Women’s and Gender History Research Paper

Women’s and gender history may be defined as the history of relations between women and men, of the changing understanding of femininity and masculinity, and of the importance of gender in the organization of society. Since any society, anywhere and at any time, consists of women and men, gender interacts with other categories, such as race, ethnicity, class, citizenship, nationalism, imperialism, and religion, and with other value systems. It assumes importance in divisions of labor as well as in crosscultural encounters throughout time and has served as a trope for hierarchical perceptions of cultures and power relations.

Gender perspectives in world history date back at least to Enlightenment world histories. At the end of the eighteenth century, some historians focused on costumes and manners, and on peoples’ ways of life. Some works pointed to the importance of material conditions, as well as to religious and political systems, for defining women’s status; some compared the lives of women within different cultures; some even characterized non-European people as feminine and implicitly less civilized. But when, in the early nineteenth century, historical research narrowed to national histories, mostly concentrating on political history, the question of gender was left to be explored by other disciplines, such as social anthropology and sociology. In the 1960s, universal history again attracted attention, mainly in the United States. By then historical research was being criticized for neglecting women and seeing men as universal representatives of humankind. Inspired by women’s movements and by new approaches to historical studies, such as the history of mentalities, demographic history, and family history, the interest in women’s history now blossomed at the national level. During the 1990s this approach also made itself felt within the growing field of universal history.

The Theoretical Framework

Most historical research rests on a dichotomous understanding of gender; an individual is seen as either a woman or a man. Some also take for granted that biology determines not only the sex of a person but also the gender. Historians have challenged this dichotomy by investigating the historical understanding of sexual differences. Departing from Aristotle’s assumption of the existence of only one sex, which sees women as embryonic, unfinished males, passing by the dichotomy created by Christianity that equates men with spirituality and women with materiality, they have traced the rise of the two-sex model from the end of the eighteenth century, reaching an apogee through Darwinism and the medical sciences, and experiencing a recent rebirth with sociobiology.

Anthropology and cross-cultural history have cast doubts on this dichotomous understanding of gender. In many parts of the world, notably Africa, but also Alaska, the Amazon region, and parts of Asia, individuals have assumed tasks, behavior, and clothing that might be seen as characterizing the opposite sex. Some cultures have seen age as determining gender, understanding children and old people as belonging to different genders than grown-up males and females. Add to this the study of gay and lesbian history and the history of sexualities, and it will be understood that world histories need to be aware of variations in the understanding of femininity and masculinity.

An increasing number of studies have shown that systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men. These revealed the need to study the history of men, too, as gendered individuals. A distinction between sex (that is, physical anatomical differences) and gender (that is, culturally and historically constructed differences between women and men) started the argument over essentialism versus constructionalism. In the 1990s queer theory and poststructuralism further diversified approaches to gender history. The linguistic turn, which focused on texts—literary as well as visual material—rather than on events, individuals, or groups also helped pave the way for studying gender as a trope for hierarchical relations in fields of history that at the outset seemed to have nothing to do with gender.

Some historians have feared that these approaches would deprive women’s history of the possibility of studying women as agents in history and reduce the focus of history to the history of women’s lived lives. The term gender history has also sometimes been seen as a departure from the original aim of restoring women to history and as weakening the political potential of women’s history. Gradually, however, helped by the growth in interdisciplinary research approaches, such divisions have become less distinct. Gender history and men’s history are now frequently seen as outgrowths of and parallels to women’s history, and cultural studies have united a number of approaches to historical research.

Applying gender as an analytical category to world history may be a fruitful way to see gender as a process where the meanings and importance of gender may change over time, and where the importance of other analytical categories—ethnicity, race, class, national and cultural identity, and so on—may interact with gender in varying ways. Gender may be seen as a basic social structure that in any culture, in any society, and at all times interacts with other social structures to determine the socialization of an individual, the distribution of work and responsibilities, and of rights in the family and in society. Gender is at work in studies of material life as well as of ideologies and politics. When societies change, so do gender relations, and changes in gender relations influence other economic, social, and political relations.

