gender history

Cohen

'crisis of politeness' erupted from the conflict between 'hard' and 'soft' masculinity, and from fear of accusations of feminity relating to this.

Michel Foucalt

'repression hypothesis' an illusion- there has always been lively discourse on the subject of sexuality

Laura Lee Downs

Britain and Grance- unequal gender work hierarchy defined by natural differneces

Cairns and Richards

Ernest Renan in 19th century- Teutonic/ Celt- Celts had weak qualities associated with feminity- this was reclaimed by Irish nationalists emphasising noble 'feminine' qualities such as chastity and moral uprightness

Subaltern

In critical theory and postcolonialism, subaltern refers to the populations that are socially, politically and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure of the colony and of the colonial homeland

Jennifer Morgan

Interpretation of slavery in southern America that control of men over women's bodies and their capacities both to work and to reproduce were essential to the planter class's pre-eminence. Therefore women's attempts to circumscribe access to their bodies was an important form of resistance.

Laura Tabili

Part of the problem is the need for more creative forms of evidence collection- because mixed race relationships were historically shunned, statistics tend to underestimate their prevelance and so focused micro-histories are needed to discover the true number

Mary Poovey

Problems with the 'linguistic turn'- renders experience women have of themselves unreliable and problematic

Keith McCelland

Trade unions spoke not just as individuals but as workers with dependents/ is this position of women in history really satisfactory, but brings women even into apparently male- dominated areas

Ferdinand de Saussure- very influential post structuralist philsopher, ideas running contrary to much of Western philosophy

a large part of what we think of as reality is really a convention of naming and characterising, a convention which is itself called language

Mireille Laget

biology as a sociocultural category for analysing and translation. Body has only ever been seen through the lens of culture and has been used for political purposes to 'justify' inequalities

Elizabeth Wilson Victorian ideal of womanhood

can be foud in the sophisticated ideology of the welfare state

Stewart Ewan

capitalism weakened elements of patriarchy in the family as society became more individualist, allowing a women's movement to emerge. [REALLY?] However other kind of oppression grew in form of consumerism

Heidi Hartmann

gender order is defined by men's access to women rather than men's access to power- allows masculinity and differentiation of levels of power between men to be understood whilst always keeping women at the heart of analysis

Wiesner Hanks middle class definition

gendered- traditionally predicated on the assumption that women don't have to do waged work

Rublack

growth of the state- could also bring diveregence between legal position and official desire for public morality on the one hand and actual reality on the other

Ann Clark

history of women's friendly societies- women's exclusion from politics was active and not due to lack of organisation and solidarity

Phillip Carter

identity conferred 18th c through capacity for gentlemanly social performance

changes in research on masculinity

research most prolific on western men and on 'dominant masculinities', often because it is these that had the political power behind them.

Michael Kimmel

seeing white middle class American men as riven with insecurities- looking at too small a scale can mask the larger picture of where the real power lies

Heidi Hartmann

sociologist, time budget studies- women take on more work in total as they have become 'liberated'

Visser- Often in the state's interest to support a conservative view of Islam in muslim countries because

women's liberation is seen as a 'western' influence which will damage their societies.

Xavier Vigna

women's work underestimated because boundaries are blurred, there are crossovers of different kinds of work

Sonja Rose

work as a useful approach: we can see gender discrimination perhaps most clearly when employers' decisions and strategies diverge most from what would be expected in models of economic rationality

Sonja Rose on those who say class solidarity more imporatnat than gender solidarity

working class women and men's experiences very different

Rousseau quote

'the male is male only at certain moments but the female is female all her life'

RW Connel current dominant masculinity

'transnational business masculinity'

finding that 'two sex culture' is a product of historical development- Thomas Lacquer found that

18th century medics only talked about one sex- with a sliding scale, groundbreaking work. For example vagina seen as a penis turned inside out

queer theory

Built on doubts about essential nature of sex, sexuality, and gender, to highlight the artificial and constructed nature of all oppositional categories

differences in masculinities

Change in locally specific constructions of hegemonic masculinity has been a consistent theme of masculinity research, but given the growing attention to globalization, the significance of transnational arenas for the construction of masculinity has also been argued.- global masculinity developing around jet-setting corporate executives- RW Connel

1832 Reform Act

Consolidation of gendered definition of the citizen as a male property owner

Michael Roper

First World War as a turning point in gender relations, social order, strengthening of marriage required after war, but also erosion of the Edwardian 'stiff upper lip'. Women essential during war, especially mothers- links between domestic sphere and battlefield essential for understanding the war.

RW Connell

Formulated the idea of hegemonic masculinity, which represented the culturally idealized form of manhood that was socially and hierarchically exclusive and concerned with bread-winning; that was anxiety-provoking and differentiated. Criticised for ignoring differences within masculinity.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg-

Gender used as a means of class differentiation- male writers used domestic women to champion 'bourgeois' and republican morality against aristocratic luxury as well as the putative brutishness of the lower orders

Leslie Alexander

Idea of 'common sisterhood' amongst women essential to first wave feminism and early women's history was not accepted by many minority ethnic women. The integration of new groups into women's history was initially clumsy, with dual, triple, and quadruple oppression models used, which failed to acknowledge the real meaning of race etc. to women.

