whom generalizations that extended to the whole sex were either impossible or unnecessary.
The differences among men have often provided ways of conceptualizing societies and social or economic groups. In medieval Europe, for example, society was thought of as divided into three groups: those who fought (nobles), those who prayed (clergy), and those who worked (peasants). Women were in some ways part of all of these groups, though they were not technically members of the clergy and they generally did not fight, so that they did not fit this conceptualization exactly and they were rarely included in the many discussions about this tripartite social order. Instead a different tripartite structure was used to think about women, based on their relationship to men: virgin, wife, widow. Women also did not fit later Marxist distinctions between working class and middle class very well, either; married women in many European countries did not own any property independently, so had no direct control of the “means of production” so important in Marxist concepts of capitalism. Such differentiation among men was not limited to works of social or economic theory, but was often reflected (and reinforced) by activities, ceremonies, and practices. In early modern European cities, for example, residents might celebrate a visit by a ruler or a religious holiday with a procession, in which the men of the town marched in groups according to their political positions or occupation; women, if they marched at all, generally did so as an undifferentiated group at the end.
Those who sought to overcome social and status differences also spoke of bringing together different groups of men. Thomas Jefferson’s words in the American Declaration of Independence expresses this as “all men are created equal,” and seventeenth-century English writers wanting to encompass all of society described their audience as “all men and both sexes.” (It is clear from Jefferson’s own writings and from this latter phrase that “all men” did not mean women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory, just as it is clear from Jefferson’s writings elsewhere as well as his actions that he did not really mean “all men” when he used that phrase.)
Although they were very attuned to other sorts of differences, until very recently most discussions of men ignored gender. In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, for example, women were often described as “the Sex,” as if men did not have any. This sense that one group is an unmarked or default category (i.e., that in the case of gender one is always talking about a man unless noted otherwise, as in “woman doctor”) has also been noted by scholars of other subordinate groups. In terms of race, whiteness is the unmarked category, appearing much less often in discussions of an individual or group than does blackness. (Thus there are “authors” and “Black authors.”) These tendencies, along with the tendency of economic and labor history to focus on men, led scholars to quip: “Women have more gender, Blacks have more race, but men have more class.” Books with titles like Woman in Western Philosophy analyzed gender, while those with titles like Man in Western Philosophy generally did not, although as women’s history developed authors who continued to use “man” tried to argue that this was somehow gender-neutral.
Within the past several decades this situation has changed dramatically, and the study of men as gendered beings has exploded in many academic fields, including history, literature, psychology, sociology, religion, and many others. Because of the long tradition of viewing men as differentiated, and because diversity of experience is such a strong emphasis in current gender scholarship, these studies generally use the plural “masculinities” rather than the singular “masculinity.” They emphasize that all men construct their masculinity in relation not only to women, but also in relation to other men, and that groups of men also vary widely in their ability to shape their own masculinity depending on their position in racial, class, and other power structures. Men who were leaders in modern Ghana, for example, developed notions of masculinity shaped by local community standards, but also by the ideas of missionaries and colonial officials. The new scholarship on masculinity is thus innovative in its recognition that men have and do gender, but traditional in its emphasis on difference. Although it is the exact counterpart to masculinity, “femininity” has generally not caught on as a term of scholarly study, perhaps because it is still seen as more restrictive and less open to variation than masculinity. “Femininities” is even less common, unless it is paired with “masculinities.”
Though studies of ideas about men have only recently been labeled as such – rather than as studies of a gender-neutral “man” or simply as “intellectual history” or “philosophy” – the fact that the male experience has been normative has often skewed the way that women have been viewed. This can be seen most dramatically in scientific and medical works. In ancient Greece, almost all philosophers and scientists agreed that men were superior, and that heat was the most powerful force in the body and a source of gender difference; women’s lack of heat was seen as the reason they menstruated (men “burned up” unneeded blood internally) and did not go bald (men “burned up” their hair from the inside). But they differed among themselves as to the reasons for gender differences and the role of each sex in conception and reproduction, differences that continued over the many centuries in which their ideas were viewed as authoritative. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and his followers generally held that women produce no semen or anything comparable, and so contribute nothing to the form, intellect, or spirit of a fetus; their menstrual blood simply produces the matter out of which the fetus is formed. Aristotelians tended to view human anatomy and physiology on a single scale, describing women as imperfect or misbegotten males, whose lack of body heat had kept their sex organs inside rather than pushing them out as they were in the more perfect male. The historian Thomas Laqueur has labeled this the “one-sex model” and noted that as late as the anatomies of Andreas Vesalius in the sixteenth century, female sex organs were depicted as the male turned inside out. In this view, females were born when something was less than perfect during conception and pregnancy, but could occasionally become male later in life through strenuous exercise or unusual heat; males never became female, however, for nature, according to Aristotle, always strives for perfection. Because both women and men were located along the same continuum, certain women could be more “manly” than some men, and exhibit the qualities that were expected of men such as authority or self-control.
The later philosopher and physician Galen (129 CE–c. 216 CE) and his followers believed that women also produce semen that contributes to the form of the fetus, though they thought this was colder and less active than that of the male and that the father was still the more important parent. Galen is credited with more than 500 works, and his ideas and writings were copied, translated, and taught within the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and later the Islamic world. His idea that both men and women produce seed became part of what historians have labeled the “two-sex” model, which held that men and women were equally perfect in their sex, distinct and complementary.
Ideas similar to Aristotle’s developed in India, though with a more religious cast. In the body of religious texts known as the Vedas, composed between 1500 and 500 BCE, the idea developed that all fetuses are male until malignant spirits turn some of them into females. Male-producing ceremonies were introduced (which are sometimes still performed), held during the third month of pregnancy.
In China, the Huangdi Neijing (translated as “The Yellow Emperor’s Manual of Corporal Medicine” or “The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon”), a collection of medical treatises compiled perhaps as early as the second century BCE, divided the life force (qi) that flowed through the body along with blood into two basic principles of operation, yin and yang. Yin generally represents darkness, cold, wetness, night, passivity, the moon, contraction, and the female, and yang light, heat, the sun, activity, expansion, day, and the male. These two are not completely dichotomous, however, for, to be complete, each yin must contain some yang, and vice versa. The Huangdi Neijing views the organ system (zang) Kidney as controlling reproduction, as it was associated with water and various watery substances were involved in conception and reproduction. It viewed the male contribution to conception as Essence, which was materially identified with semen, but also seen as a life-giving vitality and linked to cosmological processes. The female contribution is Blood, which encompasses not simply the blood that nourishes the fetus but also breast milk
