Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History: 4 Volume Set [4, Illustrated] 0195148908, 9780195148909

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OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA of

WOMEN IN World History

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Bonnie G. Smith Editor in Chief

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THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WOMEN IN WORLD HISTORY

EDITORIAL BOARD s

EDITOR IN CHIEF

Bonnie G. Smith Board of Governors Professor of History Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey SENIOR EDITORS Iris Berger State University of New York at Albany

Asuncion Lavrin Arizona State University

Indrani Chatterjee Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Chana Kai Lee University of Georgia

Barbara Alpern Engel University of Colorado, Boulder

Paul S. Ropp Clark University

Natalie Boymel Kampen Barnard College, Columbia University

Judith E. Tucker Georgetown University

ADVISORY BOARD Barbara Watson Andaya

Anne Walthall

University of Hawai‘i

University of California, Irvine

Frangoise Dussart

Merry Wiesner-Hanks

University of Connecticut

University of Wisconsin-Milivaukee

Theda Perdue

Judith P. Zinsser

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Miami University

THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WOMEN IN WORLD HISTORY Bonnie G. Smith Editor in Chief

Volume 4

Seton-Zia Directory of Contributors Topical Outline of Entries Index

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

2008

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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press 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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oxford encyclopedia of women in world history / Bonnie G. Smith, editor in chief. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-514890-9 1. Women—History—Encyclopedias. 2. Women—Biography—Encyclopedias. I. Title: Encyclopedia of women in world history. II. Smith, Bonnie G., 1940 HQ1121.093 2008 305.4203-dc22 2007034939 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WOMEN IN WORLD HISTORY

_

s CONTINUED

SETON, ELIZABETH ANN (1774-1821), founder of

the Sulpician priests she founded her community, which followed the religious tradition of the saints Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac. A year later she pronounced private vows as a Sister of Charity of St. Joseph’s, later known as the American Sisters of Charity. Simultaneously a mother and a Catholic sister, she raised and educated her own children and opened the country’s first free school for girls staffed by Catholic sisters, in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Unlike the cloistered nuns of Europe, Seton’s community actively ministered among the people. She faced many difficulties in retaining authority over the management of her new congregation and guardianship of her children. Seton was a prolific writer. She produced spiritual works, meditations, poetry, hymns, diaries, and translations. Her en¬ during legacy includes the establishment of six independent American religious communities of women and the commit¬ ment that Catholic education be available to needy students.

the first community of Catholic sisters in the United States and the first saint to have been born in the United States. Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, or Mother Seton, was the founder of the first Catholic community of women, the American Sisters of Charity. She established the country’s first free Catholic schools for young women and girls and the first Catholic orphanage (Philadelphia, 1814), and later the community founded the first Catholic hospital (Saint Louis, 1828). She is considered the pioneer of the U.S. Catholic school system. In 1975 she was canonized as the first native-born American saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Seto.n was from a wealthy and prominent Episcopalian family. Her father was Richard Bayley, a physician, the first public health officer of the Port of New York. Her mother was Catherine Charlton Bayley, who died when Seton was an infant. Educated privately, she learned to speak French and play the piano. She circulated within the upper classes of colonial American society. In 1794 Elizabeth married William Magee Seton; they had five children. She was drawn toward spirituality and acts of charity. Influenced by her father’s medical practice of care for the poor, she balanced her early life as wife and mother with a ministry to quarantined immigrants by her father’s side. Early in their marriage, her husband’s busi¬ nesses and health declined. He suffered from a tubercular condition that left him an invalid. In 1803 they traveled to Italy in hopes of a cure. The couple lived with their Catholic friends Antonio and Amabilia Filicchi. A few weeks after their arrival William Seton died. The religious fervor of the family transformed Seton’s spiri¬ tual aspirations and religious allegiance. Her intellectual in¬ quiry led her to investigate Catholic doctrine, practices, and liturgy. Upon her husband’s death and the loss of the family fortune, she returned to the United States. In 1805, despite the ire of both family and friends, she was received into the Catholic faith. Her initial years as a Catholic in Protestant New York were marked by failure in her teaching enterprises and the distrust of family members and friends. In 1808, along with her children, she left New York for Maryland to teach and support her family. At the request of

[See also Religion.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Melville, Annabelle M. Elizabeth Bayley Seton, 1774-1821. New York: Scribner, 1951. Reprint 1976. The definitive history of Seton’s life and work. McNeil, Betty Ann, D. C. “Seton, Elizabeth Ann Bayley, Saint.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. Vol. 13, pp. 30-35 Detroit, Mich.: Thomson/Gale, 2003. Provides extensive bibliographic sources. Seaton, Elizabeth Bayley. Collected Writings. Edited by Regina M. Bechtel and Judith Metz. Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2000-2002. Susan Marie Maloney

SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT. The name of Jane Addams, or “Saint Jane” as she was fondly called, will be forever tied to the settlement house movement, the social reform movement to which she devoted the bulk of her formidable energies. Writer, reformer, and political philosopher, Addams found her own sense of purpose in the settlement house movement and, as its guiding spirit, helped many others find theirs—both the fellow settlement workers and the neighbors, largely immigrants, who 1

2

SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT

benefited from the settlement house and found it a key element in their sense of what it means to be American. The settlement house movement had a reach well beyond its direct impact on the lives of individuals and communities in the realm of the American public philosophy: it became a highly significant movement in American history for both its practical and its philosophical ramifications. The settlement house movement began in Britain. The first settlement, which was linked to Oxford University, was Toynbee Hall, established in 1884 in London. Its founders, the Church of England curate Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta Barnett, sought to bring the interest and resources of the privileged to the most needy, the poor population of the East End, who were largely Jewish and Irish workingclass immigrants, not for one-sided instruction and welfare but for mutual interaction and benefit. The settlement house drew the energies of young men and women and became an important site not just of social assistance but of reform and artistic and intellectual activity as a center of labor organiz¬ ing, craft work, adult education, and other efforts. The notion that settlement work provided rare benefits not only to those it sought to help but also to those from the more privileged classes who served as settlement workers capti¬ vated the imagination of Addams, as did the hardships endured by the poor in the industrial city. Her encounter with Toynbee Hall and its environs altered her permanently, as she recounts in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), her story of the founding of her own settlement, which quickly became the most famous American settlement house. Hull-House, founded in Chicago in 1889 by Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr, represented a drastic departure from earlier traditions of philanthropy and benevolence, which by the nineteenth century had come primarily to emphasize the one-way delivery of assistance in the form of charity rather than the mutual enrichment envisioned by those with the vision and inclinations of the Barnetts and Addams. With Toynbee Hall and Hull-House as their exemplars, numerous young people, largely college-educated middleclass women, flocked to settlement houses to pursue their ideals of helping immigrants adjust to the city and learn about their surroundings. In so doing they found meaningful ways to contribute to something larger than themselves. Addams wrote about the way this work enriched the lives of settlement workers in her famous essay “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements” (1892), later incorporated as a chapter in Twenty Years at Hull-House. Settlement houses revolved around a huge variety of activities that encompassed the diverse areas of social service, vocational training, liberal education, cultural transmission, and recreation. They served as everything from soup kitchen and gymnasium to a place for union organizing and a springboard for political activism. The movement had tentacles everywhere, from the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest to California and even rural

areas of the South. Though the settlement house movement is chiefly known as a Progressive-era institution geared toward white immigrants, scholars have pointed to a wider movement tha); continued well after that era and encom¬ passed a wide array of “neighbors,” including African Amer¬ icans. A number of organizations, or even informal groups, conducted settlement-type activity under auspices separate from the mainstream settlement house movement but were clearly inspired by its tradition—for example, the YWCA, the Urban League, Southern rural schools, and the Women’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In many cases settlement houses—in the form of their descendants, community centers—still exist in the early twenty-first century. Community centers tend to lack the all-embracing quality of the settlement houses, that mixture that was their great genius and attraction. [See also Addams, Jane.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Addams, Jane. The Social Thought of Jane Addams. Edited by Christopher Lasch. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). New York: New American Library, 1961. Knight, Louise W. “Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement.” In American Reform and Reformers, edited by Randall M. Miller and Paul A. Cimbala. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996. Koven, Seth. Slumming. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth. Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

SEVEN SISTERS COLLEGES. The Seven Sisters is the name given the seven women’s colleges (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley) that formed an association in 1927 to coordinate and promote the interests of liberal arts women’s colleges. The 1927 Seven Sisters Conference grew out of several earlier meetings, the first held at Vassar with Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley colleges in 1915 to explore the common concerns of women’s colleges, particularly institutional advancement and fund-raising. Not only does each college have its own rich, historical tradition; as a group they did much to advance the cause of intellectually rigorous higher education for women throughout the twen¬ tieth century. Prior to the coeducation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the Seven Sisters offered the most presti¬ gious liberal arts education available to American women and thus served as a legitimizing, cultural counterweight to the all-male Ivy League institutions. Barnard and Radcliffe were first founded as coordinate institutions affiliated with prestigious male universities

SEXUAL HARASSMENT

(Columbia and Harvard respectively), while the other five were independent, private, single-sex female institutions from the start. Mount Holyoke College, the oldest of the institutions, was established in South Hadley, Massachu¬ setts, as a female seminary by the indomitable Mary Lyon (1797-1849) in 1837. Under Lyon’s direction, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary required rigorous academic standards for teacher preparation and, unique among fe¬ male institutions at the time, had an endowment. In 1893, it dropped its seminary altogether, becoming Mount Holyoke College and in 1971 reaffirmed its decision to remain an all women’s college. Notable alumnae include Emily Dickin¬ son, Frances Perkins, and Wendy Wasserstein. Just down the road, Smith College was founded in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1871 by Sophia Smith (1796-1870), who left instructions in her will for “the establishment and maintenance of an Institution for the higher education of women.” In contrast to Mount Holyoke, Smith began as a full-fledged college intended to parallel the most esteemed male colleges, particularly Amherst. Opening its doors with fourteen students in 1875, by the early twenty-first century Smith was educating 2,600 undergraduates per year. The third of the Massachusetts Seven Sisters, Wellesley College, was chartered in 1870 and founded by Henry Fowle (1822-1881) and Pauline Fowle Durant (1832-1917). It is noted for its pioneering student governance system, its beautiful campus, its powerful legacy of female leadership (all of its presidents have been women), and its famous graduates, including Madeleine Korbel Albright and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Founded by Mathew Vassar (1792-1868) in 1861, Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, matriculated 353 stu¬ dents when it opened its doors in 1865. At the outset, Vassar distinguished itself as an institution that valued independence of thought among its faculty and students and was the first to include a museum and teaching collection in order to embed its pedagogical emphasis on the interpretation of original sources in all its disciplines. Coeducational since 1969, by the early twenty-first century, men comprised 40 percent of its student body. Bryn Mawr, located near Philadelphia, is most noted for its forceful second president, M. Carey Thomas (1857-1935), who established its commitment to graduate education and scholarly research, offering the first PhD in social work in the United States. The final two of the Seven Sisters, Radcliffe (the fourth of the Massachusetts colleges) and Barnard, while indepen¬ dent entities, emerged as affiliates of male universities. Radcliffe began, in 1879, as the Harvard Annex, and provided instruction to female students by Harvard faculty; women were not permitted to attend classes at the uni¬ versity itself. Radcliffe became an independent college in 1894; in 1943, Harvard and Radcliffe signed an agreement that for the first time allowed women into Harvard class¬ rooms; and in 1999 the two institutions officially merged.

3

Barnard followed a somewhat similar path. The first liberal arts college for women in New York City, Barnard began as a separate college in 1889, then affiliated with Columbia University in 1900, but retained its own separate trustees, faculty, endowment, and facilities while sharing a library, courses and instruction, and the degree of Columbia University. Women first matriculated as undergraduates at Columbia in 1983. Barnard remains as one of four colleges within Columbia University and it enrolls 2,300 female students per year. Drawing upon each institution’s distinct founding vision and wealth of resources, as a group, the Seven Sisters Colleges created a powerful social and political force that assured women the highest level of undergraduate and graduate education. Unfortunately, through much of the twentieth century, minority and working-class women found little opportunity on their campuses as they mostly educated white, middle- and upper-class women. Still, in formal and informal association, the Seven Sister Colleges did much to articulate, shape, and expand educational opportunities for American women. [See also Education; United States, subentries Nineteenth Century and Modern Period; and biographical entries on women mentioned in this article.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gordon, Lynn D. Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-century Beginnings to the 1930s. 2nd ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. Margaret

A.

Lowe

SEWING MACHINES. See Artisanal Production.

