Gender in History. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

      Ideologies, Norms, and Laws Prescribing Gender Inequity

      The historical record provides countless examples of calls for male dominance and female dependence or other types of gender inequity; every chapter of this book will discuss some of these. Religious literature urged women to be subservient, and described the divine plan as one of patriarchal gender inequality. Medical and philosophical works noted that women were physically, mentally, and morally weaker than men, clearly in need of male guidance and protection. Popular rituals and norms transmitted orally from generation to generation established sharp gender boundaries, generally limiting the ability of women to move or act and criticizing or punishing those who did. Sexist and misogynistic stories, songs, jokes, jests, and images reinforced these ideas, often in ways that were malicious and cruel, as in vicious songs and jokes about wife beating and rape, or woodcuts and cartoons showing such acts. The gender inequity in most written norms and laws has been so striking, in fact, that much early women’s history involved pointing out ways in which women transcended, subverted, or ignored such restrictions, and attempting to convince readers that the situation for women in many societies of the past was not as dreadful as the laws made it seem.

      Many of the customs and norms now perceived as the most extreme involved a restriction of women’s mobility. Of these, the Chinese practice of footbinding has received the most attention, a practice that began in the period about 1000 among entertainers at the imperial court and was firmly entrenched among the elite and middle classes in northern China by about 1200. In order to bind a girl’s feet, her toes are forced down and under her heel until the bones in the arch eventually break; this generally began when she was about six, though a woman’s feet needed to remain bound all her life to maintain their desirable small size and pointed “golden lotus” shape. Explanations of footbinding have involved a wide range of factors: fantasies among male poets and literati that eroticized small feet and a swaying walk and linked these with nostalgia for the past; a change in the ideal of masculinity in Song China from warrior to scholar, which meant that the ideal woman had to be even more sedentary and refined; a desire to hide the actual importance of women’s labor by families eager to prove they were rising socially and economically; Chinese sexual ideas that linked bound feet with improved reproductive capacity and stronger infants. Dorothy Ko has emphasized that no one explanation suffices, and that the reasons for footbinding changed over its thousand-year history and were different for men and women. She notes that women were not simply its victims; they internalized Confucian notions of the importance of self-sacrifice and discipline, and the connections between bound feet, reputation, domesticity, beauty, and self-respect. Thus it was mothers who generally bound their daughters’ feet in what became a female rite of passage, and women worked together to make the exquisite embroidered shoes that further represented their high status. Because of its centrality to core social values, footbinding was tenacious in northern China; some families were still binding their daughters’ feet in the 1930s, despite efforts by government officials, missionaries, and eventually the Communist leadership under Mao Zedong to end the practice. Footbinding was not accepted by other East Asian societies, although the importation of Confucian ideas from China later restricted women’s capacities to perform ceremonies of ancestor worship and to inherit family land in Korea and Vietnam.

      Footbinding tied women physically to the household and thus kept them out of public view, as did other practices found in a great many cultures around the world. In many areas, women have been secluded by law or custom, either in particular parts of the house – the gyneceum in ancient Athens or the harim in the Ottoman Empire – or by veiling. The first records of veiling come from the ancient Near East in about 3000 BCE, where the links between this practice and household seclusion were already recognized, for the ancient Akkadian word for veiling is the same as that for shutting a door. However it was accomplished, secluding women generally involved or at least began with the elites in any society, for the vast majority of cultures could not afford to lose the labor power of half of their workers; slave and peasant women were generally not secluded, and their activities made the enclosure of elite women possible. Sometimes seclusion was more clearly an issue of status than gender. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, elite males rarely left their households, conducting their business through agents and obtaining their education through tutors; as the pinnacle of Ottoman society, the sultan never left his palace, but required all those who had business with him to meet him there. (This is another example of the complex interplay between “public” and “private.”)

      Other than very elite men in some cultures, however, and one or two groups around the world such as the Tuareg of northern Africa in which men were veiled, attempts to restrict visual and physical contact between men and women have led to the seclusion of women. As we will see in later chapters, women in some areas have developed their own interpretation and understanding of the meaning of veiling, viewing it as empowerment rather than restriction and a means of asserting cultural or national identity. This is a good example of the way in which practices originally based on one idea about the nature of men and women can be reinterpreted when the social or political context changes, or be understood differently by various individuals or groups.

      Many cultures that did not practice seclusion or veiling developed norms of conduct for women that were demonstrations of their dependent status. Women in some parts of India were expected to adopt a deferential posture when speaking with men, and in Japan were expected to drop their eyes when in public to avoid making eye contact with men. Restrictive norms have often been justified with reference to “tradition,” but may, in fact, have been recent innovations. In India, for example, the British government expanded upper-caste Brahmanic customs into Hindu law, which put greater limitations on the mobility and independence of lower-caste married women than they had experienced earlier. The 1898 Civil Code in Japan limited women’s civil rights sharply, denying them existence as legal persons and requiring inheritance to pass through the male line, a break with earlier customs. Women in Japan today generally use a form of deferential and softer speech commonly called “women’s language” claimed to be an ancient tradition but which may actually have been invented during the early twentieth century, the period in which this Civil Code was enacted.

      Women’s lack of legal status as persons was actually a common feature in many of the world’s written law codes, which have sometimes regarded women as a form of property. In most cultures until the nineteenth or twentieth century (or until today), marriage explicitly established a relationship of husbandly authority and wifely obedience. This relationship was often enshrined or symbolized in wedding ceremonies in which the wife vowed to obey her husband, or put a body part such as a hand, foot, or head, under the husband’s foot or within his hands. In many areas, a married woman was generally legally subject to her husband in all things; she could not sue, make contracts, or go to court for any reason without his approval. In Europe and European colonies, this principle was supported by the Christian view of marriage as a union through which husband and wife became “one flesh.” In England and later in the British Empire (and after the American Revolution, the United States) this legal doctrine was known as “coverture,” a word derived from the idea that a married woman’s legal identity was “covered” by that of her husband. All goods or property that a wife brought into a marriage – termed her dowry – and all wages she earned during the marriage were considered the property of her husband. Only when women’s rights activists in the nineteenth century campaigned for them were married women’s property acts gradually enacted, allowing married women to control property, inherit, write wills, and keep their earnings. In the United States, the last laws giving a husband control over all family property – what were known as “head and master laws” – were repealed in Louisiana only in 1979, after they had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and only in 1981 were laws passed in France that allowed a married woman to sell any of her own property without her husband’s permission.