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...