Gender in History

Sherry Ortner’s essay about nature and culture has been reprinted in her

The Politics and Erotics of Culture

 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996). Further discussions about the links between gender and nature include Carolyn Merchant,

The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution

 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980) and

Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England

 (2nd edn., Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Londa Schiebinger,

Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science

 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993); Vera Norwood,

Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature

 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Virginia Scharff, ed.,

Seeing Nature through Gender

 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Douglas A. Vacoch, ed.,

Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature

 (London: Routledge, 2020).

More general analyses of the role of gender in science historically include Thomas Laqueur,

Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); David Noble,

A World without Women: The Clerical Culture of Western Science

 (New York: Knopf, 1992); Joan Cadden,

Meanings of Sex Differences in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture

 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Londa Schiebinger,

The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science

 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and

Has Feminism Changed Science?

 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman, eds.,

Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture

 (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2006); Monica H. Green,

Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-modern Gynaecology

 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). A good overview of ideas about menstruation is provided in Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth,

The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation

 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), and of contraception in Lara Marks,

Sexual Chemistry: An International History of the Pill

 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

For the history of masculinities, Raewyn W. Connell,

Masculinities

 (2nd edn., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005) is essential, as is Judith Kegan Gardiner,

Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions

 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Regional studies include: Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, eds.,

A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity

 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); Matthew C. Gutmann, ed.,

Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America

 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Lisa A Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher, eds.,

Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa

 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Ruth Mazo Karras,

From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe

 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and Anna Clark, eds.,

Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture

 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Michael Kimmel,

Manhood in America: A Cultural History

 (4th edn., New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Sonya Lipsett-Rivera,

The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico

 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2019). There is a good review of many studies in Robert A. Nye, “Western Masculinities in War and Peace,”

American Historical Review

, 112 (Apr. 2007), 417–38.

Studies of the social construction of beauty and its links to gender include Sander Gilman,

Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery

 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Susan R. Bordo,

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body

 (2nd edn., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

For discussions of motherhood and fatherhood, see Clarissa W. Alkinson,

The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages

 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ann Taylor Allen,

Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914

 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden, eds.,

Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History

 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1997); Ralph LaRossa,

The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History

 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Heléna Ragoné and France Winddance Twine, eds.,

Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, and Nationalism

 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Marguerite Guzman Bouvard,

Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

 (New York: SR Books, 2002); Lynn Trev Broughton and Helen Rogers, eds.,

Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century

 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Marian van der Klein et al., eds.,

Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare and Policy in the Twentieth Century

 (London: Berghahn, 2012); Rhiannon Stephens,

A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900

 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Oyeronke Oyewumi,

What Gender Is Motherhood?: Changing Yoruba Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity

 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jodi Vandenburg-Daves,

Modern Motherhood: An American History

 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014); Jürgen Martschukat,

American Fatherhood: A History

 (New York: NYU Press, 2019).

Almost every book in this list, as well as most of those suggested in the other chapters, refers to ideologies prescribing difference or inequality. Some recent overviews include Jack Holland,

A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice

 (London: Robinson, 2019) and Kate Manne,

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

On feminism, good places to start are Estelle B. Freedman,

The Essential Feminist Reader

 (New York: Modern Library, 2007); Lucy Delap,

Feminisms: A Global History

 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020); or Bonnie G. Smith, ed.,

Routledge Global History of Feminism

 (London: Routledge, 2021). More detailed studies include: Chilla Bulbeck,

Re-orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Post-colonial World

 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); bell hooks,

Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

 (Cambridge, UK: South End Press, 2000); Patricia Hill Collins,

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment

 (2nd edn., New York: Routledge, 2000); Bonnie Smith, ed.,

Global Feminisms since 1945: Rewriting Histories

 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Chandra Talpade Mohanty,

Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Valentine M. Moghadam,

Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks

 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin, eds.,

The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism

 (New York: Anchor Books, 2004); Joyce Green, ed.,

Making Space for Indigenous Feminism

 (New York: Zed Books, 2007); Karen Offen, ed.,

Globalizing Feminisms, 1789–1945

 (London: Routledge, 2010); Amanda Lock Swarr and Riacha Nagar, eds.,

Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis

 (New York: SUNY Press, 2010).

