Gender: A World History (New Oxford World History) 9780190621971, 9780190621988, 9780190622008, 1000150046, 1450175063, 1750185079, 1815191499, 0190621974

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Gender: A World History

Gender: A World History By Susan Kingsley Kent

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3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Kent, Susan Kingsley, 1952 May 9– author. Title: Gender : a world history / by Susan Kent. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020021954 (print) | LCCN 2020021955 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190621971 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190621988 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190622008 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Sex role—History. | Gender identity—History. Classification: LCC HQ1075. K463 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1075(ebook) | DDC 305.309—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021954 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021955 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by LSC Communications, United States of America Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America Frontispiece: Actress and Union spy Pauline Cushman in uniform. Library of Congress, 2017659623

For Tarana Burke, who started the #MeToo campaign in 2007, with admiration and appreciation for her courage and persistence.

Contents Editors’ Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction: What Is Gender? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 C h a p t e r  1 Patriarchy in the Ancient World, 3000 bce–​300  ce . . . . 6 C h a p t e r  2 The Gender Rules of New Universal Religions, 200–​1000  ce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Ch a p t e r  3 Gender and War in the Age of Global Interactions,

1000–​1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Ch a p t e r  4 Gender and Slavery in the Age of Global Expansion,

1450–​1750 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Ch a p t e r  5 Gender and the State in the Age of Revolution,

1750–​1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Ch a p t e r  6 Gender in the Age of Empires, 1815–​1914 . . . . . . . . . 99 Ch a p t e r  7 Gender Politics in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . 116

Epilogue: Challenging Gender Identities . . . . . . . . . . 136 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Websites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

Editors’ Preface

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his book is part of the New Oxford World History, an innovative series that offers readers an informed, lively, and up-​to-​date history of the world and its people that represents a significant change from the “old” world history. Only a few years ago, world history generally amounted to a history of the West—​Europe and the United States—​with small amounts of information from the rest of the world. Some versions of the old world history drew attention to every part of the world except Europe and the United States. Readers of that kind of world history could get the impression that somehow the rest of the world was made up of exotic people who had strange customs and spoke difficult languages. Still another kind of “old” world history presented the story of areas or peoples of the world by focusing primarily on the achievements of great civilizations. One learned of great buildings, influential world religions, and mighty rulers but little of ordinary people or more general economic and social patterns. Interactions among the world’s peoples were often told from only one perspective. This series tells world history differently. First, it is comprehensive, covering all countries and regions of the world and investigating the total human experience—​even those of so-​called peoples without histories living far from the great civilizations. “New” world historians thus share in common an interest in all of human history, even going back millions of years before there were written human records. A few “new” world histories even extend their focus to the entire universe, a “big history” perspective that dramatically shifts the beginning of the story back to the Big Bang. Some see the “new” global framework of world history today as viewing the world from the vantage point of the moon, as one scholar put it. We agree. But we also want to take a close-​ up view, analyzing and reconstructing the significant experiences of all of humanity. This is not to say that everything that has happened everywhere and in all time periods can be recovered or is worth knowing but rather that there is much to be gained by considering both the separate and interrelated stories of different societies and cultures. Making these connections is still another crucial ingredient of the “new” world

history. It emphasizes connectedness and interactions of all kinds—​ cultural, economic, political, religious, and social—​involving peoples, places, and processes. It makes comparisons and finds similarities. Emphasizing both the comparisons and interactions is critical to developing a global framework that can deepen and broaden historical understanding, whether the focus is on a specific country or region or on the whole world. The rise of the new world history as a discipline comes at an opportune time. The interest in world history in schools and among the general public is vast. We travel to one another’s nations, converse and work with people around the world, and are changed by global events. War and peace affect populations worldwide, as do economic conditions and the state of our environment, communications, and health and medicine. The New Oxford World History presents local histories in a global context and gives an overview of world events seen through the eyes of ordinary people. This combination of the local and the global further defines the new world history. Understanding the workings of global and local conditions in the past gives us tools for examining our own world and for envisioning the interconnected future that is in the making. Bonnie G. Smith Anand Yang

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Editor s’ P re f a c e

Introduction:  What Is Gender?

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n November 24, 1929, rumors that British colonial officials planned to tax Igbo women reached the village of Oloko in southeastern Nigeria. Mark Emeruwa, instructed by the local warrant chief, Okugu, to carry out a census of women in preparation for their taxation, entered the compound of a woman named Nwanyeruwa and told her to begin counting her animals. She replied angrily that people had died from colonial counting and insulted him and his mother by demanding of him, “Was your mother counted?” Emeruwa, enraged, grabbed her by the throat and tried to throttle her. She, her hands wet with oil from the palm nuts she had been pounding, smeared his Western-​style suit with the red sticky stuff. He ran off to Okugu’s compound to tell him of the events. The warrant chief summoned her to his dwelling and insisted she would pay the tax, threatening her with deep trouble and promising that “when the district officer comes, he will take charge of you.” To a woman uncertain of what lay in store under the British legal system, his threat could well have meant she would be executed. Upon hearing of Okugu’s treatment of Nwanyeruwa, a large crowd of women surrounded his compound. There they “sat on” him, a locally recognized practice undertaken when men committed offenses against women. When “sitting on a man,” women danced and sang until the object of their grievance acknowledged his offense and promised to make restitution. In this particular instance, the chief not only refused to admit to any wrongdoing but also set male members of his compound on the women, causing injury to eight of them. In response to Okugu’s transgressions—​entirely out of step with the expectations of his office—​and owing to the persistent rumors of taxation of women circulating in other towns and villages, enormous crowds of women—​ amounting to tens of thousands—​attacked native courts, looted banks, and stormed a number of European warehouses in a variety of towns and villages in southeastern Nigeria. They chose their targets purposefully,

as Nwamuo, a member of the group “sitting on” Okugu, recounted. “They said that they wanted to destroy property generally so that all Whitemen might go home, because if they went home there would be no question of tax being paid,” she told the commissioners investigating the events of December 1929.1 Troops were called in, and on December 16, the soldiers opened fire with rifles and a Lewis gun, killing eighteen women. The next day, a huge crowd of women met at Opobo, frightening the British officials there. The lieutenant in charge of the troops gave an order to fire. The soldiers shot and killed thirty-​two women; an additional eight women were pushed by the retreating crowd into the river below and drowned; thirty-​one women lay wounded by gunfire. This event, known to Nigerians as the Ogu Umunwaanyi, or Women’s War, broke out in large part because Igbo women perceived that their place and time-​honored functions and activities within their communities had come under attack by British colonialism. Women had long participated in the governance of their villages prior to the arrival of Europeans; they had commanded a dominant and respected role in the marketplace; they contributed to the prosperity and very life of their families and kin through the processing of yams and the bearing of children. They operated within a worldview that regarded the work of men and women as mutually interdependent and equally necessary to the existence of the people and even of the earth itself. To be sure, disharmony might arise among human beings; when it did, it was the responsibility of women to re-​establish proper order. In some instances, discord between men and among men and women might grow to such a level of chaos that it threatened the very survival of the cosmos. When that happened, women believed it incumbent upon themselves to take whatever action might be necessary to right the situation. The colonization of Nigeria by the British disrupted the social order of Igbo and other southeastern Nigerian peoples, especially as it pertained to gender. Colonial officials administered their regions according to the ideas and practices they had grown up with at home, in which women were expected to occupy a realm of life entirely separate from that of men. Women, in their experience, did not participate in governance or engage in market activities; they occupied a private sphere, while men operated in public affairs. The colonial encounter thus produced a continuous series of misrecognitions of actions and intentions between colonizer and colonized. One prominent misunderstanding involved the counting of women that would take place before taxation would be imposed. For British officials, counting women served the essential purpose of identifying who would be taxed and by

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how much. For Igbo women, counting was understood to impose a cap on the number of offspring they could produce. Even today, if someone asked an Igbo woman how many children she had, she would likely reply “many” or “a few.” She would not provide a definitive number, for if she did, the universe of ancestors and gods might take that as the total number of children she would have, placing a constraint on one of her most significant obligations to her society. When colonial policies—​often carried out by Igbo men—​disrupted the activities and responsibilities of Igbo women, the women acted to correct them, assaulting the institutions of British colonialism through which those disruptions took place. In 1929, Igbo women saw in the counting of women a dire threat to the existence of their very lives and that of their entire society. They had to do something to keep it from occurring. The women assumed that British officials would comprehend their actions, recognizing that their grievances were readily apparent and just. The British failed to do so, reacting instead with horrific violence. Almost every society we know of has organized itself according to gender, assigning certain responsibilities, obligations, and privileges to some people—​and forbidding them to others—​on the basis of the different attributes those people were purported to possess as gendered individuals. The Women’s War of 1929 demonstrates what can happen when societies with differing understandings about gender collide with one another. We conventionally think of gender as the cultural or social qualities attached to a sexed body. Ideas about gender—​about the differences between male and female, men and women, masculine and feminine—​ inform how we think about almost everything that crosses our paths in the course of our everyday lives. We use ideas about femininity and masculinity to sell every product under the sun, to press for conservative or liberal policies, and to justify aggression or plead for peace—​and we usually don’t even know we are doing it. Gender is both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It is everywhere because notions about sexual difference seem the most readily available examples to explain or justify a variety of situations. We are so familiar with what we regard as differences between men and women that we turn almost automatically to gender as a metaphor for other relationships, such as those between monarchs and subjects or imperial powers and their colonies. It is nowhere because we believe, mostly, that those differences are natural, that they derive from nature. We don’t notice when we



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use them to sell, argue, justify, or challenge. But it turns out that what philosophers, religious thinkers, scientists, physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, politicians, and educators have been telling us about gender over the past two thousand years has changed frequently. That is, these ideas have a history; they change over time and vary by geographic or cultural context. They are not natural. We make them up—​we construct them, as we say today, and as a society we usually do so to further a particular political, cultural, economic, or social agenda. Gender is almost always embedded in some kind of power relationship. Just as gender is not natural, it is also not neutral. Ideas about sexual difference do not just sit around innocently; they are used to create, justify, uphold, challenge, or resist some kind of power differential in any given society or era. Usually, but not always, masculinity—​ those traits or characteristics we attribute to men—​ is regarded as superior to femininity (the qualities we assign to women), and this superiority is used to explain why, in most of our societies until the last century, women did not enjoy the same rights and opportunities as men. Men have served as the exclusive subject of most of our political, economic, and social philosophies; where women have appeared, they have served as a rhetorical device to emphasize or underscore the rightness of men to enjoy this, that, or the other right, not to make a case for the inclusion of women in the enjoyment of rights. For that reason, when we think of gender, we usually think of it as applying to women. We tend not to see men as “gendered” creatures, but as the standard against which the inadequacies or insufficiencies of women are displayed. We make meaning in the West by contrasting one thing against another. We think and understand by means of creating opposites: night/​ day, black/​white, old/​young, male/​female, and the like. We know what is feminine by contrasting it against what is masculine. That means that men are gendered too, that they are assigned qualities, characteristics, assets, behaviors, and traits just as women are, even though we do not usually pay attention to that because we see those qualities as natural, as “just the way things are.” The history of women holds an integral place in gender history, but it is not its exclusive focus. Gender history incorporates women and men, masculinity and femininity, and sexual difference generally; it places men and women in relation to one another. Underlying gender history is the conviction that gender is not natural or innocent; that what societies have fashioned as masculinity and femininity has changed over time; and that by taking these things seriously, we can see how these

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concepts have been constructed and how they have been resisted at different times and in different places. Gender has been utilized by historical actors and groups to uphold or challenge various social, economic, cultural, and political regimes, which brings up the notion of power. Gender, in fact, serves one of the most fundamental and vivid ways through which relations of power can be articulated and mobilized in any given society at any particular time. It even acts to represent relationships of power that seem entirely unrelated to men and women, such as those between monarchy and parliament, or between middle-​ ranked people and plebeians or aristocrats, or between imperial nations and “their” colonies. Utilizing images of masculinity and femininity in this way very often affects how men and women perceive themselves and are perceived by their societies, and influences the social relations they have with one another. Gender is a phenomenon that appears in every place and at every historical moment we look; it is a fundamental means by which we understand ourselves, our societies, and the worlds we live in. The chapters that follow consider only a tiny piece of the vast mosaic of gender in world history.



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Chapter 1

Patriarchy in the Ancient World, 3000 bce–​300  bce

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n 2007, scientists working with Egyptologists in Cairo discovered the mummified body of King Hatshepsut, a pharaoh whose reign had been lost to the ages until 300 bce or so, when an Egyptian priest and historian, Manetho, recovered her for posterity. Her 1,100-​ year absence from the record of the pharaohs, known as the king lists, had been deliberately contrived, for following a long and successful rule, all traces of Hatshepsut’s image as pharaoh had been destroyed. Someone had wanted any memory of her erased, and he—​it was almost certainly a he—​almost succeeded. When the mummies of two nonroyal women were discovered in tomb KV60 in the Valley of the Kings in 1903, no one paid any attention to them and the tomb was resealed. Archaeologists reopened it three years later; one of the mummies was identified as the body of Inet, the woman who had served as Hatshepsut’s wet nurse, and was moved to the Cairo museum. The other body, that of an obese, middle-​aged woman with red hair and worn teeth, remained where it had been found, on the floor of the tomb without a coffin. Over a century would pass before the remains of one of Egypt’s most powerful rulers would be recognized for what they were, the pharaoh Hatshepsut of the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom. Her discovery confounds what we thought we knew about power in the ancient world. Ancient societies ruled themselves according to a system known as patriarchy, or the rule of the father, in which male heads of households and states claimed nearly absolute power over women. The story of Hatshepsut, who presided over a twenty-​year period of stability and economic well-​being in Egypt by adopting the persona of a pharaoh, or king, shows how patriarchy could be manipulated or circumvented. In taking on the title of pharaoh and ruling as one, Hatshepsut defied all previous convention. Of Hatshepsut, the mere mortal, we know little. She described herself as “more beautiful than anything; her splendour and form

were divine; she was a maiden, beautiful and blooming.”1 The statues that survive present her as slender, possessing an oval face with a high forehead; almond-​shaped eyes; a small, pointed chin; and a fairly big nose. She wore the heavy eye makeup we associate with both Egyptian men and women—​the makeup being used to catch and trap the dust particles that constantly blew across the desert landscape. Earlier statues depict more softness than later ones; presumably these were done before she took the throne. Once she did, her appearance changed. She no longer wore the female garb of sheath dress and queen’s headdress. Instead, she was shown dressed in the traditional royal short kilt, sporting the crown, collar, and false beard of a king. Some of the early statues of her reign show an obvious woman dressed in this clothing of a man—​the face is round and somewhat immature, the body showing breasts and an indented waist. But soon thereafter Hatshepsut only appeared in the guise of a male, not only wearing men’s clothing and carrying the accessories of a king, but also performing functions only men could carry out. The body in these images was also clearly and explicitly male. Hatshepsut had turned herself into a king.

In this relief in the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, Egypt, the Pharaoh Hatshepsut sports a beard, conferring upon her the masculinity required of rulers. Shutterstock/​ 519732385



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Kingship emerged relatively late in the history of humankind. Modern human beings emerged some thirty-​five thousand years ago, having evolved from an earlier version of Homo sapiens that had appeared around two hundred thousand years ago in Africa and migrated outward into other parts of the world. For millennia they sustained themselves through hunting, fishing, gathering, and foraging, activities that required the participation of every member of the small bands that ranged across various regions. Despite their belief that a division of labor between men and women characterized these groups of human beings—​men hunting, women gathering and raising children—​ historians think they were egalitarian in their social and gender organization. Because fruits and grains made up the main portion of their diet, and finding and preparing these items fell to women, it may be that women enjoyed a high status in these early bands. Some twelve thousand years ago, in a development that had a profound impact on humanity, hunting and gathering gave way to a different way of providing food: the systematic cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals. This revolution in agriculture in turn triggered a shift in the way people lived. Rather than roam across territory in pursuit of game and grains and berries, they settled down into villages next to the fields where they tended crops and herds. Surpluses of food enabled the population to grow. Women may well have been the first agriculturalists, enjoying high status in these early settled communities. Over time, some members of these new communities, including women, who made the pots and baskets that would hold and store agricultural products, took on functions beyond agriculture, becoming artisans who made such items as textiles, tools, and other necessities. A few individuals began to capitalize on the surpluses they accumulated beyond the needs of their families, obtaining more land and wealth and setting off a stratification of society by wealth and gender unknown to hunter-​gatherers. The development of settled agricultural communities would ultimately bring about the system we call patriarchy. Literally “the rule of the father” (from the Latin for father, pater), it has an ancient pedigree, arising, it appears, at about the same time that ownership of property by individual households became predominant in the societies of the Near and Middle East around 3000 bce, and later in India, Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean. The heads of households, or patriarchs, in the earliest societies for which we have written records, may have sought to maintain their control over property by controlling the actions of the members of their households, especially the women,

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ensuring that their legitimate offspring, and not some spurious claimant, inherited their wealth. The making of law and the exercise of power have thus always been gendered and, as far as the historical record can tell us, patriarchal in nature, though the actual playing out of day-​to-​ day political operations might vary considerably. Indeed, the stratification of society by gender did not always manifest itself in the spiritual realm of these early agricultural communities. In Sumerian cosmology, for instance, the fertility goddess Inanna presided over not just love but war and violence as well, an activity that came to be regarded as the province of men. Tradition has it that she changed her guards from men into women, as did the Semitic goddess of fertility, Ishtar. Much of what we know about gender in the ancient Near East derives from the law codes written by various societies in the region. In Mesopotamia, as urban societies grew ever more stratified and differentiated, male domination increased as military men and priests accumulated and monopolized property and power. They used the patriarchal family and the control of female sexuality to ensure that their property was passed down to their heirs—​and not to others. The absolute power of the father, which included ownership of women and their offspring, became enshrined within the institutions of the state. The law punished adultery on the part of a wife with death, though husbands could take second wives and concubines, or engage in sexual intercourse with slaves and prostitutes. Husbands could beat their wives for contradicting them; fathers could cut off their sons’ hands if they raised them against their father. Analyses of the Code of Hammurabi from Babylonia (c. 1752 bce) and the later Assyrian law codex (c. 1075 bce) show how relationships between men and women and within families changed over time as societies became even more complex, suggesting particularly a tightening of restrictions on women and an increasingly harsh attitude toward them. Assyrian law, for instance, paid close attention to the veiling and seclusion of women, requiring upper-​class wives and daughters to cover their faces but forbidding other women from doing so, upon penalty of flogging and mutilation. This differentiation along lines of status had the effect of creating two separate classes of women, the “respectable” wives and daughters of men who would protect them and the “disreputable” women who were regarded as “fair game.” In either instance, the wearing or absence of the veil characterized women according to their sexual function—​mother of children or servicer of male sexual needs. Men, by contrast, counted their place in the social order on the basis of



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their occupation or their role in the economies that undergirded their societies. The Mosaic code of the Israelites, whose appearance in the Near East we date to about the twelfth century bce, ultimately came to make up the first five books of the Hebrew bible, or Torah; it differed from those of Mesopotamia and Assyria in seeing transgressions as offenses not against society or the state but against God, emphasizing the themes of redemption and salvation of believers in Yahweh, the one true God. As a small, vulnerable community trying to manage in the midst of larger powers, Israelites placed a premium on the reproduction of children, a crucial element of survival in a dangerous world. The Mosaic code thus focused heavily on the regulation of marriage as the institution within which the bearing and rearing of children would take place, and thus the means by which the survival of Israel could be assured. Some of the precepts of Mosaic law borrowed heavily from Mesopotamian and Assyrian codes: the laws treated rape and adultery, for example, as transgressions against the integrity of the family, not as sins or harms committed against God or an individual. Society expected all adult men to marry and father children and to marry as many times as they had to in order to father children. If a lineage faced extinction owing to the death of a husband, his brother was enjoined to marry and impregnate the surviving spouse to ensure that children would be born. Law codes can go only so far in revealing the nature of gender relationships, however, and they have to be placed within a larger evidentiary context that often complicates what legal systems alone suggest. Artists’ renderings from the time portray couples and parents and children as loving and affectionate with one another; letters and other documents indicate great concern for the well-​being of spouses. Indeed, even within harsh legal regimes, women enjoyed a legal personhood that gave them rights to property, allowed them to enter into contracts, and protected their ability to conduct business transactions. The reign of Hatshepsut in ancient Egypt demonstrates how social systems based on gender might be manipulated to serve political ends. She was the daughter of Queen Ahmose and Tuthmosis I, a successful warrior king who had helped strengthen newly unified Egypt after a century of foreign rule. Upon his death, Hatshepsut, aged twelve, married her half brother, Tuthmosis II, becoming thereby queen consort of Egypt. Sibling marriage, a common practice among royal Egyptians, served to strengthen the line of succession (if not the family bloodline) by cutting down on the number of in-​laws and thus possible claimants to the throne. Hatshepsut bore her brother a daughter, Neferure.

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Tuthmosis II, an unhealthy man, ruled for only three years, leaving the throne to Tuthmosis III, his young son by a member of the royal harem. Hatshepsut, as king’s daughter (to Tuthmosis I) and king’s wife (to Tuthmosis II), took over as regent for her stepson, Tuthmosis III. Initially serving only as queen regent, within five years she had stepped up to be the acknowledged king of Egypt, honored as the Female Horus of Fine Gold, King of Upper and Lower Egypt Maatkare Khnement-​ Amen Hatshepsut (the One Who Is Joined with Amen, the Foremost of Women). Egypt had no law that explicitly forbade women from the throne, and queens had acted as regents many times in the past, but a female king—​that was unprecedented. Elite Egyptian women enjoyed rights that few of their counterparts in other areas of the ancient world could boast: they could own property, inherit, amass their own wealth, choose to be educated, and even sue for divorce. But their activities tended to be restricted to the household. Men operated in the world outside the home, and women inside the home, where their duties lay in producing as many children as possible and seeing that the household ran effectively and efficiently. This was so at all levels of society; women’s additional responsibilities depended on where one stood in Egypt’s fairly specialized social order. Tomb paintings, which provide much of the evidence we possess about ancient Egypt, depict women and men toiling together to harvest fields of wheat and flax and to bear the heavy loads of produce for storehouses. Servants and slaves of both sexes worked in the kitchens of the elites to grind wheat into flour, bake bread, and brew beer. Both men and women served at the table. At the level of the royal family, queens in the centuries before Hatshepsut seldom made much of a public appearance. What power they might wield was a function of their influence with their husbands; they carried out no state duties and enjoyed few official titles. Their job was to bear children and support their husbands in their kingly responsibilities. They were the king’s wife or the king’s daughter or the king’s mother, but not queen. This is a word we have since applied to them, not one recognized by the culture itself at the time. This position of invisibility appears to have changed fairly dramatically by 1550 bce, when Theban queens began to play a more public role in the life of the kingdom. They began to accrue state and religious titles, to own and administer estates, and to wear crowns that distinguished them as royal and/​or divine personages. To be sure, they still depended on their relationship to the king for their status, and despite



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their increased presence in the governance of the kingdom, queens would not have been permitted to precede the pharaoh in either rank or function. Hatshepsut did, however. Crucially, she did so not as queen, but by taking the title of pharaoh or king. Because queens did not possess the divinity or power to rule, Hatshepsut made herself into a king, who did. Above all, she kept her kingdom peaceful and prosperous. To Egyptians, this prosperity may have proved the most convincing evidence of all that Hatshepsut’s reign was divinely inspired and sustained. She commenced a series of building projects the likes of which were unmatched, and she did so to proclaim that she, Hatshepsut the king, the chosen one of Amen-​Re, had restored to Egypt the glories of its past. Around the doorway of a temple she dedicated to a minor deity, Pakhet, for example, she had carved the message: “Utterance by Amen-​Re, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands. . . , ‘O my beloved daughter Maatkare [Hatshepsut’s royal name], I am thy beloved father. I establish for thee thy rank in the kingship of the Two Lands. I have fixed thy titulary.’ ” In a longer text over the front of the temple, she declared her policy of restoration and renewal of Egyptian greatness. “I have done these things by the device of my heart. I  have never slumbered as one forgetful, but have made strong what was decayed. I have raised up what was dismembered. . . . I have banished the abominations of the gods, and the earth has removed their footprints.”2 The female king succeeded in providing for her people a “golden age,” establishing peace, material well-​being, and stability. Hatshepsut, one of the most powerful leaders the world has ever known, died after ruling her kingdom for about fifteen years. She was overweight and diabetic and suffered from both arthritis and osteoporosis. She harbored a malignant tumor in her abdomen. None of these things killed her, however. Hatshepsut died after a diseased tooth was extracted from her infected gums; an abscess burst, spreading infection to the rest of her body. She was mummified in the ancient tradition of royal burials, her arms crossed across her chest, and laid within her tomb.3 And then Hatshepsut disappeared from view for over a thousand years. Soon after she died, someone set out on a deliberate campaign to erase her name, her achievements, her memory, and even her mummified remains from the historical record. At the same time, evidence of Neferure, Hatshepsut’s daughter, also disappeared from the record. Many Egyptologists have assumed that her coruler, Tuthmosis III, finally freed of his stepmother’s tutelage, erupted in fury and

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hacked away at all vestiges of her and her supporters. What evidence we have suggests a more prosaic campaign of political survival. In many of the places where Hatshepsut’s name was chiseled away, the name of Tuthmosis’s son was inserted. Tuthmosis III appears to have eliminated references to his stepmother’s line to ensure that his own would win out. Why this kind of erasure of Hatshepsut’s line might have been necessary arises from the circumstances of her daughter’s life. The princess Neferure, natural and uncontested child of two royal personages, Tuthmosis II and Hatshepsut, spent the first years of her life in relative obscurity, as befitted a royal child. Upon her father’s death, however, she began to make public appearances far more numerous than would be expected—​indeed, far many more than her own mother had made at the same age. From early childhood, in other words, Neferure appears to have been groomed to play a significant public role in the kingdom. She added the title of God’s Wife to that of King’s Daughter, an indication that she was serving as Hatshepsut’s queen consort. This is not terribly unexpected: as pharaoh, Hatshepsut required a God’s Wife in order to carry out her responsibilities to the gods and to ensure that maat would be preserved. She, Hatshepsut, could not act in both capacities of king and queen, so Neferure, it seems, carried out the functions of queen consort. Tuthmosis III, the child of only one royal parent rather than two, like Nefurure, might have feared that she had a better claim to the throne than his own son. Such a possibility, following the successful and prosperous reign of Hatshepsut, could not be dismissed out of hand. So Tuthmosis, it appears, systematically removed Hatshepsut from existence, ensuring that no lineage to which Neferure might appeal had ever existed. Other classical societies in the Mediterranean grew out of the chaos and disruption caused by various regional forces seeking to establish their power over neighboring territories at the start of the first millennium bce. Gradually, individual leaders emerged, offering up new ways of doing things that stimulated the development of innovative political structures and helped create social order. In sixth-​century bce Greece, for example, Solon, the “lawgiver” and so-​called second founder of Athens, reorganized the matrimonial system in the process of creating a new political community, the renowned Athenian “democracy.” In the aftermath of civil war, in which poor householders had arrayed themselves against rich ones, he instituted a political system in which landless as well as landowning men become citizens. He did so by requiring the



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equalization of 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 state. During the classical era (500–​323 bce), Athenian Greek women were segregated and secluded so that they could not be looked upon by men; they were expected to be silent and to stay out of sight, cloistered at home caring for children and the household while men spent their days in the public spaces of the marketplace or the gymnasium. Aristotle deemed women useful only for the bearing of male heirs, and Athenian law required that female children, even if already married, be married off to their father’s next of kin so that they might produce heirs for their father’s family (oikos, household). Greek women had no legal standing of their own, but were considered forever children in the law’s eyes, the property of their fathers or husbands. They could inherit or receive property as a gift, but it had to be looked after by male guardians, and women could not buy or sell property. Regarded as inferior to men in reason, Greek women were held to be too stupid even to carry out the buying and selling of goods in the marketplace.

Late fifth-​century bce Theban women knead dough to the tempo established by a flute player. Though women were not welcomed in the Greek public square as political actors, they made vital contributions to economic life. © Marie-​Lan Nguyen/​Wikimedia Commons

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For Aristotle and countless others across the centuries, women had no political function, for they—​like landless and poor 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 governance of the city-​state were explicitly cast in terms antithetical to femininity. “The relation of male to female is one of superior to inferior, and ruler to ruled,” wrote Aristotle.4 Where 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, and had to be suppressed. The polis, where men could best demonstrate their self-​sufficiency, their virtue, and their distance from femininity, had, in consequence, to be an exclusively masculine realm. The polis, according to the Athenian general and statesman Pericles, was where men achieved their highest degree of manliness. The strict separation of men and women in Athens, in conjunction with the relatively long period of time men spent before marrying—​ usually around the age of thirty, by which time they would have amassed the resources to become politically and economically independent—​ produced an exclusively male public world that tolerated and even sanctioned homosexuality. Men participated in recreational activities, debate, eating and drinking, sports, and military training in exclusively male settings. They were not expected to remain chaste in the years before marrying, and they found opportunities for sexual activity with female prostitutes and/​or other men. Women, by contrast, usually married when they were able to bear children, in their early teenage years. Aristotle did not regard males and females as possessing biological traits that were different in kind; instead, like their capacity for rationality, they differed in degree of similarity to one another. He and other ancient thinkers held that women and men possessed the same genitals,



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with the important distinction that men’s existed outside the body and women’s on the inside. Reproductive organs in men and women mirrored one another and were called by the same name. Herophilus, the so-​called father of anatomy, referred to ovaries and testicles with the Greek word for “twins,” didymoi. He believed that the fallopian tubes in women (though he did not call them that), which he regarded as spermatic ducts, extended, like spermatic ducts in men, from the didymoi to the bladder. (They do not.) The Greek physician Galen used the single term orcheis in his descriptions of both testes and ovaries, a practice that would not change for centuries. Correspondingly, ancients regarded orgasm in women to be as vital to the success of reproduction as it was in men: orgasm produced the heat in men and women that made conception possible. In this representation, which one historian calls the “one-​sex model,” the anatomy of men and women were analogous to one another, though not equal to one another in value. Men’s genitalia were regarded as more important to the generation of life than were women’s reproductive organs.5 Hermaphrodism—​ the presence of both male and female sexual organs or the inability to determine the nature of the sexual organs of an individual—​disturbed this kind of thinking about sexual difference. Eunuchs, men whose testicles had been destroyed or whose penises had been amputated, did the same. In the case of hermaphrodites, officials usually resolved the dilemma by assigning the individual a male gender. Eunuchs existed in great numbers throughout the Mediterranean and Eurasian worlds, acting as servants in households and state offices. Their inability to reproduce reassured heads of households and rulers that they posed no threat to the position of the patriarch; consequently, they often held positions of great stature and responsibility. Despite being unable to reproduce, eunuchs often presented as fully male, with the secondary characteristics thereof. Many societies tried to outlaw castration as a way to avoid dealing with the imaginative challenges posed by eunuchs, but with little success. There would always be men and women who defied the gender cultures of their societies. Not all Greeks thought in the same way about sex and gender. Pericles, for instance, distinguished Athens from another Greek city-​state, Sparta, where, he noted disapprovingly, men sought out manliness “by a painful discipline” rather than through political life.6 As a warrior state, Spartan culture emphasized military service, requiring boys as young as seven to begin training for lifelong devotion to the state. Their education stressed obedience, duty, discipline, and courage, and focused on building up physical endurance and self-​control. At the Agoge, or military

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training camp, instructors made boys go without food to toughen them up and to instill in them the cunning and resourcefulness required to get what they needed. Starvation compelled them to go out at night among villagers to steal food, a ploy designed to teach them stealth and self-​ reliance. Plutarch, a Greek essayist and historian, noted that “the boys make such a serious matter of their stealing, that one of them, as the story goes, who was carrying concealed under his cloak a young fox which he had stolen, suffered the animal to tear out his bowels with its teeth and claws, and died rather than have his theft detected.” Boys and young men exercised vigorously each day, walking miles in bare feet and inadequate clothing carrying heavy loads; they learned to handle unwieldy weapons with grace and ease; and they fought one another in mock and sometimes real battles. They lived arduous lives. As Plutarch put it, “they were the only men in the world with whom war brought a respite in the training for war.”7 Once they completed their arduous training, Spartan men dedicated their lives to the state, loyalty to which overrode all other obligations, including that to their families. As professional soldiers, they lived not at home but in barracks until the age of thirty, honing their military skills, parading, and demonstrating their physical prowess. The work of sustaining the daily life of society—​manual labor, domestic service, food production, manufacturing—​fell to a class of slaves called Helots, who possessed no rights and were often abused. Spartan women enjoyed far greater freedoms to move about in society than Athenian or other Greek women. They attended school; participated in athletic and other physical competitions such as javelin throwing, dancing, and wrestling; owned property; and conducted business in the marketplaces. Upon marriage, which was expected of all healthy Spartans, they lived apart from their husbands, making it difficult sometimes to live up to the state’s injunction to bear as many male children as possible to continue the warrior traditions and to replace soldiers lost in battle. Their resourcefulness and independence marked them as anomalous figures in the world of the Greeks: as their warrior husbands died in battle, Spartan women inherited their estates. Aristotle pointed out the counterproductive results of such a social system. “The result proves the faulty nature of their laws respecting property,” he wrote, “for the city sank under a single defeat; the want of men was their ruin.”8 However, with the rise of Alexander the Great to power in the mid-​ fourth century bce and his conquest of much of the Mediterranean and Far Eastern worlds, women appear to have lost what few opportunities they had to operate in the public world and their status seems to have declined further. Seclusion and veiling of women became commonplace.



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A sixth-​century bce Spartan woman undergoes training in preparation for a life of producing healthy young warriors. Her public presence and the meagerness of her clothing contrasted sharply with that of other Greek women, who were often kept indoors and veiled. Ancient Art and Architecture/​Alamy Stock Photo/​B10PDF

This was not true in Egypt, which differed profoundly from the Greeks in the rights and respects it accorded women. The elevated position of women there shocked the Greeks when they first conquered the territory in the fourth century bce. Although Egypt was a male-​ dominated society like Greece, it did not impose the same kinds of limitations on or hold the same attitudes toward women. Even after the Greeks

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arrived, Egyptian women enjoyed freedom from seclusion or veiling; they had rights under the law to own, buy, administer, sell, or otherwise dispose of property; their marriage contracts, being contracts, could carry provisions and terms that protected them; they could divorce; and they could testify in court—​in short, they possessed many of the legal rights afforded to men. Powerful female deities such as Isis and Hathor dominated Egyptian beliefs, and they were attended by priestesses who held high office and earned significant salaries. Queens, princesses, and other women of exalted rank enjoyed prestige and commanded respect. One such queen, Cleopatra VII (r. 51–​30 bce), ruled at the moment when the vast empire of the Greeks gave way to that of the Romans. Powerful in her own right, she offers a glimpse of the power politics that accompanied the shift from one imperial era to another. Despite her every effort, she and her kingdom would not survive the struggle, nor, in fact, would republican Rome. In the centuries between its founding in 510 bce and the second century bce, Rome had risen from a small Italian city-​state to become the single greatest power in the Mediterranean region. It possessed the entire Italian peninsula and much of the territory conquered by Alexander the Great in the fourth century bce. During this time, republican Rome governed itself through an elected body of elite men, the most important of them organized in the Senate, which each year elected from its ranks two consuls who carried out the executive functions of civil and military administration. Consuls represented the highest of the manly ideal in classical times (even if they did not always live up to their billing): successful in war, effective in politics, sexually potent, and strong husbands and fathers. Romans understood their society to be a family and arranged their political and legal offices according to the principles of patria potestas, fatherly authority. 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 on their age or birth order and whether their father still lived. Women enjoyed no rights to citizenship and could not hold office; they lacked any legal authority over their children within families, even after their husbands had died. 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. Rome’s republican form of government, which gradually increased participation to the more plebeian ranks of men, worked effectively



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when Rome was small, but as it expanded into and beyond the Mediterranean, it could not easily handle all of its new responsibilities. Increasingly, powerful individuals and political factions emerged who vied for dictatorial control, introducing a great deal of political instability in the affairs of the republic. Pompeius the Great, Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius, and Octavian, Caesar’s great-​nephew and heir, were four such men. Their ambitions embroiled allied kingdoms such as Egypt in dangerous games of intrigue and military conquest. This was the situation Cleopatra inherited from her father, himself a casualty of Rome’s internecine strife, in the first century bce. Cleopatra VII was born in 69 bce, the second oldest of five children of Ptolemy XII. The Ptolemaic line had ruled Egypt since its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 bce, which ushered in the great Hellenistic age. At the time of her birth, the empire established by Ptolemy I was crumbling, while Rome was fast approaching its ascendancy. Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, an unprepossessing figure by all accounts, found himself squeezed by the rising power of Rome and the increasing restiveness of the population of Alexandria, Egypt’s capital. Romans cast covetous eyes upon Egypt, regarding it as a source of great wealth—​it was, indeed, one of the richest kingdoms in the ancient world. Ptolemy XII was forced from his throne by the Alexandrian populace; in 55 bce, the dictator Caesar sent an expedition to Egypt to return the pharaoh to the throne. One of the members of that expedition was Marcus Antonius, one of Caesar’s most able generals. Roman troops re-​established Ptolemy in the palace in Alexandria and at his directive killed his daughter, Berenike, who had taken power when he fled three years earlier. Ptolemy rewrote his will, naming his next oldest, Cleopatra, coheir with his eldest son (who would become Ptolemy XIII). He also asked that guardianship of his two heirs fall to the Roman people, a provision that would serve as the legal justification for significant Roman involvement in Egyptian affairs over the next few years. At the time she was made coheir with her brother, Cleopatra was about eighteen years old. She had received an extraordinary education, even for women of royalty at the time, enjoying access to the unmatched resources of the library and research center at Alexandria, the envy of the world. She read and wrote numerous languages—​her native Greek and Latin, to be sure, but also Egyptian (which none of her predecessors had bothered to learn) and the languages of the peoples adjacent to Egypt:  Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopian, Syrian, Persian, and many others. She wrote medical treatises and studied history assiduously, possessing knowledge of Roman affairs, particularly, that probably outweighed

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Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

that of any of her contemporaries. Her oratorical, horsemanship, and hunting skills drew favorable comment, and once she gained and secured power, she demonstrated superb capabilities in military and administrative leadership. Upon her father’s death in 51 bce, Cleopatra and her eleven-​ year-​old brother, Ptolemy XIII, acceded to the throne. Facing severe problems—​civil unrest, drought, famine, and the presence of unemployed and troublemaking Roman troops left behind after her father had been reinstated—​Cleopatra at once tried to assert her authority. She turned to Caesar to remove her brother and secure her power; Caesar, impressed by the young woman, willingly did so, for gaining Egypt would strengthen his hand against rivals at home in Rome. He made Cleopatra coruler with her younger brother, the twelve-​year-​old Ptolemy XIV, whom she married, as was the custom. Inscriptions place Cleopatra beneath Ptolemy XIV in protocol, but the marriage—​and the corule—​was a sham. Cleopatra lived with Caesar until he left Egypt in 47 bce, leaving behind three Roman legions that could both support Cleopatra if she needed it and prevent her from acting in a manner detrimental to Rome, should she be so inclined. In 44 bce, two of Caesar’s republican enemies, Brutus and Cassius, assassinated him, setting off a civil war between Caesar’s supporters, led by Marcus Antonius and Octavian, and those who, like Brutus and Cassius, sought to restore the republic. Cleopatra got caught in the middle of this conflict, both sides requesting her assistance against the other. She promised it to both, buying time, and felt herself fortunate when in the fall of 42 bce, Antonius and Octavian’s forces defeated their rivals. The two men divided up the Roman world between themselves, Octavia taking the west and Antonius the east. Cleopatra invited Antonius to come to Egypt in late 41 bce, seeking to use him in the same way she had Caesar earlier. Where Caesar had ensured her survival as pharaoh and provided her with an heir, she hoped that Antonius would help her expand Egypt’s territorial holdings and produce backup, or insurance, heirs. Moreover, he would keep Egypt secure for her while she bore her children. For Cleopatra, unlike for kings, the production of heirs would not simply be a matter of impregnating a wife or royal mistress and leaving the business of childbirth to her. Cleopatra would obviously have to carry the child, which, even in the healthiest of women, could render her vulnerable to attempts to overthrow her. With Antonius as the father of her children, the possibility of anyone feeling strong enough to stage a coup was much reduced.