From Matriarchy to Patriarchy?

A central issue in early global women’s and gender history has been the question of the origin of patriarchy. Although most cultures overtly allocated more direct power to men than to women, historians have wondered if there was once a time when this was not so. Some have postulated the existence of prehistoric matriarchal societies in Africa, in the early Americas, and in Europe. The German nineteenth century scholar J. J. Bachofen (1815–1887) saw such societies as primitive ones that were gradually supplanted by patriarchies, which were more advanced. The socialist Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) believed that agriculture and private ownership gave rise to the nuclear family in which men controlled women’s sexuality in order to ensure legitimate offspring.

The American historian Gerda Lerner (b. 1920) has put forward the theory that patriarchy was based on the exchange of women among men and preceded other hierarchies. Other theories have examined the importance of men’s physical strength and women’s need for protection for the development of patriarchy, or they have interrogated the impact of religious and other ideological forces, of material structures such as plough-cultures, private ownership, literacy, and not least, of state formation and political systems on gender relations. Whatever the theory, insufficient source material makes it impossible to decide how male-dominated societies evolved. But the complicated structures of such societies and the variations among them through time remain enticing research areas.

Gendered Global Human Experiences

Applying gender as an analytical category means questioning the divide between the history of economic, social, political, and ideological structures and the history of private lives. A basic question may be the shifting importance of the household and family unit to the development of any society. In fact, all global human experiences lend themselves very well to gender analysis. Family structures, economic and social life, politics and value systems, religion, education, and sexuality all vary with gender among cultures and over time to different degrees. A good example may be the gendered effects of twentieth century population policies. While men and women alike were preoccupied with the family economy and the future of the nation, women experienced population policies on their own bodies. Technological and economic changes, such as the Industrial Revolution, were built on the existence of a gendered labor force and offered cheap routine female and male labor, as well as more expensive specialized, exclusively male labor.

The formation of nation-states and national identities also included women and men in different ways, burdening men with military protection, national expansion, and the economic success of the nation, and women with generational reproduction and the social upbringing of new members of the nation. While preindustrial societies sometimes lent women political power through family connections, for a long time “modernizing” democratic states allocated such power only to men. Regardless of class, ethnicity, or skin color, with very few exceptions women were the last group to obtain suffrage. Religious systems and other ideologies throughout time have contributed in various ways to uphold gender differences and gendered power relations.

Reconsidering Central Concepts

Gender analysis leads to the reconsideration of central concepts. The widely accepted definition of work as paid labor in the public sphere will need to be revised in order to include women’s unpaid work in the family and household. The importance of this work, as well as the importance of a cheap female labor force, must be taken into consideration in any analysis of material life.

The concept of power must incorporate patriarchal power structures into class and race analysis, and consider the effect of psychological sources of power, such as an appeal to emotions, to chivalry, and to honor. Politics must be considered in a wider context than that of public authorities. Civil society as well as kinship must be taken into consideration.

Access—be it physical access to certain spaces or immaterial access to certain prerogatives such as education or political power—is another concept that may be useful for women’s and gender history. Why was women’s access to public spaces and even physical mobility more limited than men’s, and why and how did this vary with social standing and among cultures? The history of physical barriers, such as foot-binding, zenanas, and harems, as well as of the morally grounded limits to women’s mobility includes a gendered understanding of access. Needless to say, educational and political systems were molded in the same perception of gendered spaces. Why did some groups of both men and women struggle to continue such traditions, while others fought to eliminate them?

Special consideration may be given to the understanding of identity. Joggling gender, class, caste, ethnicity, and nationality may seem to dissolve personal identity. But analyzing situations where several identities are at play, the historian may ask what prompts one of them to take precedence over the others. Why would an individual at times act mainly as a woman, at other times mainly as a member of a certain social group or of a specific nation? How did gender influence class identity, and how did caste identity vary with gender?