SEX RATIO. See Demography.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT. Feminists in the United States coined the term “sexual harassment” in 1975 to describe men’s sexual coercion and exploitation of women in the workplace. The term, in general use, has come to encompass a broad range of unwelcome sexual and gender-based behavior in a variety of contexts, including at the workplace, at educational institutions, in housing, and on the street. At its core, sexual harassment is the use of legal, economic, or social power to impose unwelcome

4

SEXUAL HARASSMENT

sexual advances or to create an intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment based on sex. Sexual harassment is gendered in that women are more likely to be targets of sexual harassment because of men’s legal, economic, and/ or social dominance over females in most societies. Men have rarely been held legally accountable for sexual harass¬ ment because of male-dominated legal systems and stereo¬ types that blame female victims for provoking this behavior. The History of Sexual Harassment. Despite the recent origin of the term, women have experienced sexual harass¬ ment throughout history and across the globe. Seventeenthcentury indentured servants, eighteenth-century black slaves, nineteenth-century industrial workers, and twentieth-century office workers all shared the experience of having to fend off the sexual demands of men wielding power over their lives, be they masters, overseers, foremen, or supervisors. Under systems of indentured servitude, serfdom, and slavery, women often found themselves subject to the sexual advances of masters, stewards, and overseers who controlled their lives and economic well-being. Indentured servants in the British colonies of North America and Australia often worked in private homes—a fact that made them particularly vulnerable to the sexual demands of masters or their male kin. Cases of masters impregnating their female indentured servants led Virginia to overturn a law allowing masters to claim an extension of service from a pregnant servant and led Australia to enact laws prohibiting men with a history of abusing their servants from obtaining servants in the future and single men from obtaining female indentured servants at all. In the nineteenth century, female slaves in India were often kept for sexual purposes, and their children then became slaves of their owners, as in the American South. In her 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Brent Jacobs described her escape from a master who “began to whisper foul words in [her] ear” when she was fifteen. Whether in the fields or in the house, enslaved women were subject to sexual abuse by white overseers and masters. Rape and concubinage of female slaves in the United States resulted in 10 percent of the slave population classified as mulatto by 1860. After emancipation, former slaves continued to experience sexual coercion, whether they sharecropped or worked for wages. In Brazil, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, masters profited from compelling female slaves into prostitution, to which the legal system turned a blind eye. But freedom from slav¬ ery or indentured servitude provided no protection from sexual coercion by domestic employers. In 1874 Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, published an ac¬ count of how, at the age of eighteen, she left a job as a domestic servant because her employer assigned her back¬ breaking work after she refused his sexual advances. Sexual exploitation of domestic workers has been documented from England and France to Canada, New Zealand, Japan,

the Philippines, and Peru, and from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first century. With the advent of industrialization in the nineteenth century, women and girls entering mills and factories in the United States, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere experi¬ enced sexual harassment by foremen, supervisors, and male coworkers, who saw these females stepping outside of tra¬ ditional domestic roles as fair game for sexual exploitation. High rates of unemployment and inadequate wages often left women, particularly immigrant women, vulnerable to sexual coercion by bosses and owners of factories. A sexual double standard and fear that revealing the abuse would blemish their own characters silenced women who might complain about sexual harassment. Government studies of industrial working conditions in the • United States, England, and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contained voluminous evidence of sex¬ ual exploitation of women and girls in the industrial work¬ force, although often the studies framed the issue as a problem of the immorality of working women. Female social reformers attempted to shift the terms of the debate by characterizing working women as victims of male sexual aggression rather than as seducers, and they fought for protective labor legislation in part to shield women from workplace sexual abuse. Early working women’s organiza¬ tions and trade unions defended women and in some cases organized strikes to protest sexual coercion in the work¬ place. A major goal of the U.S. Working Women’s Society, a forerunner of the Women’s Trade Union League, was to combat the sexual exploitation of women. Sexual abuse was one of the issues that arose in a 1937 strike at the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, after a large number of female workers had to go to the county hospital to be treated for venereal disease traced to a single foreman. A worker recalled, “Those were the conditions that young women had to accept in order to support their families. Sometimes they earned just enough to provide food for the family and they couldn’t lose their jobs because nobody else in the family had a job.” As industrialism spread throughout the world in the twentieth century, so did sexual abuse and harassment of female factory workers by super¬ visors and coworkers. The twentieth century saw an influx of women into the labor force. With the rise of service-based economies in the mid-twentieth century, pink-collar service and nurturing occupations expanded, drawing women in ever greater numbers into the workforce as department-store clerks, waitresses, flight attendants, clerical workers, and nurses. In these female-dominated occupations, male bosses, cli¬ ents, and customers often demanded sexual favors for con¬ tinued employment. By the late twentieth century, women began breaking into traditionally male-dominated occupa¬ tions, including blue-collar jobs like mining, construction, trucking, the trades, law enforcement, firefighting, and the

SEXUAL HARASSMENT

military. In these occupations, women often faced open hostility to their presence in these traditionally male bas¬ tions. Women experienced relentless harassment by men who believed that they did not belong there and who hoped to force them out. Women posed a threat to the masculine identity of these traditionally male-dominated occupations and created increased competition for high-paying skilled jobs. Often the harassment consisted of sexual graffiti, dirty jokes, repeated propositioning, and sexual assault. Some¬ times the harassment experienced by women had nothing to do with sex, but rather was an attempt to discourage women from staying in the trades because they were taking a “man’s job.” Women were subject to isolation, work sab¬ otage, severe verbal abuse, and physical violence. Even in male-dominated professions like medicine and law, women experienced open hostility to their presence. Globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the large number of national and international migrant workers weakened women’s position in the labor force, making them ever more vulnerable to sexual abuse in the work¬ place. Working largely in agricultural, domestic, and factory positions, such women often have marginal legal protection and few resources to resist sexual harassment. Current studies across the globe show high rates of sexual harassment. Large-scale surveys of the U.S. federal workplace beginning in the early 1980s have consistently shown that over 40 percent of women report experiencing sexual harass¬ ment. Studies show that at U.S. educational institutions as well, rates of sexual harassment are high, with 83 percent of girls in high school and 62 percent of female college students reporting having been sexually harassed, most of the harass¬ ment being peer-to-peer. Surveys in the European Union show that between 30 percent and 50 percent of women in the workplace are sexually harassed. A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that 40 percent of Chinese women working for private or foreign firms and 18 percent of those in state-owned companies had been targets of sexual harassment. The effects of sexual harassment can include economic, vocational, physical, and psychological harm, in¬ cluding decreased work or school performance, having to relocate to another job or school, depression, anxiety, shame and guilt, difficulty in concentrating, headaches, fatigue, loss of motivation, stomach problems, feeling powerless or out of control, increased blood pressure, loss of confidence and self¬ esteem, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Law and Public Policy. As women’s participation in the labor force soared in the latter half of the twentieth century, grassroots feminists in the Second Wave of the American women’s movement conceptualized men’s sexual coercion of women in the workplace as an issue of violence against women and a violation of women’s civil rights. Feminists successfully argued in court that sexual harassment at work was sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a principle accepted by the U.S. Supreme

5

Court in the 1986 case of Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson. This decision defined sexual harassment to include both quid quo pro harassment (where a supervisor offers or threatens loss of tangible employment benefits in exchange for sexual compliance) and hostile-environment harassment (where a supervisor’s or coworker’s unwelcome sexual and gender-based conduct creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment that unreasonably interferes with an individual’s performance at work). In response, many employers adopted policies against sexual harassment, developed grievance procedures, and began conducting em¬ ployee training on the issue. Some states passed laws, and cities issued executive orders, prohibiting sexual harassment. In the 1998 case of Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, the Supreme Court ruled that sexual harassment of men by other men also violates Title VII. Concerns about sex¬ ual harassment have expanded beyond the workplace to include educational institutions, housing, and street harass¬ ment. U.S. courts have ruled that sexual harassment at federally funded educational institutions violates Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments to the Civil Rights Act, but the Supreme Court has imposed rigorous liability standards, which make cases hard to win. In 1991 publicity resulting from the televised hearings of accusations by law professor Anita Hill against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas for sexual harassment when she worked for him a decade earlier at the Equal Employment Oppor¬ tunity Commission placed the issue of sexual harassment in the national and international spotlight. While the Unites States has been at the forefront of devel¬ opments in public policy on sexual harassment, nations around the world began adopting laws against sexual ha¬ rassment in the 1990s. Through transnational networks among unions, academics, the media, and policy makers, the concept of sexual harassment traveled from the United States to the European Union and its member states. By 1992 five countries outside of the United States had adopted laws prohibiting sexual harassment, and by 2002 more than forty countries had legislation specifically prohibiting sexual harassment. The European Union defines sexual harassment as a violation of the workers’ dignity, thus focus¬ ing on the exclusionary aspects of harassing conduct rather than on inappropriate sexual conduct or gender inequality, as in the United States. In the 1990s many EU members adopted legislation against sexual harassment, but most of them have done little else to combat sexual harassment in the workplace. Employers generally ignore the problem, prevention efforts are rare, and legal redress is weak. In other areas of the world as well, several countries now have laws prohibiting sexual harassment. In India, the 1997 case of Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan established that sexual harassment is illegal. In 1999 Japan passed an antidiscrimi¬ nation law that requires employers to prevent sexual har¬ assment. In 2005 China added new provisions to its Law on

6

SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Women’s Rights Protection to include sexual harassment. In 2006 the Shanghai Supplement was drafted to help fur¬ ther define sexual harassment in China. In Israel, the 1988 Equal Employment Opportunity Law prohibited employers from retaliating against employees who had rejected sexual advances, but it was not until 1998 that the Israeli Sexual Harassment Law prohibited a broad range of sexually coer¬ cive workplace behavior. Many Latin American countries, including Mexico and Brazil, have laws prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace, but it is still tolerated. In 1998 South Africa passed a progressive law against sexual har¬ assment, one that prescribes serious civil sanctions for the harasser, but few suits have been filed so far. In 2007 debates on sexual harassment include questions about what constitutes sexual harassment, the issue of con¬ tinuing high rates of sexual harassment despite laws prohibit¬ ing this behavior, concern about failure to enforce laws, how racism factors into sexual harassment, the issue of whether prohibitions impede free speech, and concerns that employers are trying to “regulate romance” in the workplace. [See also Domestic Service, subentry Paid Work; Service Sector; and Slavery.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Carrie N. The Woman’s Movement against Sexual Harass¬ ment in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. A scholarly study of how activists created public policy against sexual harassment in the United States. Bingham, Clara, and Laura Leedy Gansler. Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Lazu. New York: Doubleday, 2002. An in-depth account of the female coal miners from Minnesota who brought the precedent-setting case Jenson v. Eveleth Mines, the first sexual-harassment class-action lawsuit in the United States. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Sexual Harassment of Working Women. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. An in-depth legal analysis of sexual harassment as sex discrimination by a pioneer scholar of sexual-harassment law. MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Reva B. Siegel, eds. Directions in Sexual Harassment Law. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. An anthology of essays by scholars and activists on a wide range of issues, including history, racism, same-sex harassment, unwanted advances, speech, and transnational perspectives. Segrave, Kerry. The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Work¬ place, 1600-1993. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1993. An exhaust¬ ive history of global scope, focusing on women’s experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace. Webb, Susan L. Shock Waves: The Global Impact of Sexual Ha¬ rassment. New York: MasterMedia, 1994. A corporate consult¬ ant discusses the global pervasiveness of sexual harassment in a range of occupations and educational institutions and how organizations can respond. Zippel, Kathrin S. The Politics of Sexual Harassment: A Com¬ parative Study of the United States, the European Union, and Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Comparison of how the issue arose, differences among legal definitions, and treatment of the issue. Carrie

N.

Baker

SEXUALITY This entry consists of six subentries: \

Overview Politics Sexual Identity Heterosexuality Homosexuality Bisexuality

Overview In the 1930s Norman Haire, Harley Street’s first sexologist and a leading figure in the World League forSexual Reform, sought to provide a comprehensive guide to the immense variety of sexual practices across many cultures. The Encyclo¬ paedia of Sexual Knowledge (1934) provided a rich com¬ pendium of ways that Western and non-Western societies sought to organize sexuality. Noting the generally “degraded position of women in most societies,” the contributors high¬ lighted the ambivalence of Western cultures to pleasure. In contrast, most non-Western societies had cultural traditions, initiation rituals, and erotic practices designed to enhance pleasure: Hindu and Taoist love books, ancient Peruvian pots depicting men stimulating the clitoris, the use of koma (clay dolls) in southwest Africa to instruct girls in lovemak¬ ing techniques, the insertion of foreign objects into the skin of the glans penis by the Dayaks of Borneo to increase stimulation for female sexual partners. Haire’s opposition between a repressed West and eroti¬ cally free “primitive” cultures had great currency in the mid-twentieth century. The anthropologist Margaret Mead conjured idyllic accounts of Samoan sexual freedom. Other scholars focused on influential erotic literary traditions: the Kama Sutra of ancient India or the Art of the Bedchamber in Han dynasty China (206 b.c.e.-220 c.e.). For others even the West appeared to have a sexually tolerant and erotic past, evident in Attic vases, Pompeian wall paintings, and Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1350)—all of which seemed to suggest times when sexual abandon was accepted as natural. Modernity seemed to have changed such views. The Legacy of Victorianism. The contrast between repressed and sexually free cultures was largely imaginary. It hid the prevalence of ascetic traditions and the widespread use of sexual initiation and erotic rites to enforce male power. Those decrying “repression” were reacting against Victorian morality and medical, pedagogical, and etiquette literatures stressing the dangers of excess and the virtue of restraint. They drew their inspiration from the writings of the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), whose copious writings on mental life argued forcefully that sexuality was an instinct that could be channeled