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Cleopatra and her son Caesarian pay homage to the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris in the temple of Hathor at Dendera, Egypt. The image portrays the earthly power of Cleopatra and her son as deriving from and continuing the line of the deities who dominated Egyptian cosmology. Cleopatra greatly expanded Egypt’s territorial reach, threatening the power of Rome in the first century bce. Shutterstock/​242818003

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In Cleopatra, Antonius had an already-​established ruler—​indeed, the strongest and most astute in the entire region—​so he proceeded to enlarge her territories until the kingdom controlled as much domain as it had at its height in the third and second centuries bce. Cleopatra emerged as by far the wealthiest and most powerful ruler in the eastern Mediterranean; she seems to have been looking forward to a future in which her own heirs would rule over a kingdom that rivaled Rome in extent, wealth, and power. Such ambition was not lost on people back in Rome, who regarded Antonius’s new arrangements in the east with deep unease, especially those that appeared to favor Cleopatra so heavily. Octavian seized on such disapproval to ultimately oppose Antonius, claiming that he intended to make Rome a Hellenistic kingdom. At first this was merely a war of words, and given the support Antonius still enjoyed in Rome, most of it was directed against Cleopatra. The attacks were vicious, and all focused on her gender to make their impact felt. Charges of sexual promiscuity, seduction, witchcraft, and profligate excess—​all manner of scandalous behavior—​were leveled against her in the attempt to ruin her and Antonius. Poets railed against her: Propertius called her a “whore queen”; Horace described her as a “fatal monster”; Lucan dubbed her “Egypt’s shame.”9 In 33 bce, the war of words turned to a war of action and the fissure between Octavia and Antonius erupted into armed conflict. Octavia’s forces invaded Alexandria and routed the Egyptians. Cleopatra, fearing that she and her children would be led in triumph through Rome, resorted to suicide. The poet Horace reported that she took her life by exposing herself to the bite of a snake. Scholars do not believe she killed herself in this manner: an Egyptian cobra did not carry sufficient venom to kill a woman unless it was injected directly into the bloodstream. But the snake story prevailed and has been passed down through the centuries as truth, for it held stunning symbolic power. After all, the snake had long served as a symbol of Egyptian greatness, and virtually every pharaoh had for millennia displayed a coiled cobra on his or her headdress. What better poetic justice than for the overreaching Egyptian queen to be done in by her own ambitions? Patriarchy, it seemed, had its revenge and re-​established itself in the lands of the imperial Roman world. In Asia, patriarchy operated within the framework of Confucianism, the philosophy that stood at the heart imperial China. The Han dynasty that emerged out of the chaos of the Warring States period in China in the third century bce forged an empire that lasted for more than four hundred years and served as the model for all imperial regimes that



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would come after. Its success depended on a powerful military, a vibrant commerce, an extensive administrative apparatus, and a common culture that unified an extraordinarily diverse population. The Han found that unifying culture in the principles of Confucianism. Confucius’s teachings, compiled by his followers into a collection entitled The Analects of Confucius in the centuries following his death in 479 bce, offered a guide to proper living that reflected the chaotic period in which he lived. Perhaps the single most important precept concerned the obligation of an inferior person to obey and honor his or her superior. This dictate started first within the family, where under the concept of filial piety sons owed their father absolute loyalty and obedience. As the head of the household, his rule was sacrosanct. Similarly, heads of households in any given locality were expected to swear allegiance to their superior, the local ruler, who in turn swore fealty to his superior, and so on up the line to the emperor, who himself had the responsibility of upholding the mandate of heaven. The principle of filial piety, whether at the familial or imperial level, rested on the notion that government should be conducted by “superior men”; that is, one owed allegiance and obedience to a superior not because that person came from a particular family or was the richest or the strongest one around, but because he had achieved a level of moral character through study that entitled him to that respect. “Superior men” could command virtuous behavior from their subjects on the basis of their intelligence and their benevolence, their righteousness. Subjects demonstrated their respect, loyalty, and obedience through elaborate and detailed rituals and ceremonies. This was not a one-​way street: rulers, whether emperors, provincial officials, or fathers, had the reciprocal obligation of ensuring the well-​ being of their “inferiors.” Confucianism, the ideological foundation of Han rule, cemented the principle that the welfare of the people stood at the heart of the mandate of heaven. This did not mean that “the people” had the right to choose their leaders; it did mean that the emperor and his officials were expected to further the well-​being of his subjects. If he did not—​if he violated the mandate of heaven—​the people might legitimately turn against him. Confucian thought presents relationships within a binary framework of opposites—​between heaven and earth, inner and outer, superior and subordinate, noble and humble, ruler and ruled, for example. These dualities are represented by the concepts of yang and yin, seemingly opposite or contrary forces that are in fact in complementary relation to one another to form an interdependent, interconnected whole. Chinese

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philosophers emphasize that the relationships of men and women stand at the core of and provide the model for yin and yang. In the abstract, one is not more, higher, or better than the other, though increasingly, and especially in the minds of Confucians, yang and yin took on moral qualities associated with good and bad, more and less, higher and lower. The Confucian Dong Zhongshu, who synthesized Confucian teachings in the second century bce and provided a legitimation of the Han dynasty on the basis of them, gave yang a priority over yin, and endowed the Han rulers with yang and their subjects with yin. Thus, a hierarchy of values seen in the order of heaven and earth was soon applied to the order of humankind as well. Yang and yin themselves also began to be inscribed with qualities such as vigor and tenderness, and rationality and emotionality—​characteristics that were frequently ascribed to men and women, respectively. As Dong put it, “Yin and yang of the heavens and the earth should be male and female, and the male and female should be yin and yang. Thereby, yin and yang can be called male and female, and male and female can be called yin and yang.” From the correlation of polarities with yang and yin came an ideology of dominance of some forces over others on the basis of the qualities assigned to them: heaven over earth, sun over moon, ruler over ministers, men over women. Thinking about the way the world was organized, in other words, became infused with gendered categories that established different valuations for the paired opposites. Dong associated entities regarded as higher, stronger, and better—​ heaven, sun, ruler—​ with maleness. Those seen as lower and weaker, of less worth—​earth, moon, subordinate—​were associated with femaleness. In his rendering of yin and yang, the human creatures attached to maleness and femaleness—​ men and women—​received the same kind of differential valuation. He positioned men as dominating, powerful, and ethical, and therefore possessed of yang; he presented women, by contrast, in opposite terms, characterized by subservience, weakness, selfishness, and jealousy—​and best described as yin.10 Confucianism has been held responsible for elaborating a gender system that presented women as weak and irrational, qualities that restricted them to a narrow sphere of life within the confines of home and family and kept them from participating in or contributing to developments in politics, culture, economics, or society. Men, by contrast, possessing the attributes of strength, reason, and wisdom, were best suited by these characteristics to operate in the world of politics, scholarship, warfare, and economy. Like all gender ideologies based on opposites or polarities, this one paints an exaggerated picture of actual



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realities in China. Families of nonelite status, for example, quite literally could not afford the Confucian separations of women from productive life outside the home. Moreover, a number of long-​standing customs ameliorated somewhat the constraints imposed on higher-​status women by Confucianism. Dowries that women brought to a marriage were often worth far more than the brideprice paid to obtain a wife. Significantly, imperial laws acknowledged that dowries were the property of wives and were controlled by them; this ownership and control of property conferred upon women some ability to exercise leverage within the family. If divorce were to take place, the dowry stayed with the wife. A  man could divorce his wife on one of seven grounds:  inability to produce a son, failure to carry out the expected service to her husband’s parents, illness, theft, promiscuity, jealousy, or gossiping. These seemingly wide-​open opportunities to rid oneself of an unwanted wife were in fact restrained by three conditions. If a wife had mourned her husband’s parents, she was considered linked to them forever and thus not liable to divorce on grounds of failing to serve them; if she had contributed to her husband’s rise in the world from his young age, he could not divorce her later in life; and if divorce would leave a wife homeless and without means of supporting herself, her husband could not proceed. A woman too might sue for divorce, but doing so could have painful consequences. She would no longer have any legal claim to her children; she might well be left without financial or social support; and her sons would be ritually forbidden from mourning her when she died. These costs may well have dissuaded many women from ending brutal or unhappy marriages. The contributions of women to the well-​being of the family may have translated into meaningful influence within it. A wife and mother expected to help her husband further his career and look after his parents and sisters, engaging in activities that might substantially increase her worth in their eyes. If her husband traveled for long periods of time or became injured or ill and could not look after his affairs, the responsibility to manage the household and whatever business or property ventures he was involved in fell to her. In such instances, a woman’s power and status might be considerably enhanced. The life and achievements of Ban Zhao show the unevenness of Confucian gender ideology, at least for women of higher rank. She hailed from a family of prominent scholars, soldiers, and administrators. Ban Zhao shared in the literary upbringing of her brothers and cousins, drinking in the heady scholarly atmosphere of her father’s home. From her mother she learned literature, culture, and discipline; from her

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father, brothers, and cousins, she gained expertise in philosophy, the classics, mathematics, and astronomy. At age fourteen, she married and subsequently gave birth to a number of daughters, but her husband died early, and following tradition, she never remarried. The emperor at the time, He Di, appointed Ban Zhao the director of editorial operations in the imperial library. In that capacity, she reworked, edited, and added portions to Lienu zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women), a collection of so-​called arranged biographies written by the scholar Liu Xiang in 77–​76 bce, through which Han officials sought to celebrate good behavior or excoriate those who failed to display it. Ban Zhao’s edition became the one that was passed down through subsequent dynasties. He’s great esteem for Ban Zhao’s learning led him to place the instruction of the empress Teng Sui and her ladies in her hands. She tutored the empress in the classical writings and history of China as well as in mathematics and astronomy. Upon He’s death in 105 ce, Empress Teng served as regent for her infant son, the new emperor. He died a year later, succeeded by his cousin, the thirteen-​year-​old An; somehow Empress Teng maintained her power at court during what should have been a tumultuous period of transition. For the remainder of her life, Teng ruled the Chinese empire with wisdom, judiciousness, and a clear-​sighted understanding of how to keep the peace and provide good government to her people. To Ban Zhao, scholars agree, should go the credit for ensuring her student’s remarkable tenure and reign. At the same time, paradoxically, Ban Zhao wrote a text that has been regarded as one of the earliest formulations of Confucian ideal womanhood. Her Nüjie—​translated as Lessons for Women or Admonitions for Women—​which appeared in 106 ce, laid out a series of characteristics women should emulate and offered a number of instructions as to how young girls should be educated to achieve a state of ideal womanhood. Nüjie told readers that their daughter should be industrious, never failing to carry out her domestic duties no matter how simple or how difficult. She should always show respect to others, placing them ahead of herself and modestly putting herself last. She should not gossip or otherwise disgrace her family, but instead live purely and quietly. A girl “is lowly and weak, and should regard it as her primary duty to humble herself before others,” the treatise urged. “Always let her seem to tremble and to fear.”11 Ban Zhao asserted that a husband, if he were to control his wife, must be worthy; gentlemen, she noted, educated their sons to teach them the rules of conduct by means of which they could maintain their authority over their wives. She also insisted that girls too must be educated if they were to acquire the knowledge and skills that would



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enable them to serve their husbands. Modesty and acquiescence were the best means of securing domestic peace. In the hands of subsequent generations of Confucian scholars, Nüjie became the standard treatise on how to educate women for a lifetime of subservience and silence. Hatshepsut, Cleopatra, Teng Sui, and Ban Zhao proved the exception to the rule of power resting in the hands of men in the ancient world. Their talents and skills alone weren’t enough; they often had to take on a male persona to legitimate their rule. Women, for the most part, enjoyed little access to power, even as their contributions to the economies of households and states made it possible for them to survive and thrive. Patriarchy would endure over subsequent centuries across the globe, intensified by the emergence of new universal religions that incorporated and extended its precepts.

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Chapter 2

The Gender Rules of  New Universal Religions, 200–​1000  ce

I

n March 203, in the North African city of Carthage, a Roman woman named Perpetua stood before an arena of howling citizens and allowed herself to be attacked by a wild heifer. Thrown into the air by the large horned animal, she picked herself up and walked serenely, perhaps in shock, to await her execution by the sword. She bared her neck to the executioner, an inexperienced gladiator who missed his target and struck her on the collarbone. Screaming in pain, Perpetua “took the trembling hand of the young gladiator and guided it to her throat,” drawing his blade across her neck and killing herself, according to an eyewitness entrusted with recording the event.1 She was twenty-​ one, the mother of an infant boy so recently born that her breasts still secreted milk as she faced her persecutors. Presumably she had everything to live for. Why in God’s name would she do such a thing? For it was in God’s name that she chose her martyrdom—​not the gods that Romans recognized and worshipped, but the God of Jesus Christ, the risen. Perpetua’s short life offers us a glimpse of the attractions of Christianity in the early third century ce, when it was still a largely clandestine practice; the Christian remembrance of her death in subsequent centuries provides a foreshadowing of the impact the new religion would have on understandings about gender in the Mediterranean after it became the officially recognized religion of the Roman Empire in 313. A variety of religions emerged and spread widely across a number of regions in the period 200–​1000, mirroring—​and in some instances advancing—​ the growth of empires across the Euro-​ Asian world. Christianity and Islam, among others, provided the cultural glue that held disparate peoples together during a time of widespread political upheaval, but they also acted as a potent agent that rent previously compatible groups apart. Buddhism, which first appeared in India in the

sixth to fourth centuries bce, migrated to Asia, where it played a large role in consolidating Chinese imperial expansion. Not surprisingly, given the deeply personal questions religions sought to address—​who am I, how should I  behave in the world, whom should I  marry, and how shall I raise my children?—​gender played a significant role in the formation of universal religions. At the same time, these new belief systems acted powerfully on understandings about gender, first challenging earlier expectations for men and women but ultimately reinforcing and consolidating those views in service to the growing power of state and religious institutions and hierarchies. At the time of her birth, Perpetua would have been deposited at her father’s feet, there to await his decision whether to take her into the family. Should he have chosen not to accept her, she would have been left to die, a form of sanctioned infanticide reserved for girls. Roman law mandated that fathers raise all of their sons, but only one of their daughters. This control over life and death stemmed from the almost unrestricted power enjoyed by male heads of households. The paterfamilias ruled not just his wife and children but also slaves and even free servants and others who resided within the household; even adult male children and married daughters fell under his jurisdiction. Perpetua married at about the age of seventeen or so and established a new household with her husband. Even so, her father’s claim on her remained. As seems to have been the case in many father-​daughter relationships among the upper classes of Rome, they enjoyed a deep and loving bond with one another. Within this society, women of Perpetua’s status devoted their attention and their energies to the private space of the household. Lower-​status women would not have been able to afford to remain within the home; their contributions to the survival of their families necessitated that they labor in fields or workshops or engage in trading activities in the public world of agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. Perpetua’s activities would have been focused inward on her family, which consisted of her parents and two brothers (she had a third brother too, who had died in boyhood). But as befit a daughter of a high-​ranking Roman, Perpetua spent a good portion of her childhood being formally educated, probably by her father, so that she would be able to pass down to her sons the cultural values that Roman citizens were expected to possess and manifest throughout the course of their own lives. Among those values, religious devotion held a privileged place. Countless gods, goddesses, and other deities presided over virtually every space, linking every area of life to some form of divine power

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that looked after and protected the people who inhabited them. For many, the ritual surrounding the worship of traditional deities proved personally unsatisfying, and a number of so-​called mystery cults sprang up to fulfill people’s desires for a more immediate, more individual, and even private connection with the divine. Mystery cults differed from the public veneration of deities, in which everyone could take part, by limiting their worship to only those specially chosen few who had been initiated into the secrets of the religion. Perpetua turned to the mystery cult of the risen Jesus Christ. Unlike many of the other mystery cults, which appealed to specific groups or ranks of people, Christianity drew people from all areas of society:  rich and poor, men and women, pagan and Jewish. In transcending divisions based on gender, status, income, belief, and even family loyalty, Christianity established itself as a new community entirely. More often than not, conversion required that one sever the ties to one’s family, a wrenching experience that perhaps could be mediated by the development of fictive familial relationships with other Christians. “Brothers,” “sisters,” “fathers,” and “children” found within Christian communities were replacements for the family they may well have lost when they chose to follow Jesus. Despite her love for and devotion to her father, Perpetua sought to become a Christian, as did one of her brothers and some of the household slaves, thus separating herself from the single most important member of her household. (We do not know her husband’s disposition in this matter, for he makes no appearance and receives no mention whatsoever in the contemporary account of Perpetua’s persecution, The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity.) Such an overt act of defiance of patria potestas—​wholly apart from the emotional distress it caused—​would have been deeply shocking to Roman society, and attests to the intensity of Perpetua’s commitment to her new Christian family. The account of Perpetua’s martyrdom spread widely, serving as a model for other potential martyrs throughout the third century and becoming a significant text for men and women as they prepared to convert to Christianity. In a number of instances, the Passion took on the status of canonical scripture, and certainly the story of Perpetua’s behavior led other women to emulate her. Church officials would have found Perpetua’s martyrdom a useful tool in helping their communities to survive the persecution they increasingly faced over the course of the third century. But in 313, the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, an act that gave the religion an acceptance and a status it had not previously enjoyed. Gradually, the church found itself the beneficiary of



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A fresco in the catacombs of Priscilla in Rome, from the third century ce, depicts the various stages of a woman’s life. Scholars believe that the center figure may show a woman preaching, as she is wearing the vestments of a Christian priest. Reuters/​GM1E9BK01JL01

increasing state support, a situation that altered the relationship of its theologians to the Christian community. Whereas before, their responsibility was to figure out how to preserve and protect Christians from persecution, now their task lay in teaching Christians how to conduct themselves in what was fast becoming a Christian empire. One fourth-​ century theologian, a North African bishop called Augustine of Hippo, played a leading role in this transformation. He sought to educate Christians in their obligations to become orderly, compliant members of the Roman society to which they belonged. No longer should a Christian aspire to martyrdom; no longer should Christians seek salvation from the Holy Spirit visible and present in their churches. Now their salvation lay in their obedience to the church fathers. Within this new context, Perpetua’s Passion proved an awkward fit. For one, it venerated martyrs, effectively placing them at the same level as or above priests and bishops in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. For another, Perpetua and the celebrations of her martyrdom confronted the church with the problem of gender. Her story presented a strong and independent woman who had defied her father, a leader within her

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community brave and confident enough to take on the power of the Roman state. This vision of womanhood flew in the face of the expectations espoused by the society in which the church now held a central place. How could such a female figure be reconciled with the teachings the bishops of the church now sought to convey to their flock? She could not, so the only thing left was to rewrite Perpetua’s story. Augustine of Hippo, the fifth-​century Roman whose theological writings profoundly influenced the development of Christianity, dealt with the now-​problematic central role played by Perpetua in the Passion in a number of sermons. Like the rest of the church fathers, and consistent with the values and familial arrangements of Roman society, he regarded hierarchy as the ideal social structure, a pecking order in which men served as leaders and women as followers. Augustine linked her in his sermons to Eve, who never appeared in the Passion, in an apparent bid to remind his congregations that while Perpetua might have indeed been an extraordinary woman, she possessed the gender of the one who had brought about the downfall of humanity; Perpetua, however virtuous, was nevertheless a member of the “sex [that] was more frail.”2 Early Christianity offered a potentially radical reorganization of the social and gender arrangements of the ancient world. Christians recognized that women were beloved of Christ, that they possessed immortal souls, and that heaven knew no distinction between male and female. But as the rewriting of Perpetua’s story demonstrates, that early egalitarianism soon gave way to a deep misogyny that Christianity shared with other traditions and faiths throughout the Mediterranean. Greek, Roman, and Judaic laws, customs, and theologies held women to be inferior, subordinate creatures; Christianity built upon these ancient expressions and added its own distinct perspectives about the shamefulness and sinfulness of the body, views that saw women as especially physical and sexual and therefore especially sinful. Theologians both scorned and feared women, regarding them as ignorant, emotional, and treacherous figures whose barely concealed sexuality threatened men and the good order of society. Many women, wrote the early Christian leader Origen, “are indiscriminate slaves to lust, like animals they rut without discretion.” Women tempted men sexually, this kind of thinking went; they impelled men toward corruption and must, therefore, be kept segregated and hidden from men—​thus the sanction to separate women’s quarters from men and the insistence that they be covered and veiled, lest they compel men to sin. Augustine saw nothing positive about women, with the single exception that they bore children. Apart from fulfilling that basic requirement, he could not figure out why God



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had created them. “I fail to see what use woman can be to man,” he declared, “if one excludes the function of bearing children.”3 The emphasis that Augustine and other theologians placed on the sinfulness of sexuality marked Christianity as different from the Judaic scriptural tradition from which it hailed. Jews regarded lust as a potentially disruptive force within society if not reasonably restrained, but within marriage they viewed sex as part of the divine order handed down to them by God. Having been enjoined by rabbinical scholars to go forth and multiply, ancient Hebrews tolerated polygamous marriages. “It is an ancestral custom of ours to have several wives at one time,” noted the Jewish historian Josephus. Endowed by God with the physical capabilities to produce and experience sexual pleasure, Jews approached sex benignly and placed few restrictions on its expression, at least within marriage. Jesus himself appears to have accepted sexuality as part of God’s plan, but early Christians like the apostle Paul regarded desire as an obstacle in the path of achieving spiritual perfection. “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman,” he wrote to the Corinthians, but acknowledged that chastity would be difficult for many men. “If they cannot control themselves, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion,” he conceded in a statement that went on to acknowledge the sacred nature of marital sex while elevating celibacy above marriage on the ladder of desirable spiritual qualities.4 Augustine and other theologians went further, making sex a shameful and sinful act against God. Even within marriage, he declared, sex debased humanity. It rendered them no better than animals in its insistent claim on their bodies and faculties, he asserted; it polluted and degraded humanity. He urged Christians to be chaste within marriage as they must be outside of it, making celibacy an ideal that all people, not just women, should aspire to. Sexual desire, in his mind, reflected the original sin of disobedience to God, and as such was capable of producing disorders of every kind if left unaddressed. It might lead to all kinds of trouble, which explains the fact that while he and other Christian theologians looked disapprovingly upon prostitution, they conceded that its existence might be necessary to the proper functioning of society. After all, noted Augustine, “if you remove harlots from society, you will disrupt everything because of lust.”5 By the mid-​fourth century, Christianity had developed into a powerful force. After Rome fell in 476 to a succession of invasions by non-​ Roman peoples, the center of the empire shifted eastward. By 500, Constantinople, its capital city, sat at the heart of the Roman world.

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Formerly called by its Greek name Byzantium, the city had been established on the European side of the Bosporus strait in 330 by the emperor Constantine. Trade flourished, people prospered, and building went on apace. In the west, the centralized government and codified laws of Rome gave way to smaller units of territorial power presided over by local chieftains and their armed retainers. In the absence of a centralized political entity that could give coherence to the peoples and communities of what would become Western Europe, the Catholic Church filled the breach. Christianity, its offices, and its personnel served as a unifier of a diverse array of Latin, Frankish, Germanic, and Scandinavian societies, providing really the only institutional or cultural “glue” that could give people a sense of mutual traditions, customs, and mores. Indeed, the religion served as a kind of empire of the mind in place of an actual empire, providing a common object of faith as well as a set of shared goals that would animate peoples and princes over the next centuries. In the east, having once been the provenance of small, persecuted communities, Christianity had grown into the state religion of the empire. Christianity ushered in a new model of masculinity as elite men of classical Rome, in particular, saw in it a resolution to a number of anxieties they faced. In the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, the empire came under persistent attack by Germanic “barbarians,” so called because they were not Roman. The warrior of the Roman masculine ideal could not be said to be all that successful as Roman armies suffered numerous defeats at the hands of men regarded as base and uncivilized. Christianity, by contrast, offered men an alternative form of warfare: as a soldier for Christ, the ideal Christian man engaged in a constant battle against sin and temptation. Moreover, as the Roman republic gave way to the Roman Empire, opportunities to prove one’s manhood in the political arena decreased. Christianity offered elite Roman men the chance to redeem that status of power in the offices of the church hierarchy. Priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes replaced senators and consuls in matters of political power. Interestingly, the warrior and political figure carried over from Roman into Christian times. The difference was that the nature of conflict changed, as did the locus of politics. In the east, the leadership and practitioners of Christianity often took on the role of persecutors of those who did not embrace it. Jews and pagans suffered the terrible wrath of Christians looking to rid their communities of nonbelievers, and in places like Alexandria and Constantinople, divisions within Christianity between “orthodox” and “heretical” groups also produced a great deal of factionalism that often



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erupted in violence. The disagreements and the violent repressions of certain versions of Christianity would, in subsequent centuries, open the way for the growth of another religion, Islam, into vast portions of the Euro-​Asian world. Perhaps the most impressive of the new empires of the mind was the one created in a remarkably short time by the followers of the Prophet Muhammad. In little more than three decades following his death in 632, Islam had spread beyond its homeland on the Arabian Peninsula to encompass most of the Middle East. Over the next century, it gained a solid foothold in such diverse societies and polities as Spain, North Africa, and Central Asia. Merchants, traders, and scholars from these areas brought Islam to sub-​Saharan Africa as they traveled across long-​ established overland trade routes or voyaged by sea across the Indian Ocean to East Africa. By 1000, the religion of the Prophet Mohammad dictated the cultural and political landscape of the vast bulk of the Afro-​ Eurasian land mass. Only those societies situated on its periphery—​ Western Europe and China—​lay outside its jurisdiction. Islam came out of Arabia, in particular out of Mecca, the western Arabian town where Muhammad lived and worked and received his first revelations from God. He belonged to the Quraysh tribe, the dominant group in the area that contained within it numerous competing clans. Some of the Quraysh clans prospered as traders, involved in commerce that moved along a north-​south line along the western portion of Arabia, but many others, such as the one to which Muhammad was born, lived more impoverished lives. He found refuge in the house of his uncle Abu Talib, worked as a caravan manager on the route between Mecca and Syria, and then at the age of twenty-​five married his employer, Khadija, a well-​off widow fifteen years his senior. Her wealth provided him the life of leisure that enabled him to spend much of his time in contemplation. During one such period when he was about forty years old, the angel Gabriel visited him and told him he had been chosen to become the messenger of God. Shaken by the encounter, he rushed to Khadija, who assured him, “This is truly an angel and not a devil, and you will be the prophet of this people.”6 Mecca served as a pilgrimage site where thousands came to pay homage to the many gods residing in the Kaaba, a block-​shaped shrine over which a higher god, called Allah—​the God—​presided. At Khadija’s urging, Muhammad began to preach the message of Allah: that there was but one God; that the world would end; that Allah, who had created the world and the people in it, would judge human beings. If they accepted Allah’s teachings and submitted to God’s will, the faithful,

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the Muslim community, would know Allah’s mercy and be accepted into heaven. (The word Islam derives from the term for submission to Allah; the word Muslim refers to those who submit to God’s will.) God willed that all human beings were equal in his eyes, that there should be no rich and poor, and that there should be no clan or tribe pitted against another. If people did not accept Allah’s will, if they persisted in their divisiveness and inequities, they would be condemned to hell. Muhammad’s earliest followers came from his immediate family. After Khadija, the first to support him in his efforts to spread the world of Allah was his thirteen-​year-​old cousin Ali, son of Abu Talib, the uncle who had looked after the Prophet in his boyhood. Slowly, others gathered to his side, kin like his daughter Fatima, and some people from the wealthier citizenry of Mecca, such as the family of Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr counted himself as the first adult male to make common cause with Muhammad, and he gave most of his wealth to the activities of the Prophet. As a close neighbor and intimate friend, he and his family shared in the persecution that Muslims suffered in Mecca; Abu Bakr served as a trusted adviser and confidante and then father-​in-​law to Muhammad, for following Khadija’s death, Abu Bakr promised his daughter, A’isha, to the Prophet in marriage. She was six. He was about fifty. According to tradition, A’isha recalled that she realized her life had changed when her mother called her away from her friends and told her she must now stay inside: “It fell into my heart,” she is said to have said, “that I was married.”7 She did not know to whom she was contracted to be married, nor did she ask, recount the sources. She stayed in her family home in Mecca for another three years, Muhammad coming and going as was usual, until events forced them to flee to Medina. Muhammad’s message appealed to many of the poor of Mecca. It did not, however, endear itself to most of the wealthy Quraysh in the town, who were threatened by the egalitarian ramifications of it. While Khadija and Abu Talib still lived, Muhammed enjoyed some degree of security, but when they died within days of one another in 619, persecution of Muslims intensified, and it became clear that the followers of Islam would have to leave Mecca. Muhammad contacted a group of people from Medina who had converted to Islam during a pilgrimage to Mecca, and in 622, he met with them to discuss the possibility of moving there. The Medinians promised their allegiance to Muhammad, pledging to receive him as the messenger of Allah, and over the next three months the Hijra, or migration, of Muslims to Medina took place. Muhammad and Abu Bakr were the last men to go and almost did not



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make it, for the Quraysh had determined to end Muhammad’s challenge to their status once and for all by ending his life. They lay hidden in the hills above Mecca until it was safe to go, then made the ten-​day journey to Medina, where Muhammad was greeted as the honored leader of a new kind of community. Once he was established, he and Abu Bakr had their families brought to them from Mecca. Eager to cement the ties between their two families, Abu Bakr pushed Muhammad to carry out the marriage to his daughter A’isha. One Islamic treatise recounts that A’isha remembered: My mother came to me and I was swinging on a swing. . . . She brought me down from the swing . . . and led me till we stopped by the door. . . . [T]‌he Prophet was sitting on a bed in our house with men and women of the [Medinians] and she set me on his lap, and said, “These are your people. God bless you in them and they in you.” And the men and women rose immediately and went out, and the Prophet consummated the marriage in our house.8

She was ten; he was fifty-​four. In some ways, Muhammad’s marriages to Khadija and A’isha represent the shifts in gender relationships that took place as the Middle East became Islamic. Khadija, an independent, wealthy woman running a business, had proposed to a man younger than she, and had apparently done so without having to get the permission of or rely on the intercession of any male relative. Her marriage was monogamous, perhaps because she had insisted on a contract forbidding polygamy. Men of her society who could afford a number of wives often took them, though Muhammad did not while Khadija was alive. A’isha, on the other hand, the child of Muslim parents, became the second of Muhammad’s eleven wives following Khadija’s death, passing from the control of her father to that of her husband. During her lifetime, she and her “sisters,” the Prophet’s other wives, would become secluded and veiled; these practices long preceded the rise of Islam and were common throughout the Jewish and Christian Mediterranean. The constant presence of throngs of followers in his home had led the Prophet to shield his wives from public view; they were the first of his adherents to take the veil and be secluded from the male gaze. The restrictions imposed on Muhammad’s wives grew out of their special status derived from their relationship to him and were not at the time required of all Muslim women. They would become so in later times. Islam in its first century promoted beliefs, laws, and practices that served to improve women’s position in society; indeed, Muhammad

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had intended this to be the case. He declared that women must consent to marriage and he required that the bride price offered up by their husbands’ families be paid directly to them rather than to their fathers. He insisted that those who accepted the faith must not commit adultery or engage in the infanticide of girls, a common practice in pre-​ Islamic Arabia. The Qur’an, the collection of messages and revelations believed to have been handed down to Muhammad by Allah, laid out a number of provisions that helped to protect women, including the right to own, inherit, and sell property; the right to support by one’s husband; injunctions against a husband having more than four wives; and a caution that he should marry only one woman if he could not treat all of his wives equally. And even as A’isha and her sister wives took the veil during Muhammad’s lifetime to shield themselves from an overwhelming public gaze, upon his death she and his granddaughter, Zaynab, played crucial roles in the wars to determine the successor to Muhammad that followed. They both fought to ensure that the Prophet’s wishes were honored, Zaynab garnering fame and acclamation for saving her brother’s son by shielding him from attack in battle with her own body. A’isha’s pronouncements on a variety of practices (hadith) joined those of the Prophet in forming much of the body of Shari’ah law in subsequent years. While it remained an Arab phenomenon, Islam recognized and valued the contributions of women in public affairs. As it expanded across much of North Africa and Eurasia, however, and then into other lands, Islam accommodated the mores of the societies it incorporated, accepting laws and practices such as use of the veil and seclusion for elite women that served to isolate them and contributed to a deepening of inequality between the sexes. Muhammad’s Arabian followers conquered the Sasanian Empire of Persia and then Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean lands belonging to Byzantium in the three decades after his death in 632. They then moved further into North Africa and Spain and eastward into Central Asia. Aware that they knew little about governing these disparate non-​Arab societies, they left rule in the hands of the local inhabitants, ensuring that the customs, traditions, and practices of these lands and peoples would continue. Gradually, as the Arabian conquerors grew wealthier, they adopted the aristocratic and urban lifestyles of the places they occupied, including, prominently, the veiling of women. The rights and possibilities for women in the lands of the expanded Islamic empire closed down. Divorce instigated by men proved a simple affair, for example, while that requested by women entailed



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great difficulty and occurred only in exceptional circumstances. Women might be equal in their obligations and religious responsibilities under Islam, but as the Qur’an put it, “men are a degree higher than women.”9 Women required supervision by men, it was believed, a conviction that rendered single women suspicious and even dangerous and led to families marrying off their girls as soon as puberty hit, usually around the age of nine. By the tenth century, social expectations dictated that women’s freedom be dramatically curtailed and their proper realm restricted to the private confines of home and family, at least at the upper reaches of society. (Lower-​status urban women and those who lived in rural areas enjoyed greater scope to move about in the public realm, a freedom necessitated by the commercial and domestic services they performed in support of the larger society.) Shari’ah law began to be interpreted in such a way as to curtail women’s activities in the public realm and to seclude them from view by strangers, commentators bending the Prophet’s sayings to achieve this end. By the early years of the tenth century, religious law—​not the social and cultural practices of ancient societies—​had come to be regarded as the justification for reducing and even eliminating women’s once-​active roles in Islamic society, even as they continued to possess property and other legal rights. At about the same time that Islam was establishing an empire of the mind among vast populations in Afro-​Eurasia and Christianity was emerging as a unifying force in a deeply divided Europe, the Tang dynasty was consolidating its power in China. The fall of the Han dynasty in 220 ce had led to more than four centuries of warfare and fragmentation, until in 618 an ambitious general, Li Yuan, grabbed the throne and proceeded to construct an effective central government. Unlike the Islamic empire, a disparate amalgamation of diverse peoples and forms of government held together by a deep spiritual commitment, the Tang Empire comprised a number of religious faiths and cultural practices. Confucianism and Daoism prevailed in China, and the Confucian model of rule by the “Son of Heaven” still held sway, but economic, social, cultural, and intellectual impulses traveling along the Silk Road from Central Asia, India, and Persia had undermined their hold. The influences of the Central Asian steppes, especially Buddhism, made deep inroads in traditional Confucian Han China, and any emperor who hoped to maintain power had to grapple with this new complexity. Buddhism provided a connection between India, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. In the case of Central Asia and China, it formed a kind of bridge between the disparate cultures that softened the differences among the peoples of the Tang Empire. All kinds of people

