Gender in History E-Book

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 533

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

GENDER IN HISTORY Praise for the first edition: "Wiesner-Hanks ... accomplishes a near-impossible feat - a review of what is known about the construction of gender and the character of women's lives in all known cultures over the course of human history .... Theoretically sophisticated and doing justice to the historical and cross-cultural record, yet assimilable by students." Choice "Gender in History brilliantly explores the influence of gender constructs in political, social, economic, and cultural affairs. The remarkable cultural, geographical, and chronological range of Wiesner-Hanks' research is matched only by the sophistication, nuance, and clarity of her analysis. This book offers a rare and valuable global perspective on gender roles in human history."Jerry H. Bentley, University of Hawaii Over the past two decades, considerations of gender have revolutionized the study of history. Yet most books on the subject remain narrowly focused on a specific time period or particular region of the world. Gender in History: Global Perspectives, Second Edition, continues to redress this inequity by providing a concise overview of the construction of gender in many world cultures over a period stretching from the Paleolithic era to modern times. Thoroughly updated to reflect current developments in the field, the new edition features entirely new sections which address primates, slavery, colonialism, masculinity, transgender issues, and other relevant topics. As in the well-received first edition, material is presented thematically to reveal the connections between gender and structures such as the family, economy, law, religion, sexuality, and the state. Wiesner-Hanks also investigates precisely what it meant to be a man or woman throughout history; how these roles were shaped by various institutions; and how they in turn were influenced by gender. The author presents material within each chapter chronologically to highlight the ways in which gender structures have varied over time. The new edition of Gender in History: Global Perspectives offers rich insights into all that is currently known about gender roles throughout world history. A companion website is available at www.wiley.com/go/wiesnerhanks

Leseprobe

Contents

Chronological Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE Introduction

Sex and Gender

Gender History and Theory

Structure of the Book

The Origins of Patriarchy

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER TWO The Family

Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (4000 BCE–600 BCE)

The Classical Cultures of China, India, and the Mediterranean (600 BCE–500 CE)

Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia in the Premodern Era (600 BCE–1600 CE)

Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the Mediterranean (500 CE–1600 CE)

The Colonial World (1500–1900)

The Industrial and Postindustrial World (1800–2010)

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER THREE Economic Life

Foraging, Horticultural, and Herding Societies (20,000 BCE–1800 CE)

Agricultural Societies (7000 BCE–1800 CE)

Slavery (7000 BCE–1900 CE)

Capitalism and Industrialism (1500–2000)

Corporations, the State, and the Service Economy (1900–2010)

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER FOUR Ideas, Ideals, Norms, and Laws

The Nature and Roles of Men and Women

Binaries

Motherhood and Fatherhood

Ideologies, Norms, and Laws Prescribing Gender Inequity

Ideologies of Egalitarianism

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER FIVE Religion

Animism, Shamanism, and Paganism (from 40,000 BCE)

Written Religions in the Ancient Near East (from 3000 BCE)

Confucianism and Taoism (from 600 BCE)

Hinduism and Buddhism (from 600 BCE)

Christianity (from 30 CE)

Islam (from 600 CE)

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER Six Political Life

Kin Groups, Tribes, and Villages (from 10,000 BCE)

Hereditary Aristocracies (from 3000 BCE)

Warfare

Citizenship (500 BCE–1800 CE)

Women’s Rights Movements (1800–2010)

Colonialism, Anticolonialism, and Postcolonialism (1500–2010)

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER SEVEN Education and Culture

Classical and Postclassical Cultures (600 BCE–1450CE)

The Renaissance (1400–1600)

Democracy, Modernity, and Literacy (1750–2010)

FURTHER READING

CHAPTER EIGHT Sexuality

Classical Eurasia (600 BCE–600 CE)

The Americas (500 CE–1500 CE)

Third Genders

The Colonial World: Sex and Race (1500–1900)

Modern Sexuality in the West (1750–1950)

The Globalized World (1950–2010)

FURTHER READING

Afterword

FURTHER READING

Index

Praise for the first edition

“Wiesner-Hanks... accomplishes a near-impossible feat – a review of what is known about the construction of gender and the character of women’s lives in all known cultures over the course of human history.... Theoretically sophisticated and doing justice to the historical and cross-cultural record, yet assimilable by students...”

Choice

“Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks draws on this wealth of scholarship and her own research to provide a welcome overview of gender in global history from prehistory to date... I would recommend Gender in History as a set text for all students beginning a degree in history, alongside more conventional fare like E. H. Carr’s What is History? It should not be restricted to those students who select a course in which the main topic of study is gender. For, crucially, it demonstrates that gender is as significant as social class, race and ethnicity as a category of historical analysis, as well as providing novice historians with many insights into understanding history. This is not to ignore that it is also of value to more experienced historians, particularly because of its thematically arranged suggestions for further reading.”