SEXUALITY: Overview

Erotica. A Roman wall painting, Pompeii,

c. 27 b.c.e.-396 c.e. Casa

del Centenario, Pompeii, Italy/Scala/Art Resource,

NY

but never overcome. If sexuality was repressed and driven back into the unconscious, it found other psychic outlets— through artistic expression, philanthropy, commerce, or, more commonly, neurosis. Critics inspired by Freud depicted the West as a seedbed for sexual neurosis. If sexu¬ ality was a natural instinct, then it required cultivation through the promotion of pleasure. These critics also ignored evidence of the erotic in Victorian society. Behind an austere Victorian facade was a flourishing pornography industry. In this light Victorian England seemed more hypocritical than repressive. Recent scholars, notably Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, have stressed that Victorian culture was far from unitary. She identifies at least four competing Victorian traditions in nineteenthcentury America: an evangelical Christian movement that distrusted the workings of “the flesh,” a medical establish¬ ment that sought to enlighten people about the functioning of the sexual organs, a radical free-love movement, and a vernacular tradition grounded “in an earthy acceptance of sex and desire as vital parts of life for men and women.” Moreover, critics of Victorianism also overlooked the ways that all cultures organized and regulated sexuality, although in ways vastly different from those of the modern West. In ancient Athens men had to be the active penetrat¬ ing partner in any sexual act, although they had a variety of partners, male and female—wives, slaves, concubines,

7

prostitutes, and male youths. The most prized were the youths, who were initiated into male society in the in¬ tensely homoerotic atmosphere of the gymnasiums and symposiums. If male citizens allowed themselves to be pen¬ etrated, however, they suffered ostracism and ridicule. These rigid rules governing sex extended to particular prac¬ tices. Fellatio was ambiguous: who was active or passive in this act? The difficulty of clearly specifying the correct sexual role in oral sex made it a fraught act best avoided. Even ancient authorities, such as Pliny the Elder—much like Victorian moralists millennia later—found sex itself a trou¬ bling practice that depleted men physically and diminished them mentally. Sex once every two years, Pliny advised, was ideal for maintaining vigor. Christian teachings by early church fathers such as Saint Augustine (354-430) and Saint John Chrysostom (347-407) also praised sexual continence. The sexual body with its urgent fleshy desires was the basis for original sin. Only by denying sexual desire, overcoming its call, could men truly aspire to communion with God. Nor were fears about sexuality confined to the West. Within a variety of Eastern traditions, notably Buddhism, celibacy was highly prized. Within Hinduism, with its strong erotic traditions, there were equally important ascetic cults. Similarly, in ancient China there were competing ideals: a Confucian tradition that stressed abstinence and a Taoist tradition that praised sexual ecstasy as the path to enlightenment. Aztec priests preached sexual restraint to young warriors. Survival of Ancient Traditions. One lively debate in the history of sexuality concerns the effects of Christian ideals of austerity. In later antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Christian ideas spread throughout Europe, northern Africa, and parts of the Middle East. Investigation of whether these teachings actually changed the ways ordinary people engaged in sex is hindered by a paucity of sources. Nonetheless some historians have ventured surprising arguments. Peter Brown and John Boswell trace the origins of austerity to the pagan culture of ancient Rome and stress that the Christian emphasis on sexual austerity was found in other religious traditions, such as Judaism and Gnosticism. More controversial is the view that the ancient emphasis on active/passive sexual practices persisted well into the Christian era. A telling piece of evidence comes from the magistrate court records of late-fifteenth-century Florence, which reveal that an extensive network of adult men consorted with youths. The vast majority of adult men in the city were indicted at least once on a charge of sodomy. Did this pederastic cult of Renaissance Florence represent the persistence of an ancient tradition, or did it instead represent an isolated and distinctive subculture? Thriving subcultures of effeminate and masculine men consorting in early modern London, late Victorian New York, and

8

SEXUALITY: Overview

Weimar Germany suggest that active and passive coupling between men remained a distinctive feature of Western sexual cultures. The historian David Halperin points to the persistence of the idea of the invert, the effeminate man, as evidence of a long tradition of active/passive sexual roles in the West. When did this active/passive culture disappear? For Randolph Trumbach the decisive turning point was the eighteenth century, when subcultures of effeminate homo¬ sexuals (mollies) became a large and observable presence in major cities and towns in Europe and the Americas. Trum¬ bach argues that the increasing profile of this “third sex” created a masculinity crisis. Men feared being tarred as “mollies” and increasingly strove to secure their sexual identity through an exclusive sexual interest in women. The active/passive culture of antiquity gave way to a new heterosexual/homosexual culture, one in which sexual identity was defined more by the sex of one’s partner than by the acts that one performed. Recent research suggests that this shift to heterosexual and homosexual was gradual, occurred earlier in urban than in rural settings, and had particular rhythms in specific local contexts. Female Sexuality. The history of sexuality has been dominated by investigations into male sexuality. This reflects its origins in gay history. Women’s and gender history, however, has brought questions of female sexuality to the fore. Although surviving documentary, archaeological, and anthropological evidence largely attests to male experience, historians have found ways of exploring the history of female sexuality. For example, the rich medical literature on sexual health in the West from antiquity contains abundant evidence on prevailing beliefs about female sexuality. Techniques for achieving heightened sexual pleasure for women were prevalent in the erotic literatures of the East. Visual culture is equally revealing. In the Islamic world, in the Hindu East, and in ancient cultures of Europe, Asia, and Central and South America there is a rich visual tradition depicting women’s erotic and homoerotic pleasure. Male anxiety is also a fruitful area of inquiry. In many cultures women’s bodies and sexuality have been seen as polluting, dangerous, and threatening, requiring ritual cleansing practices and sanctions against menstruating women. Within Western culture female sexuality was depicted as weaker than men’s or, alternatively, as power¬ ful, threatening, and emasculating. For example, the figure of the tribade has a rich lineage. Masculine women evoked cultural anxieties, with the implication that they took the active role in sexual acts. In sixteenth-century Britain, argues Valerie Traub, the tribade was a common and threa¬ tening figure in literary and visual culture, representing female intimacy and homoeroticism. The mannish woman became a familiar means of expressing concern about the spread of “sapphism.”

Women’s voices can also be found in the historical record. A classic example is the poetry of the ancient Greek poet Sappho (seventh century b.c.e.), whose erotic verse explored femkle desire and physical being. Women writers and painters in many cultures and times have left vital evidence concerning female sexuality. Deciphering the meaning of these words and objects, however, is fraught with difficulty. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s influential argu¬ ment about female friendship in nineteenth-century America highlights some of the pitfalls. Smith-Rosenberg examines the intimate correspondence between many middle-class women in Victorian America, replete with effusive protes¬ tations of love and desire. Did this mean that lesbianism was widespread? Smith-Rosenberg cautions against such a conclusion, arguing that this romantic vocabulary was part of conventional social intercourse. These women were friends, not lesbians. Other historians, such as Martha Vicinus, how¬ ever, have questioned the stark distinction between friends and lovers, pointing to gradations of intimacy and the exis¬ tence of identifiable networks of “sapphists” within the wider intimate female culture. Actions are as significant as words. The widespread pun¬ ishment of female adulterers in many cultures—Athenian women committed to trial, Middle Eastern women stoned to death, Australian Aboriginal women ritually speared— suggests that, despite severe social sanctions against illicit sex, desire overcame convention. Race and ethnicity were also powerful social barriers that women transgressed. As Martha Hodes has shown, white women not infre¬ quently married African American men in nineteenthcentury America.

Empire and Sexuality. In recent decades the impact of European imperialism on the sexual cultures of the non-Western world has become a major focus of historical research. From the sixteenth century the large-scale movement of European men to every part of the world has had sexual dimensions: casual sexual encounters, rape, concubinage, slavery, enforced prostitution, and intermarriage. Women were sometimes at the forefront of resistance to invasion; in Tasmania, for instance, Tarenorerer (c. 18001831) led a band in armed warfare against European col¬ onists. More commonly women had to negotiate the clash of cultures, traversing the no-man’s-land between coloniz¬ ing and indigenous men. In some contexts women were the tools of sexual barter through which indigenous cultures sought to negotiate the presence of strangers. In other con¬ texts sexual control of women became the source of intense conflict between European colonizers and local men. Fron¬ tier sexual contacts created new Metis and Mestizo cultures in Asia and the Americas, many of which became important social groups in their own right. In Latin America, even though conflict was intense, racial mixing between European

SEXUALITY: Overview

men and indigenous women and imported African slaves was quite extensive, and Mestizo populations increased significantly. By the end of the eighteenth century they were the majority in some areas. In other contexts, no¬ tably British India, Australia, and southern Africa, so-called mixed populations were economically, socially, and legally marginalized. Historians have increasingly seen sexuality as an impor¬ tant driving force in European imperialism. Although com¬ mercial gain and political dominance remained paramount motives, sexual opportunities were a powerful lure for Eur¬ opean men. Some enforced their sexual demands on local women or imported slaves. Others sought to negotiate cul¬ tural difference to smooth erotic relations. The seventeenthcentury Dutch explorer Pieter Nuyts kept an interpreter under his bed to facilitate his amorous exploits. Planters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia and the Caribbean gloried in the bountiful sexual opportunities available with slaves and indigenous women. In eight¬ eenth-century India wealthy European traders (nabobs) mar¬ ried Indian women and recognized the children of these relationships. Within European culture pervasive discourses on the exotic Orient cast the Middle East, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific as havens for erotic sexual conquests. Women—willing and unwilling— became an integral part of the currency of empire. Some historians have seen the attraction of the empire as a reaction against Victorian culture, although such theories do not apply to empires established in the sixteenth century. To John Tosh the nineteenth-century empire was an escape from an increasingly stultifying cult of domesticity. The em¬ pire offered a homosocial world of manly endeavor, con¬ quest, and sexual adventure. For women in the non-Western world, the empire could offer opportunities for integration into the dominant culture. More commonly the experience was one of sexual enslavement and exploitation, disease, and social ostracism from their own culture. Modern sexual tour¬ ism, as well as the widespread prevalence of sexual disease, particularly in Africa and Asia, arose from the commerciali¬ zation of sex, the erosion of indigenous sexual cultures, pervasive movements of peoples across national boundaries, and the globalization of European sexual culture. Inventing Sexuality. Sex and desire are prevalent forces throughout history. For some historians the history of sexuality is a record of successive repression and tolerance. But in the 1970s the French philosopher Michel Foucault offered a dramatically different view. For Foucault sexu¬ ality was a relatively recent artifact of European culture, something produced by the new sexual sciences of the nineteenth century. Sexuality was not merely desire but a particular type of identity. In antiquity, argued Foucault, sex was intimately tied to codes of masculinity, citizenship, authority, and status.

9

Men asserted their dominance through sex. Moreover, the problem of desire was incorporated into a wider concern with diet, physical regimen, and correct attitudes, all of which were the means for achieving self-control. Being a manly citizen was the ideal. The gender of sexual partners was of secondary interest. In contrast, the modern West became obsessed with the gender of the partner in the sexual act as the key to sexual identity. This concern with sexual identities, argued Foucault, was comparatively recent. The emergence of sexual sciences such as psychiatry, sexology, and psychoanalysis put sex and sexuality at the center of human identity, categorizing the operations of de¬ sire into distinct types: homosexual, sadomasochist, fetishist, pedophile, and many more. Foucault’s approach proved influential. Although many historians still sought to find homosexual and lesbian cul¬ tures throughout the past, others—inspired by Foucault— focused on times and places “before sexuality.” In the past there were same-sex acts but no concept of distinct heterosexual and homosexual identities. Sexuality as a type of exclusive sexual orientation was a recent creation, one embedded in the particular disciplinary culture of the mod¬ ern West. Similarly, sexuality became another dimension of the clash between Western and non-Western cultures; indigenous sexual cultures that were not grounded in con¬ cepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were trans¬ formed into ones that accommodated modern identities and global sexual industries. Sexuality, for Foucault, was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, ideas of sexuality and sexual identity became a means of building social networks, claiming new rights, and seeking reform. In the twentieth century, demands for an entitlement to sexual pleasure, sexual health, and sexual autonomy became a point of mobilization for diverse groups—advocates of free love, supporters of birth control, activists for a sexual revolution in the 1960s, gay and lesbian movements, and Second Wave feminists who saw sexual rights for women as an integral part of a wider women’s liberation. On the other hand, the valorization of sexuality and the primacy of declaring one’s sexual identity locked men and women into narrow frameworks of existence. Sexuality forced people to reduce complex and multiple forms of pleasure to a single register (straight, gay, transsex¬ ual, sadomasochist), making them vulnerable to the utiliza¬ tion of sexuality for commercial gain and prey to the industries seeking to alleviate sexual misery. Sexuality be¬ came the centerpiece of identity to the exclusion of other ways of seeing the self. For Foucault sexuality was not a means of escaping sexual repression but a way into new forms of regulation and control. By the end of the twentieth century, many voices were questioning conventional ways of seeing sexuality. Feminists continued to stress that sexuality lay at the heart

10

SEXUALITY: Overview

of women’s subjection—sex slavery, prostitution, rape, do¬ mestic violence—but these critiques and campaigns took on further dimensions: the commodification of women’s bodies in advertising; the blurring of the lines between pornography and mainstream media representations; the inherent risks of masculinity and ideas of male sexual rights, which made women the most vulnerable group in Africa and Asia to HIV/AIDS; and the massive growth in global sex industries that continued to represent women as objects rather than subjects. A new voice was queer theory, which took up Foucault’s critique of identity, stressing sexual multiplicity and the fluidity of desire, and questioning the political utility of liberation movements built around notions of fixed sexual identities and communities. In the early twenty-first century sexuality was seen no longer as a means of escaping the constraints of Victorian moralism but as a problem in itself, the source of much contemporary oppression and exploita¬ tion, and something in various forms that had to be overcome. [See also Adultery; Gender Roles; Pederasty; Pornog¬ raphy; and Prostitution.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boswell, John. Same-Sex Unions in Premodem Europe. New York: Villard Books, 1994. A detailed account of gay subcultures in antiquity. Boswell, unlike Foucault and Halperin, argues that there were definite gay sexual identities in antiquity. Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. A pathbreaking account of the origin and spread of ideas of sexual austerity in late antiquity. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. A fascinating ethnographic reconstruction of an emerging male gay culture in New York, rich in detail and insight into the ways that sexuality was organized and negotiated by diverse groups in the early twentieth century. D’Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. An excellent general history of sexual reform move¬ ments in America and one of the best introductions to this broad field of inquiry. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 3 vols. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 19781986. The most influential and controversial contribution to the field. Garton, Stephen. Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revo¬ lution. London: Equinox, 2004. An overview of debates about the history of sexuality. Halperin, David M. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. An important col¬ lection of essays taking up key arguments of Foucault and rebut¬ ting many of Foucault’s critics. Hodes, Martha, ed. Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. New York: New York University Press, 1999. An important collection on sexual contacts on the frontier, inter¬ racial sex, and Metis populations.

Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Knopf, 2002. A highly original and innovative account challenging older notions that the Victorian era was uniformly regressive, highlighting the different sexual cultures and frameworks in America. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. A pioneering, original, and influential study of medical theories of the body and sexuality since antiquity; explores the ways in which medical ideas constructed notions of gender and sex and how these changed dramatically at the end of the eighteenth century. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. An impor¬ tant poststructuralist analysis of imperialism, race, gender, and sexuality. McLaren, Angus. Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. A useful overview of important debates about sexuality in the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic. Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. A highly original analysis of the magistrate records in Florence, arguing that many Florentine citizens were appre¬ hended consorting with youths. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. A pioneering and influential critique of theories of sexual identity and one of the foundation texts for queer theory. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1-29. An influential and much-cited inter¬ pretation of the relationships between middle-class women in Victorian America. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. An important study of the ways that race and sexuality intersected in the colonial context; particu¬ larly strong on ways of theorizing these encounters. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. An interesting argument about how the passion for imperialism arose out of a masculinity crisis in late Victorian England. Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge, U.IC: Cambridge University Press, 2002. An innovative study of the emergence of an identifiable lesbian culture. Trumbach, Randolph. Sex and the Gender Revolution. Vol. 1: Homosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. A pathbreaking analysis of the emergence of modern sexual identities. Vicinus, Martha. ‘“They wonder to which sex I belong’: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity.” Feminist Studies 18, no. 3 (1992): 467-497. An important overview of debates in this field and useful critique of the “female friendship” arguments of Smith-Rosenberg and Faderman. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexu¬ ality since 1800. 2d ed. London: Longman, 1989. An excellent introduction and overview to the history of sexuality in Britain since 1800. Stephen Garton

SEXUALITY: Politics

Politics There are different interpretations of the relationship be¬ tween “sexuality” and “politics” in human history. Some believe that such concepts constitute recent developments that we project onto different societies that actually organ¬ ized human activities according to other principles. How¬ ever, it could also be argued that in all societies there have always been important connections between sexuality and politics despite the fact that people may have been unaware of such concepts. Understanding human history in terms of sexuality and politics illuminates fundamental aspects of previous societies, such as the relationship between men and women and the role of sexual practices and identities in relation to political systems. Studying the past according to these concepts has shaped our understanding of how different societies have organized social life from prehistory to the present around the globe. The Prehistoric and Ancient Past. We have little evidence that gives us insight into the nature of sexuality and politics during prehistoric times, except for our knowl¬ edge that hunting and gathering were the main economic activities of all human groups. Observation of modern-day hunter-gatherer societies has shown that there is no single way of organizing production according to gender lines, which suggests that this was the same during prehistory; that is, each activity, whether hunting or gathering, may have been a feminine activity in some societies and a masculine activity in others. There is no basis for the longheld assumption (before the advent of feminist archaeology in the late twentieth century) that men were the hunters and women the gatherers in these societies. At the same time, different societies attribute varying values to each activity, and thus the empowering experience of performing an activity considered crucial for a society is sometimes performed by men, sometimes by women. As state societies developed, they adopted a variety of kinship structures and sexual norms. In some cases women had no power at all, as was the case in the Roman Empire, whereas in other cases women had political rights similar to those of men, including the right to own property, as was the case in ancient Egypt. One of the better-researched cases is Athenian society toward the fifth century b.c.e. In this society, sexuality was shaped by class, gender, and age. Adult male citizens had the right to have coitus not only with their wives but also with other males and with female slaves. In addition, most free adult men would establish sexual bonds with women known as hetaerae, com¬ panions who were also expected to provide sophisticated conversation—for instance about politics and philosophy— in exchange for gifts and financial support. Another eroti¬ cized bond in ancient Athens was that of the adult free man

11

with free adolescents, a relationship known as pederasty. The boy was supposed to use this bond to learn about Athenian society and politics, and in the ideal case he was supposed to have no sexual desire. The Athenian system was a phallocentric one in which it was considered acceptable for the adult free male citizen sexually to attain anyone among all the other groups below him, but his own anus was supposed to remain virgin. Athe¬ nians believed that only those who could master or avoid the desire to be penetrated were capable of becoming free citi¬ zens, and women and slaves were viewed as lacking such control over themselves. The association of sexuality with political power in ancient Greece was thus a very direct one. The Roman Empire, another phallocentric culture, estab¬ lished a similar relationship between sexuality and politics in which the male heads of the households had absolute power over all the members of the family, including the right to kill them regardless of justification. However, the Roman Empire was not ruled by the decisions of free men, and pederasty as an institution for learning how to become a citizen did not exist. The Christian and Muslim Worlds. In Greece, male selfcontrol had been the foremost element in the regulation of sexuality; such self-control was a direct prerequisite for political power. Centuries later, within the growing realm of Christianity, all sexual practices not oriented toward repro¬ duction were viewed as sins punishable by God, and the regulation of sexuality shifted. In this new context the valorization of sexual virginity was extended to all the social groups, especially women. The doctrine asserting the virginity of Christ’s mother, Mary, is directly tied to this development. In the Middle East, Islam also imposed many restrictions on sexual activities, a primary prohibition being that sexual activity should take place only within marriage. “Marriage” was defined in the Qur an as a complementary union of the sexes oriented toward procreation, although there is a strong tradition of Islamic texts that describe other forms of sexuality, including same-sex. Although Christianity prevailed in Europe during the Middle Ages, the lack of a centralized state that would punish the actions of its subjects allowed some space for sexual dissidence. In an attempt to strengthen their power over their subjects, the emerging territorial states in Europe began to pass legal codes for the first time in the late thirteenth century. The Siete Partidas, drafted in Castile and probably completed about 1265, defined sodomy as typical of foreigners and in many cases punishable by death; the Catholic Spanish crown’s intolerance of same-sex practices reflected contemporary ideas associating sodomy with Jews and viewing the Jewish people as dangerous outsiders. With the formation of absolutist states in the sixteenth century, opposition to people of different political and

12

SEXUALITY: Politics

religious groups strengthened, and laws against Jews and sodomy were enforced. When the Spanish learned of the practice of sodomy among various native peoples of the New World, they considered that as yet another justifica¬ tion for the conquest, citing Spanish law that called for punishing such “sinners” with expropriation and death. Other European empires also used for political reasons the punishment of those who performed sodomy. In 1533, Henry VIII and the British Parliament passed the “Buggery Act,” which gave the monarch the power to issue death sentences against those convicted of sodomy and also the right to seize their property. The monarchy used this law to expropriate the property of the Catholic Church and to stigmatize Turks and Moors who were associated with the practice of sodomy. This legislation was applied to British colonies also, and it still remains the basis for the penaliza¬ tion of homosexuality in contemporary India. More generally, European conquerors tended to view the indigenous people of the New World in the same light that they viewed women, legally defining them as minors; both groups were thought to lack the skills to govern their own destiny, and both were thought to lack control over their sexuality. For indigenous people this incapacity was considered to be a result of their ignorance of Christian religion. The Enlightenment and After. The eighteenth century brought evolving but contradictory views about the relation¬ ship between sexuality and politics. Some philosophers perceived nonnormative sexuality as a threat to society, while others believed that natural behavior could be found in the theoretically savage man, as suggested by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). The era gave rise to questions about whether equal rights within society should be extended to women, and from this idea came the possibility of understanding sexuality as the province of both genders. The eighteenth century ended with the extension of the principles of the French Revolu¬ tion to a vast area of the world. The Napoleonic Code, one of the most influential legal texts of its time, defined all forms of consensual nonnormative sexuality as private issues so long as they did not become scandals in the public sphere. The scientific study of sexuality began as a result of the development of evolutionary thought in the nineteenth cen¬ tury. Through the questioning of the religious explanation of the origin of humanity, anthropologists developed a theory of kinship. According to this view the human species had experienced a first stage where sexuality was not bound by any norm. As a result, it was possible clearly to identify only motherhood as a biological relationship; paternity was not verifiable. Because of their unique place in kinship, women had concentrated social power, in what was defined as gynecocracy” or “matriarchy.” Evolutionists suggested

that this stage necessarily ended because the limitation of sexual desire was crucial for the development of civiliza¬ tion; they equated progress with the emergence of a maledominated society. However, some radical interpretations of evolution, espe¬ cially Marxism, associated male dominion with the creation of an oppressive social order based in private property. From this point of view it was necessary to struggle for the advent of a communist society where the end of male dominion would be parallel to the destruction of capitalism. Paradoxically, Marxism and other radical social theories frequently left the subject of sexuality unattended, consider¬ ing it a secondary issue when compared to relations of production that were responsible for the existence of social classes. Some socialists, identified as “utopian” by Marxists, were more directly interested in questioning the prevailing sexual and gender order. According to Utopians such as Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Robert Owen (1771-1858), for instance, couples were an obstacle for the strengthening of the collective, which was crucial for a socialist project. Many early-nineteenth-century socialists formed collect¬ ives where they experienced different forms of kinship and sexuality, but with the growing importance of Marxism beginning in the mid-nineteenth century this tradition disappeared. With the ascendancy of evolutionary theory through the end of the nineteenth century, the medical profession— including psychiatrists and physicians—was generally guided by the idea that human development was character¬ ized by a gradual trend away from any form of sexuality except vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman. Individuals who “perverted” sexuality by performing other sexual activities were a threat to society. A person who engaged in sexual activity before marriage was understood to be imprudent and immoral, and after marriage, sexual activity was expected to be limited to the legal partner and in acceptable expressions and positions. Sexuality was a problem when it was promiscuous, in groups, commer¬ cial, nonreproductive, between individuals of the same sex, intergenerational, or sadomasochistic—these acts were interpreted as the survival of a backward past in a supposedly progressive present. Medical professionals adopted a division between “pathological” and “normal” sexuality, a dichotomy that was presented as “objective” and “scientific.” The con¬ cept of pathology vested physicians and psychiatrists with power and social control over a wide range of people whose very existence was thus pathologized, including women, homosexuals, transsexuals, and intersexed people. The Twentieth Century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the emergence of psychoanalysis implied fundamental changes in the perception of sexuality and politics. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

SEXUALITY: Politics

(1905), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) followed the evolu¬ tionary view of human sexuality, relating the history of the species with that of the life of individuals. According to his interpretation, a person achieved “normal” sexuality only as the result of complicated life processes. Some people were successful at repressing all other sexual desires except the normal, while others would stay in previous stages of sexual development. Freud claimed that it was not pos¬ sible to differentiate between normal and abnormal people and that those people who had been able to repress their nonnormative sexual desire were never entirely successful. Repression would fail because the forbidden desire would return in the form of a neurotic symptom governing the life of the individual, whose own conscious will was then undermined. In this light, Freud argued, the strict impo¬ sition of sexual norms could actually be counterproductive for civilization. Post-Freudian psychoanalysts developed different and even opposite understandings of the relationship of sexual¬ ity to politics. During the first half of the twentieth century some radical advocates of both Marxism and psychoanaly¬ sis, such as Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) and a few social philosophers of the so-called Frankfurt School, especially Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), advocated for the liberation of sexuality, arguing that repression could lead to authori¬ tarianism and even fascism. For them the repression of sexual desire served the hierarchical reproduction of capi¬ talist society. In the United States, meanwhile, the field of psychoanal¬ ysis became increasingly conservative, with many practi¬ tioners who were unquestioning of traditional family values and female social roles and who worked from principles that continued to pathologize both male and female homo¬ sexuality. The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), in his groundbreaking studies of sexual practices among men (1948) and women (1953) known as the Kinsey Reports, showed that many sexual practices viewed by the medical field as “abnormal” were more common statistically than many people believed. But when foundation funding was curtailed in the context of the extreme political conserva¬ tism of the McCarthy era, Kinsey was unable to develop his research further. At mid-century in France, meanwhile, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was developing another influential branch of psychoanalysis, arguing for a radical disassociation of anat¬ omy and sexuality and maintaining that sexuality is in fact constructed by language rather than biology. In subsequent decades Lacanian psychoanalysis was criticized for embracing gender stereotypes, and some interpretations of Lacanian theory that essentially uphold a traditional understanding of the roles of men and women have placed its twenty-firstcentury practitioners in opposition to the legalization of same-sex unions. Around the same time, Simone de