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could find sanctuary in the Buddhist temples that dotted the countryside:  rich and poor, Chinese and non-​Chinese, men and women, laypeople and monks alike came together in these sacred spaces, sharing interests and spirituality that transcended the distinctions of race, ethnicity, status, and gender. In their original formulations, dating back to the sixth century bce, Buddhist teachings tended to portray women as threatening, immoral creatures whose slavery to lust compelled them to entrap men. For that reason, they required male supervision. “A woman in childhood should be subordinate to her father,” declared the Buddha, “in youth to her husband, and after her husband’s death, to her children. A woman must not be allowed to be independent. A woman should not seek to be separated from her father, husband or son, for by doing so she brings disgrace both on her own and her husband’s family.” The Buddha himself distrusted and perhaps disliked women, though he conceded that they should be allowed to serve as nuns. “If I  had not permitted women to enter the clergy the period of the true dharma of the Buddha would have lasted a thousand years; but because I have now permitted women to enter the clergy the period of the true dharma has been reduced to 500 years. It is like a house in which there are many women and few men:  it rapidly declines,” he lamented.10 As the religion spread and various interpretations of the Buddha’s teachings took hold, Buddhism tended to relax its hostility to women. Some adherents preached that differences between men and women such as those promulgated by Confucianism were no more valid than other kinds of polarities that Buddhists rejected. The images of women as the source of evil and temptation receded as increasing numbers of Buddhist deities appeared in the guise of women, as convents serving women were established, and as fairs and festivals, previously men-​only affairs, opened to women. Buddhism’s greater open-​mindedness toward women served the people of the steppe far better than Confucianism. The gender arrangements of the steppe contrasted dramatically from those of China, where Confucian precepts had restricted women to the private realm of home and family. Steppe peoples traced their ancestry according to matrilineal rather than patrilineal descent and often paid greater tribute to mothers than to fathers. Women and men worked alongside one another in the tough environment of open-​range caring for their flocks and hunting meat. Women rode and shot as well as men in this culture, for the survival of each clan depended on everyone’s skills in the saddle and proficiency with the bow. As the ways of the steppe trickled into China with each new invasion of Central Asian peoples, Confucian principles moderated a bit,



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affording Tang Chinese women a little greater latitude than they had known in earlier centuries or would know again in later years. Divorce on the basis of mutual consent, for instance, became a relatively regular practice among people of higher rank. In villages along the Silk Road, women wearing men’s clothing rode horses and went about the marketplaces and fairs among men without veiling their faces. A  history of the Tang dynasty attributed this development to the rise of Wu Zetian (who would later take the name of Wu Zhao), the daughter of a lumber merchant who ruled Tang China first as an administrator under her incapacitated husband, the emperor Gaozong; then as regent for her youngest son; and finally as emperor in her own right. “From the time of Wu Zetian forward,” declared the author of Old Tang History, “hats and scarves became widely popular and women rarely hid themselves with veils and gauze.”11 Wu Zhao had entered the court of the Tang emperor Li Shimin as a concubine at the age of thirteen and quickly became one of his favorites. She also ingratiated herself with Li’s son and heir, Gaozong; after the throne passed to him upon the emperor’s death in 649, she gave birth to a number of sons who stood in the line of succession. Wu solidified her newfound political influence as the mother of the future emperor by accusing Gaozong’s wife, the empress Wang, of killing Wu’s infant daughter. The charge was untrue, but Wu convinced Gaozong of his wife’s guilt. The emperor deposed Wang in 655 and revoked her royal status. He then married Wu and made her empress of China. Five years later, Gaozong fell ill as the result of a stroke, leaving Wu in charge of the court as administrator. This position gave her powers equivalent to those of the emperor, and she used them to consolidate her hold on the court. When Gaozong died in 683, Wu Zhao used her considerable skills and influence to place her youngest son on the throne, bypassing the elder and more legitimate heirs to the succession. At first she acted merely as regent for her son, but within a year she claimed the throne for herself, ruling as empress in her own right for the next twenty years. Wu’s background and upbringing fitted her well to rule over an empire as diverse as China had become. She hailed from a merchant family of mixed Central Asian–​Chinese heritage, a situation that enabled her to understand and to appeal to a constituency beyond that of traditional Chinese mandarins. She was widely read in a variety of disciplines and possessed a deep knowledge of Buddhism, the cultural cement that united so many of her diverse subjects. Under her rule, Buddhism thrived as never before:  Wu promoted the religion by commissioning

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Wu Zetian became known as Wu Zhao when she was named empress of China in 690 ce. Wu made Buddhism the state religion of China, a move that helped her consolidate her power. Shutterstock/​389317600

translations and interpretations of scriptures (called sutras), by ordering the construction of new temples and the renovation of already existing sacred sites, and by sponsoring Buddhist festivals across her empire. She declared that “stealing goods from a Buddhist temple is a crime of the same order as stealing from the imperial household,” thus endowing the faith with a stature it had not previously possessed in China.12 Wu officially set Buddhism over Daoism as the recommended religion of China



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in 692, suppressing Daoism and ordering the conversion—​forcibly, if need be—​of Daoists to Buddhism. In 694 she took the final step in establishing Buddhism as a state-​sanctioned religion, moving the administrative responsibility for dealing with Buddhist monks and nuns out of the office that dealt with foreign and diplomatic affairs and into that bureau that dealt with issues concerning Confucianism and Daoism. Buddhism, this move on Wu’s part announced, was a fully Chinese religion, not a foreign one. Wu’s privileging of Buddhism over Daoism grew out of her practical political needs as the first (and only) female emperor. On a general level, Buddhism, unlike the deeply patriarchal Confucianism and Daoism, did not impose restrictions on female rule. More practically, Wu’s subjects in the non-​Chinese portions of her empire embraced the religion and, not incidentally, the ruler who practiced their faith. The “Four Peoples,” as those on the western frontier of the empire referred to themselves, pledged their loyalty to “the Sage,” who addressed their grievances and fulfilled their needs. She “is compassionate and thoughtful,” wrote the author of one Buddhist publication, “bestowing only that which is beneficial. She nurtures and fosters, leads and marshals. Before we didn’t even have thin, unlined garments; nowadays we have thick, many-​ layered vestments.”13 More particularly still, Daoism had served to legitimize the House of Tang as it came to power under Li Yuan in the early years of the seventh century. Wu’s Tang in-​laws, in fact, traced their descent from the founder of Daoism, Laozi. As the religion of her rivals for power following her displacement of her eldest son in favor of her youngest, Daoism would have had little to recommend it; indeed, it undercut Wu’s claims to be a legitimate ruler. In the face of a Confucianism that debased and denigrated women and a Daoism that denied the validity of her rule, Buddhism filled the breach. It authorized her rule, provided popular support for her administration, and gave symbolic sanction to a highly unusual situation. Wu tied herself to the Buddha in a variety of sculptures and mandalas, linking the sacred representations of the religion to that of her imperial court. From Buddhism she constructed a kind of cosmology that endorsed her unprecedented and shocking actions in taking power. She created a Chinese character for the concept of human being that represented 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.

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Wu ruled her large and diverse empire with tolerance and beneficence, though she never hesitated to take harsh and violent measures when challenged by those who would deny her authority. Indeed, her very name meant “martial,” and she lived up to it by emphasizing and promoting the art of war among her subjects, including among the women on her western borders. She also placed women in high positions within her bureaucracy and elevated the status of women across China by decreeing in 674 that the mourning period for mothers be made the same as that for fathers. Though most of her efforts to improve the position of women—​in politics, especially—​did not survive her tenure as emperor, this latter initiative did; the equal mourning period for fathers and mothers persisted through later dynasties. Wu’s reign and the initiatives she introduced alarmed conservatives within the Confucian tradition, provoking a backlash that would, over time, result in the repression of Buddhism as a “foreign” religion and in strictures against women operating outside of the home. Following her death in 705 at the age of eighty, Confucian scholars embarked on a dual campaign of denigrating the non-​Chinese subjects of the western and northern reaches of the empire as “barbarians” and castigating Wu Zhao as a murderous, sexually treacherous, corrupt, power-​ hungry usurper. Foreign religion and illegitimate female rule, in the minds of revisionists, had equally to be eradicated if the principles of filial piety, patriarchy, virtue, and austerity articulated by Chinese Confucianism were to be restored. The appearance of such universal religions as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism that emerged in the first millennium of the Christian era helped to create large cohesive empires in Eurasia. They did not create new prescriptions for the way men and women should behave and interact with one another. Rather, they drew on existing cultural understandings in the societies in which they took hold. Over time, religious precepts codified and solidified gender norms and expectations, shutting down certain opportunities for women, in particular, that might have been possible in earlier times, even as individual women found other opportunities through religion to enhance their power and influence.



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Chapter 3

Gender and War in the Age of Global Interactions, 1000–​1500

I

n 1159, forces of the Japanese emperor sent thirteen-​ year-​ old Minamoto Yoritomo, whose father had risen up against the court, into exile in the eastern portion of the main island. There he languished for twenty years, lacking office, position, armed retainers, and land. He was a nobody. In 1180, however, things turned around for him when a claimant to the throne, Prince Mochihito, called on warriors to help him regain it from usurpers. Yorimoto took this opportunity to make his own call for fighters, promising that he would guarantee their lands and rights against encroaching imperial authority if they would pledge their loyalty to him. Yorimoto’s declaration amounted to the creation of a state administered by and for warriors, and it resounded triumphantly across the countryside, drawing support from thousands of soldiers and setting off a series of civil wars. Yorimoto parlayed his strength in the east into a concession from the imperial court that recognized what came to be called the Kamakura shogunate—​a government of warlords who claimed to “protect” the emperor in the capital city of Heian and thus legitimated their military rule. Their armed retainers, called samurai, would exemplify the ideal of masculinity to which men of other classes would aspire. The shogunate survived not because of Yorimoto, however, but because of his wife, Masako. Upon his death in 1199, tensions and conflicts among samurai and the emperor spilled over into civil war. Masako, although she had no formal power, mobilized her family connections to ensure the continuity of the Kamakura shogunate. She had her seventeen-​year-​old son, Yoriie, heir to Yorimoto’s position, killed in 1203, and replaced him with her second son, Sanetomo. Along with her brother, Yoshitoki, she systematically eliminated rivals to their power and reduced them to the status of vassals, subjects who owed service to their overlord. When Sanetomo proved ineffective and weak, Masako

probably had him murdered, opening the way for Yoshitoki to take control of the shogunate. In 1221, the emperor, Go Toba, then proclaimed him an outlaw, hoping thereby to rally samurai to his side. Masako took decisive action, presenting herself to a large crowd of samurai as the symbol of and spokeswoman for her husband’s achievements, and reminding them of the hardships and humiliations they had suffered under the imperial regime before he had taken them to war against it. She exhorted them to follow her in the struggle against the emperor. Inspired and energized by her words and vision, they did, trouncing Go Toba’s warriors and consolidating the Kamakura regime. Masako served as the true leader of the shogunate until she died in 1225. The years between 1000 and 1500 saw tremendous changes in demography, economic prosperity, technology, and social and political structures, events that facilitated widespread interaction between cultures across the globe. Trade and commerce across the Afro-​Eurasian world flourished, bringing peoples into contact with one another and exposing them to new ideas, practices, and technologies from other regions. But even as these long-​distance encounters enabled increasing cross-​cultural communication and exchange, they and other prominent dynamics of the era—​most especially conflict, conquest, and sustained warfare—​promoted the development of separate and distinct cultures. By the end of the fourteenth century, regions began to be delineated in terms that we would regard as sources of identity—​“Europe,” “China,” or “India,” for example. These national identifications, in turn, would contribute to dynamics that perpetuated and expanded conflict and fighting. War became the arena in which notions and ideals of gender were most prominently expressed. The nature of warfare changed dramatically in those five hundred years. In the period from 1000 to 1200 or so, an elite force of mounted warriors in the employ of local lords or chiefs fought relatively small battles, accompanied by footmen carrying pikes, and assisted in their efforts by lengthy sieges of fortified strongholds. Starting in the middle of the thirteenth century, the utilization of gunpowder (invented in China in the tenth century) gradually made these tactics and methods obsolete and ushered in new ways of fighting. Now large armies of men armed with muskets and cannon could be put into the field by monarchs looking to centralize and expand their power at the expense of local lords. The changes took some time to play out, but as they did, they altered gender expectations in societies across Eurasia and, in at least once instance, the lands across the Atlantic.



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The establishment of the Kamakura shogunate at the end of the twelfth century marked the beginning of military rule in Japan. The emperor and his court still existed and took care of civil matters, but military governors—​called shogun—​in the provinces provided the actual administration, protecting the countryside from bandits and usurpers, collecting taxes from the farmers, and overseeing the working of the land generally. During this period, the figure of the warrior took center stage. Samurai served the governors in return for land or other forms of material compensation, providing the military might the shogu needed to maintain his power and control. Attaining the position of samurai required extensive and rigorous training in horsemanship, use of the bow and arrow, and swordplay. Young boys started learning their martial skills early, often alongside their sisters, who would not expect to fight on the battlefield but who would be ready to protect their households should the need arise. Mounted archery, in particular, formed a crucial aspect of their training; samurai practiced it daily in an exercise known as yabusame. Instituted by Yoritomo after he became concerned that samurai possessed

The fourteenth-​century Japanese samurai Kusonoki Masashige defended the Kamakura shogunate against attempts to overthrow its rule. Samurai represented the masculine warrior ideals of military prowess, loyalty, self-​discipline, and honor. Shutterstock/​1231878799

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insufficient archery skills, yabusame involved warriors shooting their arrows at three successive targets as they thundered down a track on horseback. Guiding their horses with their knees in order to keep their hands free to handle their large bows and arrows, samurai learned balance, focus, and discipline, skills that served them well not just on the battlefield but in the ordinary run of life as well. Samurai lived by a code of conduct known as bushido, the “way of the warrior.” It delineated the moral code of loyalty, respect, humility, honesty, self-​discipline, and honor drawn from Confucianism and from Zen Buddhism. Under bushido, “martial valor,” or bu, was mediated somewhat by the value placed on “cultural attainment,” or bun. In addition to obtaining fighting skills, samurai were expected to read history and philosophy, literature and poetry, and to steep themselves in the arts. The combination of cultural or intellectual achievements (bun) and martial prowess (bu) marked an ideal man’s essential nature. If anything, bun held a higher value in the eyes of Japanese than bu, however it might be manifested, making Japanese masculinity quite different from that in regions of the world where the physical man tended to predominate. Moreover, Japanese society placed an emphasis on the capacity of men to contain militarism and war, so the notion of bu was often far more about restraint than the exercise of power. The notion of containment also pertained to men’s sexual capacities:  just as they were enjoined to restrain the excessive use of force in bu, they were instructed to contain their sexual drives as well. Women, in this formulation of ideal masculinity, as was true in the discourses of female sexuality in the Middle East and elsewhere, were regarded as a dangerous sexual temptation that should be avoided. Women, lacking men’s self-​control and discipline, needed to be kept pure and moral by being contained and segregated from men. Despite the injunction against women, the Kamakura shogunate survived the death of its founder through the actions of his wife. For the next hundred years, the shogunate provided stability to Japan, despite attempts by invaders such as the Mongols to extend their rule over East Asia. In the early thirteenth century, as the societies of Japan, Korea, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East engaged in the internecine and sectarian tearing apart of one another, Genghis Khan (the word khan means chief) unified the Mongol clans of Central Asia and then sent his armies to conquer and rule over the largest empire the world had ever seen. In the space of a mere twenty years, he built and administered



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an empire bigger than the Romans, Greeks, Persians, or Chinese had achieved after centuries of trying. He did it by putting his daughters at the heads of armies and making them queens of the lands they seized. Without them, the Mongol Empire would not have existed nor endured. The royal women of Mongolia were a tough lot. They refused to accept the customs foisted on women in the adjacent “civilized” lands of China or Central Asia, eschewing seclusion, the veil, or the practice of bound feet that crippled Chinese women and immobilized them. Mongolian women rode horses, entered wrestling matches with men, and became skilled with the bow and arrow. When not at war, royal women wore extravagant and intricate headdresses over two feet in height, which gave them a commanding presence at court and “a great luster when they are on horseback,” as one witness reported.1 When war came, they exchanged their headdresses for a helmet, gathered their arms, mounted their horses, and led their troops into battle. Some of the reputation Mongols enjoyed for fierceness derived from the presence and effectiveness of women on the battlefield. Genghis Khan valued in people a quality called baatar, the capacity and willingness to act quickly and decisively without regard for one’s own personal interest or safety. He saw it in his teenaged daughter, Altani, when one night she leapt into action to save his youngest son, four-​year-​old Tolui. A Tatar kidnapper bent on avenging the death of his kinsman at the emperor’s hand had entered her grandmother’s ger (yurt), grabbed the boy, and raced away. Altani rushed out after him just as the man raised his arm to plunge a knife into the boy’s neck. “With one hand she seized his plaints”—​the braids draped over his ears—​“and with the other she seized the hand that was drawing the knife,” recounted the chronicler of the Secret History of the Mongols. “She pulled it so hard that he dropped the knife.” Guards who had left their post at the ger returned just at that moment and killed the Tatar. Though they tried to claim credit for saving Tolui, Genghis Khan wouldn’t have it. He did promote them, but “the chief merit went, by general consent, to Altani” for her heroic efforts.2 And he made sure everyone knew it. Genghis Khan sought out those who had baatar and placed them in positions of authority and responsibility as he consolidated the lands of the Mongols and conquered other territory and peoples. In addition to his daughter Altani, at least six more of his daughters—​Alaqai, Al-​ Altun, and others whose names have not come down to us—​possessed it. His four sons, drunken louts with but indifferent fighting skills and virtually no other qualities to recommend them, did not. When it came

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time for Genghis Khan to place trusted and able kin at the head of his conquered territories, he turned to the women of his family, his wives and daughters, making them beki, or princesses. Genghis Khan’s regard for the baatar of his wives, daughters, and daughters-​in-​law manifested itself in the cosmology he created following a vision he had; he gave material form to that vision through a series of laws he promulgated across his empire. The vision presented him with a picture of the world balanced through the mutual interactions of Father Sky and Mother Earth. The sky gave strength to people; the earth protected them. The sky inspired people with dreams and ambition; the earth made those desires real. One without the other could not succeed, and thus father and mother, male and female were required if one’s destiny was to be achieved. The great chief’s respect for women appeared also in his choice for his clan’s totemic symbol, the female hunting falcon. Some 30 percent larger in size and weight than the male, she was the epitome of fierceness and hunting prowess, the perfect motif for a conquering army. He issued laws forbidding girls to be sold, raped, or kidnapped; he allowed them to be married at a young age but proclaimed that they not engage in sexual intercourse until they reached the age of sixteen. And in conformance with age-​old steppe tradition, women, not men, were to initiate marital relations. If the men came up short in that arena of married life, wives enjoyed the option of redress. Once he had consolidated his control over the Mongol clans in 1206, Genghis Khan moved to expand his territory on the steppe. One way he did so was to establish alliances with other chiefs by marrying his daughters into their families and, as dictated by steppe tradition, bringing their husbands into his own family according to a practice known as bride service. With each marriage of his daughters, he issued a decree of equality between husband and wife, laying out the responsibilities, rights, and powers of each, and in doing so for them altered the situation for all women in his lands. He named the husbands guregen, meaning, literally, “son-​in-​law,” but in the context of their marriages they became the equivalent of princes consort; that is, they possessed less power and stature than their beki wives. Genghis Khan sent the guregen to war, where, more often than not, they faced an early death. His daughters, left in charge of everything while their husbands were away on campaign, ruled the territories. He also married his sons to the daughters of local chiefly families, but in these cases he broke tradition and brought them into his household. These women, also given the title of beki and sometimes khatun, or queen, served as ambassadors



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and liaisons to their tribes and helped the great khan make decisions that had long-​lasting effect on their societies. Genghis Khan assigned his daughter Alaqai Beki the central role in the invasion of China in 1211–​15. At the time of her marriage, he instructed her to “be determined to become one of my feet,” making it clear that she would help to lead the military conquest. “When I am going on an expedition, you should be my helper,” he exhorted her. “When I am galloping, you should be my steed.”3 Genghis Khan’s plans for China saw Alaqai’s sisters enter into marriage alliances:  Al-​Altun married into one of the Uigher clans of western China, while another, unnamed, sister married Arslan Khan of the Karluks in what is Kazakhstan today. Yet another daughter, also unknown to us, married Tokuchar, who was killed during a campaign in Nishapur in eastern Iran, part of Genghis Khan’s conquest of Central Asia. His widow ordered that the city be destroyed and its inhabitants executed. “She left no trace of anything that moved,” reported a chronicler of the attack, striking terror in the hearts of Muslims across the region. Tales of this ruthless, barbaric infidel woman spread rapidly, filling listeners’ heads with images of charred ruins and of skulls stacked high in pyramidal shapes. The Mongol conquest of Central Asia in the years 1219–​24 permanently undermined the Middle Eastern Muslim states’ previous dominance of commercial affairs in the region and placed the lands through which the Silk Road ran firmly in the hands of Genghis Khan’s daughters. They established a system of relay stations along the route that provided protection and allowed for far larger caravans to pass through, vastly enlarging and speeding up trade. They broke down obstacles and built new routes, ultimately creating a system that made it possible for merchants and traders to travel for thousands of miles on a single trip. Each sister ran a particular operation of the enterprise that enabled them to cooperate rather than compete with one another. One might deal in Chinese silks, while another traded exclusively in tea or spices. They fashioned a financial consortium that facilitated commerce. Alaqai devised a system of governance over China and the other disparate territories of the empire that made Mongol rule possible and turned the Silk Road into the greatest trading venture the world had ever seen. The success of Genghis Khan’s daughters excited envy and resentment in his sons. Upon the emperor’s death in 1227, his third son Ogodei became khan. He continued the conquests of his father, sending armies into Russia, into Korea, and deeper into China. But he wanted the lands held by his sisters and sisters-​in-​law, and he embarked on a campaign of sexual terror to get them. When his sister Checheyigen,

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who controlled Oirat in western Mongolia, died in 1237, he ordered his soldiers to herd four thousand girls and their male kin onto an open field. After separating the girls from their families, the soldiers tore off their clothes and gang raped them, the girls enduring one soldier after another after another while “their fathers, brothers, husbands, and relatives stood watching, no one daring to speak,” as one chronicler described the scene.4 At the end of the day, two girls had died from their abuse; the soldiers parceled out the rest of them among themselves. This was certainly not the first time rape had been used as a weapon in war, but nothing like this had ever occurred in the memories of those who witnessed the carnage. Ogodei’s ordering of the mass rape profoundly and egregiously violated the laws his father had put in place regarding women. The people of Oirat, long accustomed to hardship, pain, and nearly constant warfare, were shocked. Ogodei’s actions succeeded in their aims: he grabbed the lands of his sister and set himself up as ruler there. The mass rape marked but the first step in a long, broad-​based campaign to remove the women of Genghis Khan’s empire from their positions of power. The mother and wife, respectively, of Ogodei’s successor, Khubilai Khan (r. 1260–​ 94), Sorghaghtani Beki and Chabi, enabled him to establish his power and consolidate his rule over his multiethnic and multireligious empire. Their pragmatism (the first was a Christian, the second a Buddhist) and toughness, combined with astute political instincts, provided him with the kind of guidance he needed to ensure his success in building a thriving, prosperous reign. But over the next seventy years or so, the constant assaults on the women in charge of Genghis Khan’s empire resulted in the decline and ultimate destruction of everything the great chief had achieved. By 1368, the Han Chinese had seized the lands of the Mongol Empire and established the Ming dynasty. While Japan was developing the code of the samurai and the Mongols were consolidating their hold on Asia, Europe was beginning its slow rise out of fragmentation and obscurity. There, as in Asia and most other parts of the world, the period was marked by violent conflict. The prevalence of warfare on the European continent gave rise to the ideal expression of masculinity in the person of the knight. Arising from a group of low-​status, relatively poor armed retainers supporting local chiefs and barons in the eighth century, knights evolved by the fourteenth century into fierce warriors encased in armor, fighting on horseback for princes and popes. As a group, they developed into an elite social class, claiming a castelike status on the basis of military proficiency, spiritual piety, chivalry, and advocacy of a national identity.



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The early masculine ideal represented by knighthood emphasized the intimate relationship between physical violence and men’s honor, a dynamic that often encouraged brutality, cruelty, and the senseless, indiscriminate, and horrific spilling of blood. The Christian church had long sought ways to control or contain the violence of this group, in part by promoting a different masculine model of the holy monk and in part by threatening the excommunication of knights who fought on certain days of the week. These methods proved ineffective, but in the twelfth century, clerics hit upon a means of bringing the warrior into closer affinity with the spiritual elements of manliness identified with the church. Through a series of Crusades, they fastened the attractions of war and violence to the defense of Christianity, assigning to knights the specific responsibilities of liberating the Holy Land from “infidel” Muslims. Ideal knighthood now took on the additional qualities of fighting for a cause greater than one’s personal honor or enrichment; it suggested an obligation to support and defend Christianity. No longer simply fighting men in armor, knights could now regard themselves and be seen as servants of a spiritual and moral order. This merging of spirituality and war became embedded in the code of chivalry, a set of expectations for knightly behavior that emphasized military prowess, loyalty to one’s superiors, piety, generosity to one’s peers and followers, and courteous respect for women. This last element in turn became the core foundation of what historians and literary critics refer to as “courtly love,” a stylized approach to romance that combined sexual desire with high moral or spiritual fulfillment. At a time when marriages were political or economic arrangements, not unions based in companionship or emotional sustenance, courtly love allowed for an expression of passion—​if not sex itself—​by a knight to a woman not his wife. Courtly love and chivalry combined to venerate women (at least upper-​status women) and, in the hands of medieval writers, added to the figure of the masculine ideal the capacity for devotion to and protection of women. It gave them, in other words, an inner life, an emotional life to go along with the outer life of the man of arms. As Andreas Capellanus, a French courtier, described it in De amore libri tres in 1184: It is the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with every feeling of delight. This kind consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted for those who wish to love purely. . . . That is called mixed love which gets its effect from every delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus.5

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A fourteenth-​century manuscript depicts the Court of Love in Provence, France. Part of the courtly love tradition, these tribunals met to consider disputes between lovers and to levy punishments against lovers found to be in the wrong. P. L. Jacob, Manners, Customs, and Dress during the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance Period (1871), fig. 48

Finally, increased political centralization in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought about the transformation of the knight—​and thus the masculine ideal—​from an individual fighter to a member of a more cohesive national group. As warfare moved from conflicts among local barons or struggles for power between local nobles and monarchs seeking to expand their power to battles between larger geographical territories that were beginning to be regarded as nations, knights took on the role of defenders of the country. As the interests of the country as a whole became increasingly identified with those of the monarch, knights’ allegiances and loyalties expanded beyond that pledged to local nobles to the monarch, the figurehead associated with that larger geographical nation. The introduction of gunpowder, which saw the advent of cannon and hand-​held firearms, along with the professionalization of armies, helped bring about this development, as only monarchs



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possessed sufficient wealth to put guns and huge numbers of armed men in the field. By the time of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–​1453) between England and France, the manly ideal knight had become a divinely inspired warrior fighting on behalf of a national cause. Although warfare and masculinity were intricately wrapped up with one another in the five hundred years following 1000, fighting was not the exclusive prerogative of men. Owing to the nature of warfare in the first centuries of the period, women had the opportunity to participate fairly significantly in combat. When not participating in the individual combat that was tournament jousting, knights usually engaged in small battles as part of a tiny band of fighters on behalf of a lord to whom they pledged loyalty. Even larger battles were fought merely by a large agglomeration of these small bands. Warriors, in other words, tied to a lord and his household, were part of what we should understand to be a domestic military organization. They lived in the lord’s hall or castle; they ate with him and his family; they trained on his grounds. The female members of the household interacted with knights continually, gaining knowledge, experience, and perhaps even skill from their dealings. While men were off to war, high-​born women were expected to step in to protect and defend the interests of the lord. Indeed, as historian Christine de Pisan advised noblewomen in her early fifteenth-​century The Treasure of the City of Ladies, the wife of a lord “ought to know how to use weapons and be familiar with everything that pertains to them, so that she may be ready to command her men if the need arises. She should know how to launch an attack or to defend against one, if the situation calls for it. She should take care that the fortresses are well garrisoned.”6 Knights who knew the women of the household well through long-​time acquaintance and interaction likely responded to their leadership with respect. Women also went on crusade: some at the heads of armies of knights they had raised in response to the call of the pope; some employed as washerwomen and suppliers of food, water, and other necessaries; some as camp followers performing a variety of functions, including servicing the sexual requirements of the crusaders. For their contributions they earned a share of the booty won in battle. We have a few descriptions of women actually fighting. A Muslim historian reported the story of an elderly man who participated in the storming of a Christian trench in 1191. He described a woman archer “wrapped in a green melluta [mantle]” standing behind the rampart of the trench, “who kept shooting arrows from a wooden bow, with which she wounded several of our men. She was at last overpowered by numbers; we killed her, and brought the bow she had been using to the Sultan, who was

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greatly astonished.” A Christian chronicler told of the actions of women who set upon defeated Muslims after a naval battle in 1190. “Our women pulled the Turks along by the hair,” he recounted, “treated them dishonourably, humiliatingly cutting their throats; and finally beheaded them. The women’s physical weakness prolonged the pain of death, because they cut their heads off with knives instead of swords.” The Muslim chronicler Ibn al-​Althir told of “three Frankish women who had been fighting on horseback [who] were found among the prisoners” of a campaign in 1189. “Their sex was recognized when they were captured and their armour was removed,” he asserted. A year later, he wrote, “a queen among the Franks who lived beyond the sea left her country accompanied by around a thousand combatants. She was made prisoner in the neighbourhood of Alexandria, and her companions were also captured.”7 Women made up the largest number of captives taken by both Christians and Muslims during the Crusades, and their fate at the hands of their captors was horrific. Sexual abuse of women by the enemy was a time-​honored weapon of war, regarded as the right of the victor even by those Christian crusaders who invoked the cause of holy war. Rape as a weapon of war had a long, long history, and it extended across the globe. In the later centuries of the medieval period, the nature of warfare changed, owing in large part from what historians term the “gunpowder revolution.” Fighting evolved from knights engaged in small battles and long-​term sieges of castles to the use of large and professional armies. Feudal bands of mounted and armored retainers gave way over time to urban militias hired, supplied, and trained by monarchs seeking to expand their power over local lords. Warfare thus moved out of the domestic realm of the household into the public arena. In the process, women found less scope for their participation in matters military. Observers had always remarked upon the presence of women in battle because it was unusual—​now they regarded it not just as anomalous but as unnatural, a violation of the order of things. The actions the English took against Joan of Arc—​the embodiment of the knightly ideal—​during the Hundred Years’ War offers a stark demonstration of the shift in attitudes toward women fighting. Joan of Arc came onto the scene in 1429, appearing at a time when French defeats at the hands of the English had resulted in the loss of the lands of northern and southwestern France. The peasant girl who had heard God’s voice telling her to rid the country of the English enemy and to place the dauphin Charles—​son and heir of the



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mentally incapacitated French king—​on the throne rallied the demoralized armies. Joan donned armor, sword, and standard; mounted her horse; and led her troops to raise the siege of Orléans. Having placed Charles VII on the throne of France, she moved on to take back significant territory in the Loire valley, utterly transforming the military dynamic and enabling France to oust the English from their lands in Normandy and Aquitaine. Joan of Arc was a soldier, a fighter above all else, who strategized, planned, commanded, and victoriously led her troops in battle. She learned to fight on horseback, to handle a lance and a sword, and to use the new gunpowder technology effectively. “She could ride a horse wielding a lance as well as a more experienced soldier could,” observed one noblewoman who witnessed her training. The duc d’Alençon remarked that “everyone marveled . . . that she acted so wisely and clearly in waging war, as if she was a captain who had the experience of twenty or thirty years; and especially in the setting up of artillery, for in that she held herself magnificently.”8 Throughout her campaign to put the dauphin on the throne and to expel the English from French lands, Joan dressed as a man. In part her choice of clothing served the end of her military campaign. As she put it, she “would never for anything swear not to arm herself and wear men’s clothes.” But more than that, cross-​dressing seems to have been a way for her to establish her identity, for she wore men’s clothes everywhere after 1429, not just in battle, until her execution twenty-​eight months later. In court, in prison, even in church, she presented herself in the raiment of men, justifying her transvestism by asserting that “It pleases God that I wear it; I do it on the command of our Lord and in his service.” When the English denied her access to communion unless she conformed to conventional female dress codes, Joan refused, telling her jailers “that she preferred to die rather than to abjure what she had done at the command of our Lord.”9 French soldiers rallied to Joan in the many thousands. Through her purity, her devotion to God, her martial prowess, her undaunted courage, and her love of country—​all of those qualities that made her the ideal knight—​she inspired in them a loyalty that few other generals in history can boast. But in her enemies, the gender-​ bending overlooked by her followers provoked hatred, humiliation, and charges of monstrosity. The Duke of Bedford regarded her as “a disordered and defamed woman, dressed in men’s clothing and base in conduct,” a woman “abominable to God.”10 Indeed, after the Burgundians captured her in 1431 and sold her to the English, she was tried for, found guilty of, and burned at the stake for heresy for wearing men’s clothing.

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In this miniature portrait of Joan of Arc, painted sometime between 1450 and 1500, she is clad in armor and carries a sword and a banner depicting three saints blessing her cause. Joan led French forces against English and Burgundian troops during the Hundred Years’ War until she was convicted of heresy in 1430 for wearing men’s clothing. She was burned at the stake for her crimes. Archives nationales (France), AE/​II/​2490

The warfare convulsing Eurasia marked societies in other parts of the world as well. In the lands across the Atlantic Ocean the people many call the Iroquois—​the Haudenosaunee, or “people of the longhouse”—​engaged in a protracted period of warfare that ultimately gave



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way to a peace that officially sanctioned a prominent and substantial role for women in their society. Sometime around 1000 bce, peoples from the southwest of what would become called America migrated north-​and eastward to lands just south of the Great Lakes, in modern-​ day New York State. Their trek coincided with a shift in their methods of securing sustenance from hunting to a more settled agriculture, especially in cultivating corn, beans, and squash. These activities produced significant conflict among the peoples of the longhouse, ultimately bringing about civil war among them. Two factions emerged, fighting an ideological war over which system of provision would prevail, and although men and women fought on both sides, the conflict was profoundly gendered:  men identified with hunting, women with agriculture. As it intensified, the hunting group, led by an Onondaga chief and shaman by the name of Adodaroh whose rage had slipped over into insanity, began to resort to cannibalizing their enemies. According to Haudenosaunee tradition, the terror that followed as the Cannibals and the Cultivators battled one another compelled Sky Mother, the divine founder of the people, to send her son to end the fighting and establish peace among the rival camps. The Peacemaker, as he is still called, enlisted the help of two others, Jigonsaseh, or Corn Mother, leader of the Cultivators, and Ayonwantha (who has come down to us as Hiawatha), a member of the Cannibal bloc. He first approached Jigonsaseh, listening to her accounts of how the Cannibals had violated a fundamental obligation of war recognized by all parties to it up to this time. During wartime, clan mothers of every village were expected to sit on the paths and roads used by the war parties and provide food for the passing warriors, in return for which their villages escaped attack. “Even though we have fed their young men in passing,” she told him, according to one account, “they have not done their duty by us, leaving us unharmed. Instead, they have burned our fields and roasted our children in the fires. We must now ring our towns with palisades and post young men to guard our fields. Even so, no one is safe, for the Cannibals come in the night to steal from our numbers.”11 The Peacemaker presented his plan for peace and discussed how the two of them might implement it. He proposed the creation of Kaianeraserakowa, the Great and Binding Law of Peace. In return for his promise that women would enjoy considerable rights under the new law, Jigonsaseh accepted his suggestion that she take advantage of the obligation of women to feed warriors to spread the word. She would tell all of those she fed and sheltered about the Great and Binding Law of Peace if he would accept the corn way of life.

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The two arrived at the conclusion that a balance of agriculture and hunting would best serve the people. Compromise and mutuality—​ balance in all things—​came to characterize the customs and beliefs of the Haudenosaunee. Satisfied that with the cooperation of the Corn Mother he could make significant headway, the Peacemaker next turned to Ayonwantha, Adodaroh’s trusted speaker. Ayonwantha was a committed warmonger and cannibal; indeed, when the Peacemaker first encountered him, he was carrying a human corpse back to his cabin. But after long discussion, Ayonwantha agreed to abandon his cannibalistic ways and to join the Peacemaker and Jigonsaseh in promoting peace. The three worked together to bring each tribe of the Iroquois into the fold, till only Adodaroh remained apart. Rather than confront the unbalanced shaman, the three asked him to head the new league that would be created with his acceptance of the peace. Soothed by their message and the way in which he had been approached, he agreed. Keepers of Iroquois tradition and historians disagree over when the formation of the League of the Haudenosaunee and the Great and Binding Law of Peace that undergirds it took place. Some say the mid-​twelfth century, others the late thirteenth century, and still others the late fifteenth century. All concur that it predated the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and that the league and the peace brought an end to endemic and horrific warfare among the Haudenosaunee peoples. The traditions make clear that women played a key role in making it happen; the Great and Binding Law of Peace, called by historians the Constitution of the Five Nations Confederacy (this became the Six Nations of the Confederacy with the addition of the Tuscarora nation in 1720), recognizes their indispensable place in the life of the people in a series of provisions enumerated in belts of wampum. In the section called “Clans and Consanguinity,” the law states that “the lineal descent of the People of the Five Nations shall run in the female line. Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall follow the status of the mother.”12 Women headed up the clans through their women’s councils at the local level, the basic unit of government in a federal system. They named children, named the men who would sit at the federal level of the league, could impeach those men for breaches of accepted norms of behavior, and effectively determined whether or not the tribes went to war by controlling wartime provisions and the paths along which war parties would travel. In other words, the national agendas addressed by the league, although ultimately decided upon by men, were set forth in



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advance by clan mothers. In this way balance, that first principle of the Haudenosaunee way, prevailed in matters of gender as in all others. The ideal of balance among the Haudenosaunee, as among virtually all of the four hundred tribes that existed in pre-​Columbian North America, allowed for a vastly different array of gender possibilities than Europeans knew. Many Native American tribes recognized and honored members of their societies who presented a gender identity that was neither male nor female but a kind of combination of both. Called berdache by the Europeans who encountered them after the French word connoting homosexuality, many Native Americans today prefer to use the term two spirit to describe and address them. Most often these were men who adopted women’s roles, functions, dress, and styles, but two spirit women also existed, taking on the roles and dress of men as hunters and chiefs. Native Americans regarded—​and still regard—​two-​ spirit men and women as possessing special powers given to them by the creator. They enjoyed a distinctive prestige among the members of their communities. Berdache or two-​spirit men and women played a significant part in warfare as actual warriors themselves or as the carriers and purveyors of supernatural powers that would help the tribe in battle. Among the Lakota and Ojibway, for example, warriors about to go into battle engaged in sexual relations with two-​spirit men as a means of enhancing and strengthening their masculinity. As one account had it, Ojibway men turned to sex with the two-​spirit Ozaw-​wen-​dib (Yellowhead) so as to “acquire his fighting ability and courage, by having intimate connection with him.”13 When the Europeans arrived, they noted with apprehension the presence of fierce two spirits among the Timucua Indians of Florida, the Karankawa and Coahuiltic Indians of the Texas Gulf Coast, and Tuscarora forces; they learned quickly to fear their courage and fighting skills.14 After five hundred years of nearly constant warfare in Eurasia and beyond, the qualities, attributes, and esteem attached to peoples involved in military conflict became central to gender identities in societies and cultures across the globe. From Japanese samurai to Christian crusaders, those who fought offered a model of masculinity that informed their societies and cultures for centuries to come. Always, however, the ideals of proper manhood in any given period or place faced defiance from men and women who refused to conform to gender expectations. War both sharpened and challenged the identities of those who fought them and, just as powerfully, those who did not.

