emergence of nation states, and international relationships. This work suggests that the ideological power of gender is located not so much in explicit representations of gender in myths and rituals as in a more implicit, pervasive, and diffuse semiotic gendering of all of social life. Still, the most important contribution to date from the study of gender ideologies has been the documentation of considerable cross-cultural diversity in gender ideologies that describe and explain how and why women and men are different from each other. The documentation of this diversity in itself undermines and deconstructs essentialist views that differences between women and men are natural, supernaturally ordained, or fixed for all time in any society.

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