13

Beauvoir (1908-1896), in The Second Sex (1949), argued that womanhood was a socially constructed identity that was cast as inferior because it was not regarded as a univer¬ sal condition; society operated as if the human condition were inherently male, she asserted, and woman’s place in the culture was treated as merely representing the “other.” A type of feminism emerged in the 1950s that differed from the First Wave feminism of the 1840s to about 1920, in that this Second Wave feminism was much more strongly concerned with issues around sexuality and the control of female bodies. The introduction of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s made it far easier for women to separate sexuality and reproduction, and by the 1970s pressure from women’s groups in many Western countries had led to the overturning of legal bans on medical abortion. The modern gay and lesbian movement also emerged in the 1950s, first in the United States and then in Europe. Homophile societies of the late 1950s and early 1960s worked politely to change the public image of homosexuals, while reaching to interested scientists and intellectuals who might help erode social prejudice. Public awareness of trans¬ sexual identity also increased, beginning with the sensationalistic media coverage in 1952 after an American, Christine Jorgensen, had sex-reassignment surgery in Copenhagen. The 1960s and 1970s, the years of the so-called sexual revolution, witnessed gays and lesbians assuming a more politicized and radical view. Along with feminists they fought for a liberal¬ ization of sexual mores; they expressed pride in their sexual identities and fought to overturn legislation criminalizing same-sex sexuality. Feminists formed consciousness-raising groups to share their experiences and learn how politics was crucial in shaping them as gendered and sexual subjects; from such discussions emerged the famous insight about sexual politics that the personal is political. In the 1980s sexuality became the center of a struggle between feminism and the gay/lesbian movement on one side and the so-called moral majority on the other. The moral majority was a right-wing political movement that reacted against the sexual revolution of the previous de¬ cades, trying to ban abortion and blaming gays for the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. With the presidency of Ronald Reagan, these conservative views concerning sexu¬ ality were officially promoted, and the United States began funding Muslim fundamentalists who attacked women’s rights in order to counteract Communism in the Middle East. Within this context the Taliban reinstated old laws forcing women to cover their whole bodies and remain secluded at home. These policies against women later spread throughout the Middle East, promoted by political and religious groups who identified the rights of women as an imposition of Western imperialism. In the 1990s the growth of Muslim fundamentalism in the Middle East was parallel to the increasing influence

14

SEXUALITY: Politics

Gay Marriage. Supporters of gay marriage unfurl a rainbow flag outside the New Jersey Supreme Court as it makes its decision on same-sex marriage, Trenton, New Jersey, October 2006. REUTERS/ Tim Schaffer

of Christian fundamentalism in the West. Although these religious movements claim to have different views about society, they both promoted very similar ideas against gay/lesbian and women’s rights, as well as attacks on sexual freedom at large. Other parts of the world have also been affected by a growing fundamentalism that is sexually conservative and antifeminist. Muslim fundament¬ alism has influenced many countries in Africa, promoting laws that punish same-sex practices with death in Nigeria and the bashing of “adulterous” women throughout the region. In India this conservative trend has been repre¬ sented by the growing influence of Hindu nationalism, while in Europe and the Americas the Catholic Church has engaged in a struggle against abortion and same-sex marriage. The tensions of sexual politics in the early twentieth cen¬ tury, however, are paradoxical, because along with the increasing importance of fundamentalist movements, the struggle for the rights of women and of the oppressed sexual/gender identities—transgender people, intersexuals, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals—has achieved some im¬ portant victories. Although India is experiencing a growth in conservatism, in China many young men and women are beginning to experience a growing sexual freedom that is granting them the right to choose their own partners freely and express their affection publicly. At the same time, more countries—such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain,

Canada, and South Africa—and cities—such as Buenos Aires and Mexico City—have passed laws providing for same-sex marriage or civil unions, and the legalization of abortion is also being extended to new regions. [See also Communes; Europe, subentries Ancient Greece and Roman Empire; Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, The; Feminism; Pederasty; and Transgender/ Transsexual.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beauvoir, Simone de. 'The Second Sex (1949). Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1993. Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Chris¬ tian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab. Sexuality in Islam. London: Saqi Books 1998. Dover, Kenneth James. Greek Homosexuality. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Harris, Marvin. Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to Gen¬ eral Anthropology. 7th ed. New York: Longman, 1997, Hoagland, Sarah Lucia, and Julia Penelope. For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology. London: Onlywomen, 1988. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. 3d ed. New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946. Rosario, Vernon A., ed. Science and Homosexualities. New York: Routledge, 1997.

SEXUALITY: Sexual Identity

Vanita, Ruth, ed. Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality. London: Tavistock, 1986. Pablo Ben

Sexual Identity From the point of view of anthropology, identity is a product of the tension between the self-image of an individ¬ ual or group and the image that others project about that individual or group. There are many possible cleavages through which to draw the line between an individual or group and those considered alien or “other.” These cleav¬ ages can be constructed through differences related to social class, ethnicity, nationality, gender, or sexuality. In the case of sexual identity, there is a belief that the performance of some sexual practices and the desire related to them are crucial for subjectivity, and thus an individual or group should turn to those practices to define her or his or their identity. Sexual identity can be confused with sexual orientation. But whereas sexual orientation refers only to desire for people of the same or different sex, sexual identity is broader: it can refer not only to homosexuality and heterosexuality but also to forms that are beyond this dichotomy and can indicate variations of other kind. Even within a certain sexual orienta¬ tion there are different sexual identities. Among gays and lesbians there are very different communities related to class, ethnicity, age, sexual tastes, and body shape. Bear identity, for instance, has become an internationally identifiable sexual identity comprising gay men who are usually either hairy or heavy and who sometimes are middle-aged or older; those who desire bears have been called “hunters.” Subdivisions of sexual identity seem to multiply. Unlike straight people, lesbians and gays have been able to construct many sexually desirable groups, although they have sometimes been unable to integrate transgendered and intersexed people in the same way. Sexual identity is also sometimes confused with gender identity. Whereas sexual identity implies all those identities related to some aspect of sexuality, gender identity refers to identities constructed in relation to masculinity, femininity, and the external appearance of the genital and other gendered organs or regions of the body. Some groups have specifically fought to avoid identification through sexual identity. This is the case for transgendered people, who usually transform themselves from one identity to another. They argue that their transformation, as well as masculinity and femininity in general, is related not to sexuality but only to a way of identifying through the sexed body. There are different theories explaining the origin of sexual identity. According to the prevailing paradigm within

15

medicine and among other health professionals, sexual identity is related to genetics, hormones, or other biological factors. In the social sciences, scholars believe that sexual identity is a social construction. Heterosexuality, to cite an example, has been studied as an identity that only recently acquired the meaning it has today. In the past there was no group of people who would identify themselves through sexual practices with people of another sex. The con¬ structed character of sexual identities does not mean that individuals decide who they desire, but on the contrary, it means that they develop features that make themselves conform to already existing sexual identities or categories. According to Michel Foucault, sexual identity became possible in the West only with the development of the concept of the individual in the eighteenth century and with the growing importance in the nineteenth century of using sexuality to define the self. In other societies sexual identity should be thought of in different terms. The term “identity” has become crucial since about the 1970s. Identity politics is so important that many groups believe that adopting a collective identity helps solve problems that could not be solved otherwise. Within the lesbian and gay movement, for instance, many sub-identity categories have developed, such as sadomasochists, butch and femme, bears and pederasts. Even AIDS has become a feature related to sexual identity. All these groups claim for rights or resources using their identity-based background. Some activists have questioned identity politics because in their view such politics reinforces the fixation on identities, on labels, rather than encouraging a world where people are free to change their identity. Within feminism, some sexual identities have become crucial for internal political debates. Until the 1970s femin¬ ists were accused of lesbianism by opponents throughout the world, but in that decade a group of lesbian radicals in the United States accused straight women of having sex with the “enemy.” As a result, a considerable number of women became lesbians or declared that they identified themselves politically as lesbians. Adrienne Rich’s idea of the lesbian continuum—according to which there is a continuum of lesbianism that goes from exclusive samesex sexual activities to the mutual nurturing and intimate bonds that women have constructed among themselves in history—became crucial. According to this political view, male chauvinism attempts to erase this internal solidarity among women, and that is why it attacks lesbianism. Although lesbian radicalism began as an option to pro¬ mote a transformation of the world, more recently many feminists who belong to this group have been accused of having an anti-man complex and of being unable to work with other minority groups. Radical feminists have also been criticized for having defined femme-femme bonds as the only valid ones, rejecting role playing and other forms of

16

SEXUALITY: Sexual Identity

sexuality as products of a patriarchal society. Some radical feminists have asked for laws prohibiting different forms of sexual expression, such as pornography, which made other feminists say that the radicals were anti-sex. A pro-sex fem¬ inist movement has developed that is based on other more sexualized identities, such as sadomasochists. Authors like Judith Butler have argued that there should not be a sexual identity considered foundational for feminist politics; on the contrary, all identities should be considered as having a potential for undermining what she calls the heterosexual matrix.

[See also Gender Roles and Transgender/Transsexual.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barth, Fredrik, ed. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Boston: Little, Brown 1969. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Differ¬ ence in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Fraser, Nancy. Justice Interrupts: A Critical Reflection on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge, 1997. Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Pablo Ben

Fertility Rites. A couple embracing in a votive bed, Susa, Iran, 2000 b.c.e. Musee du Louvre, Paris/Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Heterosexuality Sex between men and women is the primary way that

literally became the property of their husbands. In South

cultures perpetuate themselves, although voluntary and

Asia some widows were expected to throw themselves onto

involuntary migration has assumed great importance in

the funeral pyre of their husbands (sati). In Britain until the

specific times and places. The organization of sexual rela¬

late nineteenth century, married women were obliged to

tions, however, is remarkably varied. To the French anthro¬

forfeit their right to make independent legal decisions

pologist Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908), what distinguishes

about property that had been theirs before marriage.

culture from nature is the exercise of prohibitions over

Patterns of exchange of women for sexual relations could

sexual instincts, primarily through the “incest taboo.” This

be unequal. Monogamy has been dominant in the West

social rule shields societies from the effects of marriages

since antiquity, but polygyny was common in many times

between people from the same family. Incest, however,

and places, polyandry less so. Although some societies

has been defined in very different ways. Although many

allowed a second wife if the first proved barren, generally

societies permit the marriage of cousins, the indigenous

polygyny signified status and power. For example, the semi-

people of Thomson River, British Columbia, for example,

nomadic Nambikwara people of western Brazil sanctioned

consider marriages between second cousins to be incestuous.

three or four wives for headmen and sorcerers. Shah Jahan

In contrast, royalty in ancient Egypt could marry siblings,

(1592-1666; r. 1628-1658), the Mughal emperor of India,

but marrying a younger sister was incestuous. Rules made

had hundreds of wives and concubines, although the

marriages a way of linking social groups through kinship networks.

Women as the Currency of Exchange. Heterosexuality made women the currency of exchange that made the reproduction of cultures possible. In some contexts women

importance of one, Mumtaz Mahal, is commemorated in the Taj Mahal. The ruling males in Inca, Maya, and Aztec societies were also entitled to many concubines. If there was an unequal distribution of wives, some men faced enforced celibacy. This might be temporary.