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Chapter 4

Gender and Slavery in the Age of Global Expansion, 1450–​1750

I

n 1724, hundreds of men and women who had escaped enslavement on the plantations of Jamaica began a series of attacks on British settlers and soldiers, seeking to end the system of slavery on the island. The runaway slaves would come to be called Maroons in the 1730s, after the Spanish cimarrón, for “fugitive, gone wild,” terms usually applied to domestic animals who wandered out of their enclosures. The so-​called First Maroon War lasted for fourteen years, during which time the British suffered significant losses and were compelled to sue for peace. Under the generalship and strategic guidance of an obeah spirit woman named Queen Nanny, the Maroons fought their numerically superior foes to a standstill. Nanny directed her fighters to use drums and an abeng—​a cow horn capable of making many different sounds—​ to send messages to Maroon communities across long distances in the mountains of Jamaica to alert them of British movements. This enabled fighters to position themselves well in advance of any attack. Arrayed in branches and leaves so as to resemble trees, the Maroons camouflaged themselves and were able to ambush the scarlet-​clad soldiers with near impunity as they labored up narrow, twisting, difficult paths to try to reach villages on the mountaintops. British losses mounted steadily and seemingly endlessly, until finally in 1738 officials instituted talks with leaders who headed the Windward Maroons. The resulting treaty, the Articles of Pacification, recognized the Maroons as freed men and women and as owners of the lands they claimed and settled. In return, they agreed to help the British put down slave revolts and to run down and return to authorities any enslaved persons who had escaped their masters. The men and women under Nanny’s leadership, the Leeward Maroons, were incensed when they learned of the pact: Nanny in fact ordered that the British messenger who brought the offending news be beheaded. Ultimately the Leeward

Maroons gave way and accepted the peace, though the women of the community continued to wear bracelets and anklets made of the teeth of slain British soldiers as a mark of their defiance. The fierce resistance of the Maroons of Jamaica provides a glimpse of a rare aspect of the experience of slavery for the millions and millions of men, women, and children who fell prey to the institution in lands across the world. Although slavery long predated it, global expansion during the centuries following 1450 accelerated and intensified the institution. Under the Mongol Empire, for example, a widespread network of economic, intellectual, and cultural connections linked the various regions of Eurasia to an extent never known before. The disintegration of the empire in the late fourteenth century opened up the opportunity for other states to flourish and to grow into empires in their own right. In Europe, ambitious monarchs in Portugal, Spain, Russia, and Austria centralized power in their territories and emerged ready and able to expand their commercial and military reach. The Ottoman, Mughal, and Qing Chinese Empires in Central and South Asia followed suit, as did a number of large states in sub-​Saharan Africa such as Abyssinia, Kano, Kongo, Mali, and Songhai. In every instance, empire building and territorial conquest involved a concomitant expansion of slavery. The two went hand in hand, extending the enslavement of men, women, and children to lands all over the globe. For millions of people over thousands of years, slavery determined the shape and feel of their lives as men and women. Slavery took different forms in different societies of the world, and the variations often created distinctions in the status and gendered experiences of enslaved people. In places like Mesoamerica prior to contact with Europeans, and in sub-​Saharan Africa, for instance, a kin-​or exchange-​based system prevailed in which outsiders were brought into a group to expand its numbers or as part of a social or political alliance. In some of the Islamic and Asian empires, states organized and ran slave systems designed to further their interests, whether those interests were religious, economic, military, or some combination. In the Americas after 1500, the system of slavery enabled private individuals to profit from the forced labor of captives. Variations within each framework existed, depending on time and place, and often they overlapped, but each also possessed distinctive characteristics. Enslaved men and women brought into a community through capture or exchange might readily become full-​fledged members of the group, with all the rights inherent therein; certainly their children would be considered part of the community. Because the goal of this system was to increase population, females

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and children constituted the majority of those enslaved. In state-​or privately run systems, enslaved persons were chattel, or property—​they lost their legal rights and legal identities, as did, usually, any children they might have. Because states could marshal significant resources to maintain slavery, they could handle adult men more easily than smaller or more informal entities; moreover, as they often utilized slaves to field an army, adult men were the preferred target of their slave buyers. In the plantation-​based system in the Americas, adult men formed the bulk of the enslaved population in the early years; enslaved women were increasingly regarded by slave owners as desirable as well, usually as sources of field, domestic, or sexual labor. In North America, though not in the Caribbean or South America, where conditions were too harsh and unhealthy and women frequently miscarried owing to extreme overwork, women’s reproductive labor ultimately made it possible for a natural increase of enslaved people. In virtually every state and society, the enslavement of women entailed sexual coercion and abuse. We tend to associate slavery with the trans-​Atlantic trade and the plantation system in the Americas, but the commerce in enslaved peoples and slavery as an institution existed in European, North African, and Asian lands long before the Portuguese and Spanish began to ship Africans to the New World. Old World slavery ensnared hundreds of millions of men, women, and children from Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and sub-​ Saharan Africa. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, following a period of economic depression, devastating epidemic illness, and political uncertainty, a number of Islamic powers found their footing and established themselves as “gunpowder empires.” The Ottoman Turks and the Mughals, in particular, expanded their reach and influence across huge tracts of territory; in West Africa, the Songhay and Kano Empires consolidated power over a broad area. Slavery played a significant and growing role in each of these states: in African Muslim societies alone, for instance, many millions of men and women were enslaved. Under Islam, legal precepts known as Shari’a law recognized only two legitimate pathways to obtaining slaves, either natural increase through reproduction or the capture of enemies in the course of jihad, or holy war. These restrictions had little impact, however, on the broad-​ based commerce in human beings among Muslims and had no impact on non-​Muslims. Muslim Africa depended on enslaved men and women to sustain their communities; wholly slave-​based economies based on salt mining and agriculture developed, and domestic work occupied



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countless millions. Leaders at every level of society, from the household to the imperial palace, especially valued enslaved women, owing to their capacity to bear children and expand the numbers of often-​endangered populations. Shari’a law provided explicit safeguards to enslaved women who bore the children of their owners. They became umm walad—​mothers of children—​once they gave birth and could not be sold away, not legally anyway. Nor could their children. Upon the death of their owners, umm walad and their children gained their freedom. The enslavement of some women made it possible for other women—​the family members of prosperous, official, elite, and royal households—​to be secluded, a condition regarded as a sign of their prestige and status. Muhammadu Rumfa, the king who instituted Islam across a wide range of West Africa in the second half of the fifteenth century, established the seclusion of his wives, daughters, and concubines—​sexual slaves—​as part of his rule. Islamic law gave Muslim males, no matter their class, the right to unlimited sexual consort with their female slaves (unless they were married), making all enslaved females potential concubines. Concubines sometimes could parlay their sexual services into a degree of protection and status—​indeed, sometimes great status—​but concubinage required women to provide those sexual services without giving them any choice in the matter. Concubines, like all enslaved women, possessed no legal or customary rights like those of free women. In the Ottoman Empire, which stretched from southern Poland in the north to southern Sudan in the south and from the western regions of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, the military might and administrative capacity that made such expansion possible derived from the enslavement of men from all over the known world. Ottoman officials turned mostly to Christian boys captured in war or seized from conquered territories to establish a military force known as Janissaries. One such captive, Konstantin Mihailović of Serbia, recounted his experience in 1455, when Ottoman troops took the city of Novo Brdo. After ordering all the families of the city out of their homes, Mihailović reported, the Emperor himself sorted out the boys on one side and the females on the other, and the men along the ditch on one side and the women on the other side. All those among the men who were the most important and distinguished he ordered decapitated. The remainder he ordered released to the city. . . . The boys were 320 in number and the females 74. The females he distributed among the heathens, but he took the boys for himself into the Janissaries, and sent them beyond the sea to Anatolia, where their preserve is.1

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A Janissary, a slave soldier in the court of the Ottoman sultan, from a sixteenth-​century book of costumes. Despite their origins as slaves, Janissaries enjoyed an exalted position in the Ottoman society and politics. To ensure their loyalty to the court, they were forbidden to marry; some were eunuchs who guarded the women of the royal court. Hungarian National Museum

Over time, Janissaries, despite being an enslaved army and forced to convert to Islam, became part of the upper ranks of society; families often offered up their sons voluntarily so that they might enhance their status. This proved to be relative, however, as elite slaves—​called kul, or



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“the Sultan’s servants”—​did not possess the rights of free subjects and could not pass down any privileges or property they had acquired in the course of their lives. In India, in an interesting twist, the skills and leadership of an Ethiopian man enslaved as a boy kept the dynamic and powerful Mughal Empire from expanding into the Deccan plateau for a number of years. The boy who would grow up to become Malik Ambar—​malik referring to the leadership role Ambar would attain—​was born in the middle of the sixteenth century to a family growing food and tending livestock in the eastern portion of Ethiopia. Captured at about age twelve in 1560, he was sold by slavers, changed hands a few times as he was moved through Arabia, and ultimately ended up in Baghdad in the service of a merchant named Mir Qasim. Qasim educated Ambar, facilitated his conversion to Islam, and brought him along when he traveled on business. Ambar learned to read and write in Arabic and may have even had some Persian; he came to understand accounting and finance and proved useful enough to Qasim to persuade the merchant to bring the twenty-​year-​old Ambar with him when he went to India in 1571. They arrived in the western Deccan region, an area in south central India inhabited largely by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians, and ruled over by Muslims hailing originally from central Asia. There Ambar would have witnessed the presence of numerous other Abyssinians, both enslaved and free, serving as soldiers and even as army commanders, and taken in the lesson that sufficient talent and skill could enable an enslaved man like himself to advance socially, politically, and militarily. Shortly after his arrival, in fact, Ambar was purchased from Qasim by the peshwa (prime minister) of the Sultanate of Ahmednagar, Changiz Khan, himself a former slave who had risen to great heights. For three years Khan showed Ambar the ropes, advising him in the ways of the court and the army. Ambar’s connections to the soldiers made it possible for him to organize a mercenary army when, in 1574, assassins killed Khan and the peshwa’s widow set him free. Armies composed of enslaved Africans found great favor among Indian princes of the Deccan at this particular historical moment, for the Mughals who had conquered the north of India looked to the region for a logical extension of their power. States on the periphery of the Deccan in particular, such as Ahmednagar, faced special danger from Mughal invasion. In 1595, the ruler of the sultanate, Nizam Shah, asked Ambar to return to defend the state’s main fort located in the capital; Ambar did so and took advantage of the need for defense to build up a loyal and powerful military force in the countryside. Some five or

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six years later he returned to the capital, this time as regent to a young member of the royal family he placed on the throne. Ambar presided over Ahmednagar as the power behind the throne for another quarter century, dying in 1626 at the age of eighty or so. The Ottoman system of slavery in the army and bureaucracy had its counterpart in the corps of concubines who made up most of the imperial harem in the sultan’s household, the private quarters of the palace inhabited by his wife or wives, daughters, young male children, and numerous concubines presided over by the sultan’s mother. The Ottoman dynasty drew on earlier Islamic and pre-​Islamic traditions that derived political authority from a marital union blessed by divine forces, placing reproductive politics at the heart of the state. For the first two centuries following the dynasty’s founding at the end of the thirteenth century, sultans contracted marriages with the daughters of other rulers in the region, seeking thereby to make alliances and to enhance their own power. But because the offspring of such unions might challenge the legitimacy of the Ottomans, sultans increasingly turned to concubines rather than their legal wives to produce heirs. Being enslaved and without maternal lineages of their own, concubines’ children could be relied on to continue the Ottoman line. Although the children of enslaved women, they themselves enjoyed freedom and faced no legal obstacles that prevented them from acceding to the throne; very early on, the dynasty’s heirs were borne exclusively of concubines. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Ottoman rulers no longer felt the need to marry into other rulers’ families, regarding them as inferior and not fit to marry a sultan. By the reign of Sulëyman I  (known as “the Magnificent,” r. 1520–​66), legal wives had been replaced by concubines as the exclusive source of heirs to the sultanate. Under his rule, the traditional patterns of politics of hereditary rule based on concubinage took new shape. In 1520, Sulëyman engaged the sexual services of a woman from western Ukraine named Aleksandra Lisowska (sometimes called Roxelana). The daughter of a Ruthenian priest, Lisowska had been captured by Tatar raiders and brought to the Ottoman court, where she began her concubinage under the name of Hürrem. She caught the eye of the emperor almost as soon as he succeeded to the throne, and she delivered him a son, named Mehmet, in 1521. Past practices in the harem limited concubines to the bearing of only one son, but Sulëyman broke with this custom when he and Hürrem had four. Moreover, the emperor refrained from engaging in sexual activity with any other concubines, making Hürrem his only consort, his favorite—​the haseki.



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Then in an unprecedented event, in 1534 he married her and moved her into his residence, acts totally out of keeping with the conventions governing the harem, concubinage, and Ottoman court life. The representative of the Genoese Bank of Saint George witnessed the wedding, writing, “this week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Sultans. The Grand Signior Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave-​ woman from Russia, called Roxalana [sic], and there has been great feasting.”2 No actual law barred the marriage and freeing of a concubine, but the situation caused deep distress at court and in the public square. A  Venetian page in the palace described the atmosphere created by this most unusual state of affairs. “Such love does [Sulëyman] bear her that he has astonished all his subjects that they say she has bewitched him; therefore they call her Ziadi, which means witch. For this reason the Janissaries and the entire court hate her and her children likewise, but because the sultan loves her, no one dares to speak. I have always heard every one speak ill of her and of her children.”3 The fact that Hürrem became one of Sulëyman’s most trusted political advisors and confidantes made her even more unpopular. A final class of slaves played a significant part in the administration of the Ottoman and other Muslim and Asian empires. Eunuchs—​men who had been castrated—​formed a valuable part of state administrations. Because they could not reproduce, they could not threaten the ruling dynasty with rival claims to the throne, and for that reason, they could be entrusted with protecting the royal household. Eunuchs were much in demand by royal and high-​status households, despite the Islamic injunction against castration. The high cost of purchasing eunuchs enhanced their status, and they could often be found at the highest levels of government. Such was the case for Beshir Agha, an Abyssinian slave who rose to become chief eunuch of the Ottoman imperial harem in the early eighteenth century. Eunuchs hailing from the Caucasus or other parts of Eurasia tended to undergo castration in the form of removal of the testicles, a process that eliminated their ability to sire children but not to engage in sexual intercourse. African eunuchs, on the other hand, and especially those from Abyssinia, who were the most highly prized, suffered radical castration of the testicles and the penis. In either case, these were gruesome operations, and mortality rates could rise to upward of 90 percent.4 Few adult men agreed to risk such odds, even if the rewards might be spectacular, so by far the majority of victims of castration were boys who had

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not yet reached sexual maturity. The physical effects—​to say nothing of the psychological impact on one’s sense of masculine identity—​lasted a lifetime: constant urinary tract infections, leakage of urine, osteoporosis, underdeveloped musculature, oversized faces, lack of facial hair, high-​pitched voices, and prematurely wrinkled skin marked the eunuch as half male at best. Still, these men were part of the elite cadre of the enslaved who helped emperors administer their vast territories. Slavery in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans looked, in many respects, like that in the Muslim and Asian empires. The story of Malintzin, an Aztec girl taken by slave traders from her village of Coatzacoalcos, near the Gulf of Mexico at the beginning of the sixteenth century, provides a typical account of Mesoamerican slavery until, suddenly, it takes an improbable turn and becomes the stuff of legend. For the first eight to twelve years of her life, she lived with her noble family in a region that experienced regular warfare as competing kingdoms sought to assert their power over one another. Some configuration of pressure on her family—​military, political, or economic—​led them to sell or give her to slave traders, who carried her off to the port of Xicallanco to be sold to a Mayan buyer, probably in exchange for some quantity of cacao beans or cloth. Her new owners put her in a canoe and paddled down the coast some fifty miles to the village of Putunchan, where Malintzin was to live for the next few years. We do not know the circumstances that led to the seizure and sale of the young Malintzin. Some families resorted to the sale of their children out of economic need and/​or the inability to feed them. Some people voluntarily sold themselves into slavery, with the hope that they could buy their freedom in the future. Given the state of politics in Mexico at the time, it seems likely that Malintzin fell prey to the exigencies of warfare. She might have been offered up to a victorious enemy as a gesture of submission or in an effort to mitigate the harm that might fall to her family or community. Whatever the case, her plight was not unusual. Most enslaved people in Mesoamerica were women or girls, expected to work as domestic servants in the grinding of corn, the care of children, and the growing and processing of cotton. Their lot was a hard one. All women ate less and lived shorter lives than men in these societies, but enslaved women suffered far worse. They also acted as concubines, required to perform sexual service for the men of the household. Any children born to enslaved women by their owners were not themselves slaves, and the fathers of these children did not sell their mothers away from them. Depending on the status of the family in which they lived, they might inherit land; in the case of a royal family,



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the male child of a concubine could even aspire to chiefdom. Sometimes concubines enjoyed the status of wives: this might occur in instances in which high-​status women were given to conquerors as part of a peace treaty. Malintzin’s Mayan community must have regarded her as a high-​ value asset, because when it was defeated in battle by Spaniards under the command of Hernán Cortés in 1518, its leaders included her in the group of twenty women it tendered to the Spanish as a sign of its submission to him. Cortés had them baptized, gave them Christian names, and parceled them out to his captains for their pleasure. Cortés must have shared the Mayans’ estimation of Malintzin, for he gave her to the most important member of his expedition, Alonso Hernández Puertocarrero, a man whose high-​ranking family back in Spain was in a position to raise the status of the conquistador. But Puertocarrero’s possession of Malintzin proved short-​lived, owing to her extraordinary talents as a linguist. She had learned the language of the Mayans with whom she lived and, while traveling with the Spaniards following their defeat, had picked up Spanish as well. When emissaries from the great chief Moctezuma arrived at Cortés’s camp and demanded to speak with him, none of the Spaniards could understand them. Malintzin did, and she must have calculated that her future with Puertocarrero—​ who might at any moment tire of her or die, leaving her at the mercy of any Spaniard who wished to claim her—​was not worth remaining silent. She spoke up, and immediately everything changed for her. According to his secretary, Cortés promised her “more than her liberty” if she served as his intermediary with the Aztec leader.5 She agreed to translate the conversations between Cortés and Moctezuma’s men, making herself indispensable and earning the admiration and respect of the Spanish. Some began to call her Doña Marina, according her the rank of noblewoman. Over the next few years, Malintzin proved her inestimable value as Cortés’s troops expanded the power of imperial Spain across the lands of Mexico. Conquest involved more than the simple overpowering of indigenous peoples by military means. The Spanish had to negotiate with the conquered peoples; they had to instruct them in the ways of their new condition, to tell them what was expected of them. Malintzin performed effectively in the role of translator not just of words, but of ways of life as well. She drew on her deep understandings of the vastly different Aztec, Mayan, and Spanish worlds to convey to each party what the other was thinking, and in so doing she enabled local peoples to accommodate and work with the Spanish. In one poignant and ironic interaction, the Tlaxcalan people, who fell to Cortés’s sword on his

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march to Moctezuma’s capital of Tenochtitlan, counted on Malintzin to negotiate their surrender. In hopes of coopting the Spaniards by making them kin, they offered their daughters in marriage to the Spanish. One can only guess at Malintzin’s emotions as she accepted into custody a group of girls and women whose fates were so similar to her own a few short years before. Their fate always entailed some degree of sexual servitude. Even Malintzin’s indispensability as a cultural go-​between did not spare her the requirement of sexual service as Cortés’s mistress. We do not know how she felt about that, and while it is certainly true that as the mother of Cortes’s son Martin she held a privileged position in his household, she—​like all the other enslaved women—​had little choice in the matter. We can perhaps gain a glimpse of her feelings about her position from her actions following a successful military engagement in Honduras in 1524. In return for her help and support on the arduous campaign, Malintzin bargained with Cortés for a husband. He agreed, giving her to his second-​in-​command, Juan Jaramillo. Their marriage marked her progress from the precarious status of a mistress to the position of a high-​ranking Spanish wife, with all the legal rights pertaining to that standing. New World systems of slavery differed profoundly from those of precontact America and the Muslim and Asian empires. The transatlantic slave trade and the New World plantations worked by enslaved African men and women looked nothing like their trans-​Saharan or Indian Ocean counterparts. Europeans had long enjoyed interactions with other parts of the world, having established trade routes to and contacts with merchants in North Africa, coastal sub-​Saharan Africa, the Mideast, China, and India. In 1450 or so, first Portugal and then Spain entered into the business of exploration, creating a maritime revolution in the process. Their activities had a profound effect on Europe and the world as a whole, opening up the previously isolated Americas to European exploitation and establishing the preconditions for European expansion well beyond its borders. As global trade and interactions increased from 1500 on, Europe became much more influential than it had been since Roman times, until, by the nineteenth century, it dominated virtually the entire globe. In contrast to the mutual trading relationships forged by Europeans with merchants in Africa and Asia, the explorers of the New World imposed their presence on the inhabitants of those lands, called Indians by Columbus after the land he insisted he had reached, by force. Unlike



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the peoples of Africa and Asia, the Amerindians he encountered had been isolated from the rest of the world, a situation that rendered them far more vulnerable to depredation and conquest by Europeans, who, after the so-​called gunpowder revolution, possessed the capacity to overpower indigenous people. The use of enslaved Africans was in part a consequence of the annihilation of Amerindian peoples through disease. Lacking a labor force drawn from local peoples, plantation owners turned to purchasing men and women captured from Africa. By 1650 or so, they had imported sufficient numbers of enslaved Africans to the West Indies that the plantation economies of tobacco and then sugar were able to flourish. The growing commerce in sugar, especially, necessitated a larger and larger workforce, which was supplied by the trade in enslaved Africans. Between 1600 and 1650, some ten thousand men and women per year were forcibly transported to the New World from Africa. Most of those went to Brazil and to the Spanish colonies of the South American mainland. Between 1650 and 1700, that number had doubled to twenty thousand per year, more than half of whom went to the French, English, and Dutch islands of the Caribbean. By 1800, trade in enslaved Africans had grown to sixty thousand per year. Life on the plantations was harsh. Enslaved men and women worked in the fields from dawn to dark, with breaks only for meals. If they lost tools or failed to meet production quotas, they were whipped and otherwise abused. Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican planter, recorded the punishments he meted out in 1756 for a variety of transgressions. “Had Derby well whipped,” he wrote in January, “and made Egypt shit in his mouth.” Seven months later he recounted whipping “Hector for losing his hoe; made New Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.” Thistlewood regularly raped the enslaved women under his control, and he often lent them out to overseers for their own “use” of them as “wives.”6 These injuries and indignities characterized the violent nature of the institution of chattel slavery, in which enslaved persons had no rights and no redress for the harm done to them. Enslaved men and women could enjoy little in the way of family life, even in those colonies—​ Spanish, Portuguese, and French—​ that allowed them to marry. The Catholic Church permitted marriage between enslaved men and women, even in cases where the owner refused them the possibility; masters in these jurisdictions also could not separate families by selling members or sending them away. These laws were more often observed in the breach, however, and British colonial officials did not recognize marriage among enslaved persons at

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all. More practically, the enslaved population lacked the time and leisure that would enable them to form relationships and families, and if they did, the level of fertility for both men and women was vitiated by malnutrition and overwork. Death rates sharply outpaced birthrates among the enslaved:  in the eighteenth century the life expectancy of an enslaved woman reached only 25.5  years; African men could expect to live only 23 years. Certainly, living conditions contributed to the heavy mortality of plantation life, but the greatest killer proved to be disease. Dysentery and malaria carried off perhaps one-​third of those newly arrived from across the Atlantic. Natural increase could not sustain enslaved populations in Brazil or the Caribbean islands; only on the North American continent could natural increase replenish the enslaved labor force. In no instance were the children or wives of enslaved families the legal property of the father and husband, as would be the case in most patriarchal societies. Enslaved men were denied the roles of husband and father that marked masculinity throughout much of the world, and they were positioned within the institution of slavery in roles considered “feminine.” Many of those who hailed from West Africa, where women did the farming, regarded the agricultural work they were forced to do as a violation of the proper gender order and were deeply humiliated by their sense of emasculation. The absence of legal male power within enslaved families did not mean, however, that they were matriarchal in nature. In the 1960s and 1970s, a heated debate over just this issue broke out after sociologist (and later US senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan claimed that the increase in female-​headed African American households, a legacy of slavery, had brought about a significant decline in the welfare of blacks in American society. He implied that “matriarchal” households produced poverty and dysfunction and would only perpetuate the widening gap between blacks and whites. This sparked an immediate response among historians of slavery, who argued that enslaved men and women had continually fought to establish themselves in “two-​parent, nuclear family” households, the model that, indeed, served as “the typical form of slave cohabitation” in the United States.7 Two-​parent, nuclear family households proved difficult to attain in the Americas, if only because enslaved husbands and wives frequently lived on different plantations, sometimes miles apart; those in the cities often lived in different households under different masters. They did form families, to be sure, but distance and the exigencies of slavery militated against their being able to cohabit and to raise their children



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together. But the absence of fathers did not mean that these families were not patriarchal, at least in New England. In Boston, for example, an enslaved woman named Jane Lake, owned by Deborah Thayer, and an enslaved man named Sebastian, owned by John Waite, married in 1700. Thayer insisted that Sebastian provide the earnings of one of his six workdays toward “the support of  .  .  .  his intended wife and her children, if it should please God to give her any.” Waite refused this provision, offering instead to “allow Bastian Five pounds, in Money p[er] annum towards the support of his children p[er] Jane.”8 Thayer agreed. Both parties to this arrangement implicitly recognized that any children born to the couple belonged to Thayer, but they also assumed that Sebastian had the responsibility of paying for their upkeep. Interestingly, Waite paid the five pounds per year to Sebastian rather than to Thayer, and she, for her part, made no bones about this. The following year, the couple’s newborn daughter, also named Jane—​and named, significantly, by Sebastian—​was baptized in the First Church in Boston. Her father carried her down the aisle and held her up to the congregation as the minister anointed her with water: fathers “holding up” their infants before the Lord had long been an important Puritan tradition. Despite the fact that little Jane belonged, legally, to Deborah Thayer, the Boston community gave Sebastian the right to act with authority as her father. Moreover, Jane and daughter Jane took Sebastian’s name, even though he did not have a surname. They became “Basteens” rather than Lakes—​ Jane’s surname—​ or Thayers. These aspects of patriarchal control seem to have been readily expected by Boston’s white and black populations alike, despite the conditions of enslavement that made Jane and Sebastian’s family mother centered. Enslaved men and women constantly resisted the conditions of their lives and made strenuous attempts to ameliorate them. These efforts ranged from passivity to refusal to work, to escape, to violence, to outright revolt. Work slowdowns and the misplacement of tools could alleviate the endless toil and tedium for a short time, but such resistance might also bring down harsh physical punishment upon the heads of those who tried it. Women could do little to avert sexual depredations by overseers and masters, even less those by their male partners, unless they took the drastic and fatal step of attacking their attackers. Some did, and they suffered terrible consequences. Women sometimes adopted reproductive strategies to alter their situations, turning to abortifacients such as the peacock flower to abort children they could not bear to see brought up in slavery.

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The Massachusetts (Colony) General Court House of Representatives printed this broadside advertisement for a runaway slave from Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1776. During the American Revolution, the British promised freedom to Africans who escaped their captivity and joined the Loyalist troops. Library of Congress, rbpe03900400

Slavery distorted the expectations societies had for how men and women should live and introduced experiences based on gender that did not prevail among nonslave populations in those same societies. Hürrem, Malik Ambar, Beshir Agha, and Malintzin represent a tiny, tiny minority of men and women enslaved in the Eurasian and Mesoamerican worlds. Malintzin’s unlikely journey from child of an indigenous noble family, to Mayan slave and concubine, to right-​hand woman to and mistress of the Spanish conquistador, and finally to noble landowner in her own right cannot in any way be considered typical, nor can that of Hürrem or Ambar. Indeed, we know about their lives only because they were so unusual. All of them possessed remarkable talents, demonstrated superb judgment, and made astute decisions, and these qualities enabled them to succeed the way they did. They were able to make use of them, however, because the systems in which they were enslaved as youth were relatively “open.” Kinship-​or exchange-​ based slavery sometimes allowed for opportunities for a kind of normal gendered life that state-​sponsored or chattel slavery did not. The plantation system of chattel slavery that characterized the Americas following the arrival of Europeans after 1492 ushered in an entirely different institution of slavery, one in which few people could thrive and prosper.

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Chapter 5

Gender and the State in the Age of Revolution, 1750–​1850

O

n May 23, 1782, Robert Shurtliff presented himself to the muster master of the Continental Army in Worcester, Massachusetts, to sign on with the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment for three years. With about fifty other men, he marched to West Point to train as a soldier in a light infantry company. The drilling was arduous—​ marching ten miles a day at double time carrying a thirty-​pound pack—​and the expectations high. Recruits had to handle their unwieldy weapons efficiently and display the qualities that marked them as virtuous citizen soldiers: courage, enthusiasm for the cause, a willingness to volunteer for risky ventures, a propensity for taking initiative, and the wherewithal to identify and act upon sudden danger. The war against the British was winding down following the American victory at Yorktown in 1781, but Shurtliff’s unit actively engaged in a series of skirmishes in Westchester County, New York. As one lieutenant described light infantrymen, “they were all chosen men, men of sprightly genius, Noble dispositions and undoubted courage.” An army physician regarded them as part of a “select corps, consisting of the most active and soldierly young men and officers  .  .  .  constantly prepared for active and hazardous service.” A veteran sergeant of the light infantrymen recalled that “they are always on the lines near the enemy, and consequently always on the alert, constantly on the watch.” Shurtliff acquitted himself well within this elite squad. Officers described him as “a faithful & good soldier,” ready to step forward in times of need and “gaining the applause and admiration” of those with whom he served.1 He saw action against the British at Tarrytown, where he was wounded. In the summer of 1783, with the war over, Shurtliff traveled to Philadelphia with Brigadier General John Paterson to put down a mutiny of discharged soldiers who had not been paid. While there he contracted a serious illness and was hospitalized. In the course of examining him,

a physician by the name of Barnabas Binney discovered that Robert Shurtliff was a woman. Binney kept her secret, and Shurtliff, whose real name was Deborah Sampson, continued to serve in the Continental Army until “he” was discharged at West Point in October. Shurtliff made

Deborah Sampson, in the guise of Robert Shurtliff, donned men’s clothing, enlisted in the army, and fought for independence during the American Revolution. She earned a pension for her contribution to the cause. Leon Abdalian Collection, 08_​01_​000406

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his way back home to Massachusetts, still clad in his “regimentals,” where for a short time he passed himself off as Deborah Sampson’s brother, Ephraim. But in 1785, she married Benjamin Gannett and gave birth to three children over the next five years. In 1792, Sampson, now Deborah Gannett, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for back pay; it awarded her the funds for her “extraordinary instance of female heroism.”2 The story of Robert Shurtliff/​ Deborah Sampson exemplifies the “world turned upside down” so characteristic of the age of revolution. The eighteenth century witnessed a number of transformations in economic, intellectual, and political life, dramatically altering the way Europeans and Americans ate, drank, dressed, worked, socialized, and thought. Trends in intellectual life associated with the movement known as the Enlightenment introduced new concepts about society, politics, government, and economy that would prove revolutionary in their impact. Political revolutions in the American colonies, West Africa, France, Haiti, and South America transformed governments in those regions. All of these changes brought about a restructuring of the balance of power across the globe, elevating the West to a position of strength in relation to the rest of the world that it had not known in earlier times. Gender was implicated in all of these developments, and as a result, relationships of men and women to each other, to the institution of the family, to politics, to law, and to work underwent dramatic modifications. New and enlarged sources of trade, new means of financial exchange, and new techniques of production generated a commercial revolution in the eighteenth century. Throughout the century, many Europeans and white Americans enjoyed a consumer boom. After 1750, this amounted to a revolution in consumption. Individuals delighted in the purchasing of commodities as never before, buying not simply necessities but luxury items as well. Women produced much of the consumer demand that helped to fuel the commercial revolution of the eighteenth century. Certainly men shopped for clothing and goods, but their forays into the shops of haberdashers or furniture or carriage makers tended to be occasional, in contrast to women’s consumption patterns, which demonstrated a regularity consistent with the running of a household that required daily purchases of mundane items. Manufacturers and retailers recognized that consumer decisions rested largely with the mistresses of households, and they pitched their goods accordingly. The commercial revolution challenged some ideas about the proper behavior of men, particularly the notion that certain men possessed



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qualities that justified their participation in political life. These qualities—​ summed up in the term virtue, from the Latin vir (“man”)—​occupied a central place in eighteenth-​century British, French, American, and Latin American economic and political theory. The concept of virtue came out of Aristotelian and Renaissance republican traditions of citizenship, which saw in participation in civic life the sole means through which men (and it was only men and men of independent wealth) could achieve their full human potential. It signified the capacity of human beings to govern themselves, to subordinate private interest to the public good. In the eighteenth century, owning landed property was the mark of the virtuous citizen. Because ownership of land and possession of independence could be enjoyed only by men, citizenship and virtue were masculine entities. Those holding nonlanded property—​goods, stocks, bank deposits, and the like—​did not qualify. Moreover, the gendered nature of virtue and property as masculine logically entailed upon possessors of nonlanded property a feminine quality. As the commercial revolution astronomically increased the amount of consumer goods available for purchase to more and more people, observers railed against the “luxury” it seemed to be instilling in the populaces of European and American societies. Commentators identified luxury with passions and desire, qualities regarded as antithetical to the stability and independence required of those who looked after the public good. Represented as feminine, luxury threatened to undermine the virtuous nature of the political realm; the owners of nonlanded wealth and the purchasers of new consumer goods who emerged in the process of the commercial revolution constituted feminized beings, subject to appetites that undermined independence and virtue. Men’s involvement in commercial economic activity called into question their manliness and thus their fitness for political power. As the English clergyman John Brown put it in a 1757 screed blaming Britain’s loss to France in the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s on the moral corruption of its leaders, “The luxurious and effeminate Manners in the higher Ranks, together with a general defect of Principle, operate powerfully, and fatally . . . to have fitted us for a Prey to the Insults and Invasions of our most powerful Enemies.”3 Enlightenment thinkers recognized that commercial life and virtue as understood in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were not compatible with one another. Philosophers devised a series of theories that sought to make them so, seeking to turn the passions and desires associated with consumption into “interests” that served the nation as a whole. Enlightenment thinkers spoke frequently of “the polished nations” of Western Europe, whose increased commercial activity and therefore

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increased wealth distinguished them from “rude and barbarous” nations characteristic of the ancient, feudal world of farmers and warriors. In an elaborate formulation of the stages in the transition from the agrarian to the commercial society, economist Adam Smith argued that the increase in wealth from exchange produced a far more just and secure state than that possible under the reign of feudal lords. In the writings of Enlightenment philosophers, commerce and capitalism took on the power to “civilize” individuals and whole societies. In introducing the exchange of property in goods between individuals, commerce provided the means by which men learned that they enjoyed things in common, that they shared interests with one another. “Commerce tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinctions and animosity between nations,” insisted the Scottish historian William Robertson in 1769. “It softens and polishes the manners of men.”4 This theory of the development of societies sought to legitimate producers, traders, and consumers as being engaged in a masculine, virtuous pursuit of wealth. While men displayed their virtue in the realm of the public sphere, it was in the domestic sphere, from women, that they learned it in the first place. A new emphasis on domesticity developed over the course of the eighteenth century as moralists struggled to find ways to render men and society more virtuous. Private morality absorbed in the home promised an effective safeguard against the corruption of public life. As the key figures responsible for the creation of domestic bliss in the midst of the vicissitudes of commercial society, women took on a new significance and importance over the course of the century. Because they enjoyed a natural “complacency,” moralists believed, by which they meant a capacity for sympathy, women possessed the power to soften men and to encourage in them the development of the sensibility that would preserve morality and virtue in a public world fraught with selfishness, corruption, and dissipation. The moral power imputed to women by the latter half of the eighteenth century was considerable, and it produced a far greater appreciation of women than had existed earlier. As one Scottish poet attested in his paean to “The married state” in 1764: If you ask from what source my felicity flows, My answer is short—​From a wif, Who, for chearfulness, sense, and good-​nature, I chose Which are beauties that charm us for life. To make home the seat of perpetual delight, Ev’ry moment each studies to seize, And we find ourselves happy, from morning to night, By the mutual endeavor to please.5



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But women’s newly recognized influence with men was effective only insofar as women exercised it through example or through gentle persuasion, moralists insisted, and their behavior should in no way suggest that they were not fully subordinate to their husbands, functioning under their beneficent but watchful gaze within their proper sphere of the home. The new recognition of women’s importance to society, in other words, carried with it many prescriptive constraints on women’s behavior, and would have significant ideological power to contain their activities in later decades. Women should expect “to command by obeying,” decreed James Fordyce in the wildly popular Sermons to Young Women, published in 1765, “and by yielding to conquer.”6 Only in this way could the reformation of male manners be brought about and sensibility inculcated in men. An ideology of separate spheres—​for men the rough-​and-​ tumble life of work and politics, for women the domestic realm of home, family, and the cultivation of morality—​took hold among the middling classes of Europe and America and would influence their societies in profound and long-​standing ways. It is important to realize, however, that this was an ideology—​a prescription—​and not necessarily a description of how people actually lived. Significant numbers of respectable middling women worked throughout the eighteenth century, either in their own trades or in the shops of their husbands. They continued to trade in luxury goods such as silks, tea, chocolate, or chinaware; they prepared and sold food and drink; they acted as nurses and midwives; they undertook all manner and kind of needlework; and they took paying boarders into their homes. In fact, not much changed in either the kinds of work women performed or in the proportion of women working over the course of the eighteenth century. What did change was the meaning that was attached to women’s work. While upper-​and middle-​class women were being transformed, ideologically speaking, into the embodiment of virtue over the course of the eighteenth century, representations of plebeian, or lower-​ranked, women were changing too. At the beginning of the eighteenth century they constituted the industrious, productive, invaluable contributors to family and national wealth; by the end of the century, plebeian women came to be regarded as coarse, profligate, and degraded. Portrayed as shameful, suspect, and even criminal, working women were depicted as posing a serious danger to the nation’s moral, physical, and economic health. Middling and lower-​ranked women took responsibility for work located around the cottage while men went off to labor in the fields

