on a sexed body,” while acceptable thirty years ago when scholars were asserting the difference between “cultural” gender and “biological” sex, is today highly contested. As the chapter by Deirdre Keenan examines in more depth, intersex and trans individuals have challenged the notion that gender is based on the body. They highlight the nebulous boundaries and permeable nature of the categories “women” and “men,” and challenge us to think carefully when using these words. Historical and anthropological research from around the world has similarly provided evidence of societies in which gender was not based on body parts or chromosomes, but on something else. Sometimes this was a person’s relationship to reproduction, so that adults were gendered male and female, while children and old people were regarded as different genders, and one’s gender thus changed over the span of a lifetime. In some societies gender may have been determined by one’s role in production or religious rituals, with individuals who were morphologically (that is, physically) male or female regarded as the other gender, or as members of a third or even fourth or fifth gender. Marcia‐Anne Dobres suggests that there is evidence for third genders as early as the Mesolithic period (10,000 BCE), Kumkum Roy discusses destabilization of binary gender categories in the Jain tradition, and Rosemary Joyce explores gender fluidity in the early Americas, as does Barbara Andaya in early modern Southeast Asia. Robert Nye notes the continuing power of the two‐gender system, however, and analyzes the ways notions of gender intertwined with those of sexuality.
Another key point of this collection is that gender must always be considered in connection with other categories of difference and social hierarchies, such as class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, religion, and so on. Often these social hierarchies reinforced one another in systems of oppression that were multiplicative rather than additive, conceptually defined as “intersectionality.” Many of the chapters in this book examine such interlocking hierarchies. As Susan Kingsley Kent observes in her review of gender and the law, legislation governing the right to vote, own property or retain an inheritance, laws determining the ownership of slaves, statutes preventing foreigners from gaining citizenship, and so forth, have always rested on the intersection of gendered assumptions of race and class. Nupur Chaudhuri and Utsa Ray discuss the intertwining of gender and racial understandings in colonial India, where colonial authorities viewed Englishmen as vigorous and “manly” while Bengali men were dependent, soft, and “feminine.” Several chapters, including those by Barbara Winslow and Patricia Acerbi, examine movements that challenged these interlocking hierarchies, particularly those that connected feminism with the struggle for national liberation and anticolonialism, thereby challenging both imperialist and gender hierarchies. Those struggles continue, as witnessed by the March for Black Trans Lives in Brooklyn in June 2020, which brought more than 10,000 people together, one of many demonstrations for racial justice around the world that summer, sparked by police violence and systemic inequalities.
Others chapters look at situations in which social hierarchies counteracted one another or created contradictions. Many of the essays in this collection discuss high‐status women who ruled over or alongside men despite cultural norms that decreed female inferiority and subservience. Bella Vivante points to the ruling queens from pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt and Kate Kelsey Staples those of medieval Europe. Amy Kallander highlights the important political, social, and philanthropic roles of women in the Ottoman and Mughal ruling courts, and Christine Worobec examines the empresses of eighteenth‐century Russia and Eastern Europe.
Several of the chapters provide evidence of more fluid gender roles – whether positive or negative – while others point to ways in which many types of historical developments served to rigidify existing notions of masculinity and femininity. This included the social stratification that accompanied the rise of centralized states in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica, as Bella Vivante and Rosemary Joyce point out. It continued with the spread of text‐based religions and philosophical systems, such as Christianity and Confucianism, which tended to relegate women to an inferior status, as Barbara Andaya and Vivian‐Lee Nyitray note.
Colonization was a potent force in creating more rigid gender roles. Allyson Poska and Susan Amussen discuss ways in which European empires imposed patriarchal norms on those they encountered in the Atlantic World, and also trace how women resisted European domination by asserting their traditional gendered power and authority. Sean Redding’s chapter demonstrates how Europeans colonizing Africa sided with the most retrograde aspects of the colonized, and imposed male domination in ways it had not previously existed, a process Utsa Ray finds in other imperial settings as well. Colonization also created new myths, particularly related to masculinity. The frontier narrative, from crossing the Great Plains of North America to forging into the jungles of Africa to subduing the Indian subcontinent, has been a mainstay of triumphalist historical narratives and the core of the western literary canon. Linda Kealey, Charles Sowerwine, and Patricia Grimshaw challenge American, Canadian, and Australian frontier mythology, and point to links between this and later racism and exclusivity.
As they provide evidence for both fluidity and rigidity in gender structures, the essays also provide evidence on both sides of the debate about women’s agency and oppression. Merry Wiesner‐Hanks, Raevin Jimenez, and Kumkum Roy document ways in which the family and kin group served as an institution protecting and supporting male privilege and patrilineal descent, but also as a location of real female power. Judith Tucker explores the ways in which the doctrines and institutions of Islam were both restrictive and liberating for women, while Meghan Roberts notes that early modern women worked actively in science and medicine, creating networks that enabled them to do so, despite enormous constraints and marginalization. Anne Walthall traces how Chinese women created a rich literary culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, despite Confucian ideas about women’s inferiority, and other authors also highlight women’s writing, music, and dance. Several authors discuss new scholarship on the actions of enslaved people in creating new cultural and social forms despite the humiliation, violence, disease, and dehumanization brought by enslavement.
Women’s history began in some ways as a branch of social history, and many of the chapters include extensive discussions of issues that matter to social historians: the family, work and leisure experiences, marriage patterns, and class differences. Laura Frader provides an overview of the historical influence of gender on labor and looks particularly at the ways that women’s and men’s work has been valued differently over time, a fact that the examinations of labor in the chronological‐geographic essays reinforce. Marcia Wright discusses how kinship systems in Africa adapted to dramatic social and economic change, revealing women’s important role as entrepreneurs. Julie Hardwick finds similar adaptation in early modern Western Europe, as does Amy Kallander in the early modern Middle East, although both authors remind us that the impact of economic development, and of other social and political changes, was very different for elite urban dwellers than for rural people. According to Deborah Simonton, complex and conflicting gender ideologies in the modern era intersected with industrialism and urban development in Europe, and Linda Kealey emphasizes the same processes in Canada.
The scholarship of the last forty years has made clear, however, that the centrality of gender is not limited to social issues, and many of the chapters examine themes that have traditionally been the province of political, diplomatic, and even military historians. Though some mainstream national history – the accounts that legitimate nations and their governments – remains cut off from the interpretative richness gender analysis provides, the process of building and ruling societies has always been carried out according to gendered principles. Judith Tucker examines the relationship between nationalist struggles and women’s movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth‐century Middle East; Anne Walthall and Barbara Molony do the same in East and Southeast Asia. Sonya Lipsett‐Rivera analyzes the roles women assumed in the rebellions and wars of independence in Latin America, and Sean Redding those in Africa. Barbara Molony and Karen Petrone suggest ways that the study of war – long viewed as a primarily masculine realm, though rarely studied as such – benefits from closer analysis of gender. According to Molony, the sex slavery that was part of World War II in Asia came into the headlines in 1991 when Korean and Chinese women forced into prostitution to serve the Japanese imperial army during World War II as so‐called