SEXUALITY: Heterosexuality

In Southeast Asia men often entered a Buddhist monas¬ tery for a period of time, only to marry later. Some South American, Australian Aboriginal, and African societies enforced celibacy for long periods until men reached a sufficient status that entitled them to marry. In late anti¬ quity, the Christian fathers, Gnostics, and other religious groups made celibacy a virtue, a means of transcending the flesh and achieving a greater communion with God. Confucian teachings also praised abstinence. One solution to a shortage of wives was to find sexual gratification outside marriage. This could mean forms of sexual play that did not involve intercourse, sexual initia¬ tion of younger men by women beyond childbearing years, same-sex pleasures, and, in cultures where sex was com¬ mercialized, prostitution. In most cultures, however, the bachelor was an abject figure. Some cultures were remarkably inventive in dealing with the problem of sex before marriage. In seventeenth-century France, parents promoted the custom of “French kissing” for courting couples, involving the use of loose-fitting cloth¬ ing that facilitated sexual play but prevented intercourse. Similarly, in Puritan New England parents sanctioned the custom of “bundling,” allowing young men to spend the night with their daughters, provided that both remained fully clothed. Through this method parents sought to exert a measure of control over the choice of husband. Other evidence from early modern Europe suggests that mutual masturbation was widely practiced by men and women before marriage. Marriage was a means of sustaining lineage. Most cultures placed a high priority on female virginity before marriage and women’s fidelity within it. Wives were the vessel for the production of the next generation, and it was vital to secure a legitimate heir to family name and property. Some cultures resorted to elaborate rituals and practices to safeguard chastity—for instance, sewing together the lips of the labia in southern African tribes or using the chastity belt in medieval Europe. In contrast, many cultures tolerated men seeking sexual gratification outside marriage. In antiquity, married Greek and Roman men were expected to have sexual relations with concubines, slaves (male and female), prostitutes, and youths. Although husbands and wives may have desired each other, marriage was primarily about kinship, about the cementing of social bonds through reciprocity, inheri¬ tance, and property. Prostitution was tolerated by Christian cultures as an outlet for male desire that protected the virginity of virtuous women. Importance of the Erotic. Sex could involve more than kinship and property. A variety of literary and visual texts attest to the power of desire and the importance of the erotic in cultural life. In paintings, sculpture, sagas, stories, and verse many cultures celebrated sex as the wellspring of

17

social renewal and the point of connection between culture and nature. In many cultures female symbols represented sexuality, fecundity, and “mother nature.” In some cultures the erotic was celebrated in literature and art—pre-Hispanic Maya and Moche art, Khmer temples, Pompeian wall paintings, the sixty-four arts of love, and the Taoist love books of Han dynasty China. The transcendent power of love was also at the heart of great narratives, legends, and folktales in many cultures, the Ramayana of South and Southeast Asia, the Homeric Odyssey of ancient Greece, and the green-clawed thunderbird tale of the Blackfoot Plains tribe of North America. Love and desire also inspired tragedy, including the medieval romance of Tristan and Isolde, the Shakespearean drama Romeo and Juliet, and the Burmese legend of the Naga. Within these diverse erotic traditions there is abundant evidence about sexual pleasure for both men and women. Numerous visual and literary texts across many cultures and times attest to the importance of orgasm and wide¬ spread knowledge of how to achieve it. Many cultures considered female orgasm an essential part of conception. In the West medical and scientific literature on the body and sexuality, from Galen (second century b.c.e.) until the eighteenth century, maintained that female orgasm was an integral part of reproduction. This belief was double-edged. Restricting population might have involved avoiding female orgasm as one (flawed) means of birth control. This is largely speculation, but there are excellent birth and baptismal records for Eur¬ ope from the sixteenth century and later that indicate that the birthrate remained low and remarkably constant over four centuries. This was achieved through delaying the age of marriage (on average until the late twenties in most parts of Europe and North America) and the use of birth-control measures such as extended periods of lactation. On the other hand, women of all races married early in Spanish and Portuguese America. In many cultures midwives and women elders were integrally involved in regulating sex and birth, by, for example, enforcing female circumcision in Africa, developing herbal remedies to cause miscarriages in early modern Europe, and advising young women in most cultures on how to prevent conception. The Intercourse Revolution and Birthrates. From around the 1750s in Europe and the Americas, however, the centuries-old effort to control fertility unraveled. The fertility rate began to rise rapidly, and by the end of the century the European population had nearly doubled. More people in Europe and North America were marrying at a younger age and were having children. Even the illegitimacy rate, traditionally low, began to rise signifi¬ cantly, suggesting that there was a more general move toward what some historians have called the “intercourse revolution” of the eighteenth century. Men and women

18

SEXUALITY: Heterosexuality

were now having intercourse more often, in preference to other forms of sexual play, than ever before. Some have speculated that the rising popularity of inter¬ course reflected growing prosperity, which gave couples the confidence to reproduce because they felt that they were now able to support offspring. Others have seen it as a consequence of the new wage-earner economy in which young men and women, particularly in the working classes, were increasingly financially and socially independent from their families. Disposable incomes and city pleasures (such as music halls and drinking venues) facilitated greater sex¬ ual independence and decisions to marry by choice based on mutual affection rather than for reasons of kinship and property. Men and women were increasingly freed from the traditional social prohibitions imposed by families and close-knit communities. For many historians these patterns reflect the emergence of “sexual modernism.” In contrast, Spanish and Portuguese America created a very different form of sexual revolution. From the sixteenth century in the New World colonists began to mate freely with indigenous women and with black women (African slavery was the base of the economy). Although the indige¬ nous population declined sharply beginning in the sixteenth century because of the ravages of disease, the Mestizo popu¬ lation began to increase in parts of rural and urban Spanish America. In the eighteenth century, however, the indige¬ nous population and other parts of the population of Spanish America began to increase, although a satisfac¬ tory sexual theory to explain this growth is lacking. The European and North American intercourse revolu¬ tion was short-lived. The birthrate began to fall again, going into a pattern of long-term decline that continues in the West even today. The timing of the beginning of the birthrate decline varied considerably: in France by the 1780s, in New England around 1800, in Britain, Germany, and many other parts of Europe in the 1850s, and in Australia in the 1880s. In Spanish America, Asia, and Africa, how¬ ever, increased fertility rates—reinforced by cultural and religious values stressing sex as a means of reproduction rather than pleasure—and lower child mortality due to improved child care and health facilities continued to fuel significant population growth, at least up to the mid- to late twentieth century. Why did birthrates decline in the West? By the end of the eighteenth century, new ideals of political rights and indi¬ vidual liberty encouraged women to have a voice in social affairs. At the same time the evangelical movements in Britain and North America fostered ideals of purity, moral restraint, the family as a domestic haven, and women as naturally fitted to organizing this private sphere. Women were seen to have a central place in the home and an important public role within philanthropic and moralreform movements. Similarly, domestic ideals promoted

the idea that children should be treasured and nurtured. Ideals of women’s domestic role and children’s value encouraged the creation of smaller family units living in harmony. Detailed studies of local contexts suggest that women influenced by evangelical and moral-reform ideas were the first to lower fertility. Urbanization, destitution, slums, and working-class discontent also played a part in lowering the birthrate. Reformers such as Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) posited a direct relation between population growth and scarcity. Within this climate of opinion, moral restraint, abstinence, and birth control were essential measures for promoting economic prosperity. Rising expectations about standards of living encouraged women to have fewer children. Nineteenth-century middle-class reformers in Britain, Europe, and North America may have promoted the virtues of abstinence, but women had to negotiate the perils of men’s insistence on conjugal rights and the consequences in ruined health and even death from childbirth. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and the United States there was a flourishing trade in birth-control devices, baby farming, and abortion services to meet the demand of women who desired greater control over ferti¬ lity. Historians have debated the relative significance of abstinence, birth control, and abortion in lowering fertility, but all certainly played their part. This momentous demo¬ graphic revolution, with its far-reaching effects on the shape of family life and the capacity of women to engage in the public sphere, was largely the work of individual women making hard choices about how many children they could bear. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and the Americas women also developed the first sustained critique of male sexual rights. Women’s prominence in moral-reform and philanthropic organizations brought them face to face with the effects of prostitution, child sexual exploitation, venereal disease, female mortality from botched abortions, and other manifestations of men’s demand for access to women’s bodies. A flash point for this emerging awareness of male sexual complicity in the vice trade was the efforts of many govern¬ ments to ensure that prostitutes were free of venereal diseases. In Britain the 1866 Contagious Diseases Acts, which sanctioned the incarceration of diseased prostitutes in “lock hospitals,” appeared to Josephine Butler and other British campaigners to be a form of government endorse¬ ment of male vice. Underpinning this and related women’s movement campaigns on domestic violence, incest, and prostitution was an argument that men were more prone to animal instincts. Women had greater self-restraint and were less prone to base desires. The corollary was the assertion that social progress was possible only if men lifted themselves up to the higher moral plane of women.

SEXUALITY: Heterosexuality

Sexology undermined this critique of male sexuality. The widespread scientific interest in sex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries questioned the earlier claim by the women’s movement that women were beyond sexu¬ ality. Growing evidence of the importance of female sexuality and women’s discontent with their sexual experi¬ ences fueled the idea that women were entitled to pleasure. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) argued forcefully that sexual instincts were natural in both men and women and that to repress them risked neurosis and misery. Freud pathologized the older feminist belief in women's capacity to tran¬ scend sexuality. A new generation of feminists, such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, began to campaign for women’s sexual rights, advocating birth control not only to free women from the burden of childbearing but also to enable them to engage in sex for the sake of pleasure without fear of conception. Women’s Right to Pleasure. Did new ideas of women’s right to pleasure take hold? Detailed sex survey work on college-educated Americans from the 1890s onward sug¬ gests that there was a gradual transformation in heterosexual relations across the century. The generations born after 1905 were more inclined to engage in premarital sex, masturbation, and homoeroticism than earlier generations. The controversial work of the American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) suggested widespread premar¬ ital sex across all classes as well as the prevalence of oral sex, masturbation, and homoerotic practices. He also argued that women had greater erotic range, that they desired and experienced orgasm as intensely as men, and—crucially, and contrary to Freud—that female orgasm was clitoral, not vaginal. Later sex researchers such as William Masters and Virginia Johnson also confirmed that stimulation of the clitoris was central to female orgasm. The idea of active female sexuality and the right of women to sexual pleasure played an important part in both the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the emergence of Second Wave feminism in the 1970s. The idea of sexual freedom dominated debates on sex in the mid- to late twentieth century. The importance of overcoming sexual repression became a central tenet of the liberation movements, with an emphasis on free love and sexual experimentation. Continuing evidence of widespread sexual oppression of women—rape, prostitution, sexual violence, sex slavery, the representation of women as sex objects within porno¬ graphy and mainstream media, and persistent levels of sex¬ ual misery among heterosexual women—brought sexuality within the wider feminist campaign for women’s political, social, and economic rights. For feminists, women had the right to sexual freedom, and they campaigned for an end to male sexual exploitation of women. The emergence of ideas of sexual liberation and female sexual autonomy became part of a larger dynamic of

19

colonialism. Western domination over centuries had eroded indigenous sexual cultures. Colonial powers outlawed oppressive practices such as polygyny and widow burning in India and foot-binding in China but in their place had fostered sexual enslavement and prostitution. Twentiethcentury nationalist struggles in most parts of Europe’s empires drew much of their inspiration from Western ideals of political rights, sovereignty, and democracy. Women in many parts of the world were also influenced by feminist ideas, and women’s movements emerged in many parts of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. These movements often had to navigate a difficult path between the competing demands to join men in the struggle to defend indigenous cultures and overthrow imperial powers and the recognition that nationalist struggles often involved support for male sexual dominance. These feminist movements faced difficult decisions about whether to support or oppose indigenous cultural practices such as female circumcision. Was race oppression more important than sex oppression? At home and in major international feminist forums, women of color debated how to negotiate and reconcile the struggles against race oppression and the movement for women’s freedom from male sexual domination. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the idea that women should enjoy sexual freedom was widespread. As the idea of sexuality slowly emerged as an integral part of individual identity and people increasingly sought to define themselves by their sexual orientation (straight, gay, bisex¬ ual, transsexual) or by their refusal to accept such straitjackets (queer), men and women came to see that heterosexuality should involve respect and a right to mutual sexual pleasure. The continuing prevalence of prostitution, rape, and sex¬ ual violence and the mounting evidence of the spread of HIV/AIDS among women, particularly in Africa and Asia, suggest that the assertion of male sexual rights comes at the cost of women’s sexual rights. Heterosexu¬ ality has remained an area of conflict as much as one of pleasure. [See also Adultery; Marriage; Prostitution; Rape; Sati; and Virginity.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Godbeer, Richard. Sexual Revolution in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Excellent analysis of eighteenth-century sexual culture in New England. Hodes, Martha. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Original and fascinating account of sex across racial lines in the United States. Lavrin, Asuncion, ed. Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Pioneer¬ ing collection on the history of sexuality in Latin America, with broad coverage of issues and different regions within Latin America.

20

SEXUALITY: Heterosexuality

Macfarlane, Alan. Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Repro¬ duction, 1300-1840. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Important study of long-term trends in fertility and family-formation patterns in medieval and early modern England. Nnaemeka, Obioma, ed. Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Important collection examining how female circumcision became a point of conflict in colonial Africa and the complex ways in which imperialists and Africans sought to either condemn or support this practice. Segal, Lynne. Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure. London: Virago, 1994. Thoughtful feminist analysis of the politics of sex and sexuality. Shorter, Edward. The Making of the Modern Family. London: Collins, 1976. Landmark study of the eighteenth-century inter¬ course revolution and its subsequent developments. Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000. Interesting study of the emergence of sexual modernism in bohemian New York. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 15001800. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977. Landmark study of changing patterns of family formation, love, and sex in early modern England. Walkowitz, Judith R. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pioneering feminist analysis of the history of prostitution. Wrigley, E. A., and R. S. Schofield. The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction. London: Edward Arnold, 1981. Pathbreaking analysis of the demographic history of England, with good coverage of the intercourse revolution and the decline in the birthrate.

roles. This is even more the case if subadults are consid¬ ered a gender and sexual relations involve the older one dominating and, often, penetrating the younger. The concept of “homosexuality” is further complicated by the difficulties of fitting female-female and male-male sexuality within a single category. In reference to males, homosexuality means contact between the penis of one male and the body of another person who was born male and/or the desire by someone born male for contact with the penis, thighs, or orifices of someone else born male. Lesbian scholars have rejected a behavioral definition of homosexuality or lesbianism that necessarily includes geni¬ tal stimulation or any desire for physical contact with another woman’s genitalia. The lesbian historian Lillian Faderman wrote: “‘Lesbian’ describes a relationship in which two women’s strongest emotions and affections are directed toward each other. Sexual contact may be a part of the relationship to a greater or lesser degree, or it may be