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some distance from home. They spent long hours tending crops, looking for firewood, and gleaning fields, in addition to the never-​ending and ubiquitous chore of spinning, labor that earned them the approbation of their neighbors and society as a whole. In towns and cities, women’s work in spinning, knitting, weaving, stitching, and lace-​making sustained a widespread, lucrative foreign and domestic trade in textiles; women provided the domestic labor force in thousands of homes and small workshops. The early eighteenth-​ century plebeian women of Europe and America were nothing if not industrious, contemporaries agreed, and their productive value to the family, the community, and the nation was recognized and acknowledged. “When our Woollen Manufactory flourishes,” observed one writer, “the wives and children of small Farmers, Cottagers, and Labouring Men, can earn nearly as much money by spinning at the wheel, as the man can get by his industry in the field.” These workers “not only support themselves but enrich their country at the same time.”7 This image of plebeian women as industrious, productive contributors to the commonwealth suffered numerous assaults after 1750. A  combination of increased unemployment, urbanization, and an intensification of conflict between classes acted to produce in the minds of elites a picture of laboring people as immoral and even criminal. Plebeian women were the object of many of the negative portrayals of the poor drawn by fearful elites. In the countryside, agricultural reformers blamed women for holding up improvements in farming by continuing practices that dated back centuries. Gleaning, the practice of scouring the fields for wheat not cut down by scything, generated much condemnation. “How many days, during the harvest, are lost by the mother of a family and all her children,” demanded one reformer scornfully, unmindful of the necessity that drove them to it, “in wandering about from field to field, to glean what does not repay them the wear and tear of their cloaths in seeking?” Worse, decried another agricultural expert, gleaning encouraged the laborer “to gather his employer’s corn in a careless and slovenly manner” in order to leave a store for women to recover later.8 In cities like London, which were growing at a rapid pace, migrant rural women came to be regarded as responsible for increasing the ranks of thieves, beggars, and prostitutes. The numbers of poor women did not change appreciably over time—​some 86 percent of those classified as poor in 1755 were women, a percentage that had not changed much by 1803—​but attitudes toward them did. Now they were regarded with distrust and suspicion as illegitimate burdens on the state. In virtually every area of women’s employment, from cottage



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industry to domestic service to the earliest factories, the valuation placed on the work women performed dropped dramatically. The middle-​class domestic ideal called for women to stay at home to look after the needs of their husbands and children. These new societal attitudes could not prevent women from working, for necessity was a harsh taskmaster, but they had enormous consequences nonetheless. If the definition of “worker” no longer included women, if “workers” were men, then men could easily displace women in areas of work that were traditionally theirs. Women who had to work to feed themselves and their families found it nigh impossible to command employment that paid a wage sufficient for them to do so. “Women’s work,” by definition, paid poorly and was by its nature intermittent. The negative connotations attached to women’s work also placed enormous pressure on men and women to live up to a standard of exclusively male breadwinning that few working families could afford. The ideology of separate spheres, then, had a powerful, if uneven, impact on the men and women of various ranks. Where it depicted middling and upper-​ranked women as nearly divine in character and elevated them to a level of influence they did not have before, it reduced working women to nearly subhuman status. The picture of the virtuous “angel in the house,” as the middle-​class woman would be called in the nineteenth century, required her mirror image, the degraded, brutish, immoral working woman. William Lecky, in his History of European Morals, published in 1869, recognized that the despised working woman, often depicted as a prostitute, made not just the representation of the pure woman possible, but actually secured her saintliness in very real ways. “Herself the supreme type of vice,” he wrote, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony or remorse and despair. On that degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame.9

The ideology of separate spheres for men and women hardened and became more concrete for upper-​and middle-​class women following the liberal revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Americas and France. The liberal regimes built by those revolutionaries were founded on a constitution that invested the authority to govern in the people, as opposed to the monarch. Their

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philosophy was based on the rule of law, equality before the law, and the recognition of individual civil rights. These liberal regimes had a profound and lasting effect on the Western world; they would ultimately undo the regimes of privilege and absolutism of the ancien regime and ground the political systems of the West in the form of the liberal nation-​state. Liberalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century—​known as classical liberalism—​ differs from our modern understandings of the term, most especially in its relative conservatism. Classical liberalism conferred citizenship and participation in government upon independent property owners. Because married women could not own property under common law, and because unmarried women were considered the dependents of men within the family, citizenship, in liberal formulations, was denied them. It was also denied to those men who did not own property or were dependent upon others, such as servants, laborers, or lodgers. Subsequent movements seeking to enfranchise women and working-​class men claimed that citizenship rested not on possession of property but on the capacity for individuals to reason. Everyone, regardless of social rank—​or, as people like the radical Mary Wollstonecraft would soon assert, of gender—​possessed the ability to reason and everyone, therefore, qualified for direct participation in the political nation. Historians use the term radical to describe these beliefs and the movements they inspired in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in our modern usage, radical tends to pertain to anarchist or communist positions, but in its earlier manifestations it described what we would regard as democratic demands. Revolutionary wars in America and France created a new kind of male ideal in those lands, the citizen-​soldier. Until the late eighteenth century, warfare occupied people of a particular status in society and was fought by mercenaries and those unfortunate enough to fall prey to press gangs. Now, however, in America, France, Haiti, and South America, war became an affair of citizens fighting on behalf of one another in the interests of the people and the nation. The ideals of the warrior mirrored those of the citizen:  the virtuous citizen was also a manly fighter for the nation. Honor, previously bestowed on men of a certain high status, now attached to men of a much lower rank as well. Manliness became identified with service to the nation and the soldier became the model for all men in French and American societies. In Britain, defeat at the hands of the American colonists in 1783 and the threat of French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars compelled contradictory responses. The wars with France provided the patrician



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class that ruled Britain and commanded its armies with an opportunity to redeem itself. Humiliated by upstart citizen militias in America, the men who led the British army found themselves cast as effeminate poseurs who had nothing to contribute to the nation and only undermined its strength. War with France gave them a second chance to present themselves as manly and heroic leaders, and they took it up with a vengeance, contributing to a cult of heroism that surpassed virtually all previous instances in intensity and display. Men such as Lord Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar, set themselves apart from others of their own status, and certainly those of a meaner station, by touting their patriotism, their courage, and their honor—​their manliness. At a time when the “other ranks,” the enlisted and conscripted men described by the Duke of Wellington as “the very scum of the earth,” were regarded as unreliable, uncivilized, and even dangerous, the elite military class presented itself as the protectors of the nation and the progenitors of imperial expansion. Men only slightly lower down on the social scale joined in the celebration of heroics as well, taking up positions in the army and navy in a burst of patriotism and pride. Manliness and military service had become intricately connected with one another. The liberal revolutions drew on Enlightenment thought that extrapolated the ideas of the scientific revolution about the universe to social and political life. Just as the universe could be shown to be governed by laws of nature, philosophers insisted that society and its political expression or government were also governed by laws of nature. It was possible to understand the operations and characteristics of nature through the exercise of reason, natural philosophers asserted. If applied to human relations, reason would reveal that political systems and division of societies along unequal lines were unnatural. Moreover, the use of reason would enable humans to discover natural institutions and relations; once found, people would naturally conform to them and find peace, harmony, and happiness. As Baron de Montesquieu put it, laws should be in relation to the climate of each country, to the quality of its soil, to its situation and extent, to the principal occupation of the natives, whether husbandmen, huntsmen, or shepherds: they should have relation to the degree of liberty which the constitution will bear; to the religion of the inhabitants, to their inclinations, riches, numbers, commerce, manners, and customs. In fine they have relations to each other, as also to their origin, to the intent of the legislator, and to the order of things on which they are established; in all of which different lights they ought to be considered.10

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The notions of natural law—​and its corollary, natural rights—​and reason underpinned the liberal revolutions and justified the armed revolt of people against their tyrannical rulers. These principles proved to be tricky, as they purported to be universal in scope, applying to everyone. Most male revolutionaries did not intend for them to apply to women or to people of color, and the contradiction between the promise and the reality of natural laws and natural rights would exercise people on both sides of the Atlantic for many years. Women played significant roles in both the American and French Revolutions, agitating, protesting, marching, providing succor and aid to soldiers in the field, even fighting themselves. As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, “If our Men are all drawn of[f]‌and we should be attacked, you would find a Race of Amazons in America.”11 Their activities and actions often made the difference between success and failure, as military leaders clearly recognized. The October Days of 1789, when some seven thousand working-​class women marched to the king’s palace at Versailles and brought him, his family, and the National Assembly back to Paris, marked the victory of revolutionaries over their recalcitrant monarch. Women also demanded rights, for under the law of coverture in the American colonies and Roman law in France (which did not encompass all of the kingdom), women had no rights or legal existence apart from their fathers or husbands. A daughter or married woman had no legal rights to her property, her earnings, her freedom of movement, her conscience, her body, or her children; all resided in her father or her husband. Only widows enjoyed these rights, and given the hardships of life in the eighteenth century and the need for all family members to contribute to the family economy, few widows could afford to remain unmarried for long. Abigail Adams famously urged her husband to “remember the ladies” as he and other founders drafted the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Eliza Wilkinson of South Carolina demanded in 1783 that women be acknowledged as citizens in their own right, asserting, “I won’t have it thought that because we are the weaker sex as to bodily strength we are capable of nothing more than domestic concerns. They won’t even allow us liberty of thought, and that is all I want.” In 1779, Judith Sargent Murray penned an essay entitled “On the Equality of the Sexes,” in which she insisted that the “Order of Nature” commanded complete equality between men and women.12 American revolutionaries paid little heed to women’s calls for equal rights, despite the fact that many of the ideas that would be enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution derived from



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In October 1789, French women marched to Versailles during the French Revolution to bring the king and the National Assembly to Paris, where they could be watched by the Parisian populace. Their actions helped to ensure the capitulation of the king. Augustin Challamel, Histoire-​musée de la république Française, depuis l’assemblée des notables (Paris: Delloye, 1842)

their knowledge of the way the Iroquois people did things. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson borrowed a number of schemes from the Iroquois to construct their model for American government, but not those provisions that gave women a formal role in political life. Women did engage in electoral politics, canvassing and campaigning for their preferred candidates alongside men who did not possess sufficient property to vote, activities welcomed and encouraged by politicians. (In New Jersey, propertied women could actually vote in state and federal elections until 1807, but this exception was not duplicated in any other state.) The political upheavals in France initially increased women’s rights and opportunities to participate in the affairs of their nations. In the early years of the French Revolution, legislators seeking to end the arbitrary powers of the monarch—​the father of his subjects—​turned their attention to curbing the corollary power of the father in the family. They changed the marriage laws so that adult children could exercise their freedom to marry whom they wished and could also free themselves from unhappy marriages by means of divorce. They passed legislation

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that allowed illegitimate children to inherit just as legitimate children did and gave daughters equal inheritance rights with sons. Women responded with alacrity, suing to gain property they had been denied in years past. In 1791, Thomas Paine published The Rights of Man, in which he claimed that citizenship rested not on possession of property but on the capacity for individuals to reason. Everyone, regardless of social rank—​ or, as people like Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft would soon assert, of gender—​possessed the ability to reason, and everyone, therefore, qualified for direct participation in the political nation. That same year de Gouges issued her Declaration of the Rights of Woman, urging revolutionaries to recognize that natural law and natural rights pertained to women as they did to men, that men’s subjection of women violated natural law and must end immediately if France was to become a just and virtuous nation. To that end, she insisted, women should be treated just as men were with regard to taxation, criminal punishment, property ownership, and political participation. The next year, Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argued for women’s full admission to the political nation, with all the rights and responsibilities accorded to men, on the grounds that women, no less than men, possessed reason and contributed to public virtue through the rearing of civic-​minded children. She urged that women be educated in the “manly virtues” (just as men, she asserted, should become “chaste and modest”) and learn to become industrious, independent members of society rather than dependent parasites. She envisaged citizen-​women taking to “the field” to “march and counter-​march like soldiers, or wrangle in the senate to keep their faculties from rusting.”13 Political leaders in America and France accepted and celebrated the part women played in revolution, but only within the framework of an ideology historians have come to call “republican motherhood.” As virtuous wives and mothers, women possessed the power to influence their husbands and sons, to educate them in the principles of republicanism and good government. But they should not, within this formulation, act politically as autonomous agents. Some women ignored this restriction and spoke out vociferously on political matters. They did not seek to vote or to hold office necessarily, but their actions nevertheless provoked a backlash. The assertions of women’s rights to equality, liberty, and formal political participation set off alarm bells among a significant portion of the male political class.



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In France legislators began to pass laws that removed women from the public sphere of politics: they banned women’s clubs and forbade them from membership in men’s clubs; they prohibited women from attending public meetings; and they barred them from gathering in groups. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 went further to implement a society based on separate spheres for men and women, establishing laws that reinstituted the patriarchal nature of the family. Women lost the legal personhood and the rights that they had gained just a dozen years earlier:  they could not sue or be sued; they could not testify in court; they could not control their property. In short, they were shunted back into the private sphere of home and family, where their duties consisted of maintaining domestic peace and tranquility. In the United States, just as states were in the process of enfranchising more and more white men, they began to explicitly outlaw women from voting. The radical politics of the American and French Revolutions, the development of free trade practices in commerce and industry, the factory system and a new division of labor, the creation of class society—​all of the elements and characteristics we identify with the rise of liberalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries acted to destabilize and ultimately overthrow the old order of landed elites. In the course of all this upheaval, a new gender order was established too, for liberalism carried with it the promise and the threat of equality between men and women. For many people, however, such a prospect could not be tolerated. “Reason is mature,” wrote one French commentator in 1794, “it is serious, it is austere, and these qualities cannot be associated with a young woman.”14 The potential contradiction between, on the one hand, a liberal ideology that had legitimated the dismantling of aristocratic power and authority and the enfranchisement of middle-​ class and later working-​class men and, on the other, the denial of the claims of women to full citizenship was resolved by appeals to biological and characterological differences between the sexes. Doctors, scientists, clergymen, and politicians began to establish definitions of femininity whose qualities were the exact opposite of those that had warranted widespread male participation in the public sphere. Men possessed the capacity for reason, action, aggression, independence, and self-​interest. Women inhabited a separate, private sphere, one suitable for the so-​called inherent qualities of femininity:  emotion, passivity, submission, dependence, and selflessness, all derived, doctors and politicians claimed insistently, from women’s sexual and reproductive organization.

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Upon the female as a biological entity, a sexed body, nineteenth-​ century theorists imposed a socially and culturally constructed femininity, a gender identity derived from ideas about what roles were appropriate for women. This collapsing of sex and gender—​of the physiological body with the social creation—​made it possible for women to be construed as at once sexually pure and purely sexual. These definitions excluded women from participation in the public sphere and rendered them subordinate to men in the private sphere as well. As Jacques-​Louis Moreau put it in his Natural History of the Woman in 1803, “If it is correct to state that the male is only male at certain moments, but that the female is female all her life, it is principally to this [uterine] influence that this must be attributed; it is this influence that continually recalls woman to her sex and gives all of her conditions such a pronounced physiognomy.”15 Nineteenth-​century physicians and scientists made women out to be, anatomically and physiologically, entirely unlike men. They were now not merely lesser men, weaker vessels—​beings holding a lower place on a hierarchical scale; they were utterly different beings, almost a different species entirely. Where once women and men possessed similar sexual organs, for example—​testes and ovaries sharing a single name and function—​now those organs did and were called different things. Women’s organs that had not earlier had a name—​the vagina, for example—​now were given one. Representations of skeletons and nervous systems took on “male” and “female” characteristics. Sexual pleasure for women no longer played a necessary role in conception as it did for men.16 All this happened not because scientists and physicians had gained better, more accurate understandings of the human body. On the contrary, they did not know a whole lot more than their earlier brethren, and they discounted much of what the ancients had known. What had changed was society itself, earth shatteringly so in the minds of many, and it seems that the revolutionary remaking of society compelled the remaking of the female body. Revolutionary fervor extended beyond the borders of Europe. In August 1791, the enslaved population of Saint Domingue (modern-​day Haiti) revolted. The National Convention in Paris formally acknowledged the legitimacy of the slave revolution and in 1793 offered freedom to any slave who would join the French armies fighting Britain and Spain. Between 1798 and 1801, under the leadership of a former slave, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Saint Domingue succeeded in ridding the island of British and Spanish troops and of hostile French planters. Victorious,



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L’Ouverture wrote a constitution abolishing slavery and he set himself up as governor for life. In January 1804, the general who had led the Saint Domingue army of ex-​slaves, Jean-​Jacques Dessalines, declared the independent, sovereign state of Haiti. The experience of nearly continuous warfare throughout the 1790s and into the 1800s, along with the constant threat of invasion by European powers, resulted in an emphasis on militarism as the mark of Haitian masculinity. The figure of the black general became a national icon; that of the rebel slave morphed into the citizen soldier defending the nation against those enemies who would re-​enslave the Haitian people. Women had no place in this kind of iconography except as the object of protection by warriors. The first constitution excluded women from voting or holding office, and it explicitly established the new country as a model of patriarchy. “No one is worthy of being a Haitian,” asserted Article Nine, “if he is not a good father, a good son, a good husband, and above all a good soldier.”17 The Haitian Revolution marked the first statewide emancipation of enslaved peoples of the modern era. In the early nineteenth century, the revolt of a number of South American colonies against Spain similarly offered enslaved men the opportunity to join armies in exchange for their freedom. As in Haiti, the new republics placed a premium on the military male, as the revolutionaries styled themselves as manly, virile fighters for independence from an enfeebled, effeminate Spain. Despite the fact that many women, enslaved and free, fought against the Spanish, the revolutions were described as male affairs, and the new constitutions that granted South American men independence and political rights explicitly barred women from enjoying them. As in the United States, France, and Haiti, South American republics envisaged themselves as patriarchal republics modeled on Rome. In 1807, Britain outlawed the trans-​Atlantic slave trade, and then, in 1833, the institution of slavery itself. These actions resulted from a decades-​long campaign carried out by evangelical Christians and humanitarians. Women played a crucial role in the abolition fight, as they urged Americans and Britons to consider the suffering and inhumane conditions imposed on enslaved peoples by their fellow countrymen and countrywomen. The moral basis of antislavery appeals—​sympathy for others, pity, compassion, the so-​called feminine qualities associated with sensibility—​dovetailed nicely with the traits purportedly possessed by women.18 Britons found slavery incompatible

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with their sense of rightness, their sense of themselves. To be “British” in the first half of the nineteenth century entailed holding an abolitionist position, whether for political, economic, or sentimental reasons, as much as it involved embracing liberalism and the concept of separate spheres for men and women. For British women, antislavery sentiments dovetailed precisely with their purported greater sensitivity to cruelties and injustices, their greater morality and higher spiritual natures. For British men, devotion to Christian precepts as much as to liberal principles of justice and legal equality meant that no respectable middle-​ class male could turn a blind eye to the brutalities of slavery. Notions of manliness contained a strong element of abolitionism, of ending the oppression of African men, women, and children at the hands of British planters and overlords.19

Abolitionist literature of the 1780s often featured an enslaved man in chains. The slogan “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” was meant to appeal to the notions of universal rights during the age of revolution. Library of Congress, 2008661312



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Evangelicals and liberals understood enslaved people to be part of the human family of man. The model of a universal human family enabled abolitionists to think in terms of equality before God and to see slavery as an abomination, but this imagined family structure closely resembled that of British families, in which a father ruled over his dependent wife and children. Within it, enslaved males occupied the position of children who would have to be guided and educated into manhood, which could not be attained until they enjoyed property in themselves and thus independence. Enslaved women required schooling in the ways of separate spheres ideology; they would have to learn to depend on, serve, and be subservient to their husbands and fathers.20 As an article in a Cape Town, South African newspaper put it, “Freedom . . . offers something in addition to personal enjoyments. The Freeman become the Head of a Family. . . . The Father, however poor, however overlooked or despised by the world, is now an object, in one place at least, not only of love but reverence. There is now a circle where, if he chooses, he may reign as King.”21 Emancipation in the British colonies served the purposes of empire, as did that in the French colonies, where the revolutions of 1848 brought about immediate abolition of slavery. The early supporters of women’s rights frequently characterized women’s position in society as analogous to slavery; many of them, in fact, like the Americans Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B.  Anthony, had come to their feminist positions after having served at length in the antislavery campaign. Without the means to become financially independent of men, women would forever be locked into the same situation of vulnerability to abuse from men as enslaved Africans experienced at the hands of their masters. The marriage contract, in particular, buttressed by the legal systems of Europe and America, gave husbands complete possession of their wives’ bodies. Throughout the nineteenth century women and their male allies challenged the legal, political, and social limitations placed on women, seeking property rights, education and employment opportunities, and the right to divorce, insisting that rather than protecting women in the domestic sphere of home and family, these legal disabilities exposed them to the brutalities of the world at large. The most radical challenge of the women’s movement to patriarchal control consisted of demands for enfranchisement on the same lines as men. The campaign for the vote was designed to eliminate the notions of separate spheres and “natural” differences between the sexes insisted on by domestic ideology. In the United States, a convention of women held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 passed unanimously

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The delegates to the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 included both men and women. The Role of Honor listed those who endorsed the “Declaration of Sentiments” calling for women’s equality with men. Library of Congress, scrp4006701

all of the resolutions calling for property rights, guardianship of children, inheritance rights, and the like. The clause demanding women’s suffrage, on the other hand, barely achieved a majority of votes. Soon, however, votes for women became the mainstay of the American feminist movement, as a resolution passed at an 1856 national convention noted: “Resolved, that the main power of the woman’s rights movement lies in this: that while always demanding for woman better education, better employment, and better laws, it has kept steadily in view the one cardinal demand for the right of suffrage: in a democracy, the symbol and guarantee of all other rights.” Former teacher and temperance advocate Susan B. Anthony joined with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an ardent antislavery activist, to spearhead the movement for women’s suffrage that began after the Seneca Falls convention and lasted for more than sixty years. A  few French women led by the utopian socialist Jeanne Déroin, a feminist journalist who was jailed for her opinions, demanded the vote in 1848 from the newly established provisional government; its demise at the hands of Louis Napoleon cut short the question of women’s suffrage as well. The women’s suffrage campaign in Britain began in 1866 when the election of John Stuart Mill to Parliament made it possible to introduce legislation enfranchising women. The economic and political revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced the material and cultural resources with which the West established itself as a dominant player in the world at large. Convinced of their moral superiority, exemplified especially by their gender order of separate spheres and their treatment of women, and armed with the economic and technological means necessary, the previously insignificant countries of Europe and the United States emerged ready, willing, and able to take on the rest of the world. Over the next seventy-​five years, Europeans would bring their notions of a proper gender order to lands far beyond their shores and assess the qualities of peoples there on the basis of how far they accorded with Western ideas about masculinity and femininity.

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Chapter 6

Gender in the Age of Empires, 1815–​1914

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n February 11, 1892, Major Fukushima Yasumasa left his office at the Japanese embassy in Berlin, mounted his horse, and set out on a sixteen-​month journey across Eurasia. He intended his trip to be a reconnaissance mission that would provide Japan with the intelligence necessary to counter the threat of Western expansion into areas Japan considered its sphere of influence. “In my most humble opinion,” Fukushima wrote home to his superiors in January 1891, “the greatest threat and imminent danger is Russia. We must obtain all of the information that we can pertaining to Russia’s eastward expansion plans as quickly as possible.”1 He rode through Germany and Poland and into Russia, crossing the Ural Mountains into Asia on an 8,700-​ mile journey on horseback. He was particularly eager to see for himself the progress Russia had made on the Trans-​Siberian Railroad, whose construction had begun in Vladivostock in April 1891. Strong spring storms hampered his travel and frightened his horse. When he reached the Urals, hot summer temperatures and biting insects, along with the depredations of bandits and thieves, compelled Fukushima to travel at night. Howling wolves alarmed both horse and rider and made the nighttime riding a daunting experience. In Siberia, he encountered whole villages ravaged by cholera; their inhabitants would not or could not offer him hospitality. He struggled through swampland that threatened to entrap his horse. In September, Fukushima reached the Altai Mountains on the border of Russia and China and faced extreme cold as he ascended along the steep rocky pathways. Food was scarce. Snow fell on September 22, rendering the trail icy and treacherous as he descended the mountain into Outer Mongolia. By December he reached Lake Baikal, riding through deep snowfields in extreme cold. The worst months of the Siberian winter lay ahead, with temperatures falling to fifty degrees below zero. In February, the baying of a wolf spooked his horse; Fukushima, only half into his saddle at the time, was dragged along the ground by his mount. He struck his head on a large block of ice and fell unconscious with a gaping wound.

After a number of days in bed, Fukushima recovered, and he entered Manchuria on March 20, 1893. A week later, traveling through grassy plains, he and his horse got caught up in the black smoke and flames of a brush fire caused by spontaneous combustion. In April he contracted what could have been malaria and lay unconscious for ten days. While he recuperated, the seasons turned, bringing spring rains and impassable muddy roads. Through May and June he rode through China, Korea, and back into Russia, reaching Vladivostok on June 12. Fukushima arrived back in Japan at the end of June 1893. His adventures and tales of derring-​do on the Asian continent, widely covered in the press, made him a national hero at a time when Japanese statesmen had come to be seen as effeminate imitators of Western values, colonized betrayers of a manly Japan. “In one fell swoop,” wrote an Osakan newspaper, “this stalwart fellow of five lands and two seas has astonished us all and elevated the good name of Japanese men. What’s more, he has made our nation’s pride shine among the Great Powers.”2 Young men hankering to prove their manliness flocked to what was fast becoming Japan’s imperial frontier on the Asian continent, seeking to emulate their country’s new military hero. During the second half of the nineteenth century, and especially after 1870, the industrialized countries of Japan and the West embarked on an intensive program of imperial expansion. Justifications for the taking and administering of lands and people rested upon notions of fundamental difference among those doing the imperializing and those being colonized. Gender stood at the heart of these ideas of difference, serving both to represent the character and identities of colonizers and colonized and to legitimize actions taken by imperialists on behalf of and against “their” subjects. Justifications for empire moved from the mission to educate lesser peoples in the ways of civilization and self-​government in the first half of the nineteenth century to assertions that Asian and African peoples were inherently incapable of exercising the self-​control necessary for governing themselves in the second half. In the process of that transition, colonized and nonwhite peoples became increasingly depicted as feminine. Representations of empire took on the image of masterly, manly Europeans, Americans, and then Japanese exercising control over irrational, impulsive, weak-​willed, effeminate peoples. These ideas derived from Enlightenment thought, which posited that although there may once have been a common origin for and unity of humankind, differences of climate and geography had intervened to create a variety of separate peoples who looked different; spoke different languages; had different histories; and enjoyed different cultural,

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social, legal, and political practices. As philosopher Adam Ferguson claimed in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society: The burning ardours, and the torturing jealousies, of the seraglio and the haram, which have reigned so long in Asia and Africa, and which, in the Southern parts of Europe, have scarcely given way to the differences of religion and civil establishments, are found, however, with an abatement of heat in the climate, to be more easily changed, in one latitude, into a temporary passion which ingrosses the mind, without enfeebling it, and which excites to romantic achievements: by a farther progress to the North, it is changed into a spirit of gallantry, which employs the wit and the fancy more than the heart; which prefers intrigue to enjoyment; and substitutes affectation and vanity, where sentiment and desire have failed. As it departs from the sun, the same passion is further composed in a habit of domestic connection or frozen into a state of insensibility, under which the sexes at freedom scarcely chuse to unite their society.3

These theories asserted that racial differences and the status of women in different societies, in particular, corresponded to habitation in one of three climatic zones: torrid, temperate, and frigid. The levels of “civilization” these zones determined were intimately associated with sexuality. Hot climates—​those found in the torrid zones immediately adjacent to the equator—​stimulated inordinate sexual desire and behavior; the populations residing there displayed few inhibitions and in fact indulged in riotous sexual activity on a regular basis. As one moved further away from the equator, toward Europe, say, in the temperate zone, the degree of sexual passion exhibited by populations diminished, or at least was much more readily controlled. Further north, in the frigid zone, men and women were so indifferent to passion as to practically ignore each other. These various regimes of sexual desire and activity correlated with the extent to which societies participating in them had developed their social, economic, and political systems. Civilization and political liberty scarcely existed, according to many Enlightenment thinkers, in the hot climates of the torrid zone, where heat and uninhibited sexual activity sapped the energies of individuals and rendered them lethargic and compliant. In the more temperate zones of Europe, climate and sexual restraint enabled the development of societies that enjoyed the energy, productivity, and discipline necessary to produce political liberty and civic virtue. The “backward” societies of Africa, populated by indolent, slavish, lascivious men and women, provided a vivid contrast of the differential effects of climate and geography on progress and civilization. As philosopher John Millar argued in 1771 in his Origin of the Distinction



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of Ranks, African and Asian societies “entertain very gross ideas concerning those female virtues which, in a polished nation, are supposed to constitute the honour and dignity of the sex.”4 Climatic theories assumed that all human beings shared a common origin, that they were similar to one another in their capabilities, and that education could raise inferior peoples up to a level of civilization that would justify their freedom and even self-​government. Such notions undergirded the abolitionist movement in Europe and the United States and informed Britons’ claims that their presence in India was part of a mission to bring “civilization” and self-​government to that ancient land. In the second half of the nineteenth century, under the impact of Social Darwinism, harsher and more rigid ideas about race challenged and overcame such a liberal view. Social Darwinists applied Charles Darwin’s ideas about the survival of the fittest—​describing how animals evolved—​to human society. During the late 1850s and 1860s, such Social Darwinists began to describe racial and ethnic differences in absolute, biological terms, so that people of non-​European backgrounds were construed as utterly different from their European or Japanese overlords—​indeed, unable ever to become like them. The outbreak of the Indian Rebellion in 1857 helped to usher in this profound change in attitudes about racial difference from a liberal view to far more conservative assertions of the irremediable, biological nature of racial differences and inequalities. The rebellion broke out in May 1857, when Indian soldiers of the Bengal army—​called sepoys—​ rose up against their British officers. The rebellion spread across much of northern India, attracting alienated groups from all parts of society. For more than a year, Hindus and Muslims, merchants and landowners, princes and peasants fought against and in many cases defeated local British authorities, until it seemed that they might be able to oust the British altogether. They did not, but it took at least fourteen months before the army that had remained loyal to Britain, made up predominately of the “manly” warrior “race” of Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, and Nepalese Gurkhas, was able to re-​establish control in large parts of Oudh and the Punjab and to reassert their authority over the subcontinent as a whole. The British admired the Indians they considered especially martial; they attributed to them a manliness that other South Asians, especially Bengali Hindus, lacked. The effeminacy of Bengali men, in the thinking of eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century theorists, entailed a sexual appetite and debauchery of enormous proportions. Savagery had for centuries connoted a promiscuous sexuality that reduced indigenous peoples to the level of the

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primitive; Europeans used these sexualized images to justify European intervention to tame and discipline the unruly impulses of these subhuman creatures. Throughout the rebellion and long after, tales of the most horrible atrocities committed by Indian men against British women circulated throughout India and the home country. Though these stories could not be verified and in fact were later debunked by British officials, accounts of rape, torture, mutilation, and murder of “our countrywomen” continued to circulate as truth. They electrified the British public, searing the British imagination with pictures of scalped and dismembered white women, infants cut from their mothers’ wombs, children burned alive, and women crucified. In private letters home, newspapers in Bombay and London, histories of the mutiny, and subsequent novels right up through the 1960s and 1970s, the rape of English women served as the indelible sign of Indian savagery. Colonial insurrection, rebellion against imperial rule, took on the dimensions not of a political act carried out by oppressed people seeking to overthrow foreign domination but of a sexual crime committed against an English woman, indeed against all of British womanhood.