For some of the newest currents in feminism, see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,

We Should All Be Feminists

 (New York: Anchor Books, 2015); Amrita Basu,

Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms

 (2nd edn., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2017); Nicola Rivers,

Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides

 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Lynn Fugiwara and Shireen Roshanravan, eds.,

Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics

 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2018); June Eric-Udorie, ed.,

Can We All Be Feminists?: New Writing from Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 Others on Intersectionality, Identity, and the Way Forward for Feminism

 (London: Penguin Books, 2018); Katherine M. Marino,

Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement

 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman, eds.,

Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism

 (2nd edn., London: Seal Press, 2019).

CHAPTER THREE

Early Human History (to 3000 BCE)

Studying early human history on any topic means relying primarily on material remains: tools made from hard materials; fossilized bones, teeth, and other body parts; evidence of food preparation, such as fossilized animal bones with cutmarks or charring; holes where corner-posts of houses once stood; rock art and pigments; bits of pottery and metals. To this, scholars add evidence from linguistics, primatology, ethnography, neurology, and other fields, reports from ethnographers and missionaries, and written sources from cultures that existed centuries later in the same area. Physical remains gave the earliest human era its name – the Stone Age. Nineteenth-century scholars divided this further, into the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic Era (to about 9500 BCE), during which food was gained largely by foraging, followed by the New Stone Age, or Neolithic Era (about 9500 to 3000 BCE), which saw the beginning of plant and animal domestication.

Using material evidence to analyze gender is difficult. By themselves, tools and other objects generally do not reveal who made or used them (though sometimes this can be determined from the location in which they were found), nor do they indicate what they meant to their creators or users. Tools made of hard materials survive far longer than those made from softer materials such as plant fibers, sinew, and leather, or from organic materials that generally decay such as wood, which gives us a skewed picture of early technology and lifeways. Evidence gets rarer and more accidental in its preservation the further back one goes, so interpreting the partial and scattered remains of the early human past involves speculation. This is particularly true for gender and other social and cultural issues.

This chapter reviews the basic outline archaeologists, paleontologists, and other scholars have developed about early human history, although just as in physics or astronomy, new finds spur rethinking. It surveys some generally accepted ideas about gender roles and relationships, as well as key controversies about them, beginning with the evolution of hominids and ending with debates over the origins of patriarchy.

Early Hominids

The eighteenth-century European scientists who invented the system we now use to classify living things placed humans in the animal kingdom, the order of Primates, the family Hominidae, and the genus

homo

. The other surviving members of the hominid family are the great apes – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans – and the family includes a number of species that have become extinct.

Between seven and six million years ago some hominids in Africa began to walk upright at least some of the time, and over many millennia the skeletal and muscular structures of some of them evolved to make upright walking easier. About 3.4 million years ago, some of these hominids – who paleontologists place in the genus

Australopithecus

 – began to use naturally occurring objects as tools to deflesh animals, as evidenced by cutmarks and scrapes on fossilized animal bones. This gave them greater choice about when and where they would eat, as they could cut meat into portable portions. At some point, certain groups in East Africa began to make tools as well as to use them; the earliest now identified are 2.6 million years old, but archaeologists suspect that older ones will be found. Hominids struck one stone against another to break off sharp flakes that contemporary archaeologists have found are capable of butchering (though not killing) an elephant, and carried the rocks from one place to another to make these stone tools.