Stephen Garton

Homosexuality Although recurrent sexual conduct is the core of the concept “sexuality,” this includes more than physical contact and certainly more than genital contact. It includes what persons want (desire) and their fantasies, in addition to what their bodies do. The prefix homo- means “same,” usually under¬ stood as involving persons of the same biological (chromo¬ somal) sex. Although gender (roles and dress), (genital) sex, and sexual conduct are expected to fit together smoothly so that feminine females have sexual relations with masculine females, this does not always occur, and departure from one part of the bundle does not necessarily involve differences from conventional patterning in the other two. Thus there are masculine women sexually involved with or attracted to feminine men, masculine women with fem¬ inine women, feminine women with feminine women, and so on. A considerable amount of “homosexuality” across time and space has been heterogender—that is, involving pairs of the same biological sex who enact different gender

Pride Parade. Annual Pride Parade moves down Atlantica Avenue, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 2003. REUTERS/Bruno Domingos BD/GAC

SEXUALITY: Homosexuality

entirely absent” (pp. 17-18). In 1975 the poet Adrienne Rich proposed thinking of a “lesbian continuum” that in¬ cludes “women-identified women” with no experience of or desire for genital contact with another woman, although she suggested a less permeable category of those who live a “lesbian existence”—that is, females who organize their primary emotional relationships around other females. Not easily observed, let alone measured, living (for at least some time) a “lesbian existence” is still an irremedi¬ ably contestable category. But, Rich cogently argued, so is “heterosexuality” of women: qualitative differences of experience exist, but the absence of choice about sexual partners remains the “great unacknowledged reality” about female sexuality across time and space. If females have no choice but to marry men and bear children, then even giving birth—which was, until recently, a seemingly concrete marker for having had sex with a man—does not establish heterosexual desire. In the majority of times and places in which families arrange marriages, romantic love and desire are neither required nor expected between those breeding new extensions of the family. Engaging in such behavior does not establish females’ desire for intercourse with males as a class, or even for a particular male sexual partner. Heterosexual desire is an assumption even about those for whom there is tangible proof of having engaged in heterosexual intercourse. In the ancient Greek distinction, sexual passion, erds, was distinguished from philia, an affectionate love. In pederastic love, the man was driven by erds and received philia from his beloved. The Greeks regarded penetration as essential for erds and attributed a possible carnal return of passion to women, calling it anteros. Some male homosex¬ ual relations involve only one person’s erds, whereas the term “female homosexuality” is widely used to encompass nongenital relations based on what the Greeks labeled philia, as well as relations with one or both or neither female having erotic feelings. Further complicating clear categorical distinctions of kinds of “sexuality,” most sexual conduct is not observed by others and “desire” is a nebulous category, particularly in that desire for intimacy does not invariably include desire for genital contact with the person desired. Still, either same-sex sexual behavior or same-sex desire seems neces¬ sary to categorize “homosexuality.” Identification of one¬ self by such desires as being “a homosexual” cannot be a criterion in that many of those who engage in recurrent homosexual behavior do not have such a self-conception— and a few who do not have any same-sex sexual experience do identify themselves as “homosexual” or some local label for a kind of person who loves persons of his or her own sex. A fashionable (deconstructivist) theme has been that, be¬ cause the word “homosexuality” was not coined (in German) until 1869 or borrowed (into English) until 1892, there was

21

no homosexuality in earlier history. Parallel arguments that sexuality did not exist before the word “sexuality” was coined in 1800 or that heterosexuality did not exist before 1892 are less commonly pressed, though not alto¬ gether lacking. These modern labels, however, have referents to persons in times prior to the coining or diffusion of the term “homosexuality,” and there have been labels for such kinds of persons in many cultures, with more labels for males sexually involved with other males than for females sexually involved with other females. Terms that include both male-male and female-female sexual pairings are rare in the roster of world cultures. In Christendom, it was often held that women could not be “sodomites,” although a few were tried for what many found incompre¬ hensible—that is, sex without a penis being involved. Sociohistorical Variations. Some same-sex sexual con¬ tact probably occurs and is desired by some persons in all societies. The modern, northern European and American notion that everyone who repeatedly engages in same-sex sexual behavior is “a homosexual,” a distinct species with unique features, is far from being universally credited. Indeed, the concept of “the homosexual” does not very well explain much of behavior, life, or categorization even in the society that popularized the model. First, not all those involved in homosexual behavior consider them¬ selves or are considered by others homosexual, even in a city such as contemporary San Francisco in which “gay” and “lesbian” are clearly recognized as categories of persons; and there are visible, public gay and lesbian organizations. Second, no single type of “homosexual” with a unique set of characteristics exists. Still, although there are considerable ranges in commit¬ ment to and identification as homosexual, as well as variation over the life course of any one person, there are only a few recurring patterns of social organizing and cultural under¬ standing of homosexual relations and conceiving of roles in which homosexuality is a part. As for other cultural domains, only a few basic categorization systems recur across space and time. Barry Adam proposed a fourfold typology of social struc¬ turings of homosexuality: (1) by age difference, (2) by differ¬ ences in gender presentation, (3) by occupations in which homosexual conduct is expected, and (4) modern/egalitarian/gay relations not organized by differences in the status of partners. David Greenberg suggested structuring by class differences as another type, but occupational and class types can be subsumed in structuring by gender and age differences (see Murray, 2000). Although relationships structured by age, gender, occupation, and comradeship may coexist in a society, one of them tends to be more visible on the ground, both among those who are native to the society and in explanation to aliens (such as anthropol¬ ogists) who inquire about local same-sex sexual relations.

22

SEXUALITY: Homosexuality

For instance, age-graded male homosexuality was the legitimate form across ancient Greek polities. Genderdefined and comradely homosexuality also occurred, and at least gender-defined homosexuality was labeled—with a term for such a kind of person, kinaidos. Similarly, many indigenous North American peoples had terms for a gendervariant role labeled by alien observers berdache (recently reglossed as “two spirits”), but there were no labels for males who were masculine by their culture’s standards, did male work, and had sexual relationships with other males, nor for females who were feminine by their culture’s standards and had sexual relationships with other females. There is always intracultural diversity, and even one person may understand the same behavior differently on different occasions with different partners, or even with the same partner. No single set of cultural institutions ever completely contains the full range of human experience and innovation. Even a role category may be variously inter¬ preted and lived by individuals within a society, just as completely written-out stage roles are interpreted and played differently by different performers. Over time shared new meanings may alter even the cultural categories. Also, organizations that are overshadowed by a dominant one may nonetheless persist—as, for instance, age-stratified and gender-stratified homosexualities exist in present-day Amsterdam and Sydney. Whether the typology of sociocultural organizations of same-sex sexuality applies to female homosexuality has been relatively little discussed. Those interested in the social construction of sexualities cannot—consistently with their theory or with knowledge of the distinct constraints on women’s movement and associations in various societies— take a similarity between male homosexuality and female homosexuality as “natural” and preordained. Yet there has been a marked reluctance to deconstruct this particular equa¬ tion (that of male-male and female-female sexual relations), even though it is this linkage that seems to be what is most unique to the modern, ’’Western” (northwestern European and North American) conception of homosexuality. The equation of male and female homosexuality as similar to each other—let alone as instances of a larger single category of “homosexual”—is alien to those involved in recurrent homosexuality in many societies, including lesbian feminists in North America and Europe of the 1970s (see Wolf). Relations structured by differences in age. The lack of any equivalent of a bachelorhood period between puberty and marriage for females in the gerontocratic and/or polygynous societies that have age-structured male homosexual relations is a structural impediment to age-structured female homosexuality. Restriction on female movement earlier in life and outside the household is another. These societies also lack institutional positions for women to

mentor girls. Nevertheless, there is evidence of at least rudimentary age-stratified female-female relationships in some places. The corpus pf women’s writings celebrating the charms of budding girls is very slender compared with that by men on the charms of budding boys. The extent to which this is an epiphenomenon of the lack of female inscriptions of female desire is hard to gauge. What work has survived of the ancient Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos (c. 610-c. 580 b.c.e.) is extremely fragmentary, and there have been very few women whose writings (or paintings) have survived at all. The fragments from Sappho address girls in the way that male lovers addressed their young beloveds and celebrate girls’ youthful beauty. The differing heights of the female partners in lesbian scenes on surviving ancient Greek vases suggest age differences. A fragment from the philosopher Hagnon suggests that there was Spartan initiation by female elders of female youths: “Among the Spartans, it was cus¬ tomary [for adult women] to have intercourse with girls before their marriage, as one did with boys.” Kinship idioms seem to be common for female homo¬ sexuality structured by age difference—for instance, “elder sister” with “younger sister” among marriage-shunning Cantonese women and young Japanese women in the early twentieth century (“S” for “sister” relationships), and “mummies” with their “babies” in Lesotho. Not all age-structured homosexuality is intergenerational. The differentiation of roles may not involve large (or even any) differences in chronological age, even for pairs of a “mummy” and her “baby.” The normative age difference for S relationships was two school grades. Generally the one playing the role of elder takes the initiative in sex and is supposed to protect the younger partner from others—in particular, from males and from other females who find the younger one attractive. That the subordinate party may out¬ grow her role is a recurrent expectation, and a source of anguish and fear to the elder one. The elder partner courts the younger, so the younger has the power of lack of interest, which may be feigned. Relations structured by differences in gender. Although the representations of heterogender homosexuality outside North America and northwestern Europe are mostly of males, female-female sexual relations organized by gender differ¬ ences also are recorded for various locations. Involvement by women in heterogender homosexuality seems less likely to be exclusive and lifelong than does male involvement in heterogender homosexuality. In classic butch/femme relations, it is the butch who loves, the femme who is loved and whose receptivity (which may involve but not always does involve—passivity) makes her easy prey to males, at least in the view of the hutches unsure of their hold.

SEXUALITY: Homosexuality

There are a number of reports of females who crossdressed and engaged in male occupations in Native American societies—along with many more reports of males who cross-dressed and engaged in female occupations. The sexual conduct of both male and female “berdache” is unclear in many reports—more unclear in the writings about female ones than in the more numerous and generally more detailed ones about male ones (see Roscoe). On Cebu, a southern island in the Philippine archipelago, Donn Hart found females who cross-dressed and engaged in male occupations. These females were sometimes referred to as bayot, the term for male cross-dressers, and sometimes with the female-specific term lakin-on. Rather than identifying themselves with a distinct (third-gender) role, some passed as men away from their natal village and in some instances elsewhere those born female became soldiers presumed to be male. In Indonesia, Thailand, and Taiwan, the word “tomboy” has been borrowed from English for masculine-appearing women who work in stereotypically masculine occupations such as security guard and bus conductor and reject feminine dress. In Taiwan, “tomboy” has been abbreviated to “T,” in Thailand to “tom.” The conventionally feminine partner is referred to as po or bo (wife) in Taiwan, dee (from “lady”) in Thailand. Carol Robertson noted that in contemporary Hawaii the category mahu includes women who dress and work as men and “women and men who might, in English, call them¬ selves ‘gay’” (p. 314). She did not report any female-female sexual behavior on the part of mahu born female, but she cited statements that girls were raised as boys to keep them free of sexual liaisons with men. As is often the case, it seems that there has not been inquiry about whether lack of sexual liaisons with men means lack of all sexual contact. Among the Minangkabau of western Sumatra, Evelyn Blackwood reported that “alternatively gendered individ¬ uals find partners among same-sex individuals who appear straight-looking and are usually bisexual. The masculine (jantan or tomboi) partner in a lesbian couple is also called cowok, an Indonesian slang term for a young man or lakilaki (man) while her feminine partner is called cewek, Indonesian slang for a young woman” (p. 62). Cowok are not attracted to other cowok. Blackwood wrote that both gender variance and homosexuality are ignored as long as family duties, particularly procreation, are fulfilled—an instance of the general Islamic “will not to know” about irregular gender and sexual behavior (see Murray, 1997). As in other Muslim societies, the pressure to marry and pro¬ create is even stronger on women than on men, so most lesbians are, have been, or will be married. In an unpublished 1993 conference paper B. J. D. Gayatri also reported some acceptance of Javanese daughters’

23

liaisons with other females, as long as they are discreet enough to permit plausible deniability and as long as the liaison does not interfere with the production of new family members. Some married women said that they give their bodies to their husbands but their hearts to women. Gayatri reported that butch lesbians were sometimes referred to as band, a term commonly used in reference to male trans¬ vestites (Gayatri noted that many Javanese do not distin¬ guish “homosexual” from “transvestite”). Some also knew the term lesbi, but neither term is applied to the feminine participant. The hutches whom Sakia Wieringa met in Jakarta as well as in Lima, Peru, like those in Buffalo, New York, during the 1950s and 1960s about whom Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeleine Davis wrote, had trouble finding and holding jobs: their commitment to “a butch dress code, a certain corporeal style, and gendered [masculinist] structures of lan¬ guage was so important to them that it overruled other con¬ cerns, such as financial security” (see Blackwood and Wieringa, p. 216). Their conventionally feminine partners could find and hold jobs. Economic dependence on femmes increased the anxieties of hutches that their femme partner would abandon them for a male. The feeling that femmes are not committed lesbians is far from being unique to Indonesia. Examples of femme partners turning or returning to men are many. Similarly, steadier income providing a basis for power within a couple is a common pattern. “The femme controlled the scene and the butch could play her part, the active part, according to the specifications of her femme lover,” Wieringa concluded (see Blackwood and Wieringa, p. 218). In Taiwan the homosexuality of Ts is thought to be innate, yet also contagious. At least, those born Ts are blamed for corrupting partners for whom homosexuality was not inborn. Ts often pass as men, although they are not free from family pressure to stop binding their chests and to become wives of natal males. Antonia Chao noted some change and conflict between Ts of different generation about whether Ts are “real men” or “butch women” who desire gender-conventional females—that is, whether their mascu¬ linity is primarily innate (natural) or a role (performative) or, in current jargon, whether the Ts are “transgendered” rather than “homosexual.” T bars in Taiwan are modeled after Japanese ones with hostesses (and karaoke and heavy drinking). Otokoyaku (male impersonators—most notably, stars of the fourhundred-member Takarazuka Theater troupe, who have an almost entirely female audience) continue to fascinate many female Japanese. Those playing male roles are not supposed to live their cross-gender role offstage, however. The otokoyaku interviewed by Jennifer Robertson avoided specifying how often these artificers of masculinity have offstage sexual relationships with other biological females.