Indian Sepoys besiege the town of Cawnpore during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. British accounts of the rebellion turned what many saw as a war for independence into an assault on white women by “savage” and “bloodthirsty” Indian men. Charles Ball, Massacre in the Boats off Cawnpore, British Library, W 4162, opposite 336



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In story after story, British women and girls were stripped of their clothes, sexually molested, and thrown to the masses for further abuse. One clergyman claimed in a letter to The Times that he witnessed Indians taking 48 females, most of them girls of from 10 to 14, many delicately nurtured ladies,—​violated them and kept for the base purposes of the heads of the insurrection for a whole week. At the end of that time they made them strip themselves, and gave them up to the lowest of the people to abuse in broad daylight in the street of Delhi. They then commenced the work of torturing them to death, cutting off their breasts, fingers, and noses, and leaving them to die. One lady was three days dying.5

Certainly British women and children, as well as British men, died at the hands of the rebels. But they died, most of them, from shots fired in battle or from diseases they contracted during long sieges of their towns and stations, where lack of clean water, food, and medical supplies made them susceptible to cholera and dysentery. Such deaths, however, could not readily be mobilized to justify a ferocious British response to the revolt, in which British soldiers retaliated against the rebels by executing whole villages, burning civilians and soldiers alive, and tying Indians to the mouths of cannon that were then fired. The outrages committed by British soldiers against Indian soldiers and civilians were reported at the time and in later nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century historical accounts to have been the consequence of uncontrollable fury provoked by the rape and torture of British women and children by the Indians. “Remember the Ladies! Remember the Babies!” they were reported as crying as they rode into battle seeking revenge from men who had degraded their women and desecrated their homes.6 Most Indian men and men of color generally came, as a consequence of the rebellion, to be regarded as defilers of innocent British women, until the image of the rape and mutilation of white women by black men came to stand not merely for the mutiny itself but for the whole relationship of Britain to its colonial subjects. Britons, having responded with fury at the outrages committed against their women, as the new imperial narrative had it, would see their mission as one of protecting innocent, chaste white women from black men and saving black women from black men as well. A  new model of British manliness began to emerge from the events and accounts surrounding the Indian Rebellion. No longer exclusively the man of reason, but also a man of action, passion, and romance, the postmutiny prototype of English manliness

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possessed a love of justice; he was slow to anger but capable when provoked of meting out a terrible, violent retribution against his foes. A man of body more than of mind now, he nevertheless continued to demonstrate his capacity to reason, one of the most important elements in distinguishing this newly aggressive Briton from the “manly” warrior tribes like the Sikhs. With the infusion of “scientific” arguments about racial superiority and inferiority drawn from the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, the story of imperialism changed from one of liberal gentlemen bringing free trade, civilization, and the tools of self-​government to childlike, feminized peoples of lesser development to that of an aggressive, powerful, authoritarian, racially superior European nation conquering savage, sexualized, and feminized lands and establishing order over subhuman, animal-​like savages of a biologically inferior breed. These new ideas took on particular prominence in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when Europeans conquered and carved up the continent of Africa. In many ways, theories about imperial manliness highlighted anxieties about its absence at home in Europe at the turn of the century. The French defeat at the hands of Germany in 1870, for example, had introduced all kinds of questions about the fighting qualities, the very manliness, of the French people. Moreover, dramatic depopulation instilled fears that the country would not be able to defend itself against an increasingly bellicose Germany. Anxieties about a society gone soft plagued Britain as well. Although its population had grown dramatically in the late nineteenth century, it was dwarfed by those of the United States and Germany, and its birth rate had slowed considerably. Fears of population decline joined concerns about the quality of the British population, especially in light of a growing awareness of the depth and degree of poverty and of the high levels of infant mortality that existed throughout the country. The conditions of city life, many believed, enervated formerly healthy specimens, demoralizing them and causing physical deterioration. The solution lay in gathering up the remaining “unoccupied” territories of the world and peopling them with Britons. It was through acquisition, possession, and rule of colonies overseas that Britain’s health would be maintained. Imperialists saw in competition with the other European powers, the United States, and Japan the means by which to create a robust society of virile men and proper, moral women. As former British prime minister Lord Rosebery put it in a letter to The Times in 1900, “an empire such as ours requires as its first condition an Imperial Race—​a race vigorous and industrious and intrepid. Health of mind and body exalt a nation in the competition



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of the universe. The survival of the fittest is an absolute truth in the conditions of the modern world.”7 For other Europeans, conflict offered the most effective means of strengthening the citizens of a nation. In the eyes of many who embraced Darwin’s notions of the survival of the fittest, war constituted a positive good, an arena in which men could be hardened and those who were unfit could be selected out and prevented from procreating, and thus passing on inferior or degenerate traits to a subsequent generation. Through war, the “effeminate” could be weeded out, the manly preserved. “The stimulus of a great patriotic excitement,” wrote one apologist for war and empire, “the determination to endure burdens and make sacrifices, the self-​abnegation which will face loss, and suffering, and even death, for the commonweal, are bracing tonics to national health, and they counteract the enervating effects of ‘too much love of living,’ too much ease, and luxury, and material prosperity. . . . Strength is not maintained without exercise.”8 Africa, and especially African women, had long exemplified for Europeans ideas of difference, strangeness, diversity, and disorder. The earliest European travel writings about Africa drew upon notions of gender and sexuality to convey the sense of outlandishness that European explorers experienced as they came in contact with African societies for the first time in the fifteenth century. Many precolonial African cosmologies relied on a model of gender relations that was dualistic in nature. That is, unlike in Western theories of origin and social order, women were not perceived to be defective or deficient men. Certainly they were regarded as lacking in certain male characteristics, but men, similarly, were understood to be lacking in certain female aspects; this situation made it necessary to combine male with female elements to ensure that the world worked as it was designed to. Within a cosmology gendered in this way, conceptions of law and authority might very well require the fusion of male and female power. Among the Yaka of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, and the Yoruba of present-​day Nigeria, kingship rituals involved a chief enacting a birth, an event that connected him with the fertility of women. The power of reproduction undergirded the political authority of the chief; indeed, his distinction from and superior position in relation to his subjects depended on the fact that he possessed both masculine virility and feminine fecundity. The Luba of the Congo Basin believed that the spirits of their kings resided in the body of a female spirit medium; only a woman, they judged, possessed a body “strong enough” to contain a royal spirit. They invested their new kings with

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the authority to rule by seating them on a stool held up by the figure of a woman, whose presence, they hoped, would attract the spirits of the dead and ensure peace and well-​being. Among the Moundang people of what is now called Chad, the king was female as well as male.9 The presence of women chiefs in many sub-​Saharan African societies was not an anomaly, as it was in the West; rather, these women legitimately exercised power in their own right, responsible for promoting their sons’ interests as kings, protecting them from their enemies, and looking after the interests of the state by checking, when necessary, what might be their sons’ abusive exercise of power. The nature of queenly power was often lost to late nineteenth-​century European colonial officials whose Western preconceptions about gender and power caused them to regard female chiefs as exotic, freakish, even witchlike; prevented them from grasping local situations; and ultimately impeded their ability to control their colonial subjects. Among the Asante of western Africa, for instance, one ahemaa, or female ruler, Yaa Akyaa, exercised her considerable powers as queen mother to resist British efforts to gain control over her people after the formal establishment of the Gold Coast colony. So successful was she that the British finally felt compelled in 1896 to remove her and her son, Prempe I, to Sierra Leone, where she died in 1917. These instances of perceived gender reversals confirmed Europeans in their thinking about racial difference. Eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​ century writers sought to categorize human beings on an evolutionary scale that placed Europeans at the pinnacle and Africans at the bottom. In this representation of humankind, Africans delineated the place where humans and animals merged.10 Africa, in the minds of the British, came to signify unalterable, fundamental difference from European social and gender roles, European morals, mores, customs, values, and traditions, difference usually expressed by means of a promiscuous sexuality attributed to Africans, and especially to African women, by writers and explorers. One English observer embedded his description of African sexual practices within a long list of qualities believed to be the antithesis of the manly English gentleman and the proper English lady:  the African was “proud, lazy, treacherous, thievish, hot and addicted to all kinds of lusts, and most ready to promote them in others, as pimps, panders, incestuous, brutish, and savage, cruel and revengeful, devourers of human flesh, and quaffers of human blood, inconstant, base, treacherous, and cowardly,” noted an entry in The Universal History (1760); one could no more “be an African and not lascivious” than to “be born in Africa and not be an



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African.”11 So overwhelming was the sexuality of African women in the minds of British men that it exceeded all bounds. “If they meet with a [white] Man,” traveler William Smith averred in a 1745 account of his experiences in Guinea, “they immediately strip his lower Parts and throw themselves upon him.”12 The conflation of primitive savagery and sexuality appeared early on in the stories about Amazons who inhabited West Africa, and Europeans used those stories to justify violence against those who resisted British and French efforts to expand their control of the area. Tales of “scantily attired” tattooed female soldiers in Dahomey brought home to Britain by adventurers and government officials excited the colonial imagination about Africa and African women. Ever since the late seventeenth century, armed, uniformed, disciplined women had served as palace guards to the king of Dahomey. By the time Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, they had taken on the functions of warriors. Their size, strength, and demeanor led Europeans to dub them “Amazons,” after the ancient Greek stories of savage women warriors. The gender and sexual disorder exemplified by Amazon women could be readily adduced by their “masculine physiques” and unwomanly traits. “Such  .  .  .  was the size of the female skeleton, and the muscular development of the frame,” observed explorer Richard Burton in 1863, “that in many cases femineity [sic] could be detected only by the bosom.”13 Europeans regarded Amazons as superior to male soldiers in discipline, skill, loyalty, effectiveness, and ruthlessness. By the late nineteenth century, stories circulated widely in Britain of Amazons who engaged in horrific hand-​to-​hand combat using sharpened fingernails and razors to kill, mutilate, and then eat their foes, and of women who brought back the scalps, genitals, and internal organs of their fallen enemies to display as trophies. As Burton’s widow claimed, Amazons were “crueler and fiercer than men,” creatures who tortured their prisoners and cut open the bellies of pregnant women.14 Their martial prowess introduced complexity and contradiction into the notion of manly, martial races. Dahomean women trained hard and often; in 1861, a French missionary watched one of their training exercises. “At a given signal,” he wrote, “they throw themselves with indescribable fury upon the bank of thorns, cross it, leap upon the thorny house, retire from it as if driven back, and return three times to the charge—​all this with such rapidity that the eye can scarcely follow them. They clamber over the thorny obstacles as lightly as a dancer vaults upon a floor, and that though their naked feet are pierced in all directions with

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Seh-​Dong-​Hong-​Beh was the leader of the Amazon troops of Dahomey in 1851. Women warriors fought fiercely on behalf of the Dahomean kings; descriptions of them by European travelers cemented their image as bloodthirsty savages in the minds of the British public. Frederick E. Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomans: being the journals of two missions to the king of Dahomey, and residence in his capital, in the year 1849 and 1850 (London, 1851), vol. 1, facing 23. Library of Congress, 05014405

the sharp thorns of the cactus.” Their training stood them in good stead on the actual battlefield. British Commander Frederick Forbes, who was in West Africa as part of an antislavery naval squadron, watched an attack by Dahomean forces on the city of Atakpame in 1840. Most of the inhabitants fled, but some four hundred defenders of the city fought back tenaciously, “kept the Dahomeans in check, killed many, [and] put the males to the rout.” It was the Dahomean women who determined the outcome, Forbes noted. “Had it not been for a rally of the amazons, [the defenders] would have discomfited the Dahomean army.”15 During the French war against Dahomey in 1892, the women warriors, who made up about one-​third of the army, fought courageously and tenaciously, harassing French troops as they made their way into the hinterland. The French reported the women’s exploits in fulsomely positive terms, impressed by their willingness to attack and attack again the dug-​in French forces. Ultimately, the Europeans prevailed, deeply cutting into the women’s numbers, eventually compelling them to retreat, and establishing French rule in the colony. We generally think of imperialism as a Western phenomenon, but in Asia, Japan proved the equal of the European and American colonial powers. In 1853, as part of its program of expansion that would ultimately become a full-​blown imperial enterprise by the end of the century, the United States sent a fleet under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry to “open” Japanese ports to trade with the Western powers. The inability of the Tokugawa shogunate to prevent the intrusion, and its willingness to sign what many regarded as a humiliating treaty with the United States, led to its downfall at the hands of disgruntled samurai warriors and the establishment of imperial court rule in 1868. The Meiji restoration, as it was called, disrupted the Japanese social, economic, and political order as reformers sought to transform the country from a feudal society into a liberal capitalist one. Government officials believed that their best route to preserving Japanese power lay in imitating the West, in adopting the technologies, values, and lifestyles of Europeans and Americans. Japanese gentlemen took to wearing the costume of Western men, including the high-​collared shirts that became a caricature of Westernization. “High collar” gentlemen garnered derision and scorn from those, mainly samurai, who saw in such mimicry the mark of effeminacy. These critics adopted an oppositional style of dress and conduct, fashioning themselves as tough, primitive, foul-​ mouthed “barbarians.” One university student spoke for many, many others when he decried his fellow students’ desire to emulate the West. “I feel they have become too civilized,” he complained. “They have lost

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their interest in barbarism, and their tastes have become like those of schoolgirls.”16 For many people in Japan, imperialism offered the antidote to what was perceived to be a debasing of the warrior tradition exemplified by the samurai. The exploits of Major Fukushima during his arduous trip across Eurasia provided a welcome contrast to the inauthentic actions of the “high collar” men of the Meiji restoration and inspired a large cohort of would-​be adventurers. Paradoxically, as the country modernized over the next decades and began to take colonies in Asia, the Japanese increasingly incorporated a vision of masculinity that resembled that of Western Europe and the United States. In the military, for instance, speech patterns borrowed from the German army took hold, as officers gave commands in short, sharp, guttural utterances. Western-​ style physical training replaced earlier Japanese methods based on samurai traditions; officers began to sport haircuts and facial hair like those of Europeans. Most significantly, the Japanese began to contrast themselves to their Asian subjects, peoples they identified as weak and inferior, by casting the Chinese, for instance, as pig-​tailed, effeminate, ridiculous creatures and themselves as manly guides who would show the way to recovering their self-​respect. As a top government official said of Korea, the Japanese had an obligation to uplift that benighted nation. “A poor, effeminate people, with no political instinct, with no economic ‘gumption,’ with no intellectual ambition, is become the Brown Japanese Man’s burden,” wrote Nitobe Inazō, a politician and diplomat who served as the administrator of Taiwan in the early twentieth century, recalling Rudyard Kipling’s concept of the “White Man’s Burden.” “Something must be done to resurrect a dead nation.”17 Concepts of and notions about gender were not consistent. At the same time that government officials promoted an imperial masculinity as the means by which Japan could hold itself up against the West, they looked to women to play a central role in the colonization of Okinawa, Taiwan, Korea, and, later, Manchuria. The role of women in the Japanese empire was markedly different from that of women in most European settler colonies. While men made up the overwhelming majority of settlers in European colonies for decades, if not longer, there were roughly equal numbers of Japanese men and women in the colonies in Korea and Manchuria. Japanese officials viewed empire as “women’s business” because they believed women were better suited to the key tasks of colonization, including learning foreign languages and setting up shops and offices. Large numbers of middle-​class women



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In 1900, Major General Yasumasa Fukushima (holding binoculars) led Japanese troops in an invasion of China. Japanese imperial incursions into China and Korea helped to rehabilitate a masculinity that many contemporaries felt had been under assault when Japan became susceptible to Western influences following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Ironically, in this painting Fukushima wears a Western-​style uniform and is consulting with a British army officer. Ishimatsu Nakajima, The Japanese Army under Major General Fukushima Advancing with the Allied Armies toward Tʻien-​chin, China, Library of Congress, 2009631625

became business owners and managers and held positions of authority within the local administration of the colonies—​in contrast to the more conservative gender roles they performed in Japan itself. Such liberal advances for women raised concerns among certain colonial officials at home, leading to the extension of the ideology of “good wives, wise mothers” to Korea. In 1912, for instance, the Girls’ Public Higher School Ordinance of Korea declared that attention should be put on the following matters. 1) It should have students cultivate the virtues of modesty and thrift, and keep gentleness in languages and behaviors. 2) It should have students acquire a lot of knowledge and practical skills. Attention should be made so that they would not become unfaithful to family matters, and in particular, learn things necessary for becoming good housewives. 3) Students should be educated to cultivate virtues as well as knowledge.18

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Other women were indentured sex workers—​“comfort women,” they were called—​or madams or traffickers in the sex trade. Colonial officials rounded up Japanese garayukisang—​prostitutes—​for the purpose of providing sexual services to colonial officials in nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century Korea. In 1932, government policy changed; imperial and military leaders would turn to colonized women in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria to address the sexual needs of soldiers. The practice, which lasted until the end of World War II in 1945, would devastate whole populations of subject women. Efforts to control the gender roles and sexual behavior of subject peoples marked imperialism everywhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an agenda that spoke at least as much to anxieties about the character and behavior of the colonizers as it did to those of the colonized. The United States was no exception in this regard, as the government sought to change the behaviors and mores of native peoples as it took their lands and placed them on reservations. The story of a Crow boté (the Crow word for berdache, or two-​spirit person) by the name of Osh-​Tisch, or Finds Them and Kills Them, exemplifies the crucial role played by gender and sexuality in imperialism. Osh-​Tisch, born a male in 1854, regarded herself as female from birth. She “inclined to be a woman, never a man,” she told Hugh Scott, a member of the Board of Indian Commissioners. “I have done it ever since I  can remember because I wanted to do it.” Botés were not unusual among the Crow, according to Pretty Shield, a Crow woman who was interviewed by a journalist in the late 1920s, and Osh-​Tisch “was neither a man nor a woman. She looked like a man, and yet she wore woman’s clothing; and she had the heart of a woman. Besides, she did a woman’s work. . . . She was not a man, and yet not a woman. She was not as strong as a man, and yet she was wiser than a woman.”19 Osh-​Tisch enjoyed a reputation as an “in-​between person,” an intermediary between spiritual forces, a power she received in a dream. In 1876, just a week before the Battle of Little Big Horn, Osh-​Tisch and 175 other Crow warriors, including a woman by the name of The Other Magpie, joined General George Crook in a battle against the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne, peoples the Crow considered enemies for their encroachment on Crow lands. During the fighting, a Lakota warrior wounded Bull Snake and knocked him off his horse; as Bull Snake lay on the ground, Osh-​Tisch “dashed up to him, got down from her horse, and stood over him, shooting at the Lacota [sic] as rapidly as she could load her gun and fire,” according to Pretty Shield. The Other Magpie knocked the Lakota warrior down with her coup stick and



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George Catlin’s painting of a dance honoring “two-​spirit” men, called berdaches by Europeans. Men who dressed like and took on women’s roles held high status in Native American cultures; they also played an important role in warfare. George Catlin, Dance to the Berdash, 1835–​1837, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr., 1985.66.442

Osh-​Tisch shot and killed him, in the process earning the name Finds Them and Kills Them. The Other Magpie took the Lakota’s scalp. When they returned to their village, Pretty Shield remembered, it “was one of the finest sights that I have ever seen. . . . I felt proud of the two women, even of the wild one [The Other Magpie], because she was brave. And I saw that they were the ones who were taking care of Bull-​snake, the wounded man, when they rode in. Ahh, there was great rejoicing.”20 Pretty Shield told this story in the late 1920s, noting that “the men did not tell you this [because] they do not like to tell of it.”21 By this time, it appears, many Crow people had internalized the values inculcated in them by the US government’s long-​term, intensive, and extensive campaign of “taking the Indian out of the Indian.”22 Indian agents, missionaries, boarding schools, and the army embarked on a program of annihilation of native cultures. This included, prominently, an assault on Indian ideas and practices concerning sexuality and gender. “I know of no tribe of Indians where vice is as prevalent,” wrote agent Henry Williamson in 1887 of the Crow people. Two years later, a doctor at the Crow agency insisted that the acceptance of the boté in

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Crow society was owing “to the debased standard of the people among whom he lives.” In the 1890s, an agent by the name of Briscoe “tried to interfere with Osh-​Tisch, who was the most respected badé,” according to historian Joe Medicine Crow, using the contemporary spelling for a two-​ spirit person. “The agent incarcerated the badés,” he reported, “cut off their hair, made them wear men’s clothing. He forced them to do manual labor. . . . The people were so upset with this that Chief Pretty Eagle came into Crow Agency, and told Briskow [sic] to leave the reservation. It was a tragedy, trying to change them.” Efforts to stigmatize boté continued with the arrival of a Baptist minister by the name of William Petzoldt in 1903. “He condemned our traditions,” recalled Thomas Yellowtail, “including the bade. He told congregation members to stay away from Osh-​Tisch and the other badés” and “continued to condemn Osh-​Tisch until his death” at the age of seventy-​five in 1929. Osh-​Tisch never changed his ways or questioned his sense of identity, but the exhortations of people like Williamson and Petzoldt took their toll on the openness of the attitudes of younger Crow. “That may be the reason why no others took up the badé role after Osh-​Tisch died,” lamented Yellowtail.23 Imperialists used gender to express the relationships of colonizer to colonized. They also saw in the subjection and control of indigenous peoples the means by which to assert and reinforce a masculinity that seemed to them to be under assault from a variety of forces. In their efforts to impose their ideas about gender and sexuality on colonized peoples, they disrupted the lives of millions of men and women across the globe. In the twentieth century, resistance to imperialism would itself play out in gendered terms.



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Chapter 7

Gender Politics in the Twentieth Century

I

n 1951, a Kikuyu woman named Elizabeth Gachika took an oath of allegiance as a “freedom fighter” to Mau Mau, a guerrilla movement against the British and those loyalist Kikuyu who supported the colonial government in Kenya. The next year, following the assassination of loyalist Chief Maruhiu, some of her neighbors named her to British officials; she was arrested and jailed for three months in Nairobi. Upon her release, she journeyed to the forest where rebels from Kiambu, Meru, and Nyeri districts had established a camp from which they conducted assaults on Britons and loyalist Kikuyus. For a year Gachika smuggled food into the camp, cooked, and performed largely domestic tasks for the fighters. In 1953, she became a soldier herself. “I went with the men on raids,” she told an interviewer later in her life. At one point, the soldier she was on patrol with lost his nerve and “refused to shoot” at enemies they encountered. So she “took the gun and shot and then we ran away.” Gachika and another woman “would go to look for Europeans and if they yelled we would shoot them. We were the ones who fought for freedom,” she insisted. “The work of killing people like Waruhiu was the work of women and girls. Women were doing a lot of work. Girls are very tough.”1 During a gun battle with the British, Gachika was shot and captured. She was sent, her wounds untreated, to Kamiti prison, where “hard core” Mau Mau women were detained. There she would have been forced to do hard labor, digging up trees, quarrying stone, and carrying it long distances on her head to supply the road building undertaken by colonial officials. She would have been poorly clothed and insufficiently housed and fed. Infractions of the rules brought down harsh punishments: beatings, rape, withholding of food. As another detainee described Kamiti, it “was a hell prison. Some were dying, some were beaten to death, sometimes they died after work. We were happy when someone died because we said ‘Now she is free.’ ”2

The drama and intensity of Gachika’s ordeal was not uncommon in the context of the momentous events of the twentieth century. Two world wars, the Russian Revolution, massive depression, decolonization, and the Cold War generated intense political debates and struggles across the globe. Gender was never far from the center of politics in the twentieth century, playing a central part in such political movements as communism, fascism, anticolonialism, and feminism. The Great War of 1914–​18 unsettled gender relations in virtually all the belligerent countries that fought it, as women went into the factories and took up positions that enabled the war effort to go on. The disruption continued into the 1920s and 1930s, as worldwide phenomena such as the emergence of the “modern girl” and massive unemployment among men owing to depression seemed to threaten their masculinity. A  backlash ensued, causing a reversion to prewar gender arrangements—​or at least a yearning for them—​among the Western nations. Fascism, a radical nationalist, expansionist ideology, emerged within this context. In place of the blurring of gender lines and roles that marked so many societies in the interwar period, fascism promoted clear distinctions between male and female. In German, Italian, and Japanese portrayals of masculine and feminine, there was pronounced sexual difference, not ambiguity or androgyny. That was true even when, as in times of necessity or emergencies such as war, the actual behavior of men and women did not necessarily conform to them. Fascism placed an inordinate emphasis on manliness. At its heart stood the figure of the warrior: hard, brave, intrepid, single-​mindedly devoted to serving the nation. The manliness of the fascist ideal stood in stark relief against his gendered—​and racialized—​others, Jews and colonized peoples who were portrayed as weak, soft, irresolute, and venal. The possibilities of being corrupted by femininity or racial inferiors required that the new fascist man stick to men of his own kind, to eschew the institutions and locales of those whose presence might compromise him with temptation or contamination. Home, school, family, the marketplace—​these posed threats to manliness by virtue of the women and Jews who inhabited them. Instead, fascists promoted the exclusively male environment of the military, where men bonded with each other in their dedication to the nation and remained free of feminizing influences that might taint or weaken them. Male comradeship, fascists believed, provided the scaffolding around which the building of the state should take place.



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Nazi propaganda used images of uniformed German youth and young women dressed in peasant costumes to emphasize traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity. Poster: Shutterstock/​249573004; photo: Shutterstock/​249572890

The ideal new man of Italian, German, and Japanese fascism possessed a high degree of discipline and strength of will. His control over his mind and emotions contrasted sharply with the qualities fascists associated with the decadent bourgeois liberalism of the Western democracies and modernist impulses in art and music. He engaged in rigorous physical activity to hone his body and turn it into an instrument of war. The Nazi version of the new fascist man portrayed him in terms of Nordic racial characteristics—​tall, lean, with chiseled facial features, broad shoulders, and powerful arms. He glowed with health and radiated strength. He was ready and eager to take action whenever called upon. Japanese masculinity, like constructions of manliness across many parts of the globe, placed significant emphasis on power over women, often manifested in rape and other forms of sexual abuse. The combination of oppression of women and the value placed on physicality justified much of the sexual violence committed against local women and the creation of “comfort women” (or juugun ianfu) for the use of military men in the occupied areas. Beginning in China after the

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invasion of Shanghai in 1932, Japanese troops placed thousands of women under a regime of sexual slavery, imprisoning them in “comfort stations” and making them available to Japanese soldiers. As the demand for comfort women increased, Japanese authorities looked to their Korean colony to supply it. After the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, the number of brothels grew exponentially, spreading across the territories taken by the Japanese and populated by local indigenous women. One such woman, Maria Rosa Henson, not yet sixteen years of age, was taken by the Japanese army in the Philippines to service the sexual needs of its soldiers. Her first night in the brothel passed uneventfully. The following day, however, her nightmare began. “A Japanese soldier entered my room and pointed his bayonet at my chest,” she recounted. “I thought he was going to kill me, but he used his bayonet to slash my dress and tear it open. I was too frightened to scream. And then he raped me. When he was done, other soldiers came into my room, and they took turns raping me.” After the first twelve, she was allowed to rest for half an hour. Another twelve followed. “I bled so much and was in such pain, I could not even stand up,” she recalled. Day after day, from two o’clock in the afternoon until ten o’clock at night, Henson suffered ongoing rape at the hands of countless soldiers, her “dress . . . brittle from the crust that formed from the soldiers’ dried semen.” Afterward, she washed herself “with hot water and a piece of cloth so I would be clean. I pressed the cloth to my vagina like a compress to relieve the pain and the swelling.”3 In China, understandings of gender drew in large part from the teachings of Confucius, formulated two millennia earlier but still resonating in the early part of the twentieth century. The ideal of masculinity for Chinese men rested on the principle of wen-​wu, in which the combination of cultural or intellectual achievements (wen) and martial prowess (wu) marked an ideal man’s essential nature. If anything, wen held a higher value in the eyes of Chinese than wu, however it might be manifested, making Chinese masculinity quite different from that in the West, where the physical man tended to predominate. Moreover, Chinese society placed an emphasis on the capacity of men to contain militarism and war, so the notion of wu was often far more about restraint than the exercise of power. The notion of containment also pertained to men’s sexual capacities: just as they were enjoined to restrain the excessive use of force in wu, they were instructed to contain their sexual drives as well. Women, in this formulation of ideal masculinity, were regarded as a dangerous sexual temptation that should be



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avoided. Women, lacking men’s self-​control and discipline, needed to be kept pure and moral by being contained and segregated from men. The occupation of coastal China by foreign powers during the nineteenth century called into serious question Chinese men’s claim to possess wen-​wu. They had not been able to keep their country out of the hands of Westerners or Japanese. Regarded as weak and ineffectual, many Chinese men internalized the notion of themselves as the “sick men of East Asia,” poor creatures who had not had the physical capability to defeat foreign enemies. As a consequence, the appeal of wen as a significant element of masculinity began to lose ground to that of wu—​the apparent incapacity of Chinese men to fight off foreign invaders made physical force all the more attractive as a component of male identity. Traditional ideas about patriarchal authority came under attack, especially during such moments as the New Culture Movement, which reached its crescendo in the May Fourth Movement of 1919–​21, when students in Beijing took to the streets to protest Western and Japanese imperialism.4 Chinese women were vocal antagonists in the latter, and the interwar period saw a significant development of feminist thinking seeking reform of marriage laws and the introduction of property and voting rights for women; access to jobs in the public sector; and the prohibition of polygamy, concubinage, and prostitution. Between 1924 and 1927, the Chinese Nationalist and Communist Parties joined together to try to establish a unified nation-​state. Women constituted a powerful constituency advocating for revolution, and their participation in the short-​lived alliance posed a challenge to traditional male power in China. The women sought to create a society in which relations between men and women were more equal in the family, society, the economy, and politics. As was the case in Europe, feminist reforms were sometimes ancillary to nationalist or communist goals. Yet the leadership of both the Nationalist and Communist Parties recognized that their success in creating a national government depended on their ability to mobilize women; they were eager to support feminist demands and help create feminist organizations. The collapse of the Nationalist-​Communist coalition in 1927 and the Japanese incursions into China by Japan during the 1930s cut short the feminist movement that had developed in the mid-​1920s, although its efforts to challenge traditional patriarchy and transform gender relations continued to have effect. Women participating in the Long March, for instance, when communists fleeing the nationalist forces of Chang Kai-​shek trekked for thousands of miles across China and Tibet, defied powerful constraints that in conventional society rendered their lives

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miserable. To take but one example, poor, rural Han Chinese women could expect to be treated as little more than slaves and producers of children. Wu Yuqing, one marcher who joined the communists as an eleven-​year-​old, had been sold into marriage by her father in exchange for opium, to which he was addicted. Her mother-​in-​law worked her like a dog. She “tied a rope around my waist and just pulled it tighter when I said I was hungry,” Wu recalled. “She worked me from dawn to dusk, with only one meal in between. And then she complained I ate too much. They treated their pigs better.” When Wu’s cousin, who worked for the Red Army and the local Soviet government, suggested she join them, Wu hesitated. “You have nothing to lose but the rope around your waist,” her cousin pointed out, persuading Wu to rethink things. “She made me see the absurdity of my life,” the young girl explained. Far too young to use a rifle or serve as a porter, she found work on the propaganda team, one of forty other girls her same age. The propagandists tailored messages to women who suffered under patriarchy, singing songs containing lyrics such as Before women suffered like being fried in a pan; Our fate changed with the Red Army. Feet unbound, hair cut, We became the same as men. As men, we follow the army and conquer the world.5

Conditions on the Long March tested the endurance and courage of the strongest people. For women, however, even the most basic of bodily functions posed extra difficulties. With little in the way of supplies, women found themselves having to improvise when they menstruated. Woman Wang, who became the commander of the Fourth Army’s Women’s Regiment, told a researcher that she “dreaded” the arrival of her period, as there was no cloth or paper with which to absorb the flow of blood. Wang stuffed leaves in her pants when she could find them, but sometimes she “just had to let it run.” The embarrassment women suffered could be acute, as when one woman crossing a river stained the water red. A soldier thought she had been wounded, crying out to her, “Sister, sister, you’re bleeding.”6 To prevent this kind of mortification, authorities tried to make sure that women could ride a horse during their periods. Rarely did this accommodation materialize, however, given the hardships of the trek, and Woman Wang, for her part, actually envied those women who could no longer menstruate owing to hunger, cold, and exhaustion.



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Relations between men and women on the Long March could be fraught, exacerbated by the prohibition against marchers bringing their partners with them. Wu Yuqing recalled that “the rule was very strict. . . . Only important men like Mao or Zhu De were allowed to have their women with them. Senior officers also took their pick. But nobody else was permitted.” Her propaganda group agitated against entangling liaisons, singing “Fluttering the red flag, and carrying five-​foot rifles, we’re up before sunrise. Sisters of the Revolution: don’t love boys, love guns!” These restrictions ended up putting women at risk from frustrated men. Red Army commanders worked hard to limit the incidence of rape, whether of women marchers by their comrades or of local civilians by Red Army soldiers; they made rape an executable offense and punished other forms of “unlawful acts against women” with a variety of sanctions. One officer, Wu remembered, “tried his luck, and we never saw him again.”7 Wu and her comrades appreciated the Red Army’s strict policies that kept them safe (for she and many of them had direct experience of rape at the hands of enemy soldiers when they were captured). Gradually, as authorities brought the incidence of rape under control through discipline and punishment, restrictions loosened a bit. As long as women did not complain about the attentions of male officers, and as long as they kept their activities quiet—​literally—​Red Army commanders tended to look the other way. Inevitably, pregnancies resulted, bringing their own special hell with them. “It was tough enough to walk without any extra burden,” noted Woman Wang. “Imagine having a belly twice as big as a watermelon and trying to keep up with troops at the same time!”8 They could not, and porters had to carry them on stretchers. When the porters ran off, other women had to take up the burden of carrying them. When it came time to deliver the baby, the progress of the march did not stop, not even for the most prominent of women, such as He Zizhen, Mao’s third wife. She gave birth to three children on the march and in each instance had to leave the child behind with a local family. Many men objected to the presence of women on the Long March, fearing what would happen to them should they be captured by the enemy. Others believed that if the nationalist forces realized they were fighting women, they would redouble their efforts so as to avoid the shame and humiliation of losing to female soldiers. In fact, women shaved their heads “so that the enemy wouldn’t know they were fighting women,” Wu recalled. But she insisted that rather than make marchers vulnerable, “we are as good as men, if not better.” The addition of women to the ranks of the Red Army made it stronger, she argued. Women took on the burdens of portage when men ran off in the initial

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months, ensuring that vital supplies remained available to the troops. They recruited soldiers to its ranks as it made its way across the country, and they were the ones who convinced frightened villagers to take in ill and wounded troops who had to be left behind. Moreover, Wu asserted, women did better on the march than men. True, they did not face the same degree of combat, but even on the Tibetan Plateau, where no battles took place, fewer women died proportionately than men. “Women knew how to look after themselves,” she explained, and always kept with them the four implements that ensured their survival: a washbasin, a hefty stick, an animal skin, and a needle. And because they were smaller in size than the men, she believed, they did not need as much food or oxygen on the elevated altitude of the plateau. Thousands of men—​bigger and stronger than she and her comrades—​died in the snows of the plateau, but only a few women did. “Most of us had what was needed to keep going,” she said, simply.9 When the communists came to power in 1949, they acknowledged their indebtedness to women in the movement in legal codes that gave women equal rights with men.

A statue memorializing the efforts of ordinary Chinese men and women in bringing about the communist revolution in 1949 stands in front of Mao Zedong’s mausoleum in Beijing. Women, depicted here in uniforms and peasant garb and carrying weapons and tools, played a significant role in the success of the revolution and helped rebuild China following decades of warfare. Shutterstock/​ 84615988



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Like fascism and communism, anticolonialism took center stage in the twentieth century, and as was true of the first two, it had a pronounced gender component. In the late 1950s and 1960s, anticolonial crusades gripped the African continent. No movement held broader significance than the guerrilla war that exploded in Kenya during the 1950s. It seemed a clear and straightforward battle of black versus white, of dreadlocked fighters in the forests of central Kenya conducting a campaign against British troops. However, the situation was far more complex, highlighting the reality of almost all anticolonial struggles. They were never as clear as “black” and “white.” The impact of colonialism over the previous half century had been uneven and had created class distinctions among Africans. Many educated, wealthy Africans had prospered under European rule, and they were as much the targets of anger—​and often even more so—​as colonial officials. The Mau Mau movement erupted among the Kikuyu of central Kenya, the colony’s most populous ethnic group. At its roots lay a multitude of social problems created—​and exacerbated—​by the colonial system over the previous half century. Most of the problems revolved around land, a fundamental element within Kikuyu culture whose importance cannot be overstated. One could not be considered a man if he did not own a piece of land. But since the 1920s, the native reserves had become progressively more crowded, as two generations of fathers had subdivided their property among their sons, reducing the size of plots with each succession. As this process took place, wealthy and educated Kikuyu had proved adept at gathering up small pieces of land to add to their burgeoning properties. The issue of land shortage had profound implications for gender roles and relations, which stood at the heart of the movement. The lack of land altered the relationship of men to women: prior to colonization, women and men enjoyed relatively equal status, in economic terms at least. As land became less available, men became poorer. As one prominent chief put it, “Man is compelled to sell his goats and sheep to divorce his wives, and is forced . . . to denounce his fatherly right to his children in order to limit their family to the area of allotment given to these slave squatters.” By the 1950s, the ability to sustain oneself and one’s family depended, for many, on the good husbandry and business acumen of wives, a situation that did not sit well with many men. For unmarried men, lack of land meant they could not marry and establish the marital and familial relations that marked their arrival as men. Jomo Kenyatta, an anticolonial leader and the first president of an independent Kenya, pointed out that colonial rule, in denying men the

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ability to make decisions for themselves and their families, “destroyed the spirit of manhood.”10 Mau Mau aimed to restore the proper order of gender and other social relations by securing land and freedom for Kenyans. Women played a crucial role in the Mau Mau movement. Some participated in the fighting against British authorities and the loyalist Home Guard. Most operated as part of the passive wing of the campaign, serving as couriers, scouts, and spies and supplying the fighters in the forests with food, weaponry, and intelligence. The British at first had no idea that women were as active as they were, attributing to Kenyan women the qualities they believed characterized European women: passivity, a love for peace, and lack of interest in politics. Within a very short time, colonial officials came to see just how wrong they were. By 1953, one wrote home to the authorities that “at the present time they are keeping Mau Mau alive.”11 One way to contain the activities of Mau Mau women involved the “villigisation” process imposed by British authorities. To cut off Mau Mau’s logistical channels, the British enclosed Kikuyu villages in barbed wire and imposed a curfew on them. As many as a million Kikuyu lived in about eight hundred of these villages, against whom the Home Guard and other loyalists enjoyed a practically unrestricted hand. The British also built an extensive system of “detention and rehabilitation” camps—​ concentration camps—​in which more than eighty thousand suspected Mau Mau were held. When the resistance movement ended and the British made plans to grant Kenya independence, men returned home from the detention camps to find their wives pregnant, their land seized, and their cattle gone, but they had no recourse against the loyalists who had stolen their livelihoods and dishonored their wives. British staff and loyalists carried out torture—​including rape, castration, and murder—​in the camps. Some eight thousand women were detained in Kamiti and other smaller compounds, where they faced forced labor and horrific conditions. British officials, calling upon the judgment of “experts” such as the anthropologist Louis Leakey and the psychiatrist J. C. Carothers, pronounced the “hardcore” women to be of “unsound” mind. For the British, mental illness, rather than a political commitment to redressing deep-​seated and far-​reaching grievances, accounted for the actions of Mau Mau women. The abuse—​often sexual—​of Kenyan men and women in the detention camps amounted to a systematic response of British authorities to the rebellion against their rule. The British government acknowledged the widespread nature of their violence in 2013, when Foreign



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Minister William Hague announced to the House of Commons that Britain would pay reparations for the damage it had done as a colonial power in Kenya. This remarkable development arose from a case brought by four elderly Kenyans—​Wambuga wa Nyingi, Jane Muthoni Mara, Paolo Nzili, and Gitu wa Kahengeri. They sued the British government for the treatment they had suffered in colonial detention camps during the Mau Mau war of the 1950s. Nyingi had been badly beaten and disfigured during nine years of imprisonment. Mara had been repeatedly raped and otherwise sexually abused; in one instance guards inserted a glass soda bottle filled with hot water into her vagina. Nzili had been castrated. “I felt completely destroyed and without hope [in the camps],” the eighty-​five-​year-​old man told reporters.12 The British government acknowledged that torture and abuse had taken place, but it declined to accept responsibility. That responsibility had passed to the Kenyan government at the time of independence, it contended. Britain’s high court ruled otherwise, compelling the government to make financial and other amends. Kenyan men and women who had been caught up in the suppression of Mau Mau—​which entailed profound gender and sexual humiliation—​could recover at least some of their dignity in the acknowledgment by Britain of their suffering. The search for dignity and autonomy that pervaded anticolonialist movements stood at the center of feminist movements across the world as well. By the time the Great War broke out in 1914, suffrage campaigns had attained the size and status of a mass movement in many countries, commanding the time, energies, and resources of thousands of men and women, and riveting the attention of the public. Women in New Zealand had won the right to vote in 1893, long before those in any other country. Australian and Finnish women had secured the right to vote in 1902 and 1906, respectively, followed by their Norwegian sisters in 1913. In early 1918, Parliament granted the vote to British women over the age of thirty. This measure, while welcome to feminists as a symbol of the fall of the sex barrier, failed to enfranchise some three million women aged eighteen to twenty-​nine. French women did not gain the vote at this time, despite their contributions to the war effort, though German women were enfranchised in the creation of the Weimar Republic and American suffragists won their fight for votes for women in the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920. In other parts of the world the war strengthened revolutionary and nationalist movements against European colonialism that contained strong feminist components. In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 brought to power a government committed to the

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emancipation of women. Ultimately seeking the dissolution of the family as the only true means by which women could make themselves the equals of men, the communist regime introduced a new family code in 1918. It raised women’s status to that of men’s, made marriage a civil rather than a religious matter, gave illegitimate children identical legal rights to legitimate children, and made divorce readily available to both parties. Two years later, the government made it legal for women to obtain abortions legally if they were done by a physician. The Russian family legislation brought more rather than less hardship to women. Easy divorce, free sexual unions, and an inability to enforce child support payments on the fathers of children they bore out of marriage created distress for many, many women abandoned by husbands and sexual partners. One Communist Party member, harkening back to the slogan of the French Revolution, declared that the new laws had brought women “liberty, equality, and maternity.” Joblessness rates for women soared with the implementation of the New Economic Policy in 1921, forcing thousands of women into prostitution to survive. Government bureaucrats did not always share the commitment to women’s freedom that Bolshevik leaders such as Lenin had espoused, and factory managers turned a blind eye to the harassment of women workers at the hands of their male comrades. Feminism might be the official policy of the communist regime, and it did help to bring about improvement in places like women’s literacy, but for many women it could mean little positive change in their everyday lives. With Stalin’s rise to power in the late 1920s, the commitment to women’s equality and emancipation waned. The state resurrected the family as an official unit of society, made abortion illegal, and made divorce difficult and expensive to obtain. The rationale for this shift in policy derived from Stalin’s need for massive amounts of labor to work the fields and heavy machinery that would fuel the economic growth of the Soviet Union—​women needed to bear the children who would grow into productive members of society. David Riazanov, the founder of the Marx-​Lenin Institute, argued in 1926 that young women and men had to recognize that the needs of the communist state superseded their individual interests. “We should teach our young . . . that marriage is not a personal act, but an act of deep social significance, demanding interference and regulation by society.”13 But women had to work if their families were to survive, and the abandonment of programs designed to ease their domestic obligations ensured that they bore a double burden. Although abortion rights and easier divorce were restored to women



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upon Stalin’s death in 1952, the weight of work and familial duties remained the same. Feminism in Japan unfolded against the backdrop of the need to modernize the country. In 1868, reformers looking to transform the country from a feudal society into a liberal capitalist one established the Meiji government, named for the emperor reigning at the time. They saw in women the agents of what they referred to as “civilization.” They promoted a Western-​ style education—​ modeled on American institutions—​for women, whom they expected to help create a modern polity. The experiment proved to be very short-​lived, however; as early as the 1880s, the Meiji government reversed its direction and oriented women’s education not toward work in the public sphere but to the domestic sphere of family and household. Moreover, within the male-​ dominated family of Japan, women could not own or inherit property and were obliged to obey men, even their sons. They could not vote or belong to political parties or attend political meetings. These restrictions were at odds with Japan’s eagerness to show the world that it was a modern nation as defined in the West. A middle-​class feminist consciousness developed within this context, manifesting early on in a movement to provide birth control information and devices to women. This particular issue arose in the context of the great weight attached to women’s obligations as mothers. Certainly there was an emphasis on domesticity in Western ideals of femininity as well, but in Japan, the expectation that women would care for home and family was more than an expectation; it was a duty. Women had the responsibility to become mothers of children who would advance the interests of the state; by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maternal duty encompassed the fostering of nationalism and militarism. They were expected to produce offspring who would people the nation’s factories, farms, and military forces. To that end, the government criminalized abortion and embarked on a campaign to encourage women to have as many children as possible. Japanese feminists such as Ishimoto Shidzue, who cultivated close ties with American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, challenged the state’s control of reproduction. Before long, she and her colleagues in the birth control movement joined forces with other feminists seeking to enlarge women’s rights generally and to obtain the vote. They explicitly linked women’s control of reproduction to the political agenda of women’s rights. At the Fifth National Women’s Suffrage Convention in 1934, for example, Ishimoto succeeded in persuading the delegates to resolve that the Japanese government ease restrictions on abortion in the criminal code and to establish clinics that would provide both birth

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control information and contraceptive devices throughout the country. For many feminists, the right of women to control their fertility went beyond individual rights; it also served as a means of acting against the government’s military and imperial agenda by cutting down on the number of sons they provided to the army. The government knew of this connection and had begun to act to defend its interests in encouraging population growth. In 1935, it introduced regulations on Japanese doctors’ abilities to prescribe and promote contraception. Ishimoto told American reporters in 1937 that women’s crusades for contraception reflected not just “the necessity of raising [the] standard of living by limiting the number of children in any family. . . . We want peace,” she emphasized, “and we want lives free from the terror of impending struggle.”14 Local authorities arrested her in mid-​December and held her for some two weeks. The government then prohibited her from disseminating contraceptive information or devices in January 1938. By this time, Japan had embarked on war with China, and targeting the birth control movement was part of the effort to impose nearly total control over the civilian population. Elsewhere, in places such as Egypt and India, feminist campaigns could not be extricated from the anticolonial movements of which they were a part. During the national revolution of 1919 to 1922, when Egypt secured its nominal independence from Great Britain, feminist and nationalist leaders organized mass demonstrations of elite women, who left the security of their harems to make clear their hatred of colonial rule. In 1920, feminists demanded the creation of a women’s section of the Nationalist Party and insisted that it partake substantively in decision-​making processes, making its objections loudly and publicly known when it was bypassed. With independence, nationalists’ enthusiasm for women’s involvement and for feminist demands such as education and employment opportunities, the right to worship in mosques, and political participation weakened appreciably. The Constitution of 1923 declared that “all Egyptians are equal before the law. They enjoy civil and political rights and equally have public responsibilities without distinction of race, language, or religion.” While this text appeared to define a regime that would fully recognize women’s rights, an electoral law negated them by excluding women from the suffrage. Almost immediately, the Egyptian Feminist Union formed, demanding education and work for women, reform of personal status laws that restricted their movement and their comportment in public, abolition of state-​sponsored prostitution, and the vote. Women won education rights and a minimum legal marriage age, but their other demands were ignored.



