on the Maasai comes from Dorothy L. Hodgson, The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005).
For thinking about the complex relationships between gender, sex, and sexuality, Judith Butler’s works, especially Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (2nd edn., New York: Routledge, 2000), are central, though they can be challenging to read. Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (revised edn., New York: Basic Books, 2020) is equally significant.
For thorough discussions that include the latest biological research on sex differences, see Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography (updated edn., New York: Anchor, 2014) and David C. Geary, Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (3rd edn., New York: American Psychological Association, 2020). Gilbert Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1994) and Sabrina Petra Ramet, ed., Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1996) contain essays about gender crossing, blending, inverting, and transcending, past and present. For trans issues, see Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2006).
Doubts about the value of “women” as an analytical category were conveyed most forcefully in Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), though they have primarily been associated with the work of Joan Scott, such as Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
On intersectionality, Frances Beal’s “Double Jeopardy: To Be Both Black and Female” was originally published as a pamphlet in 1969, and was then included in Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Random House, 1970). The Combahee River Collective Statement is in Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983). Kimberlé Crenshaw’s original article is “De-marginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989), 139–66. Recent surveys of intersectional scholarship, including transnational, include: “Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory,” special issue of Signs, 38:4 (2013), 785–1055 and Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (London: Polity, 2016). On gender in Africa, see Oyèrónké Oyewùmi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) offers a broad survey of debates about the linguistic turn. On the spatial turn, see: Jo Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?” at Spatial Humanities: A Project of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, University of Virginia Library, http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn. On the emotional turn, see Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What Is the History of the Emotions? (London: Polity, 2018). On the material turn, see: “AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture,” with Leora Auslander, Amy Bentley, Leor Halevi, H. Otto Sibum, and Christopher Witmore, AHR, 114:5 (2009), 1355–404.
For queer theory, good places to begin are Riki Wilchens, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (New York: Alyson Books, 2004), which incorporates the author’s experiences as an activist, or Hannah McGann and Whitney Monaghan, Queer Theory Now: Foundations and Futures (London: Red Globe Press, 2020), designed for students. For analyses of the development of queer theory, see the special issue of The GLQ Forum, “Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender,” 10:2 (2004), 211–313.
On critical race theory, see Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (3rd edn., New York: NYU Press, 2017). Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (3rd edn., London: Routledge, 2015) both provide good introductory surveys of the main ideas in postcolonial theory. A solid introduction to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony is Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
The best introduction to critical race feminism is provided in two books edited by Adrien Katherine Wing, Critical Race Feminism: A Reader (2nd edn., New York: New York University Press, 2003) and Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000). On feminist postcolonial theory, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Reina Lewis and Sarah Mills, Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2003); Margaret A. McLaren, ed., Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). The interdisciplinary journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, which began publication in 2000, is the best place to see the newest directions in global feminist scholarship.
The development of women’s and gender history as a field has been examined in Laura Lee Downs, Writing Gender History (2nd edn., London: Hodder/Arnold, 2010) and Sonya O. Rose, What Is Gender History? (London: Polity, 2010). Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) analyzes trends in women’s and gender history over the past several decades and calls for historicizing the study of patriarchy. Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) and Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug, eds., Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders (London: Berghahn Books, 2014) look at the impact of gender history.
For a survey of trends in women’s and gender history around the world, see Leonore Davidoff, Keith McClelland, and Eleni Varikas, eds., Gender and History: Retrospect and Prospect (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). For a collection of the writings of feminist historians, see Sue Morgan, ed., The Feminist History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006).
The Instructor’s Companion site for this book has more suggested readings, plus many links to original sources, and can be found here: www.wiley.com/go/wiesner-hanks/genderinhistory3e
CHAPTER TWO
Ideas, Ideals, Norms, and Laws
Difference has been a key concept in gender history over the past decades. Historians have emphasized that women’s experiences differed because of class, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other factors, and they varied over time. Every key aspect of gender relations – the relationship between the family and the state, the relationship between gender and sexuality, and so on – is historically and culturally specific. Today historians of masculinity speak of their subject only in plurals, as “multiple masculinities” appear to have emerged everywhere, just as have multiple sexualities in the works by historians of sexuality.
Despite this variety, certain ideas that are similar to one another have emerged in a wide variety of cultures, and have come to shape many aspects of life. This is not to say that these concepts were the same everywhere or that they did not change over time, but that there were significant parallels and continuities across time and space that can be compared. This chapter explores the ways these concepts developed and how they shaped the informal norms and more formalized laws regulating people’s lives. It looks at five areas: ideas about the nature and proper roles of men and women, what
