BEHOLD! A History of Gender Roles

Through investigations of writers as diverse as Silvia Federici, and Angela Davis, Maria Mies, and Sharon Hays, Judith Butler, and Steven Gregory we have come to understand that confronting the categorization of gender differences is a complex and nuanced project. Whether one is an ontologist, exploring the metaphysical nature of gender differences (that may or may not lead down the road of essentialism) or a phenomenologist exploring how exactly it is that one “does” gender—to the extent that there even exists a concept called gender—one must employ a varied and multipartite approach. Writers such as Federici, Mies, and Davis sketched out a framework of the history of gender roles for us. From what Federici calls a time of primitive consumption through feudalism, to the time of slavery and rapid industrialization and, indeed, through our current technological revolution, we have seen the basic gender differences between the sexes evolve over time. To be sure, our notions of what is expected from both women and men have changed since prehistoric times, and they continue to evolve. Sharon Hays in the chapter “Pyramids of Innequality” of her book Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform shows us how, in the United States, poverty and access to the social safety net have been raced and gendered. She provides a springboard for further investigation.

The study of gender and its historical analysis has, itself, evolved. Linda Kerber in her essay Seperate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History argues that the metaphor of a separate women’s sphere which she traces back to the Victorian era and to de Tocqueville’s analysis of America—and which may, indeed, have been useful at one point, in order to doth the coil of male dominance and oppression—has outlived it’s usefulness and become inherently problematic.   Writing at about the time that the concept of Intersectionality was beginning to take root as a tool of theoretical analysis, Kerber demonstrates that one of the glaring limitations of the separate spheres trope is that it allows historians to avoid thinking about race and class by myopically focusing on the sphere of white middle-class women. Joan Scott, whose essay Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis appears just a few years prior to Kerber’s, demonstrates that by drawing from other diverse disciplines (anthropology, cultural studies, economics, literary criticism) historians can show how knowledge, power, and indeed identity can be shaped by the category of gender. Echoing other poststructuralists of the time, Scott tells us that gender is, in point of fact, part of a larger system of relationships, and it links together the forces of ideology, normative behavior, political action, and identity formation. Scott breaks with tradition and suggests that gender is defined in relation to other cultural and ideological forms and not tied to any biological origins or mired in the rubric of sexual roles; that it is, in effect, not about some essential attributes but about its social function within an historical period.

In their engaging study On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough, economists Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn “test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution and persistence of gender norms.” What they found was that in those societies that employed the use of ploughs for agriculture, women are less likely work outside the home, be elected to elected office or run businesses today. To be sure, the use of ploughs versus hoes is not an arbitrary choice. Ploughs are necessary for large tracts of land where crops like wheat, barley and rye are grown; while hoes are used for crops (sorghum, millet, etc…) that need less land to be grown, not to mention that the types of soil needed to cultivate these crops are also immensely different. Though, the authors tell us, when ploughs were introduced in many regions, men gained an advantage, since ploughs and the animals used to pull them required significant strength. Women became housebound.

Henrik Hartog informs us of the legal doctrine of coverture, whereby a woman’s legal rights—such as they were—were subsumed by her husband upon marriage as she underwent, in effect, a legal death. Enshrined in English Common Law, coverture survived for centuries (up until the 1960s in some cases!), migrating to the United States where it was slowly modified by a host of laws and legal rulings on the property rights of married women that for the most part imposed proscriptions on their ability to incur major debts for which their husbands could be held liable. Hartog explains that coverture—however foreign and misogynistic it sounds to modern ears—involved a certain obligation and responsibility on the part of the husband (though that sounds more like paternalism cloaked in misogynistic legal precedent.) A married woman was a feme covert, a dependant. Jeanne Boydston paints a wholly different picture of eighteenth century America and women’s involvement in the burgeoning labor market. In The Woman Who Wasn't There: Women's Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States Boydston points to the emphasis on household productivity in order to deal with an volatile economy. She tells us that by the mid-eighteenth century the flexible nature of “woman’s work” (which could be done at home, with tools that were readily available) gave rise to the role of wife as “deputy husband”. Though soon the growing linkage between what Boydston calls “independent manhood” and “economic agency” began to overwhelm. There was a reordering of the concept of gender in late eighteenth century America, and the aforementioned trope of separate spheres that Linda Kerber eloquently debunks began to take hold.