citizens. He did so by equalizing the marriage portions, the dowries, that brides might bring to their marriages, making women a kind of placating circulating commodity. Because rich fathers could not endow their daughters with greater dowries than poor ones, rich and poor households could exchange women in an effort to ameliorate tensions based on wealth, reduce the risk of civil war, and establish a peaceful polity (Leduc, 1992).
In the developing states of the ancient world, claims to rule and to make law often rested upon references to male divinity: Egyptian pharaohs, Mesopotamian princes, and Chinese, Japanese, or Mayan emperors recited narratives that linked their families to a single masculine deity who was credited with having created life, thus providing sacred legitimation for what was no more than the bald exercise of power by one family over all others. Within the dynasties constituted as divine, female relatives might and did stand in as rulers when male heirs failed to materialize in order to preserve the dynastic line, their claim to rule deriving from their familial relationship to the deceased king or missing successor, not to any right they enjoyed themselves as women. In Egypt, for example, queens like Nefertiti and Hatshepsut ruled in place of male pharaohs. Hatshepsut, significantly, appears bearded in all pictorial or plastic depictions of her, the beard being the emblem of Egyptian royalty, a reminder that rulership was a masculine prerogative. Wu Zhao, a Tang empress who usurped the authority of the male line and ruled in her own right from 690 to 705 CE as the only female emperor in Chinese history, had to construct a kind of cosmology that legitimated her unprecedented and shocking action. She created a Chinese character for the concept of human being that foregrounded the process of birth as flowing from one woman, a function usually presented as the result of the masculine, dominant, creative yin drawing forth power from the feminine, properly inferior, receptive yang. She also fashioned a character for her first name that showed the sun and the moon moving over heaven, a depiction that suggested not simply that Wu was the Daughter of Heaven, as emperors were Sons of Heaven, but might in fact be heaven itself (Tung, 2000).
Biological women might rule as pharaohs or emperors, but the gender of rule was masculine, a trait that did not always correspond to a male person. Under the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), court ministers sometimes represented their relationship to the emperor through the hierarchical masculine and feminine principles of yin and yang, in which the male creative force of the emperor activates the receptive female power of his imperial servants. Courtiers further articulated their servile status vis‐à‐vis the emperor by styling themselves minister‐concubines, a clear reference to the masculinity of the ruler and the femininity of those he ruled. One of the most effective monarchs of England, indeed, all of Europe, Elizabeth I, recognized the long‐standing gender principle of rule when she reassured her subjects in the late sixteenth‐century, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” She referred to herself as a “Prince” and claimed for herself the qualities of masculinity that legitimated her royal power. In more modern times, English and American reformers from the eighteenth century onward based their claims for political participation on their “manliness,” a set of conditions that not every male person possessed, and without which they should be excluded from political life. Aristocrats and working‐class men, for instance, in the eyes of bourgeois English “radicals” and American patriots, lacked the requisite manliness to govern either themselves or their respective nations; the former because they seemed in thrall to women and to “effeminate” French fashions, the latter because they lacked the financial means that gave them independence. In both cases, their masculinity, though not their maleness, was in question (Colley, 1992; Clark, 1997; Kann, 1998).
Even states that eschewed monarchical rule for that of citizens, like republican Rome or “democratic” Athens, drew upon familial patriarchal models to organize political life. Romans understood their society to be a family and arranged their political and legal offices according to the principles of patria potestas, fatherly authority, so that magistrates, always male, behaved like paterfamilias and ruled in consultation with a council of other paterfamilias; and citizens, always male, recognized themselves as unequal to one another, just as they would be within families depending upon their age or birth order and whether their father still lived. Women enjoyed no rights to citizenship and could not hold office, just as they lacked any legal authority over their children within families, even after their husbands had died (Lacey, 1986; Thomas, 1992). Women, Romans believed, did not possess the moral or mental capacity that would enable them to enjoy legal capacity, to look after the interests of anyone but themselves.
Women had no rights to citizenship in Athens, either, a situation explained and justified by Aristotle in terms that reverberated across the centuries right down to our own time. Aristotle’s political theory, the stories he told to legitimate the legal and political regime of his time, explicitly constructed the realm of politics as masculine (Brown, 1988). Politics, according to Aristotle, provided men – and it was only men and men of independent wealth, at that – the sole means by which they could achieve their full human potential; the polis, he insisted, was the “higher thing,” and the place where man, “by nature,” was “intended to live.” The “self‐sufficiency” demonstrated by men who headed households based on land, or oikos, enabled them to subordinate their private interests to the public good, to demonstrate the virtue required to act politically.
For Aristotle and countless others across the centuries, women had no political function, for they – like men who did not enjoy independence and who were classified, in political terms, as feminine – could not, by their nature, display the self‐sufficiency necessary to transcend personal concerns. Self‐sufficiency meant freedom from material necessity, especially of the necessities associated with the body. Women, for the Greeks, appeared to be all body, creatures in thrall to their physical organization who could not free themselves as men could and should strive to do in order to reach the highest good, the “good life” of politics. Politics, in other words, and the criteria of those who could participate in the polis, were explicitly cast in terms antithetical to femininity. Whereas women for the Greeks, and for many other cultures, too, demonstrated by their weakness of mind, lack of self‐control, appetites, and sexual desires an existence closer to animality than to humanness, men could show through freedom from material and bodily necessity their capacity to act politically. Because femininity seemed so close to animality in its apparent enslavement to bodily needs, and because humanity was defined by the Greeks in opposition to animality, femininity threatened men’s status as human beings, and their capacity for freedom and autonomy; it had to be suppressed. In consequence, the polis, where men could best demonstrate their self‐sufficiency, their virtue, and their distance from femininity, had to be an exclusively masculine realm. Aristotle’s thinking about politics and about the place of men and women in them was taken up by later Western political theorists with the recovery and rehabilitation of classical ancient thought during the Renaissance.
The Medieval and Early Modern Periods
During Europe’s medieval period, the centralized government and codified laws of the Roman and Carolingian empires gave way to smaller units of territorial power presided over by local chieftains and their armed retainers. In the absence of a single ruler who could dominate over others, and in the face of almost endemic warfare, local individual families came to serve as vital sources of stability. Under the feudal system characteristic of Europe between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, political power became fragmented and personal; it rested in the hands of that landed military ruler or lord who could command the loyalty of the warriors around him, the knights who pledged their homage, a term deriving from the French word for man, homme. “I will be your man,” they pledged their lords in return for prerogatives of wealth and behavior that set them apart from the vast majority of men and women of this period and constituted them as an aristocracy, explicitly betraying the masculine nature of the warrior societies that comprised feudal Europe. But despite the overwhelmingly male composition of the ruling duchies, principalities, and kingdoms that dotted the European countryside, the elite wives, sisters, and daughters of local rulers and knights found a great deal of scope within which they might exercise power and administer the law, mostly as the