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With the Arab socialist revolution of 1952, feminists such as Duriyya Shafiq, head of the Daughters of the Nile Union, took the opportunity to point out the contradiction between a constitution that declared equal rights for all and an electoral system that denied women the vote. Shafiq led a hunger strike and a sit-​in in parliament to draw attention to feminist demands. Despite opposition from conservative and fundamentalist Muslim groups, the revolutionary government gave women the vote in 1956. At the same time, however, the government

The Egyptian feminist Doria Shafik takes her first nourishment following an eight-​day hunger strike in 1954. The strike forced the Egyptian government to commit to improving the status of women. Keystone Press/​Alamy Stock Photo/​ E0M9EE

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began to outlaw feminist organizations. By 1959, feminist groups had been shut down; in 1964, women’s organizations were legally banned from forming. Organized feminism disappeared, as women were forced to retreat from public view. The first organized Indian feminist movement appeared in 1917 with the formation of the Women’s Indian Association. Subsequent groups arose in the 1920s, the most visible and influential being the All India Women’s Conference. Its members sought originally to open up discussion of women’s education but quickly realized that many other issues—​the seclusion of women, child marriage, the compulsory remarriage of widows, for example—​were intricately connected to it, and all of them, in turn, were bound up in the question of British rule. Equality and opportunity for women, they knew, were inseparable from the burning issue of Indian independence. Nationalist men supported feminists’ demands for suffrage, eager to demonstrate that Indian men were far more progressive than their supposedly superior British overlords; upon gaining independence, the ruling Congress Party included universal adult suffrage and sex, caste, and religious equality in the constitution. But when it came to sexual equality in the home, they were less able to show enthusiasm. In fact, when the All India Women’s Conference proposed the reform of the Hindu Code in 1934, seeking change in marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws to better serve women, nationalist men objected. In 1943 and 1945, the Legislative Assembly rejected a new Hindu Code that incorporated women’s equality in domestic matters. After independence in 1947, opposition to it remained high, despite the support of such influential men as Nehru. Only when Nehru made it an issue of his prestige and support after 1951 did the new code pass, and even then it took over two years. Feminists had been clear from the start that their agenda depended on the success of the nationalist agenda, but when the time came for nationalist men who had succeeded in throwing off foreign domination to agree to ending their own domination of women in personal affairs, they balked. Non-​Western feminists insisted on establishing a movement that reflected the reality of their lives. They needed to adapt those causes within Western feminism that served their purposes to respond not just to male domination but to colonialism as well. They welcomed Western feminists to their conferences in the spirit of international solidarity, and they prized the support and input they received from them, but Arab and Muslim women in the Middle East and Indian feminists asserted their independence from their European and American sisters



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in no uncertain terms. As the invitation to the 1932 Eastern Women’s Congress in Tehran put it, “we Oriental women should make a determined effort to understand one another and develop among ourselves a spirit of Asian sisterhood, with the object of preserving all that is valuable in our age-​long national and social cultures and of discriminating what is best for us to assimilate from outside Asia.”15 What is called the second wave of feminism, known at the time as women’s liberation, arose in the West in the 1960s. Inspired in part by the civil rights movement in the United States and the new left movements in Europe, women in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and America began to demand freedom from the roles, portrayals, and expectations that limited, diminished, and oppressed them. In the United States, a presidential order opened civil service jobs to those who qualified “without regard to sex”; the Equal Pay Act of 1963 sought to reduce inequities in wages and salaries based on gender; the 1964 Title VII extended the ban on discrimination in employment to include “sex”; and the passage of Title IX in 1872 outlawed discrimination in education. In Britain, the Equal Pay Acts of 1970 and 1975 and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 made it possible for women to gain equal treatment in some areas of education, training, and wage earning. But second-​wave feminists looked for more than equality with men before the law; they sought changes in the law, the social and economic system, and the culture that would “liberate” them from current conceptions of femininity that, they argued, locked them into stifling, unfulfilling, slavish positions, and often made them vulnerable to sexual predations from men. Unlike contemporary liberal feminists and those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, feminists seeking liberation believed that the very system in which they lived required abolition or complete overhaul. Second-​ wave feminism emerged at roughly the same time as a number of other liberation movements, especially the so-​ called sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. A number of developments contributed to new and more permissive ideas about sex, but nothing had greater effect than the availability of the “pill,” a reliable contraceptive, and of legal abortion, which changed remarkably the material consequences of sex for both men and women. Effective contraception and legal abortion made it possible for women to engage in sexual intercourse with a much-​reduced fear of pregnancy. Venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea could be readily treated by antibiotics. These material improvements helped to open up whole new possibilities of physical pleasure for women, who were more free to explore and experience sexual opportunities than previous generations of women had

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been. But they also made it possible for men to put a great deal of pressure on women to engage with them sexually: absent the constraints of unwanted pregnancy, women were far more susceptible to accusations of prudery and other forms of verbal coercion. As the British writer Celia Haddon put it in her 1983 The Limits of Sex, “in some ways, the sexual revolution had freed me from guilt and anxiety; in other ways it had enslaved me anew, with different fetters.”16 The negative implications of the sexual revolution for women helped to provoke the new wave of feminism in the early 1970s. The sexual revolution of the 1960s had placed a premium on men’s pleasure and the fulfillment of their sexual desires, at the expense of women, whose highly sexualized images appeared in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, on billboards and posters, and in the pages of mass-​ circulation newspapers. Women’s liberation activists protested loudly and vividly against such depictions of women as sexual objects. One of their first actions took place in 1970 at the Miss World beauty contest in London, when a group of women interrupted the pageant by leaping on stage and blowing whistles, hooting, mooing like cattle, and brandishing signs that read “Miss-​conception,” “Miss-​treated,” “Miss-​ placed,” and “Miss-​judged.” They lobbed stink bombs, flour bombs, and smoke bombs at the contestants, the judges, and Bob Hope, the master of ceremonies. Their actions and subsequent arrest created a spectacle that garnered enormous publicity for the movement.17 The sexual revolution was closely tied in with other countercultural movements that challenged the political, social, and gender orders of Western countries. Alongside “women’s lib” activists, antiwar protests, student demonstrations and sit-​ins, racial equality and black power groups, and gay rights organizations appeared right on the heels of the “sexual revolution,” presenting mainstream Western societies with a multipronged assault on its values and institutions. Attitudes about homosexuality and toward homosexuals tended to become increasingly tolerant, so that by 1970 or so, gay men and lesbians felt sufficiently safe to abandon their closeted existences and venture out to form a distinct community with a visible subculture and lifestyle. Among some gay men, the new freedom produced a great deal of promiscuity and hedonism; for most others and for lesbians generally, it offered an opportunity to live their lives honestly, comfortably, and openly. Eschewing conventional gender prescriptions for a society based on individual family units presided over by heterosexual couples of husband and wife who conformed to current standards of masculinity and femininity, gays and lesbians offered alternative models for intimate relationships and



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community ties. These included families headed by same-​sex couples and groups of gay men and lesbians acting communally to raise and care for children. The advent of global feminism has considerably strengthened the ability of feminists across the world to agitate for and bring about change in women’s lives. As feminists in Africa, Asia, and Latin America pointed out that North American and European women enjoyed a degree of prosperity, health, safety, and political stability that most women in the world did not, it became excruciatingly clear that feminism as it had been formulated in the industrialized countries of the world had little relevance elsewhere. In pointing out the so-​called north-​south divide between women, African, Asian, and Latina feminists called attention to the fundamental needs of women in the poor nations of the world and demonstrated how differences of class, sexuality, race, religion, culture, and ethnicity among women across the globe necessitated a broader, fuller, and more comprehensive feminist politics that could encompass and address them. As one Latin American pointed out, within Western feminism there has been “resistance to incorporating difference, particularly in terms of race, sexuality, and class. There is also a resistance to analyzing power relations within the feminist movement itself.

On March 8, 2017, thousands of women and men turned out to march in celebration of International Women’s Day in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Similar marches and protests took place all over the world. Shutterstock/​599208032

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Although the feminist movement in Latin America has become more diverse over the past forty years, feminist discourse has been monopolized by a white and mestiza urban middle-​class elite and has displayed a decidedly heterosexist bias.”18 Global feminism, while recognizing deep and divisive differences among women, has emphasized the importance of coalition building among diverse feminist groups and organizations. In consequence, a significantly strengthened, internationally effective, and more just and open-​minded feminist politics has emerged.



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Epilogue: Challenging Gender Identities

I

n November 2016 in British Columbia, Kori Doty gave birth to Searyl Atli Doty. Kori, a nonbinary trans person, refused to allow the infant to undergo a genital inspection for the purposes of registering Searyl as a boy or a girl on a birth certificate or a health card. “It is up to Searyl to decide how they identify,” Doty declared, “when they are old enough to develop their own gender identity. I am not going to foreclose their choices based on an arbitrary assignment of gender at birth based on an inspection of their genitals.” Kori had not been given that opportunity as a newborn, having been assigned a gender on the basis of “assumptions [that] were incorrect, and I ended up having to do a lot of adjustments since then.” Searyl did receive a health card designating the baby’s sex as “U”—​presumably standing for “unspecified” or “unknown”—​but to obtain a birth certificate for Searyl, Kori would have to choose a gender designation for the baby. Doty and seven other complainants brought a case to British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal requesting that gender designations be removed from all new birth certificates; Doty argued that “requiring a gender marker” infringed upon Searyl’s rights “as a Canadian citizen to life, liberty and security of the person.”1 The government of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, started issuing gender-​neutral birth certificates in May 2018.2 British Columbia did the same shortly thereafter, giving people who do not identify as either male or female the option of placing an “X” in the gender field of their applications for identity cards, driver’s licenses, and birth certificates.3 The conventional categories of male and female, man and woman, and masculine and feminine have throughout history been refused by people who took on identities that did not correspond to their biological sex. In some instances, such gender nonconformists received the affirmation of their societies and communities. In India, a community of men called the hijra wear women’s clothes and behave as women as part

of their worship of the Bahuchara Mata, the Mother Goddess. They subject themselves to castration, making themselves eunuchs—​neither men nor women—​and taking on the persona of a third gender. They do this in furtherance of their identification with the goddess, and they enjoy the recognition and approval of their communities as they preside over religious and ritual events. In Southeast Asia, blurred gender definitions figured prominently in religious ceremonies. Men who dressed as women and women who dressed as men in ritual performances placed themselves outside the realm of the merely human and in that of the divine. Their cosmologies compelled them to take on personas that transcended those of male and female as part of their obligation to protect and defend the spiritual interests of their communities. Transvestism, in other words, was sacred among people such as the Bugis and the Ngaju Dayak of Southeast Asia. More often, however, men and women who refused to present themselves in conformity with their biological sex provoked scorn, fear, and hatred. Joan of Arc was tried and put to death for the act of wearing men’s clothing and refusing to abandon her male persona. That particular response should probably be regarded as extreme and unusual, though violence against transgender people has never gone away and in many places transgender folks face serious threats. In the twenty-​first century, however, transgender people have won significant victories in the courts and have made remarkable cultural advances in countries around the world. We appear to have arrived at a historical moment where the opprobrium attached to transgender folks is dissipating. Argentina, Denmark, India, Iran, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Nepal, Germany, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, France, Canada, Colombia, Ireland, South Africa, and Malta legally recognize, in some form, transgender people. In the United States, Oregon and California have followed suit. As Human Rights Watch’s 2016 World Report noted, we seem to have turned the tide in regard to accepting people whose understandings of their gender identities do not match their biological sex.4 Indeed, in 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled in a 6-​3 decision that LGBTQ and trans people cannot be discriminated against. This is not to suggest that societies have fully accepted transgender people. Many countries outlaw “posing” as the opposite sex and jail people who are transgender. Verbal and physical assaults occur with regularity. Between 2007 and 2014, according to the Trans Murder Monitoring Project, 1,731 transgender people were murdered across the world; many, many more suffered torture, mutilation, and injuries



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falling just short of death. A number of states in the United States have passed so-​called bathroom bills that require trans men and women to use the lavatory corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate. In response, however, organizations representing some of the most male-​ oriented, even macho institutions in the country promised to boycott the states that refused to change these laws. The National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), along with major banking, commercial, and entertainment interests, have pressured legislatures in conservative states to alter their stances. One particular incident in the United States provides a measure of just how far transgender rights have progressed: in late July 2017, President Donald Trump tweeted that transgender people would not be permitted to serve in the military. Surprisingly, some of the most conservative Republicans in the country—​ Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama and Representative Ileana Ros-​ Lehtinen of Florida  —​ immediately responded that anyone who wished to serve America in the armed forces, no matter their sex or gender, should be welcomed, not excoriated. “You ought to treat everybody fairly and give everybody a chance to serve,” Shelby told CNN. “No American, no matter their sexual orientation or gender identity, should be prohibited from honor + privilege of serving our nation,” tweeted Ros-​Lehtinen.5 This change in the cultural acceptance of changing gender definitions has occurred with astonishing speed. In part it is a result of feminist movements opening up and expanding societies’ understandings of gender as a category of identity that is fashioned or constructed, rather than a category whose characteristics are present at birth and determine our lives. This change did not come easily or smoothly. Many early second-​ wave feminists resisted regarding male-​to-​female transgender people as women, and the issue provoked dissension and division within the movement. In 1973, Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, refused to accept singer Beth Elliott as a woman. “I will not call a male ‘she,’ ” Morgan declared angrily and dismissively. “Thirty-​two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman’; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.”6 Today certain elements of the radical feminist movement, including such prominent figures as Sheila Jeffreys, Ti-​Grace Atkinson, and Janice Raymond, protest the inclusion of male-​to-​female transgender people

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in the category of “women.” Best-​selling Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, when asked by a UK interviewer whether trans women are “any less of a real woman,” replied, “my feeling is trans women are trans women.” She argued that it is not “how we wear our hair or whether we have a vagina or a penis” that determines our gender identity; rather, women’s experiences in a male-​ dominated world, which trans women do not share while growing up as boys and then men, mold their sense of themselves as women. “It’s about the way the world treats us,” she explained, “and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experiences with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.” Adichie’s remarks dismayed many transgender people, especially in Nigeria, who noted that their lives growing up were full of ridicule and even trauma. Adichie did not recant her statement but has made it very clear that feminism should welcome all people who wish to be a part of it. “Of course trans women are a part of feminism,” she wrote.7 Despite disagreements among its adherents, feminism did much to open up questions of gender identity that have acted to soften attitudes toward transgender people. Gay rights movements across the world and the expanded notions of civil rights protections advanced by courageous activists and politicians also played a significant role, and social media innovations have made things move quickly around the globe. The US Supreme Court’s legal recognition of gay marriage, the election of lesbians and gay men to elective office in many parts of the world, the increase in the number of gay parents and the experience of children growing up and attending school with children of gay parents—​all of these developments have created a global cultural recognition, however denied it might be by many, that gender is not merely a dual entity, but a multifaceted one. A broader view of gender has led many people to regard those whose identities either do not conform to their sex or cannot be captured within a two-​gender framework as no less human and no less deserving of rights and dignity. Histories of gender show us just how malleable those categories of man/​woman, male/​female that we have for so long understood to be “natural” and “normal” really are. They enable us to see how gender has been used to define what is right and proper in various societies at various times, how it has been utilized to exercise power, and how people adopt it and manipulate it to resist the exercise of that power. Analyzing gender in its multiple manifestations and operations over



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Signs designating public restrooms for all genders, New York and California, 2020. Their appearance in venues throughout the world reflect rapid changes in attitudes toward transgender and nonbinary people. Shutterstock/​553276315, Photographs by Drew Anderla, Salma Ismaiel, and Ryan Kaldari

time and across space should encourage us to bring our critical eye to bear on all categories of identity and experience, vastly opening up our understandings and appreciations of our human conditions and the political, economic, social, and cultural regimes in which they are embedded.

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Acknowledgments

W

riting global histories involves a group effort, and I  am grateful to many friends and colleagues for their help in producing this rather daunting book. Bonnie Smith, as ever, gave inspiration and practical guidance. My thanks to Lil Fenn, Peter Wood, Carol Byerly, Marcia Yonemoto, Mithi Mukherjee, Marc Matera, Misty Bastian, Myles Osborne, and Priscilla McGeehon for the wealth of information and assistance they provided. I could not have done it without them. Two anonymous readers offered crucial insights into and criticisms of the first draft of the manuscript, for which I thank them. Nancy Toff provided an extraordinary level of scrutiny of the revisions, making the chapters tighter, clearer, and more accessible. Brent Matheny did yeoman’s work pulling everything together and putting the book into production. Thanks, too, to Niko Pfund and Julia Turner for their part in making the book happen. I am most appreciative of their efforts. Anne Davidson, whose support never wavers, deserves more than thanks. She makes everything possible.

Chronology 33,000 bce

Modern humans emerge and expand beyond Africa, arrange themselves in egalitarian groups of hunter-​gatherers 10,000–​3,000  bce

Agricultural revolution and settled communities create social hierarchies based on wealth and gender 3000 bce

Development of patriarchy in Near and Middle East creates male-​dominated societies 1752 bce

Babylonians produce Hammurabi’s Code, placing legal restrictions on women’s behavior 1500–​1457  bce

Hatshepsut reigns in Egypt as a king 500–​323  bce

Athenian democracy prizes politics as the highest good for men; Spartans emphasize martial virtues of both men and women 200s bce

Han dynasty consolidates power in China on the basis of gendered Confucian principles of filial piety and yin/​yang distinctions 51–​30  bce

Cleopatra reigns in Egypt 106 ce

Ban Zhao’s Nujie (Lessons for Women), laying out how women should attain ideal womanhood, appears in China 350 ce–​onward

Christian fathers develop concepts of sexuality as sinful, women as embodiment of sin 610 ce

Muhammad founds Islam in western Arabia with aid of wives Khadija and Aisha, enlarging women’s rights and opportunities 650 ce–​onward

Islam expands to other lands and closes down opportunities for women 660–​705  ce

Wu Zhao reigns as empress of Tang China, promotes Buddhist precepts that validate her right to rule 1000–​1300

Emergence of knightly ideal of masculinity and the conventions of courtly love in Europe

1180

Kamakura shogunate established in Japan; samurai warriors become prominent figures in Japanese governance and become ideal of Japanese masculinity 1206–​24

Genghis Khan’s daughters enable him to rule extensive Mongol Empire in Central Asia 1260–​94

Khubilai Khan rules Mongol Empire with help of his mother, Sorghaghtani Beki, and sister, Chabi 1429

Joan of Arc leads troops to place Charles VII on French throne 1431

Joan of Arc burnt at the stake for dressing as a man Sometime between mid-​twelfth century and late fifteenth century

League of Haudenosaunee established in Great Lakes region of America; constitution includes prominent role for women 1518–​24

Malintzin serves as interpreter and sexual partner to Hernán Cortés during the conquest of Mexico 1521–​58

Concubine Hürrem becomes the mother of Suleyman the Magnificent’s four sons, and the Ottoman emperor’s most trusted advisor 1724

Start of First Maroon War against the British in Jamaica under the leadership of Queen Nanny 1750–​1890

Ideas about separate spheres for men and women and the passionlessness of women dominate Western European and American societies 1780s–​90s

The concept of “republican motherhood” informs women’s political activities in France and the United States 1782–​83

Deborah Sampson serves in Continental Army in the guise of “Robert Shurtliff” during the American War for Independence October 1789

During the “October Days” of the French Revolution, women march to Versailles to return the king and the National Assembly to Paris 1791

Thomas Paine publishes The Rights of Man; Olympe de Gouges publishes A Declaration of the Rights of Woman 1792

Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1804

The Napoleonic Code helps to reinstate patriarchal rule in France

144 Ch ronolog y

1848

Women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York 1856

Women’s suffrage campaign begins in the United States 1866

Women’s suffrage campaign begins in Great Britain, challenging the notion of separate spheres for men and women 1868–​78

Meiji restoration encourages Japanese to emulate Western gender ideals 1880–​1905

Europeans justify their colonization of Africa using representations of gender and sexuality 1914–​18

Great War requires women in all European countries to participate in war effort, disturbing traditional gender roles for women 1917

Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia assert deep commitment to gender equality 1918

British women over the age of thirty get the vote; women in Weimar Germany get the vote 1920

American women get the vote 1922–​45

Fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Japan assert deeply conservative ideals of masculinity and femininity 1926–​40

Stalin’s regime backtracks on gender equality and introduces legal restrictions on divorce, birth control, and abortion October 1934–​October 1935

Women make up significant contingent of participants of Mao’s Long March in China 1939–​45

Total war in Europe and the Pacific requires the contributions of virtually all women to the war effort 1944

French women get the vote 1952–​60

Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya recruits women against British colonial rule 1920–​50s

Feminist movements appear in Japan, China, Egypt, and India 1960s

Second-​wave feminism emerges in the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe 1963

Equal Pay Act enacted in United States

Ch ro n o l o g y 145

1964

Title VII outlaws employment discrimination in the United States 1970

Equal Pay Act enacted in Great Britain 1972

Title IX outlaws discrimination in education in the United States 1975

Sex Discrimination Act enacted in Great Britain United Nations declares 1975 International Women’s Year 1977

United Nations General Assembly urges March 8 as UN Day for women’s rights and world peace, setting the stage for annual International Women’s Days 1980s

Rise of global feminism enlarges the movement’s agenda and participants 1995

United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, declares that women’s rights are human rights Late 1990s

Awareness and tolerance of LGBT people expands in many parts of the world Backlash against rights of LGBT people emerges; religious conservatives fund homophobic campaigns 2000s

Awareness and tolerance of transgendered people expand across the globe 2015

US Supreme Court legalizes same-​sex marriage 2020

US Supreme Court makes discrimination against LGBTQ and trans people illegal

146 Ch ronology

Notes INTRODUCTION

1. Quoted in Misty Bastian, Marc Matera, and Susan Kingsley Kent, The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 146, 147, 153. C H AP TER 1

1. Joyce A. Tyldesley, Hatshepsut: The Female Pharaoh (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 129. 2. Quoted in Tyldesley, Hatshepsut, 156, 157. 3. History, In Search of History Egypt's Great Queen, FilmRoos, 2010. 4. Quoted in Dana Jalbert Stauffer, “Aristotle’s Account of the Subjection of Women,” Journal of Politics 70, no. 4 (October 2008): 929–​41, 935. 5. Quoted in Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 25. 6. Quoted in Paul Halsall, “Early Western Civilization under the Sign of Gender: Europe and the Mediterranean,” in A Companion to Gender History, ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-​Hanks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 290. 7. Plutarch, The Life of Lycurgus, 18.1, 22.2. 8. Aristotle, Politics: Book 2, 1269b. 9. Propertius, Poems, III.11.39; Horace, Odes, I.37.21; Lucan, Pharsalia, X.59. 10. Quoted in “Gender in Chinese Philosophy,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://​www.iep.utm.edu/​gender-​c/​. 11. Quoted in Nancy Lee Swann, Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies, 1960), 83. C H AP TER 2

1. Quoted in Joyce E. Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 143–​47. 2. Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion, 171, 172, 174, 175. 3. Quoted in James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 65, 85. 4. Quoted in Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 52, 60. 5. Quoted in Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 106. 6. Quoted in Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-​Sunni Split (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 32. 7. Quoted in Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 50. 8. Quoted in Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 51. 9. Quoted in Guity Nashat, “Women in the Middle East, 8000 BCE to 1700 CE,” in A Companion to Gender History, ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-​ Hanks (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 235.

10. Quoted in Jess Nossiter, “ ‘Gender Trouble’ in Early Buddhism,” International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture 11 (September 2008): 165–​84, 169. 11. Quoted in N. Harry Rothschild, Wu Zhao, China’s Only Woman Emperor (New York: Pearson, 2008), 13. 12. Quoted in Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 138. 13. Quoted in Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 138. CHAPTER 3

1. Quoted in Jack Weatherford, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), xiv. 2. Quoted in Weatherford, The Secret History, 8. 3. Quoted in Weatherford, The Secret History, 51. 4. Quoted in Weatherford, The Secret History, 89. 5. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 122. 6. Quoted in Megan McLaughlin, “The Woman Warrior: Gender, Warfare and Society in Medieval Europe,” Women’s Studies 17, no. 3–​4 (1990): 193–​209, 203. 7. Quoted in Helen Nicholson, “Women on the Third Crusade,” Journal of Medieval History 23, no. 4: 335–​49, 338; quoted in Keren Caspi-​Reisfeld, “Women Warriors during the Crusades, 1095–​1254,” in Gendering the Crusades, ed. Susan B. Edgington and Sarah Lambert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 99; quoted in Nicholson, “Women on the Third Crusade,” 340. 8. Quoted in Kelly Devries, Joan of Arc: A Military Leader (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 56 9. Quoted in Susan Crane, “Clothing and Gender Definition: Joan of Arc,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 302. 10. Quoted in Devries, Joan of Arc, 137. 11. Quoted in Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 116. 12. Quoted in Barbara A. Mann, “The Lynx in Time: Haudenosaunee Women’s Traditions and History,” American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 423–​49,  438. 13. Quoted in Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), 9. 14. “On February 11, 1712, Colonel Barnwell of South Carolina attacked the Tuscaroras at Narhantes, a Tuscarora fort on the Neuse River, North Carolina. Barnwell’s troops were surprised to find that the most fierce of the Tuscarora warriors were women who do not surrender ‘until most of them are put to the sword.’ It was an Iroquois custom to put Two Spirits on the front lines to scare the enemy. A warrior woman and man in women’s clothes were as frightening to Euro-​Americans then as they are now.” Duane Brayboy, “Two Spirits, One Heart, Five Genders,” Indian Country Today, January 23, 2016, https://​ indiancountrymedianetwork.com/​news/​opinions/​two-​spirits-​one-​heart-​five-​genders/​ . CHAP TER 4

1. Konstantin Mihailović, Memoirs of a Janissary, trans. Benjamin Stolz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), 99.

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2. Quoted in Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 61–​62. 3. Quoted in Peirce, The Imperial Harem, 63. 4. Rudolph T. Ware III, “Slavery in Islamic Africa, 1400–​1800,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3, AD 1420–​1804, ed. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 58. 5. Quoted in Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 41. 6. Quoted in Hilary Beckles, “Black Masculinity in Caribbean Slavery,” in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses, ed. Rhoda E. Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2004), 234, 237. 7. Daniel Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: United States Department of Labor, 1965); Jacqueline Jones, “ ‘My Mother Was Much of a Woman’: Black Women, Work, and the Family under Slavery,” Feminist Studies 8 (Summer 1982): 235–​69, 252. One of the most influential responses to Moynihan came from Herbert G. Gutman in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1976). 8. Quoted in Gloria McCahon Whiting, “Power, Patriarchy, and Provision: African Families Negotiate Gender and Slavery in New England,” Journal of American History 103 (December 2016): 583–​605, 589. C H AP TER 5

1. Quoted in Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 99, 98, 162. 2. Quoted in Young, Masquerade, 11. 3. Quoted in Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–​1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), 83. 4. Quoted in Kent, Gender and Power, 66. 5. Quoted in Kent, Gender and Power, 68. 6. Quoted in Kent, Gender and Power, 69. 7. Quoted in Deborah Valenzw, The First Industrial Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 17. 8. Quoted in Kent, Gender and Power, 73. 9. Quoted in Kent, Gender and Power, 190–​91. 10. Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke and Co., 1873), bk. I, chap. 2, at 6. 11. Quoted in Young, Masquerade, 9. 12. Quoted in ushistory.org, “Revolutionary Changes and Limitations: Women,” U.S. History Online Textbook, http://​www.ushistory.org/​us/​13e.asp. 13. Quoted in Kent, Gender and Power, 128. 14. Quoted in Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 154. 15. Quoted in Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 158. 16. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 150. 17. Quoted in Mimi Sheller, “Sword-​Bearing Citizens: Militarism and Manhood in Nineteenth-​Century Haiti,” Plantation Society in the Americas 4 (1997): 233–​78,  244.



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18. Claire Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–​1870 (London: Routledge, 1992); and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–​1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992). 19. .See Catherine Hall, “ ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains . . . to Afric’s Golden Sand’: Ethnicity, Race and Nation in Mid-​Nineteenth-​Century England,” Gender and History 5, no. 2 (1993): 212–​30. 20. .See Catherine Hall, “Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 240–​70. 21. Quoted in Diana Patton and Pamela Scully, “Introduction: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, ed. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 13. CHAPTER 6

1. Quoted in Richard B. LaTondre, The Golden Kite (Santa Clara, CA: Chez de Presse, 2010), Kindle loc. 3798 of 5560. 2. Quoted in Jason G. Karlin, Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014), 59. 3. Quoted in Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–​1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), 88–​89. 4. Quoted in Kent, Gender and Power, 89. 5. Quoted in Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), chap. 3. 6. Quoted in Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–​1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 209. 7. Quoted in Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-​Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 39; Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–​2004 (New York: Pearson, 2004), 130. 8. Quoted in Porter, The Lion’s Share, 129. 9. See David Schoenbrun, “Gendered Themes in Early African History,” in A Companion to Gender History, ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-​ Hanks (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 249–​72 ; Oyeronke Oyewumi, ed., African Gender Studies: A Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); Mary Nooter Roberts, “Luba Art and Divination,” Art and Life in Africa, University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, https://​africa.uima.uiowa.edu/​topic-​essays/​show/​ 23?start=6. 10. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1:99, 104. 11. Quoted in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22. 12. Quoted in Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 34; McClintock, Imperial Leather, 23. 13. Richard F. Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (London: Tylston and Edwards, 1893), 1:112; 2:42. 14. Quoted in Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 2:xi.

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15. Quoted in Edna G. Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 228, 231. 16. Quoted in Karlin, Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan, 59. 17. Quoted in Michele M. Mason, “Empowering the Would-​Be Warrior: Bushidō and the Gendered Bodies of the Japanese Nation,” in Recreating Japanese Men, ed. Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 75. 18. Quoted in Sug-​In Kweon, “Japanese Female Settlers in Colonial Korea: Between the ‘Benefits’ and ‘Constraints’ of Colonial Society,” Social Science Japan Journal 17, no. 2 (July 2014): 169–​88n13, https://​doi-​org.colorado.idm.oclc.org/​10.1093/​ sjj/​jyu004. 19. Quoted in Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 27, 31. 20. Quoted in Roscoe, Changing Ones, 32, 33. 21. Quoted in Roscoe, Changing Ones, 31, 32. 22. See Donald A. Grinde Jr., “Taking the Indian Out of the Indian: U.S. Policies of Ethnocide through Education,” Wicazo Sa Review 19, no. 2 (Autumn 2004): 25–​32. 23. Quoted in Roscoe, Changing Ones, 35, 36. C H AP TER 7

1. Quoted in Cora Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1992), 136. 2. Quoted in Presley, Kikuyu Women, 143. 3. Maria Rosa Henson, Comfort Woman: A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery under the Japanese Military (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 36, 37. 4. Kam Louie, “Chinese, Japanese and Global Masculine Identities,” in Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan, ed. Kam Louie and Morris Low (London: Routledge, 2003), 9. 5. Quoted in Sun Shuyun, The Long March: The True History of Communist China’s Founding Myth (New York: Anchor, 2006), 130. 6. Shuyun, The Long March, 120. 7. Quoted in Shuyun, The Long March, 131. 8. Quoted in Shuyun, The Long March, 120. 9. Quoted in Shuyun, The Long March, 133–​34. 10. Quoted in John Lonsdale, “Authority, Gender and Violence: The War within Mau Mau’s Fight for Land and Freedom,” in Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, ed. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (Oxford: James Curry, 2003), 58–​59, 51. 11. Quoted in Katherine Bruce-​Lockhart, “ ‘Unsound’ Minds and Broken Bodies: The Detention of ‘Hardcore’ Mau Mau Women at Kamiti and Gitamayu Detention Camps in Kenya, 1954–​1960,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8, no. 4 (2014): 590–​608,  593. 12. “Mau Mau Uprising: Kenyans Win UK Torture Ruling,” BBC News, October 5, 2012, accessed September 17, 2014, http://​www.bbc.com/​news/​uk-​19843719. 13. Quoted in Beatrice Farnsworth, “Bolshevism, the Woman Question, and Alexandra Kollontai,” in Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (New York: Elsevier, 1978), 202.



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14. Quoted in Taeko Shibahara, Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 100. 15. Quoted in Charlotte Weber, “Between Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern Women’s Congresses of 1930 and 1932,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (2008): 90. 16. Quoted in Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 2001), 18. 17. See Barbara Caine, English Feminism, 1780–​1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), afterword. 18. Ángela Ixkic Bastian Duarte, “From the Margins of Latin American Feminism: Indigenous and Lesbian Feminisms,” Signs 38, no. 1 (September 2012): 153. EP ILOGUE

1. Zamira Rahim, “Canadian Baby Given Health Card without Sex Designation,” CNN, July 5, 2017, http://​www.cnn.com/​2017/​07/​04/​health/​canadian-​baby-​gender-​ designation/​index.html. 2. Jessica Smith Cross, “Gender-​Neutral Birth Certificates Could Be Issued in Ontario by 2018,” The Star, May 18, 2017, https://​www.thestar.com/​news/​canada/​2017/​05/​ 18/​gender-​neutral-​birth-​certificates-​could-​be-​issued-​in-​ontario-​by-​2018.html. 3. Cross, “Gender-​Neutral Birth Certificates,” https://​www.thestar.com/​news/​canada/​ 2017/​05/​18/​gender-​neutral-​birth-​certificates-​could-​be-​issued-​in-​ontario-​by-​2018. html. 4. Kyle Knight, “Rights in Transition: Making Legal Recognition for Transgender People a Global Priority,” Human Rights Watch, 2016, https://​www.hrw.org/​world-​ report/​2016/​rights-​in-​transition. 5. Quoted in Noa Yadidi and Grace Hauck, “McCain Criticizes ‘Unclear’ Trump Policy on Transgender Military Ban,” CNN, July 26, 2017, http://​www.cnn.com/​ 2017/​07/​26/​politics/​congress-​reaction-​transgender-​military-​policy/​index.html; Megan Trimble, “Republicans, Democrats Respond to Trump’s Transgender Troop Ban,” U.S. News, July 26, 2017, https://​www.usnews.com/​news/​national-​news/​ articles/​2017-​07-​26/​trump-​ban-​on-​transgender-​troops-​draws-​swift-​response-​from-​ republicans-​democrats. 6. Quoted in Michelle Goldberg, “What Is a Woman?,” New Yorker 90, 24–​28, https://​colorado.idm.oclc.org/​login?url=https://​search-​proquest-​com.colorado.idm. oclc.org/​docview/​1557691280?accountid=14503. 7. Quoted in Samantha Schmidt, “Women’s Issues Are Different from Trans Women’s Issues, Feminist Author Says, Sparking Criticism,” Washington Post, March 13, 2017, https://​www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​morning-​mix/​wp2017/​.