Later developments in gender history

In the 1990s theoretical perspectives that attempted to recognise multiple lines of difference, such as Critical Race feminism and postcolonial feminism

Mrinalini Sinha

India, feminisation of colonial male, Edward Said

Hazel Carby

It needs to be ensured that black history doesn't simply deal with absenses, as early women's history often did-- deconstruct the ways black women were portrayed

Bell Hooks

It should be acknowledged that the woman's liberation movement has contained elements which are oppressive and ignore black women, with for instance 19th century women campaigning for the vote suggesting that black men shouldn't have the vote. Liberation politics shouldn't be seen, as it has sometimes been in the past, as a competition about who is more oppressed.

Richard Greaves

Protestantism- great ambiguity- split between the radical views of early Christians, seeing family in a metaphorical sense and calling fellow believers 'brother' and 'sister', seen by the Romans as a threat to marriage and the social order, and the teachings of St Paul which went on to define much of Christian doctrine surrounding the issue of gender. Women often involved in early Protestant movements and then pushed out subsequently.

Shepard

Questions whether we should see everything in terms of its relationship to hegemonic masculinity

Joan Scott

Seeing concepts of gender as subject to change and a site of conflicting interpretations, linked to language and representations. Offers hope for change.

Caroline Bressey

Sophisticated synthesis is needed, as exemplfied in Alexander's multicultural history of London- unearthing the many levels of interaction between white and ethnic minority women

Richard Rorty's 1967 anthology origin of phrase 'linguistic turn'

The Linguistic Turn, in which it is taken to mean the turn towards linguistic philosophy

Lyndal Roper

Witchcraze- ideas closely linked to representations of the body. Note the difference- young women seen as essential components of society because of fertility, old women feared/ Sonja Rose- in the second world war it was young women who were often the target of suspicions.

Timothy Mason

Women in Nazi Germany- times of particular stress can reveal much about the strength of particular gender constructions. Even when women's work was essential to the war effort, Nazi Germany still promoted the ideal of domestic, childbearing woman to the detriment of the country's wartime economic capcity

Sheila Rowbotham

a critical race feminist perspective need to acknowledge the role of white women in past injustices- their role in oppression was often particularly significant because of their insecure social position- turning on black women could help them feel superior to somebody

Gerda Lerner

against 'contributionist' approach of women's history at the time of first wave feminism- falling into the trap of adopting definitions of what is history derived from men.

Leslie Alexander

an acknowledgement that historians must be careful not to attempt to replace black women's rich cultural history with a women's collective identity which many don't relate to. Analysing history through black women's own eyes may mean not automatically privileging gender over any other identities.

Wiesner Hanks

analysis of economyic life- should include reproductive as well as productive activities

Richard Borshay Lee

anthropologist: 'hunter-gatherer' should be 'gatherer- hunters', including women in early history of work

Ann Clark masculinity

artisans created a masculine environemtn yet often relied on women's earnings for surivial of the family

Joan Scott criticises the premise of focusing primariliy on 'experience' of womn (as Mary Poovey argues)

beacause it takes for granted as a starting point the existence of the individual- need to look at a deeper level at the process of construction of the woman in the first place- position and identity through symbols and subjective judgments.

Sonja Rose

concepts of citizenship particularly strong in times of war- internal 'unity' only maintained through steep gender hierarchy. Media whipped up fear of teenage girls 'running wild', national identity strengthened around idea of public morality, with women always the ones accused of lack of patrionism

Darlene Jushka

criticise: white feminist discourses suggest women of colour need to be 'rescued' from their religion and culture

Gerda Lerner in many ways speculative history of women

destruction of fertility goddesses and replacement by male God essential for establihsment of patriarchy

N Davis family used as a symbol for other kinds of subordination

e.g. in the work of Jean Calvin and John Locke

Rijfat Hassan theologian

egalitarian passages in the quran are not likely to be recognised because those who interpret are often men promoting state- backed perspectives

Kathryn Ringrose

eunuchs in Byzantium: gender constructed around social roles rather than choice of sexual object like in the west. Looking beyond the modern west not only dismantles race bias of history but also demonstrates the fluidity of gender frameworks. Eunuchs often became powerful public adminstrators., cultural frameworks independent of Greek language which was limited to 'man' and 'woman'

Clair Crowston

female competition outside the guild system brought down the guilds

Madeleine Guilbert

feminine qualities and skills recognised, but subjectively allotted a lower market value

Sonja Rose

gender affected class relations as it limited the possibility of unity within the working class- men struggled to compete with women in certain industries and saw them as a threat. Women e.g. in Lancashire mills reluctance to unionise, partly because union activity was often predicated on masculine values.

