viewed as “male,” and very old people with qualities usually regarded as “female,” such as dependence.
One of the dichotomies frequently associated with gender is that of the household and the world beyond the household. This is described in different ways in different places: in China as a split between inner and outer (nei-wai), in ancient Greece as a split between public and domestic, among the Bun people of Papua New Guinea as a split between internal and external. This division is often described as one between public and private, and much of the earliest work in women’s history explored the ways in which men in many cultures have been associated with the public world of work, politics, and culture and women the private world of home and family. These studies traced the differing degrees of separation between public and private, generally viewing points when the household and the political realm were less separated, such as the early Middle Ages in Europe or colonial North America, as times of greater gender egalitarianism, and those when they were more separated, such as Song China or the nineteenth-century United States, as points of greater hierarchy.
Feminist political theory and activism often argued that the public and the private were never really separate (an idea captured in the slogan “the personal is political”), and historians have more recently explored the various ways these arenas have been linked. They have also pointed out that although men are usually associated with the public realm, with a common ideal for men being one of active participation in all aspects of public life, in some instances this was not the case. In classical India and in Judaism for much of its history, the ideal for men was one of renunciation of worldly things for a life that concentrated on study and piety. In Judaism, this ideal often meant that women were quite active in the “public” realm of work and trade to support the family, though this was not the case in classical India, where the work to support scholarly men was carried out by lower-caste men rather than the scholar’s wife and daughters.
Another oppositional pair is that of nature/culture. In a very influential essay, the anthropologist Sherry Ortner asked, “Is female to male as nature is to culture?” She gathered together examples from many geographic areas of ways in which women’s physiology, social role, and psyche are viewed as closer to nature than men’s, and in which women are viewed as intermediaries between nature and culture, responsible for transforming natural products into food and clothing for their household, and for the early stages of transforming “uncivilized” children into members of society. The links between women and nature have also been explored by historians of science, who point out that nature is often described or portrayed as female (Figure 2.1), and that exploring nature or carrying out scientific research is often described in terms of masculine sexual conquest or domination.
Figure 2.1 Enea Vico, Nature, 1545–1550.
In this engraving by the Italian artist Enea Vico, Nature expresses her breast milk onto dead and dying men. The caption above reads: I, nurturing [Nature] restore to wholeness the fallen, I lead back those about to perish. Metropolitan Museum, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949.
As with the dichotomy between public and private, counterexamples to the woman/nature versus man/culture linkage exist, such as the mythical American West, where “cultured” women tamed “natural” men when they brought in schools and churches, or Nazi Germany, where women were praised as the bearers of culture and morality. There are also nature/culture divisions that are not especially gendered, such as the sharp contrast in many West African societies between a cultivated area associated with humans – in which all human activities, including sex and burial, had to take place – and the noncultivated bush. Ortner herself has modified her conceptualization somewhat, though she still asserts that the opposition between human agency (culture) and processes that proceed in the world apart from that agency (nature) is a central question for all societies, and in most of them gender provides a “powerful language” for talking about this opposition.
The nature/culture dichotomy is often related to one of order/disorder, though the way these correspond may be different, with nature sometimes representing order and sometimes disorder. This linkage is itself gendered: when nature is conceptualized as orderly, as in Confucian understandings of the cosmic order, it is usually linked to male superiority; when it is regarded as disorderly and capricious, it is linked to women. The order/disorder dichotomy is sometimes expressed in psychic terms, as an opposition between the rational and the emotional or passionate, with men generally representing the rational and women the emotional. As noted previously, this gender dichotomy was often qualified by class and racial hierarchies that limited the capacity for reason to one type of man, however, with certain types of men, like women, seen as closer to nature and less rational.
Along with binaries that split men and women, there were also binary categorizations within each sex that shaped ideas about gender and the norms and laws that resulted from them. One of these was that of purity and impurity. Women in many cultures were regarded as impure or polluting during their menstrual periods and during or after childbirth, and many taboos or actual laws limited women’s activities or contacts with others during these times. Women were sometimes secluded or sent to special places during menstruation and childbirth, and then went through rituals that reincorporated them back into the community once this period was over.
Menstrual and childbirth taboos have generally been regarded as representing a negative view of women, judging them as unclean or dangerously powerful simply as the result of natural bodily processes. This may have been the opinion of educated or prominent men, but both historians and anthropologists have discovered that women often developed their own meanings for such rituals. They regarded menstrual huts as special women’s communities, and demanded rituals of purification after childbirth (often termed “churching” in Christian areas), sometimes despite men’s efforts to end such rituals. Contemporary women have, in fact, devised new rituals to celebrate certain bodily events such as menarche (first menstruation) and menopause, arguing that in earlier societies these were important and positive markers of life changes.
In many cultures, men also went through periods of purity and impurity that shaped their abilities to undertake certain activities, particularly religious ones. Very often this was related to a discharge of bodily fluids or sexual activity, but in some religious traditions any contact with women also made male religious personnel impure.
Purity and impurity are closely related to one of the most studied cultural dichotomies, that of honor and dishonor or honor and shame. Honor is a highly gendered quality, with male honor generally associated with action of some type, while female honor is associated with inaction. Men gained honor by protecting their families, demonstrating physical prowess, exercising authority, and showing courage, while women simply maintained honor by preserving their sexual purity. Women were thus divided into two categories on the basis of sexual honor, sometimes labeled “the virgin” and “the whore,” while men’s honor was more variable. Honor was very often shared among the members of one’s family or clan group, so that the actions of any member reflected on the others. Loss of honor in some societies resulted in legal punishments, as did charging someone with being dishonorable if those charges proved to be untrue. Even more often, however, honor was affirmed or disputed through popular rituals – waving bloody sheets the morning after a wedding (which still continues in some areas) or throwing rotten food at husbands suspected of being cuckolds. Historians studying honor have emphasized that, as with all norms, care needs to be taken not to confuse ideals with reality. Even cultures that seem to be obsessed with female sexual honor sometimes offered ways for women to quietly regain their honor after it was lost; in early modern Spain, for example, women pregnant out of wedlock frequently sued the father of the child for damages, which then became a dowry and allowed them to marry.
Along with purity and honor, physical attractiveness is another dichotomous category that has been intimately shaped by, and in turn shapes, ideas and norms of gender. What characteristics make a woman or man attractive are, of course, highly variable both among cultures and among subgroups within