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Further Reading GENERAL

Achebe, Nwando, and Claire Robertson, eds. Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. Engel, Barbara Alpern. Women in Russia, 1700–​2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kent, Susan Kingsley. Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–​1990. London: Routledge, 1999. Ko, Adeline, and Yu-​Mei Balasingamchow. Women and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia. London: Routledge, 2018. Meade, Teresa A., and Merry E. Wiesner-​Hanks. A Companion to Gender History. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Murray, Pamela S., ed. Women and Gender in Modern Latin America: Historical Sources and Interpretations. New York: Routledge, 2014. Sariola, Salla. Gender and Sexuality in India. London: Routledge, 2012. Smith, Bonnie G. Women’s History in Global Perspective. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Wieringa, Saskia, and Horacio Sivori, eds. The Sexual History of the Global South: Sexual Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America Paperback. London: Zed Books, 2013. Yonomoto, Marcia. The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS GENDER?

Kent, Susan Kingsley. Gender and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. CHAPTER 1: PATRIARCHY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, 3000 bce–​300  ce

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Roller, Duane. Cleopatra: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Rosenlee, Li-​hsiang Lisa. Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Tyldesley, Joyce. Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh. London: Penguin, 1998. CHAPTER 2: THE GENDER RULES OF NEW UNIVERSAL RELIGIONS, 200–​1000 ce

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Kuefler, Mathew. The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Rothschild, N. Harry. Wu Zhao, China’s Only Woman Emperor. New York: Pearson, 2008. Salisbury, Joyce E. Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman. New York: Routledge, 1997. CHAPTER 3: GENDER AND WAR IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL INTERACTIONS, 1000–​1500

Cleary, Thomas, ed. Code of the Samurai: A Modern Translation of the Bushido Shoshinshu of Taira Shigesuke. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1999. Devries, Kelly. Joan of Arc: A Military Leader. Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999. Edgington, Susan B., and Sarah Lambert, eds. Gendering the Crusades. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Mann, Barbara Alice. Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. McLaughlin, Megan. “The Woman Warrior: Gender, Warfare and Society in Medieval Europe.” Women’s Studies 17, no. 3–​4 (1990): 193–​209. Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000. Weatherford, Jack. The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire. New York: Crown, 2010. CHAPTER 4: GENDER AND SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL EXPANSION, 1450–​1750

Berry, Daina Ramey, and Leslie M. Harris, eds. Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Eltis, David, and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Vol. 3, AD 1420–​1804. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Foster, Thomas A. Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Klein, Cecilia F., ed., Gender in Pre-​Hispanic America. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001. Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. CHAPTER 5: GENDER AND THE STATE IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION, 1750–​1850

De Pauw, Linda Grant. “Women in Combat: The Revolutionary War Experience.” Journal of Armed Forces and Society 7, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 209–​26. Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Oberg, Barbara B., ed. Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Scully, Pamela, and Diana Paton, eds. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

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Zagarri, Rosemarie. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. CHAPTER 6: GENDER IN THE AGE OF EMPIRES, 1815–​1914

Bastian, Misty, Mark Matera, and Susan Kingsley Kent. The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Edgerton, Robert B. Warrior Women: The Amazons and the Nature of War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Germain, Félix, and Silyane Larcher. Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848–​2016. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Ha, Marie-​Paule. French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Karlin, Jason G. Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. Levine, Philippa, ed. Gender and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sinha, Mrinilini. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1995. Streets, Heather. Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–​1914. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004. CHAPTER 7: GENDER POLITICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Grayzel, Susan. Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Grayzel, Susan, and Tammy M. Proctor, eds. Gender and the Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Jolly, Margaretta. Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968 to Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1988. Krylova, Anna. Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Passmore, Kevin, ed. Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–​45. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Presley, Cora Ann. Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya. Baltimore, MD: Imprint Editions, 2013. Robb, Linsey, and Juliette Pattinson, eds. Men, Masculinities and Male Culture in the Second World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Rose, Sarah. D-​Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II. New York: Crown, 2019. Siegel, Mona. Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights after the First World War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Smith, Bonnie G., ed. Global Feminisms since 1945. New York: Routledge, 2000. Sun, Shuyun. The Long March: The True History of Communist China’s Founding Myth. New York: Anchor Books, 2006.



F u rt h e r R e a d i n g 155

Yoshiaki, Yoshimi. Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. EPILOGUE: CHALLENGING GENDER IDENTITIES

Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle, eds. The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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Websites African Women on the Internet www.library.stanford.edu/​all/​?q=African+ Women+on+the+Internet&op=Search Part of Stanford University’s library holdings. Provides links to resources pertaining to African diaspora women and African women south of the Sahara. American Women: A Gateway to Library of Congress Resources for the Study of Women’s History and Culture in the United States www.lcweb2.loc.gov/​ammem/​awhhtml/​ index.html Produced by the Library of Congress, the site makes it possible to search the print publication American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women’s History and Culture in the United States (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2001). It provides links to the digitized material pertinent to American women located on the Library of Congress website. Fordham University’s People with a History: An Online Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans* History www.sourcebooks.fordham.edu/​pwh/​ Offers documents, texts, and images treating the history of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people across the globe in all chronological periods. Fordham University’s Women’s History Sourcebook www.sourcebooks.fordham.edu/​women/​ womensbook.asp An invaluable collection of materials pertaining to gender in the ancient, medieval, and modern world, covering the entire world.

GLBT Historical Society www.glbthistory.org/​ Located in San Francisco, the GLBT Historical Society is home to the Dr. John P. De Cecco Archives & Special Collections, one of the most extensive archives in the world concerning LGBTQ people. History in Focus: Gender www.history.ac.uk/​ihr/​Focus/​Gender/​ websites.html Created by the Institute for Historical Research in London, with links to a wide range of websites treating gender and sexuality across much of the English-​speaking  world. H-​Women www.networks.h-​net.org/​h-​women Part of the broad and diverse H-​net program, H-​Women provides a platform for discussions about research and teaching; the state of the field of gender history; and historiography. The Women’s History Network www.womenshistorynetwork.org/​ The Women’s History Network, headquartered in London, advocates for women’s history through a variety of functions such as publishing a peer-​ reviewed journal, holding conferences, and offering means of networking. It provides up-​to-​date information about other agencies and activities promoting women’s history as well.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.    abolitionism, 94–​96, 95f, 102 Amen-​Re,  12 abortion, 126–​29,  132–​33 American Revolution Abu Bakr, 37–​38 citizen-​solider ideal and, 87 Abu Talib, 36, 37–​38 liberalism and, 86–​87, 92 Abyssinia, 64 Sampson’s experience as a soldier in, Adams, Abigail, 89 79–​81,  80f Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 138–​39 slavery and, 77f Adodaroh,  59–​61 women’s roles in, 89, 91 Africa. See also specific countries The Analects of Confucius, 24 anticolonial campaigns in, 116, 124–​26 Anthony, Susan B., 96–​98 cosmologies during pre-​colonial era Antonius, Marcus, 19–​20, 21–​23 in,  106–​8 Aristotle, 14–​16, 17 the Enlightenment and, 101–​2 Arslan Khan, 52 European imperial regimes in, 105–​6, Articles of Pacification (Jamaica), 63–​64 107–​10, 116,  124–​26 Asante, 107 Islam in, 35–​36, 65–​66 Asia. See also specific countries kingship rituals in, 106–​7 the Enlightenment and, 101–​2 sex in, 107–​8 Japanese imperialism in, 110–​13 slavery in, 64–​66, 73 slavery in, 64–​65, 73 trans-​Atlantic slave trade and, 73, 74 Assyrian law codex, 9–​10 women chiefs in, 107 Athens (ancient), 13–​15 agriculture Atkinson, Ti-​Grace,  138–​39 first systematic cultivation of crops and, 8 Augustine of Hippo, 31–​34 Haudenosaunee and, 59–​60 Australia, 126, 137 patriarchy and, 8–​9 Austrian Empire, 64 slavery and, 65–​66, 74 Ayonwantha (Hiawatha), 60–​61 women’s work in, 8, 85–​86    Ahmose (queen of Egypt), 10 baatar (decisiveness), 50–​51 A’isha,  37–​39 Ban Zhao, 26–​28 Al-​Altun, 50–​51,  52 Basteen, Jane, 75–​76 Alaqai Beki, 50–​51, 52 Basteen, Sebastian, 75–​76 Alençon, Duc d’, 57–​58 Bedford, Duke of, 58 Alexander the Great, 17, 19, 20 berdache (nonconforming gender identity Ali Talib, 37 among Native Americans), 62, 113, Allah, 36–​37,  38–​39 114f. See also two spirit people All India Women’s Conference, 131 Berenike (queen of Egypt), 20 Altani,  50–​51 Binney, Barnabas, 79–​81 “Amazons” (women warriors in Dahomey), birth control, 128–​29, 132–​33 108–​10,  109f Botés (two-​spirit persons among Crow Ambar, Malik 68–​69, 78 Indians),  113–​15

Brazil,  74–​75 British Empire. See also Great Britain Africa and, 1–​3, 107–​10, 116, 124–​26 India and, 102–​5, 131 Jamaica and, 63–​64, 74 masculinity and, 104–​6 Mau Mau uprising (Kenya, 1950s) and, 116,  124–​26 Nigeria and, 1–​3 slavery and, 63–​64, 74–​75 Brown, John, 82 Brutus, 21 Buddhism Buddha and, 40–​41 bushido code of conduct for samurai and, 49 Central Asia and, 40–​42 China and, 29–​30, 40–​41, 42–​44 Confucianism and, 40–​41, 45 origins of, 29–​30 patriarchy’s declining influence in, 40–​41,  44 Wu Zhao and, 42–​45 Bugis, 137 Bull Snake, 113–​14 Burton, Richard, 108    Cady Stanton, Elizabeth, 96–​98 Caesar, Julius, 19–​20, 21 Caesarian, 22f Canada, 136 Capellanus, Andreas, 54 the Caribbean, 63–​64, 74–​75 Carothers, J. C., 125 Cassius, 21 Catholic Church, 34–​35, 74–​75. See also Christianity Catlin, George, 114f Central Asia, 39, 40–​42, 52 Chabi, 53 Changiz Khan, 68 Chang Kai-​shek,  120–​21 Charles VII (king of France), 57–​58 Checheyigen,  52–​53 Cheyenne Indians, 113–​14 China Buddhism in, 29–​30, 40–​41, 42–​44 communism in, 120–​23, 123f Confucianism in, 23–​26, 27–​28, 40–​42, 44, 45 Daoism in, 40, 42–​44 divorce in, 25–​26, 41–​42 European imperial presence in, 119–​20

160 Index

feminism in, 120–​21 Han dynasty in, 23–​25, 26–​27, 40, 53 Japan and, 111–​12, 121, 129 Long March (1930s) in, 120–​23 marriage in, 25–​26, 120–​21 masculinity and, 119–​20 Mongol Empire’s invasion of, 52–​53 Qing Dynasty and, 64 Red Army in, 122 sexual relations in, 119–​20 Tang Dynasty and, 40–​45 Christianity anti-​Semitism in,  35–​36 Augustine of Hippo and, 31–​34 the Crusades and, 54, 56–​57 heresies suppressed in, 35–​36 marriage and, 34 martyrdom and, 29, 31–​33 masculinity and, 35, 54 patriarchy and, 33–​34 Perpetua’s devotion to, 29, 30–​33 Roman Empire and, 33–​34 sex and, 34 Christine de Pisan, 56 Cleopatra VII (queen of Egypt) Antonius and, 21–​23 ascension to the throne of, 21 Caesar and, 21 children of, 21–​23 education of, 20–​21 Egyptian territory and influence expanded under, 23, 28 image at temple of Hathor of, 22f Ptolemaic Dynasty and, 20 Roman civil war (44 BCE) and, 21 Roman critics of, 23 suicide of, 23 Coahuiltic Indians, 62 Code of Hammurabi, 9–​10 “comfort women” (forced sex workers in Japanese Empire), 113, 118–​19 commercial revolution, 81–​83 Confucianism The Analects of Confucius and, 24 Buddhism and, 40–​41, 45 bushido code of conduct for samurai and, 49 Dong Zhongshu and, 24–​25 filial piety and, 24 Han Dynasty and, 23–​24 masculinity and, 119–​20 Nüjie (Lessons for Women) and,  27–​28

patriarchy and, 23–​26, 27–​28, 40–​42, 44, 45 reciprocal obligations in, 24 Tang Dynasty and, 40, 41–​42, 45 yang and yin framework of opposites in, 24–​25,  40–​41 Constantine (emperor of Rome), 31–​32,  34–​35 Constantinople,  34–​36 Constitution of the Five Nations Confederacy (Great and Binding Law of Peace, Haudenosaunee people), 60–​62 Constitution of the United States, 86–​87,  89–​90 Corn Mother (Jigonsaseh), 60–​61 Cortés, Hernán, 72–​73 courtly love ideal in medieval Europe, 54, 55f Crook, George, 113–​14 Crow Indians, 113–​15 The Crusades, 54, 56–​57    Dahomey, 108–​10, 109f Dance to the Berdash (Catlin), 114f Daoism, 40, 42–​44 Darwin, Charles, 102, 105, 106 De amore libri tres (Capellanus), 54 Declaration of Independence (United States),  89–​90 de Gouges, Olympe, 91 Déroin, Jeanne, 96–​98 Dessalines, Jean-​Jacques,  93–​94 divorce ancient Egypt and, 11 China and, 25–​26, 41–​42 French Revolution and, 90–​91 Islam and, 39–​40 Soviet Union and, 127–​28 domesticity, 83–​84, 86–​87, 128 Dong Zhongshu, 24–​25 Doty, Kori, 136 Doty, Searyl Atli, 136    Egypt. See also Cleopatra VII; Hatshepsut anticolonialism in, 129 Constitution of 1923 in, 129–​31 division of labor in, 11 feminism in, 129–​31 Islam and, 39 marriage in, 18–​19 Ptolemaic Dynasty and, 20 revolution (1952) in, 130–​31 Roman Empire and, 19–​20, 21–​23

royal women in, 11–​12 socialist revolution (1952) in, 130–​31 women’s rights in, 11, 18–​19 women’s suffrage and, 129–​31 Egyptian Feminist Union, 129 Emeruwa, Mark, 1 England, 55–​56, 57–​58, 59f. See also Great Britain the Enlightenment, 81, 82–​83, 88, 100–​2 Equal Pay Act of 1963 (United States), 132 Equal Pay Acts of 1970 and 1975 (United Kingdom), 132 eunuchs, 16, 67f, 70–​71,  136–​37 Eve (Book of Genesis), 33    fascism,  117–​19 Fatima (daughter of Muhammed), 37 femininity. See also feminism abolitionism and, 94–​96 African pre-​colonial cosmologies and,  106–​7 agriculture and, 85–​86 Athens of antiquity and, 15 class and, 84–​87 commerce and, 3, 82, 84 domesticity and, 83–​84, 86–​87, 128 The Enlightenment and, 101–​2 fascism and, 117 imperialism and, 100, 102–​5, 107–​8,  111–​12 medical theory in the nineteenth century and,  92–​93 feminism anticolonialism and, 129, 131 anti-​pornography campaigns and, 133 birth control and, 128–​29, 132–​33 in China, 120–​21 in the developing world, 134–​35 in Egypt, 129–​31 equal pay and, 132 in India, 131–​32 in Japan, 128–​29 marriage and, 131 second wave feminism and, 132–​33,  138–​39 Seneca Falls Convention (1848) and, 96–​98,  97f Soviet Union, 127 transgender people and, 138–​39 women’s suffrage movement and, 87, 96–​98,  126 workplace discrimination and, 132 Ferguson, Adam,  100–​1

I n d e x 161

Finland, 126 First Maroon War (Jamaica, 1730s), 63 First World War (1914-​18), 117 Forbes, Frederick, 108–​10 Fordyce, James, 84 Four Peoples (followers of Wu Zhao), 44 France. See also French Revolution empire of, 74–​75, 108–​10 feminism in, 132 Franco-​Prussian War (1870) and, 105–​6 Haitian Revolution and, 93–​94 Hundred Years’ War and, 55–​56, 57–​58, 59f masculinity and, 105–​6 Napoleonic Wars and, 87–​88, 93–​94 republican ideology, 94 War of the Austrian Succession and, 82 women’s suffrage in, 96–​98, 126 French Revolution citizen-​solider ideal and, 87 liberalism and, 86–​87, 92 marriage laws and, 90–​91 natural rights doctrine and, 91 patriarchy and, 90–​91, 92 women’s role in, 89, 90f Fukushima Yasumasa, 99–​100, 111, 112f    Gachika, Elizabeth, 116–​17 Galen,  15–​16 Gannett, Benjamin, 79–​81 Gaozong (emperor of China), 41–​42 Genghis Khan. See also Mongol Empire alliances through marriage arranged by,  51–​52 baatar (decisiveness) prized by, 50–​51 Central Asia conquests of, 52 China invaded (1211) by forces of, 52–​53 cosmology of, 51 daughters of, 50–​53 Germanic tribes of antiquity, 34–​35 Germany fascism in, 117–​18 feminism in, 132 Franco-​Prussian War (1870) and, 105–​6 women’s suffrage in, 126 Go Toba (emperor of Japan), 46–​47 Great Britain. See also British Empire; England abolitionism in, 94–​96 American Revolution and, 87–​88 Napoleonic Wars, 87–​88,  93–​94 War of the Austrian Succession and, 82 women’s suffrage in, 96–​98, 126 gunpowder, 47, 57

162 Index

Haddon, Celia, 132–​33 Hague, William,  125–​26 Haitian Revolution, 81, 87, 93–​94 Hammurabi (emperor of Babylonia), 9–​10 Han dynasty (China), 23–​25, 26–​27, 40, 53 Hathor,  18–​19 Hatshepsut (pharaoh of Egypt) death of, 12 discovery of mummified body (2007) of, 6 historical erasure of, 6, 12–​13 in male guise, 6–​7 marriage to Tuthmosis II, 10 patriarchy circumvented in rule by, 6, 10–​11, 12, 28 physical appearance of, 6–​7 relief at Temple of Hatshepsut of, 7f Tuthmosis III and, 12–​13 Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), 59–​62, 89–​90 He Di (emperor of China), 26–​27 Henson, Maria Rosa, 119 hermaphrodism, 16 Herophilus,  15–​16 He Zizhen, 122 Hiawatha (Ayonwantha), 60–​61 hijra (community of men in India who behave as women in worship practices),  136–​37 Hindu Code (India), 131 homosexuality, 15, 62, 133–​34, 143 Horace, 23 Hundred Years’ War (England and France, 1337-​1453), 55–​56, 57–​58,  59f Hürrem (Aleksandra Lisowska), 69–​70,  78    Ibn al-​Althir,  56–​57 Igbo,  1–​3 imperialism anticolonialism and, 116, 124, 129 British Empire and, 1–​3, 63–​64, 74–​75, 102–​6, 107–​10, 116,  124–​26 femininity and, 100, 102–​5, 107–​8,  111–​12 French Empire and, 74–​75, 108–​10 Japan and, 100, 105–​6, 110–​13 masculinity and, 102–​3, 104–​6, 107–​8, 110–​12, 115,  124–​25 rape and, 102–​5, 103f slavery and, 64, 65, 74 Social Darwinism and, 102, 105–​6 Spanish Empire and, 65, 72, 74–​75, 78

United States and, 105–​6, 110–​11,  113–​15 women’s roles in, 111–​12 Inanna, 9 India British imperial presence in, 102–​5 Buddhism and, 40–​41 feminism in, 131–​32 Hindu Code in, 131 independence (1947) of, 131 marriage in, 131 Mughal Empire and, 64, 65, 68–​69 rebellion (1857) in, 102–​5 sepoy soldiers in, 102, 103f slaves as soldiers in, 68–​69 Inet, 6 inheritance laws, 90–​91, 96–​98, 131 Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), 59–​62, 89–​90 Ishimoto Shidzue, 128–​29 Ishtar, 9 Isis, 18–​19, 22f Islam in Africa, 36, 39, 65–​66 in Asia, 36, 39 The Crusades and, 54, 56–​57 divorce laws and, 39–​40 equality emphasized in, 36–​37 Hijra (migration to Medina) in, 37–​38 marriage and, 38–​39, 69 Muhammad and, 36–​39 origins in Arabia of, 35–​36 Ottoman Empire and, 67–​68, 69, 70 Qur’an and, 38–​40 Shari’ah law and, 38–​40, 65–​66 slavery and, 64–​68 veiling of women and, 38–​39 women’s role in public life in, 38–​40 Israelites (ancient), 10 Italy, 117–​18, 132    Jamaica, 63–​64, 74 Janissaries (Ottoman military force), 66–​68, 67f, 70 Japan Buddhism and, 40–​41 China and, 111–​12, 121, 129 “comfort women” (forced sex workers) in empire of, 113, 118–​19 fascism in, 117–​19 feminism in, 128–​29 imperialism and, 100, 105–​6, 110–​13 Kamakura shogunate and, 46–​48, 49 Korea and, 111–​13

masculinity and, 100, 110–​12, 118–​19 Meiji restoration (1868) in, 110–​11, 112f, 128 samurai warriors in, 46, 48f, 48–​49, 62,  110–​11 Taiwan and, 111–​12, 113 women’s suffrage in, 128–​29 Jaramillo, Juan, 73 Jefferson, Thomas,  89–​90 Jeffreys, Sheila, 138–​39 Jews, 33–​34, 35–​36, 117 Jigonsaseh (Corn Mother), 60–​61 Joan of Arc, 57–​58, 59f, 137 Josephus, 34    Kahengeri, Gitu wa, 125–​26 Kaianeraserakowa (Great and Binding Law of Peace among Haudenosaunee),  60–​62 Kamakura shogunate (Japan), 46–​48, 49 Kano Empire, 64, 65 Karankawa Indians, 62 Kenya, 116–​17,  124–​26 Kenyatta, Jomo, 124–​25 Khadija, 36–​37, 38 Khubilai Khan, 53 Kikuyu, 116, 124, 125 Kipling, Rudyard, 111 knighthood in medieval Europe courtly love ideal and, 54, 55f the Crusades and, 54, 56–​57 elite social status and, 53 Hundred Years’ War (1337-​1453) and,  55–​56 loyalty to the monarch and, 55–​56 masculinity and, 54, 62 Kongo, 64 Korea, 40–​41, 49–​50, 52–​53,  111–​13 Kusonoki Masashige, 48f    Lakota Sioux, 62, 113–​14 Laozi, 44 Latin American revolutions, 81, 94 law codes Assyrian law codex and, 9–​10 Code of Hammurabi and, 9–​10 Mosaic code, 10 Napoleonic Code and, 92 Shari’ah law and, 38–​40, 65–​66 Leakey, Louis, 125 Lecky, William, 86 liberalism, 86–​87, 92, 94–​95, 118

I n d e x 163

Lienu zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women, Liu Xiang), 26–​27 Li Shimin, 42 Lisowska, Aleksandra (Roxelana; Hürrem), 69–​70,  78 Liu Xiang, 26–​27 Li Yuan (emperor of China), 40, 44 Long March (China, 1930s), 120–​23 Louis Napoleon, 96–​98 L’Ouverture, Toussaint,  93–​94 Luba,  106–​7 Lucan, 23    Mali Empire, 64 Malintzin (Aztec slave), 71–​73, 78 Manchuria, 111–​12, 113 Manetho, 6 Mao Zedong, 122 Mara, Jane Muthoni, 125–​26 Maroons (fugitive slaves), 63–​64 marriage. See also divorce Athens of antiquity and, 13–​14 China and, 25–​26, 120–​21 Christianity and, 34 dowries and, 13–​14, 25–​26 Egypt and, 18–​19 European colonists and Native Americans joined in, 73 feminism and, 131 French Revolution and, 90–​91 India and, 131 Islam and, 38–​39, 69 Mosaic code and, 10 polygamy and, 34, 38, 120 same-​sex marriage and, 139 slavery and, 74–​76 Soviet Union and, 126–​28 Sparta and, 17 Masako (Kamakura shogunate leader), 46–​47,  49 Masashige, Kusonoki, 59f masculinity abolitionism and, 94–​96 Athens of antiquity and, 15–​17 Christianity and, 35, 54 citizenship and, 81–​82, 87, 92 The Enlightenment and, 101–​2 eunuchs and, 16, 70–​71 fascism and, 117–​18 Haitian Revolution and, 94 imperialism and, 102–​3, 104–​6, 107–​8, 110–​12, 115,  124–​25

164 Index

knighthood in medieval Europe and,  53–​57 male breadwinner model and, 86 Roman Empire and, 35 samurai warriors of Japan and, 100, 110–​12,  118–​19 slavery and, 75 Social Darwinism and, 106 Sparta and, 16–​17 warfare and, 15, 16–​17, 35, 56, 62, 82,  87–​88 Mau Mau uprising (Kenya, 1950s), 116,  124–​26 Mayans, 71, 72 May Fourth Movement (China, 1919-​21),  120 Mecca (Arabia), 36–​38 Medina (Arabia), 37–​38 Meiji restoration (Japan, 1868), 110–​11, 112f, 128 Mesopotamia, 9, 10 Mihailović, Konstantin, 66 Mill, John Stuart, 96–​98 Millar, John, 101–​2 Mochihito (prince of Japan), 46 Moctezuma, 72 Mongol Empire. See also Genghis Khan Central Asia conquests (1219-​24) of, 49–​50,  52 China invaded (1211-​15) by, 52–​53 mass rapes during the succession battle (1237) in, 52–​53 royal women’s active role in, 49–​53 Montesquieu, Baron de, 88 Moreau, Jacques-​Louis, 93 Morgan, Robin, 138 Mosaic code, 10 Mott, Lucretia, 96 Moundang,  106–​7 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 75 Mughal Empire, 64, 65, 68–​69 Muhammad (Prophet of Islam) early life of, 36 hijra (migration) to Medina (622 CE) of,  37–​38 marriages and wives of, 36–​38 on marriage within Islam, 38–​39 preaching by, 37–​38 revelations of, 36, 38–​39    Nanny (Maroon fighter in Jamaica), 63–​64 Napoleonic Code, 92

Napoleonic Wars, 87–​88,  93–​94 Native Americans. See also specific groups epidemic disease during Columbian exchange among, 74 European imperial violence and, 73–​74 two-​spirit people (those with nonconforming gender identity) among, 62, 113–​15, 114f US government and, 114–​15 warfare and, 62, 113–​14 women’s role in public life among, 61–​62 natural law doctrine, 88–​89, 91 Neferure (princess of Egypt), 10, 12–​13 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 131 Nelson, Lord, 87–​88 New Culture Movement (China, 1920s), 120 New Zealand, 126, 137 Ngaju Dayak, 137 Nigeria, 1–​3,  138–​39 Nitobe Inazō, 111 Nizam Shah, 68–​69 Norway, 126, 137 Nüjie (Lessons for Women, Ban Zhao),  27–​28 Nwamuo,  1–​2 Nwanyeruwa,  1–​2 Nyingi, Wambuga wa, 125–​26 Nzili, Paolo, 125–​26    Octavian, 19–​20, 21, 23 Ogodei Khan, 52–​53 Ogu Umunwaany (“Women’s War,” Nigeria, 1929),  1–​3 Ojibway Indians, 62 Okugu,  1–​2 Origen,  33–​34 Osh-​Tisch,  113–​14 Osiris, 22f The Other Magpie, 113–​14 Ottoman Empire concubinage in royal court of, 69–​70 early modern expansion of, 64, 65, 66 eunuchs in, 70 Islam and, 67–​68, 69, 70 Janissaries (military force) in, 66–​68, 67f, 70 slavery in, 64, 65, 66–​68, 67f,  69–​70 Süleyman I and Hürrem in, 69–​70    Pahket, 12 Paine, Thomas, 91

The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity,  31–​33 Paterson, John, 79–​81 patriarchy agricultural societies and, 8–​9 Buddhism and, 40–​41, 44 Christianity and, 33–​34 Confucianism and, 23–​26, 27–​28, 40–​42, 44, 45 Hatshepsut’s circumvention of, 6, 10–​11, 12, 28 law codes and, 8–​9 male heads of households’ power in, 6, 9, 30,  40–​41 Napoleonic Code and, 92 Roman Empire and, 19, 23, 30–​31, 32–​33 women treated as subordinate in, 6, 9, 15, 19, 25–​26, 28, 30, 40–​41 Paul (Christian apostle), 34 The Peacemaker (Haudenosaunee people),  60–​61 Pericles, 15, 16–​17 Perpetua Christian devotion of, 29, 30–​33 marriage of, 30 martyrdom of, 29, 31–​33 patriarchal culture of Roman Empire and, 30–​31,  32–​33 Perry, Matthew, 110–​11 Persia, 39, 40 Petzoldt, William, 115 Plutarch,  16–​17 polygamy, 34, 38–​39, 120 Pompeius the Great, 19–​20 pornography, 133 Portuguese Empire, 64, 65, 73, 74–​75 Prempe I (Asante king), 107 Pretty Shield, 113–​15 prostitution, 34, 129 Ptolemy XII (king of Egypt), 20 Ptolemy XIII (king of Egypt), 20–​21 Ptolemy XIV (king of Egypt), 21 Puertocarrero, Alonso Hernández, 72    Qasim, 68 Qing Dynasty (China), 64 The Qur’an, 38–​40 Quraysh clan (Arabia), 36, 37–​38    rape British suppression of Mau Mau uprising and,  125–​26

I n d e x 165

rape (Cont.) the Crusades and, 57 imperialism and, 102–​5, 103f Japanese occupation of countries in World War II and, 118–​19 Mongol Empire succession battle (1237),  52–​53 Red Army’s defense during Long March against, 122 slavery and, 66, 69, 71–​72, 73, 76 Raymond, Janice, 138–​39 reproduction abortion and, 126–​29, 132–​33 birth control and, 128–​29, 132–​33 Herophilus on, 15–​16 Japanese culture and, 128 Long March (China) and, 122 royal succession and, 69–​70 slavery and, 64–​66, 71–​72, 75, 76 transgender people and, 136 Riazanov, David, 127–​28 Robertson, William,  82–​83 Roman Empire Christianity and, 29, 31–​35 civil war (44 BCE) in, 21 Egypt and, 19–​20, 21–​23 fall of Rome (476 CE) and, 34–​35 Germanic invasions of, 35 masculinity and, 35 patriarchy in, 19, 23, 30–​31, 32–​33 religious devotion to Greco-​Roman gods in,  30–​31 Roman Republic as predecessor of, 19–​20 Rosebery, Lord, 105–​6 Ros-​Lehtinen, Ileana, 138 Rumfa, Muhammadu, 66 Russia, 64, 99, 117, 126–​27. See also Soviet Union    Sampson, Deborah (Robert Shurtliff), 79–​81,  80f Sampson, Ephraim, 79–​81 samurai warriors (Japan) bun (cultural attainment) and, 49 bushido code of conduct, 49 masculinity and, 46, 48f, 49, 62, 110–​11 Meiji Restoration and, 110–​11 sex and, 49 shogun (military governors) and, 48 yabusame training exercises and, 48–​49 Sanetomo (Kamakura shogunate leader),  46–​47

166 Index

Sanger, Margaret, 128–​29 Sargent Murray, Judith, 89 Seh-​Dong-​Hong-​Beh,  109f Seneca Falls Convention (1848), 96–​98,  97f sepoy (Bengali soldiers in India), 102, 103f Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 (Great Britain), 132 sexual relations. See also reproduction adultery and, 9, 10 in China, 119–​20 Christianity and, 34 The Enlightenment and, 101–​2 imperialism and, 102–​3 Judaism and, 34 medical theories of the nineteenth century and, 93 samurai warriors and, 49 sexual revolution of 1960s and, 132–​34 two-​spirit people and, 62 Shafiq, Duriyya, 130f,  130–​31 Shari’ah law, 38–​40, 65–​66 Shelby, Richard, 138 shogun (military governors in imperial Japan), 48 Shurtliff, Robert (Deborah Sampson), 79–​81,  80f slavery abolitionism and, 94–​96, 95f, 102 in Africa, 64–​66, 73 agriculture and, 65–​66, 75 in ancient Greece, 16–​17 in Asia, 64–​65, 73 British Empire, 63–​64, 74–​75 The Caribbean and, 63–​64, 74–​75 children in, 64–​65, 66, 75 death rates in, 74–​75 domestic work in, 71–​72 emancipation of individual slaves and, 66,  69–​70 escapes and attempted escapes from, 76, 77f eunuchs and, 70–​71 families in, 75–​76 Haitian Revolution and, 93–​94 imperialism and, 64, 65, 74 Islam and, 64–​68 Maroons (escaped slaves) and, 63–​64 marriage and, 74–​76 masculinity and, 75 in Mesoamerica, 64–​65, 71–​73, 78 military service and, 64–​65, 66–​68

in the Ottoman Empire, 64, 65, 66–​68, 67f,  69–​70 punishment and, 74, 76 reproduction and, 64–​66, 71–​72, 75, 76 sexual coercion and rape in, 66, 69, 71–​72, 73, 76 Spanish Empire and, 65, 72, 74–​75, 78 trans-​Atlantic slave trade and, 73, 74 in the United States, 75–​76, 77f women in, 64–​65, 66, 71–​73 Smith, Adam,  82–​83 Smith, William,  107–​8 Social Darwinism, 102, 105–​6 Solon,  13–​14 Songhai Empire, 64 Songhay Empire, 64, 65 Sorghaghtani Beki, 53 Soviet Union, 127–​28. See also Russia Spanish Empire expansion in early modern era of, 64, 73 Latin American revolutions and, 81, 94 Mexico and, 72–​73, 78 slavery and, 65, 72, 74–​75, 78 Sparta, 16–​17, 18f Stalin, Joseph, 127–​28 Sulëyman I (Ottoman emperor), 69–​70 Sumer, 9    Taiwan, 111–​12, 113 Tang Dynasty (China) Buddhism and, 40–​41, 42–​44 Daoism and, 42–​44 Li Shimin and, 42 Wu Zhao and, 41–​45 Teng Sui (empress of China), 27, 28 Thayer, Deborah, 75–​76 Thistlewood, Thomas, 74 Thomas Yellowtail, 115 Timucua Indians, 62 Tlaxcalan people (Mexico), 72–​73 Tokuchar, 52 Tolui, 50 transgender people eunuchs and, 136–​37 feminism and, 138–​39 hijra and, 136–​37 legal rights for, 136, 137 military service among, 138 reproduction and, 136 two-​spirit people and, 62, 113–​15, 114f violence against, 137–​38 Trump, Donald, 138

Tuscarora Indians, 62 Tuthmosis I (king of Egypt), 10 Tuthmosis II (king of Egypt), 10–​11, 13 Tuthmosis III (king of Egypt), 11, 12–​13 two-​spirit people (Native Americans with gender identity that is neither male nor female), 62, 113–​15, 114f    United States American Revolution and, 79–​81, 80f, 86–​88, 89, 91, 92 constitution of, 86–​87, 89–​90 Declaration of Independence and, 89–​90 feminism in, 132 imperialism and, 105–​6, 110–​11, 113–​15 Native American reservations and,  114–​15 republican ideology, 94 slavery in, 75–​76, 77f transgender people in, 137–​38 women’s suffrage in, 89–​90, 92, 126    veiling of women, 9–​10, 17–​19, 38–​39, 50    Waite, John, 75–​76 Wang (empress of China), 42 warfare. See also specific conflicts gunpowder and, 47, 57 knighthood in medieval Europe and, 54,  55–​57 masculinity and, 15, 16–​17, 35, 56, 62, 82,  87–​88 samurais and, 46, 48f, 48–​49, 62, 110–​11 two-​spirit people and, 62 women engaged in, 56–​58, 79–​81, 80f, 108–​10, 113–​14, 116,  122–​23 War of the Austrian Succession, 82 Wellington, Duke of, 87–​88 Wilkinson, Eliza, 89 Williamson, Henry, 114–​15 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 87, 91 Woman Wang,  121–​22 Women’s Indian Association, 131 women’s suffrage movement, 87, 96–​98, 126 World War II, 119 Wu Yuqing,  120–​23 Wu Zhao (Wu Zeitan) Buddhism and, 42–​45 Confucian critics of, 45 Four Peoples and, 44 Li Shimin’s imperial court and, 42 statue of, 43f

I n d e x 167

Wu Zhao (Wu Zeitan) (Cont.) as Tang Dynasty empress, 42–​45 women’s role in public life and, 41–​42, 45    Yaa Akyaa, 107 Yahweh, 10 Yaka,  106–​7

168 Index

Yoriie,  46–​47 Yoritomo, Minamoto, 46–​47, 48–​49 Yoruba,  106–​7 Yoshitoki,  46–​47    Zaynab,  38–​39 Zhu De, 122

NEW OXFORD WORLD HISTORY

GENERAL EDITORS Bonnie G. Smith Rutgers University Anand A. Yang University of Washington EDITORIAL BOARD Donna Guy Ohio State University Karen Ordahl Kupperman New York University Margaret Strobel University of Illinois, Chicago John O. Voll Georgetown University The New Oxford World History provides a comprehensive, synthetic treatment of the “new world history” from chronological, thematic, and geographical perspectives, allowing readers to access the world’s complex history from a variety of conceptual, narrative, and analytical viewpoints as it fits their interests.

Susan Kingsley Kent is an Arts & Sciences Professor of Distinction in the Department of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of The Global 1930s (2017) with Marc Matera, A New History of Britain: Four Nations and an Empire (2016), and Queen Victoria: Gender and Empire (2016), among others.

Chronological Volumes The World from Beginnings to 4000 bce The World from 4000 to 1000 bce The World from 1000 bce to 300 ce The World from 300 to 1000 ce The World from 1000 to 1500 The World from 1450 to 1700 The World in the Eighteenth Century The World in the Nineteenth Century The World in the Twentieth Century

Thematicand Topical Volumes The City: A World History Democracy: A World History Empires: A World History Food: A World History The Family: A World History Gender: A World History Genocide: A World History Health and Medicine: A World History Migration: A World History Race: A World History Technology: A World History

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