Like making anything, making these stone flakes required intent, skill, and physical capability, the latter provided by a hand that was able to hold the “hammer” stone precisely, with an opposable thumb and delicate muscles that could manipulate objects. Why austrolopiths developed this hand that was very different from the less flexible (but much stronger) hands of other primates is not clear, but what

is

 clear is that they already had it when they began making tools. The human hand did not evolve to use or make tools, but used tools because it had already evolved. It is thus what paleontologists call an “exaptation”: something that evolved randomly or for a reason that we do not yet understand, but was then used for a specific purpose. Other structures within the body that became essential in later developments – such as the larynx, which allowed more complex speech – were also exaptations. (Many social structures and cultural forms were exaptations as well – they developed for reasons that are unknown, or perhaps simply as experiments, but then became traditions; explanations for how they originated were invented later that probably have little to do with how they had actually developed, as we will see with patriarchy shortly.)

Australopiths seem to have eaten anything available, and to have lived in larger groups than just a few closely related individuals. Living in larger groups would have enabled them to avoid predators more effectively – for hominids were prey as well as predators – and may have encouraged more complex communications and behaviors.

Around two million years ago, one of branch of australopiths evolved into different types of hominids that later paleontologists judged to be in the genus

homo

, including

homo ergaster

 (“working human”). They made multipurpose sharpened stone tools generally called handaxes and then slightly specialized versions of these, which they used for a variety of purposes, including chopping plants as well as meat. This suggests greater intelligence, and the skeletal remains support this, for these early members of the genus

homo

 had a larger brain than did the australopiths. They also had narrow hips, longer legs, and feet that indicate they were fully bipedal, but here there is an irony: the slender upright pelvis made giving birth to a larger-brained infant difficult. Large brains also take more energy to run than other parts of the body, so that large-brained animals have to eat more calories than small-brained ones.

This disjuncture between brain and pelvis had many consequences, including gendered ones. The pelvis puts a limit on how much the brain can expand before birth, which means that among modern humans, much brain expansion occurs after birth; humans are born with brains that are only one-quarter the size they will be at adulthood. Humans thus have a far longer period than do other animals when they are completely dependent on their parents or others around them. Those parents also have a long period during which they must tend an infant or it will die. Judging by brain size, that period was shorter in

homo ergaster

 than in modern

homo sapiens

, but it may still have been long enough that groups developed multigenerational social structures for the care of infants and children. Perhaps

homo ergaster

 mothers might have even helped one another to give birth, just as they (and the males as well) helped one another gather, hunt, and prepare food, activities that are clearly evident in the fossil record.

Along with a larger brain and narrower pelvis than austrolopiths,

homo ergaster

 also had other physiological features with social implications. Their internal organs were small, including those for digestion. Thus in order to obtain enough energy to survive, they had to eat a diet high in fat and protein, most easily obtainable by eating animals and animal products – insects, reptiles, fish, eggs, and birds along with mammals. Catching some of those animals may have necessitated walking or running significant distances in the hot sun, which is difficult for most mammals because they only lose body heat through panting.

Homo ergaster

 probably had the ability to cool down by sweating, a process made easier by the fact that they were relatively hairless.

This lack of body hair facilitated cooling (and thus hunting), but it also meant that infants could not cling as easily to their mothers as could those of other primate species. How

homo ergaster

 mothers handled this problem is not evident in the fossil record. Perhaps they did not hunt when they had small children or they left their children briefly, as sites indicate that groups sometimes had a home base to which they returned. Perhaps they devised slings made of plant or animal material to help carry their children, though like any tool made from soft materials, these have left no trace.

Another solution to the problem of a short digestive tract is to transfer some digestion outside the body, through cooking. Raw meat is hard to chew and digest, as are many raw plant products; other primates spend many hours a day chewing. Cooking allows an outside source of energy – fire – to do much of this work, breaking down complex carbohydrates and proteins to increase the energy yield of food; it also detoxifies many things that would otherwise be dangerous to eat. There are a few shreds of evidence of fire at early

homo ergaster

 sites, and some scholars, including Richard Wrangham, argue that even without fossil evidence of actual cooking, the larger brains, smaller and less pointed teeth, and shorter guts that developed about two million years ago would only have been possible with cooked food. Other scholars see cooking as a more recent invention, perhaps as late as 400,000 years ago, when hearths become a common part of the archaeological evidence in many areas.