In short, rethinking a number of concepts indispensable to historical analysis will bring forward a new and more varied knowledge of global human experiences.

Cross-Cultural Interactions

Gender played an important role in the meeting of different cultures—for example, the varied influence of Islamic understandings of gender in India and sub- Saharan Africa from the eleventh century onwards, or the Chinese military expansion during the Tang and Song dynasties (618–907 CE and 960–1279, respectively), which spread a strict patriarchal culture to much of East Asia. Chinese-Mongol contacts, however, witnessed a reciprocal distaste for gender relations in the other culture and left little influence either way. Colonial and imperial contacts are the most explored cross-cultural meetings. Enlightenment world historians used gender as a trope for communicating cultural differences. They sometimes characterized non-European cultures not only as “hideous” and “dark-colored,” but also as exhibiting unsympathetic characteristics such as “more than feminine cowardice.” Later male colonizers could construct the notion of colonized women as representing “true femininity” since they served and obeyed men, in opposition to their Western counterparts, who increasingly refused to do so and even demanded the same rights as men.

Ironically, women missionaries, in their ardent attempts to spread Western values and lacking a full understanding of the workings of gender in cultures other than their own, often encouraged Victorian feminine behavior in colonized women. They did this despite the fact that many of them had intentionally broken out of the limitations implied in Victorian ideals.

The Western understanding of masculinity was also at play. The British would perceive a physically strong and athletic male body and the capacity for self-control and restraint as necessary for those who intended to rule a nation. Seeing Bengali middleclass men as small, frail, effeminate, and lacking self-control, British officials might find them unable to govern themselves, let alone a whole society.

The interaction of changing understandings of gender provides an interesting approach to the study of cultural encounters. Growing opposition to British rule and Westernization strengthened the need for the family as a refuge for Bengali middle-class men. This paved the way for more education for women so they could become intelligent mothers and wives who would uphold Bengali historic traditions within the family. But in the long run this also led to the formation of Indian women’s organizations, and for a while, to cooperation between Indian and British women in the fight for women’s suffrage. Repressive British policies at the end of World War I, however, damaged these cross-cultural contacts, and Indian women rebelled against being seen as young daughters to be educated by British protective mothers. The spread of Western feminism after World War II raised similar questions about cooperation and conflict among women.

Critical Dialogues?

As in so many other fields, the uneven growth of historical sciences around the world has implications for the gendering of world history. Women’s and gender history first evolved in the United States and Canada, and was taken up soon afterward by Western European universities; the spread to Eastern Europe and to Asian, African, and Latin American universities was slower. But since many historians from these parts of the world are educated at American or European universities, Western research approaches and Western theories exert an overwhelming influence within women’s and gender history all over the world.

Special awareness is needed when studying culturally contested historical phenomena, especially if they have an impact on today’s societies. Among them are traditions such as sati (widow burning), veiling, and female genital mutilation. For a historian analyzing these traditions, it becomes especially important to distinguish between attempting to understand and explain behavior that is foreign, or sometimes even repulsive, and accepting such behavior; understanding is not the same as accepting. Historians may need to openly acknowledge their own limited cultural and class background, sometimes even their gendered background, in order to work at transgressing such limits. Subaltern (a term referring to those people socially, politically, and/or geographically outside of the existing power structure) studies like those in the 1980s have helped counteract the flood of Western histories. Dialogues have been encouraged by the trend to stop perceiving colonialism and imperialism exclusively as a polarization between the metropolis and the colony and instead to highlight the interaction between what used to be seen as center and periphery. Critical dialogues among historians of various cultural backgrounds are multiplying at international conferences, in journals especially devoted to women’s and gender history, and through the workings of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. Such developments are promising for further research in global women’s and gender history.

The very character of gender as an analytical category makes it an excellent tool for world historians working at any period and in any society or region. Women’s and gender history yields a wealth of new knowledge about the global past. There is a lot to gain by exploring this field of world history—and a lot to lose from not doing so.

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