Giesela Bock

gender history is not just about women but all historical issues and linking one half of humanity with the other half- men two need to be seen in a different way

Lawrence Stone

historians' God- 10 commandments for women's history- don't only write about women

in Protestantism and dismantling of cult of Mary can we see the continuation of process laid out by Gerda Lerner

in which female religious figures are destroyed in favour of exclusively male concept of the divine.

remember the importance of the body

it has often been a very important symbol which has helped maintian and justify gender difference- inc. social biologists even in latter 20th century

Shulamith Firestone

liberation only through new reproductive technology, body as a burden

EP Thompson

masculinised version of working class history

Natalie Davis 18th century gender ideas

more constraining concepts developed, but there was also a vision of alternative gender systems that emerged from anthropology in the New World

Movement in history

move to gender history- including men, linguistic deconstruction, critical race theory, queer theory in the 1990s

Gilbert Herd sexual dimorphosim

often seen as defined by biology- corresponding to 'competition of males for mates', but it is culturally constructed too- much discussion of the subject after French Revolution

Heidi Hartmann- family

patrarchy necessitates a means of distribution= the family

Joan Kelly

periodisation- Renaissance irrelevant for women, developments were male orientated

Leslie Alexander

political splits on the definition of 'black' can have harmful effects- e.g. British Asians could be sidelined- constant vigilance is needed to maintain a truly integrated history and not repeat the mistakes of the past

women's friendly societies studied by Ann Clark nevertheless...

put in place membership criteria based on male- derived standards of 'respectability'

June O Connor

religious texts, reveal a thoroughly androcentrist position

Remember to take a critical eye to women's history itself

remember for instance the uneven distribution of women's history departments- hence dominance of Britain and America in these histories

Natalie Davis

rituals of sexual inversion syuch as the Feast of Fools- clergy dressed up as women, allowed them to say things they otherwise would have and release pressure. In painting of 'Mad Meg' during the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands, the soldiers were represented by evil female figure. E.g. As You Like It, Rosalind disguises herself as a woman and is only returned to her 'proper place' after abuse of Fredrick's male authority has been revealed. Early feminist Christine de Pisan flipped concept of disorderly woman on its head and said men were the disorderly ones

Giesela Bock women's history and gender history

should not be seen as oppositional- women' history gender history par excellence

Heidi Hartmann

should see the family as a site of conflict and disagreement, with mutuality of interests only up to a certain extent, rather than a unified sociological entity

Sociobiology

some tried to find answers for gender hierarchy and constructions outside history, seeing it as an innate biological feature of humanity

Natalie Davis on capitalism

strengthened the patriarchal family, disagrees with Stewart Ewan

Ramon Guttierez

studies in Mexico focused on marriage- site of negotiaton of symbols, competing claims to authority, church could often conflict with patriarchy- church's support at least by no means straightforward. Seeing complexity and conflict in colonial history based on gender, away from the traditional narrative of the unified and triumphant European colonising population.

Kathleen Gleadle's studies undermine the assumption

that the growing hold of domesticity in middle class lives restricted women's political activities

Gilbert Herd

the haemaphrodite in western culture- sexual dimorphocism in erotic art. Hemaphrodite morphed into Renaissance conception of the monster, including in Lutheran propaganda about the Pope.

Judith Butler

the position of the critic is essential for a politically engaged critique: poststructuralism

Lawrence Stone

the state absorbed functions previously reserved for wider networks of kinship, thereby strengthening the role of the patriarchal family

Aristotle and Galen

these thinkers saw gender as a spectrum, very different to later concepts of gender: two sex model a later development coming with new middle class ideal and civic republicanism

different views of Islam in gender history

took over cultural traditions in the region through invasion, that Islam better for women than the system before: no infanticide and introducing marriage, that women had more freedom before Islam and introduction of polygamy

John Tosh

turning point in gender atittudes was the 18th century with new individualism, punishinng work ethic etc.

Amira Sonbol on Islam and Conservative interpretation- suitable for modern state patriarchy

undermining historical perspective into past practices by seeing a single interpretation as static and unchanging. Also inventing punishment of stoning which is not in scripture: simpy misogyny

Elizabeth Wilson

welfare state as protective paternalism, conservative social ideology, a little more wealth of society distributed to ensure stability without any transfer of rights and political power

Gerald Moran

women in New England Protestantism but on the other hand were they independent actors or simply tools, following cultural obligation of respectability

Kathleen Gleadle

women in non-conformist enlightenment- women inspired by religion to be involved in radical change. Asserts extremely influential political activity based in the home as well- Republican motherhood, narratives of ordinary woman's domestic duties and a the political activities of a minority of women can not be so easily split from one another

Maxine Berg

women often essential in pioneering new work routines- development of capitalism

Leonardo Bruni

women should receive a classical education