Reviews in History

“Merry Wiesner-Hanks has produced a judicious and learned book. Gender in History brilliantly explores the influence of gender constructs in political, social, economic, and cultural affairs. The remarkable cultural, geographical, and chronological range of Wiesner-Hanks’ research is matched only by the sophistication, nuance, and clarity of her analysis. This book offers a rare and valuable global perspective on gender roles in human history.”

Jerry H. Bentley,

University of Hawaii

For my premodern/postmodern women’s reading group

This second edition first published 2011

© Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks 2011

Edition history: 1e (Blackwell Publishing, 2001)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wiesner, Merry E., 1952–

Gender in history: global perspectives/Merry Wiesner-Hanks. - 2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8995-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Sex role–History. 2. Social history. I. Title.

HQ1075.W526 2011

305.309–dc22

2010003198

Chronological Table of Contents

The division of time into historical eras, a process termed “periodization,” is highly contested in world history: many period labels contain implicit or explicit value judgments; developments that historians have seen as marking a division between one period and the next occurred at widely varying times around the world; and important aspects of life often continued across many periods with relatively little change. Thus every system of periodization is problematic, but it is difficult to give them up entirely, so this chronological table of contents uses the large divisions of time that are most common in world history courses. It does not include references to chapter 4, which is organized topically, nor does it include every brief comment. I have included this table to make it easier to read this book in conjunction with courses that are organized chronologically.

Paleolithic Era (to 9500 BCE) 13–17, 55–60, 109–11

Neolithic Era (9500 BCE-3000 BCE) 17–20, 60–1

Ancient agricultural societies (3000 BCE-600 BCE) 25–9, 61–2, 113–15, 137–41

Classical societies (600 BCE-600 CE) 29–33, 63–5, 115–22, 141–50, 170–8, 195–202

Postclassical societies (600 CE-1450 CE) 33–9, 122–3, 126–7, 178–82, 202–6

The early modern world (1450–1750) 39–44, 65–8, 123–6, 151–5, 206–9

The modern world (1750-present) 45–50, 69–77, 112–13, 128–9, 155–62, 182–9, 209–18

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 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, and 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, and Tessa Harvey, the history editor at Wiley-Blackwell, who encouraged its progress and suggested I write a second edition. Anne Hansen, Susan Kingsley Kent, Jeffrey Merrick, and Susanne Mrozik read drafts of chapters and provided invaluable suggestions. My graduate student Brice Smith combed the library and the web for new materials as I set out to write the second edition; he found so much that we decided the only way to include these was to set up an accompanying website, and in doing so I was assisted by my graduate student Lea Gnat. 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, Lisa Di Caprio, Scott Hendrix, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Grethe Jacobsen, Margaret Jolly, Susan Karant-Nunn, JoAnn McNamara, Teresa Meade, Pavla Miller, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Allyson Poska, Diana Robin, Lyndal Roper, Anne Schutte, Bonnie Smith, Hilda Smith, Ulrike Strasser, Susan Stuard, Larissa Taylor, Gerhild Scholz Williams, and Heide Wunder. My husband, Neil, and my sons, Kai and Tyr, have become accustomed to my need to write, and “Mom is writing” is a normal explanation in our house for its failure to live up to Martha Stewart standards. Finally I would like to thank the present and former members of my women’s reading group, which began as one exploring medieval and Renaissance women and now knows no bounds: Margaret Borene, Martha Carlin, Mary Delgado, Shelly Hall, Janet Jesmok, Deirdre Keenan, Gwynne Kennedy, Gretchen Kling, Sandy Stark, and Louise Tesmer. None of us anticipated when we started getting together more than 15 years ago what an important part of our lives those meetings would become. Further on in the book I consider the issue of women’s informal communities; the meaning of such groups in the past may be lost to us as they have left no records, but those in the present provide great sustenance, both intellectual and gustatory. This book is thus dedicated to our group.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The title of this book would have made little sense to me when I chose to be a history major nearly four 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. 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 only hearing 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, first fitting them into the categories with which we were already comfortable – nations, historical periods, social classes, religious allegiance – and then realizing that this approach, sarcastically labeled “add women and stir,” was unsatisfying. Focusing on women often disrupted the familiar categories, forcing us to rethink 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. Even newer historical approaches, such as the emphasis on class analysis using social science techniques termed the New Social History which had developed during the 1960s, were found to be wanting in their consideration of differences between women’s and men’s experiences.

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 we used to describe individuals – “artist” and “woman artist,” for example, or “scientist” and “woman scientist” – kept us from thinking about how the experiences of Michelangelo or Picasso or Isaac Newton were shaped by the fact that they were male, while it forced us to think about how being female affected Georgia O’Keefe or Marie Curie. 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. 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.” Several university presses started book series with “gender” in their titles – “gender and culture,” “gender and American law” – and scholars in many fields increasingly switched from “sex” to “gender” as the acceptable terminology: “sex roles” became “gender roles,” “sex distinctions” became “gender distinctions” and so on. Historians interested in this new perspective asserted that gender was an appropriate category of analysis when looking at historical developments, not simply those involving women or the family. 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: “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.” 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.