Wherever and whenever it occurred, cooking had enormous social and cultural consequences. Cooking causes chemical and physical reactions that produce thousands of new compounds and make cooked foods more aromatic and more complex in their flavors than raw foods. As descriptions of roasted coffee or chocolate put it, they develop “overtones” or “flavor notes” of completely different things. Because members of the genus

homo

 were omnivores, they may have been genetically predispositioned to prefer complex flavors, so that cooked food tasted (and smelled, which is essential in taste) better. Thus cooking led to eating together in a group at a specific time and place, which increased sociability. Cooking may also have encouraged symbolic thought, as cooked foods often make us think about something else, and both cooking and eating can be highly ritualized activities – plus cooking involved fire, which itself has deep meaning in later human cultures.

The evidence for cooking among

homo ergaster

 is thin, but the evidence for migration is unequivocal. Gradually small groups migrated out of East Africa into Central and Northern Africa, and into Asia by about 1.5 million years ago. They reached what is now Spain by at least 800,000 years ago, and then further north in Europe.

Some groups evolved into slightly different species of hominids, the most famous of which are the Neanderthals (

homo Neanderthalis

), named after the Neander Valley in Germany, where their remains were first discovered. Neanderthals lived throughout Europe, Western Asia, and Siberia between about 130,000 and 30,000 years ago, the era of the last ice age. They had brains as large as those of modern humans and made and used complex tools that enabled them to survive in the diverse environments and climates in which their bones have been found. They built freestanding houses, and controlled fire in hearths, where they cooked animals, including large mammals and many kinds of plants. They lived in small communities, and cared for their young, old, and injured. They sometimes buried their dead carefully, and occasionally decorated objects and themselves with red ochre, a form of colored clay.

Neanderthals most likely understood biological sex differences, but what cultural significance they gave to these and thus how they understood gender is difficult to determine. Judging by wear and tear on skeletal remains, both males and females engaged in the same type of hard physical labor, and died at similar ages, so there was little behavioral differentiation. Males and females were buried in the same way and with similar types of grave goods.

Evidence from one 50,000-year-old Neanderthal site in Spain has yielded intriguing suggestions about some aspects of gender and family relations. Here 12 individuals of various ages appear to have been killed and eaten by another group, during a period – judging by the tooth enamel of the victims – of food scarcity. DNA evidence shows that these 12 individuals were related, and that the adult males were more closely related than the females. Thus the men had most likely stayed with their birth family, while the women had come from other families, a pattern that would be replicated later among

homo sapiens

 of many eras and places. Two of the children were offspring of the same woman, and were about three years apart in age; this birth interval, perhaps the result of long breastfeeding, is also something that would be replicated among many later foragers. Extrapolating from a single site to all of Neanderthal society is dangerous, but this provides a glimpse of Neanderthal social relationships, both hostile and caring.

What archaeologists term anatomically modern humans (AMHs or

homo sapiens

) spread from Africa into areas in Europe and Western Asia where Neanderthals lived, and the two groups lived side by side for millennia, hunting the same types of animals and gathering the same types of plants. Eventually Neanderthals became extinct, killed by humans or diseases they had brought in, or simply losing out in a competition for food as the climate worsened in a period of increasing glaciation that began around 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals and

homo sapiens

 also had sex with one another, at least sometimes, for between 1.5 and 2.1 percent of the DNA in humans living today outside of sub-Saharan Africa comes from Neanderthals. Since 2010, genetic studies of Neanderthals have taken off. Scientists have found, for example, that the exchange of genes between Neanderthals and AMHs provided resistance to some viruses, but also increased the genetic risk to others, including COVID-19. They have also found sex-based differences. Neanderthal-derived DNA does not include the mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to child, which means that the children who passed on their genes came from Neanderthal males and AMH females. This does not mean that there was no sex involving Neanderthal females and AMH males, but simply that this did not produce offspring that survived. Similarly, no modern man to date has been found with a Neanderthal Y chromosome, which suggests that the male offspring of Neanderthal males and AMH female