A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов

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A Companion to Global Gender History - Группа авторов

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of powerful families, they might enjoy power themselves.

      Despite the existence of laws that prohibited women from holding political office, serving as commanders of armed men, presiding over manorial courts, or sitting on royal or municipal councils – all justified by earlier Roman beliefs that women lacked intelligence, were weak‐minded (imbecilitas sexus), wily, and avaricious – elite women did all of these things (Shahar, 1983). The power of feudal lords derived from their ownership of the source of wealth in their societies, land. To the extent that elite women owned land, as they did increasingly during and after the reign of Charlemagne in the ninth century CE, or in place of their husbands and fathers, who were often away from the manor engaging in military campaigns, women carried out the functions of law, taxation, justice, administration, and war that attended the possession of estates. Abbesses, presiding over church lands, ordered knights to fight in battles. Queens and noblewomen drew up law codes, like the Usages of Barcelona, one of the first written law codes to appear after the demise of the Carolingian empire. And between 1100 and 1600, at least thirty women had sovereign authority in Europe, not as regents for their underage sons or absent husbands or fathers (Monter, 2012).

      The political ideas laid out in 1513 in Machiavelli’s The Prince and other writings constitute a shift in worldview concomitant with that of the Renaissance weltanshauung as a whole. In medieval times, the stability of any given European society depended upon the mutual dependence of individuals and groups of people, organized into estates, upon one another. Medieval Europeans imagined their social order to be a “great chain of being,” with God the Father and the angels at the top, followed by monarchs, aristocrats, and everyone else. Women held their various positions on the chain by virtue of their relationship to men as wives or daughters; as women, they were inferior and subordinate to men, as God had demonstrated in making Eve out of Adam's rib. The Renaissance introduced a different, more recognizably modern understanding of humans and human society in which autonomy, not dependence, was the goal for which men strived; freedom and self‐government on the part of individuals and of political communities became positive ends. Beginning in the sixteenth century, dependence took on overtones of femininity and childishness, characteristics to be avoided by men as much as possible, as they threatened to destroy men’s autonomy, their very manliness. Machiavelli expressed the concerns about masculinity felt by many of his contemporaries in his near obsession with the concept of virtu (or virtue).

      Drawn from the Latin vir, which means “man,” virtue signified the capacity of human beings to govern themselves. Whether that capacity derived from God, from nature, or from reason, as later enlightenment thinkers would have it, the self‐knowledge and self‐command articulated in the ideal of virtue enabled “political man” to subordinate private interests to the public good. For Aristotle, as we have seen, the oikos, or landed household, provided the requisite material basis upon which independence and thus virtue and citizenship rested. Machiavelli substituted the bearing of arms for the possession of oikos. It was a preeminently masculine quality; indeed, the possession of virtue signaled the existence of a “real man,” a man ready and able to take action on behalf of himself and the political community (Pitkin, 1984). Just as virtue constituted the highest form of manliness for Machiavelli, its opposite, effeminato, signified the despicable qualities of passivity and dependence, the qualities most closely associated with women and those that disqualified them and men who resembled them from the realm of politics.

      Machiavelli’s ideas about women and politics, however modern his theories about the political behavior of states and rulers might be, offered nothing new of substance to debates about women’s political participation. They closely resembled the thinking of classical Greeks, Romans, and Christian fathers, who believed that Eve's transgressions had stained all women with her sin. Construed as insatiably lustful, with sexual appetites greater than men's, women of the early modern period were perceived to be potential agents of damnation and destruction, requiring the mastery of men to preserve their propriety and honor, and the stability of the social and political order itself. It was not for nothing that Elizabeth I placed enormous emphasis upon her status as the virgin queen. In repudiating her sexuality, at least symbolically, she could better downplay her femininity and fashion herself a masculine ruler.

      Perhaps the best known and most influential of all the tales spun out to explain and legitimate political authority is that of social contract theory, especially that associated with the writings of Englishman John Locke. His works justified the deposition of James II in 1688 by members of parliament on the grounds that the king had failed to live up to the terms of an original social contract by means of which human beings left behind an existence in the state of nature and established a civil society. This contract, he wrote, recognized the so‐called “natural” rights of men to life, liberty, and property, and bound its parties – the ruler and the ruled – to certain obligations, failing to live up to which the contract could be voided and the ruler overthrown. Locke’s ideas reverberated throughout eighteenth‐century Europe and North America, providing American colonists and French revolutionaries with a powerful legitimating tool as they built their arguments for their revolutionary actions. The doctrine of liberalism that emerged from Locke’s political theory also provoked the creation of a somewhat coherent argument about women sharing in its precepts and would provide nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century feminists throughout the world with the ammunition they would need for their battles to bring women into the world of politics and gain for them recognition and respect as political actors.

      Early seventeenth‐century Britons understood the world in which they lived to be fundamentally, properly, and irrevocably hierarchical. Hierarchies of gender mirrored those of status based on landownership in rural areas and on guild structures in the towns. Just

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