24

SEXUALITY: Homosexuality

Surviving Roman writings about sexual relations between women were all written by men. The penetrator—usually with some sort of dildo or with a protruding clitoris—was called tribas, from a Greek word meaning “to rub.” In literary representations the penetrating women often took on other male behavior (especially weightlifting) and donned masculine dress. The satirist Martial portrayed a woman, Philaenis, who could outdrink and outeat any man, could compete successfully at male sports, including wrestling and jumping with weights, and who “pounded” eleven girls a night. Renaissance European literary imagin¬ ings of desire for those passing as another sex are also mostly heterogender—for instance, the Amazon knight Bradamante in canto 25 of the Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto and Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The sexual behavior—and, still more, the sexual desire—of women taking on male roles, for both those passing as men and those known to be biologically female, as among Balkan “sworn virgins” or “female husbands” in western and southern Africa, was sometimes presumed by those who wrote about the gender-variant roles, but usually not investigated. Same-sex sexual relations not structured by status differences. As for the “femme” in heterogender femalefemale relationships, involvement in egalitarian femalefemale sexuality seems to be more episodic and less enduringly self-defining than men’s engagement with egalitarian male-male sexuality typically is. Enduring egalitarian relationships between female partners occur, but many of the zealous lesbian feminists of the 1970s (when the egalitarian ethos was most vigorously enforced and when the term “politically correct” was coined) later drifted to sexual relationships with men. That some “women-identified women” from that time had no same-sex sexual experience or desire—“political lesbians” taking the label out of solidarity and/or revolting against patriarchy—has made this migration seem even larger. From the ancient world there are records—written by males—suggesting that women had sexual relations with each other during certain festivals from which males were excluded, notably the seventy-two-hour Thesmophoria, a late-autumn festival devoted to Demeter, and the Dionysian rites of the Maenads (“raving women”), which involved married women. These interludes, which may have been homosocial with no genital contacts, were short-duration holidays from male authority. There are a number of scattered reports of longer-term relationships of sexual mutuality between women in so-called traditional or tribal societies, especially Pacific island ones. Among rural Tahitians, Robert Levy wrote, “transient homo¬ sexual contacts between women are said to be frequent. These are said to involve mutual mouth-genital contact

or mutual masturbation. These contacts are not considered particularly abnormal or signs of altered sexuality. They involve women who also engage in ordinary heterosexual behavior” (p. 141). Margaret Mead mentioned “the rough homosexual play that characterizes a group of women on any festive occa¬ sion” among the New Guinea Tchambuli, and that, in mwai dance in which heterosexual alliances are made by women courting males disguised as females, “when there are no masks on the dancing-ground, the women play among themselves, jocosely going through the pantomimes of intercourse” (p. 177). As with most descriptions of “exotic” behavior, the reader is left to guess what the pleasures and interpretations of real and of simulated homoeroticism were for the natives of the culture. Wulf Schiefenhovel discussed sexual relationships between adult Eipo women in the eastern highlands of Irian Jaya. These relationships, involving vulva rubbing, were public knowl¬ edge, spoken of with bemusement and “some form of respect for the strength of their sexual desire. . . . The essence of the explanation was, ‘They are horny and that’s why they are doing that.’” (p 410). Early twentieth-century writings about Australian Aboriginal societies stressed mutuality in femalefemale sexual relationships. There are also scattered reports from traditional African societies of young women—in some places married, in others before marriage—engaging in mu¬ tual masturbation and taking turns wielding a dildo on a special friend of the same sex. The most stringent demands of egalitarianism in relation¬ ships, and not only in sexual relations, were made by 1970s lesbian separatists. Expectations of egalitarian relations were also current among gay men, although gay men were less concerned with challenging the genuineness of the homo¬ sexuality of others than lesbians were. Since then, genderdifferentiated relations have been increasingly accepted and even fashionable, whereas pederasty has been con¬ demned by both lesbian and gay men, especially in North America, although age differences in relationships between those classified as adults were accepted even during the hyper¬ egalitarian 1970s. Assessment. There are still very few societies for which data are available on the interactional negotiation—let alone the meanings for individuals involved—of homo¬ sexual behavior. This is even more the case for female homosexual behavior than for male. The view that without the possibility of impregnation and/or without a penis what people do is not “sex”—a view that is especially pervasive in African societies, where same-sex genital contact is “play,” not “sex”—has led to denials that homosexuality exists in this or that society. Both natives and many alien observers assume that in ongoing relation¬ ships one partner must play at being a man (if not being one)

SEXUALITY: Bisexuality

and the other play at being a woman (if not being one), so homosexuality that is not heterogender is not noticed, and is literally inconceivable. The historical and anthropological record of roles is spotty, and the record of subjectivities is close to nonexistent. A pervasive trend in feminist scholarship has treated sex as something that is done to women, although some lesbian writers, such as Joan Nestle, have described it as erotic choices made by desiring females, not just as being ravished by men and/or by butch women. “Desire” is a buzzword, and attempts are being made to explore the erotic subjectivity of women who desire women. Eventually, if this project of doc¬ umentation continues, there will be data for a less superficial history of changes and continuities in female homosexualities and for contrasting patterns of female-female eros, male-male eros, and female-male eros in multiple cultures than are cur¬ rently possible. [See also Gender Roles; International Lesbian and Gay Association; Pederasty; and Queer Theory.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam, Barry D. “Age, Structure, and Sexuality: Reflections on the Anthropological Evidence on Homosexual Relations.” Journal of Homosexuality 11, nos. 3-4 (1985): 19-33. Blackwood, Evelyn. “Falling in Love with an-Other Lesbian.” In Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork, edited by Don Kulick and Margaret Wilson, pp. 51-75. London: Routledge, 1995. Blackwood, Evelyn, and Saskia E. Wieringa, eds. Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Chao, Antonia. “Global Metaphors and Local Strategies in the Construction of Taiwan’s Lesbian Identities.” Culture, Health, and Sexuality 2 (2000): 377-390. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friend¬ ship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981. Greenberg, David F. The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Hart, Donn V. “Homosexuality and Transvestism in the Philippines.” Behavioral Science Notes 3 (1968): 211-248. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993. Levy, Robert I. Tahitians-. Mind and Experience in the Society Islands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Mead, Margaret. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Soci¬ eties. New York: Morrow, 1935. Murray, Stephen O. Homosexualities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Murray, Stephen O. “The Will Not to Know: Islamic Accommoda¬ tions of Male Homosexuality.” In Islamic Homosexualities: Cul¬ ture, History, and Literature, by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, pp. 114-154. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Exist¬ ence.” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631-660.

25

Robertson, Carol E. “Art Essay: The Mahu of Hawai'i.” Feminist Studies 15 (1989): 312-326. Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Schiefenhovel, Wulf. “Ritualized Adult-Male/Adolescent-Male Sexual Behavior in Melanesia: An Anthropological and Ethological Perspective.” In Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions, edi¬ ted by Jay R. Feierman. New York: Springer, 1990. Wolf, Deborah Goleman. Lesbian Community. Berkeley: Univer¬ sity of California Press, 1979. Stephen

O.

Murray

Bisexuality In modern usage, “bisexuality” refers to a broad range of human sexual identities, desires, and behaviors. The term, first coined in English in the 1820s, originally denoted the biological phenomenon whereby an organism (animal or human) possessed biological traits of both the female and male sexes; today this is called intersexuality or hermaph¬ roditism. By the early 1900s, social and cultural changes, especially scientific research on human sexuality and the historical emergence of more visible same-sex subcultures, led to a revision of “bisexuality” to refer to individuals who are sexually attracted to both sexes and may engage in both heterosexual and homosexual activities during their lifetime. By the late 1900s a visible bisexual movement had emerged in many countries worldwide, particularly in Europe and North America. Bisexuality Prior to the Twentieth Century. A general consensus has emerged among social scientists that although heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual behaviors have been documented in various cultures throughout human history, modern conceptions of human sexuality, and thereby modern sexual identities, are distinctly historical construc¬ tions, the result of complex long-term social processes. With regard to bisexuality, bisexual behavior—though not a modern bisexual identity whereby an individual uses the term “bisexual” for self-identification—has been documented since ancient times. Given the preeminence of male protago¬ nists, writers, and scholars in classical Greek texts, evidence of homosexual and bisexual activity by women is sparse. However, the lyric fragments of Sappho, a poet on the Isle of Lesbos in the sixth century b.c.e., and the Roman poet Ovid’s story of the Greek mythical figure Tiresias—who lived as a male and then female and loved both men and women—suggest that the ancient Greeks were aware that women could have same-sex sexual relations in addition to relations with the opposite sex. Since ancient times, the history of bisexuality among women is difficult to trace, not only because of the paucity

26

SEXUALITY: Bisexuality

of historical sources on women’s experiences but also because of the absence of a discernable conception of bisexuality before the twentieth century. Indeed, scho¬ lars such as Martin Duberman have maintained that follow¬ ing the rise of Christianity in late antiquity, the ancient Greeks’ impartiality to bisexual behavior gave way to a Judeo-Christian culture hostile toward nonheterosexual behaviors. Yet women in the Western world during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and early modern period had intense romantic friendships and physically intimate relationships even while maintaining heterosexual marriages. These rela¬ tionships were tolerated to varying degrees so long as the women did not pose an overt threat to dominant notions of proper feminine behavior—that is, female submission to male authority. Indeed, intense romantic relationships between women (single, betrothed, and married) were per¬ missible in the early modern period (1600s-1800s) because middle- and upper-class families sought to protect women from heterosexual relationships that might damage their reputations and thus their social position. Well-known literary texts illustrate comparable social mores and behavior patterns in the non-Western world. For example in imperial China, Li Yu (1611-1680) wrote Lian xiangban (Pitying the Perfumed Companion), a famous play about same-sex desire between Madam Fan, a young mar¬ ried woman, and a young woman whom Madam Fan meets at a Buddhist monastery. Yu crafted a happy ending for the drama by having Madam Fan make arrangements for the young woman join to the Fan household as her hus¬ band’s concubine. Beginning in the late 1800s, scholars in the emerging field of psychiatry turned their attention to the study of human sexuality, eventually giving rise to the field of sexology, and through their research they documented actual case histories for what came to be known as bisexuality in the modern sense: sexual attraction to and sexual interactions with both women and men. Leaders in the field, including Richard von Krafft-Ebbing (1840-1902), Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), developed a range of theories concerning heterosexual and homosex¬ ual desires and behaviors, conceptualizing bisexuality as a midpoint between the two polarities. These theorists were generally more sympathetic to both homosexuals and bisex¬ uals than were their contemporaries, which led them to call for more socially tolerant attitudes toward sexual minor¬ ities. Although Ellis believed in the presence of latent bisexuality in all people and Freud viewed all human beings as possessing a potential bisexuality, both men viewed heterosexuality to be the dominant, or more biologically correct, expression of human sexual behavior. Bisexuality in the Twentieth Century. Research on the history of sexual minorities has documented the presence

of both homosexual (gay and lesbian) and bisexual subcultures in both Europe and North America during the early decades of the twentieth century. A loosening of traditional community and family authority because of industrialization and urbanization permitted the emer¬ gence of more liberated views of human relationships in both artistic communities and urban areas, most notably in Paris, London, and New York City. In this context a number of female artists and city dwellers, including married women, experimented with bisexuality, and some women maintained both heterosexual and lesbian relation¬ ships, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in succession. For example, more liberal attitudes toward female sex¬ uality allowed a certain level of acceptance of bisexuality among artist and middle-class communities, such as mem¬ bers of the African American Harlem Renaissance arts community in New York City. This measured acceptance allowed women, including married women, to pursue samesex relationships without strong social sigma. Indeed, female artists such as Ma Rainey (1882-1939) and Alberta Hunter (1895-1984) cultivated a bisexual public persona that suggested sexual sophistication. The perceived exoti¬ cism of bisexuality gave these women a cachet useful in the more liberal environment of the 1920s, increasing their appeal among urban audiences. Though the era of the Harlem Renaissance allowed some women (and men) to develop bisexual identities, women who were more inclined toward lesbianism clearly felt pressure to portray themselves to wider audiences as bisexual rather than as lesbian. The years of World War II (1939-1945) marked a major turning point in the history of sexual minorities worldwide. The global nature of the conflict resulted in an intensifica¬ tion of the historical processes that gave rise to sexual minority subcultures in the early twentieth century: indus¬ trialization, urbanization, and an erosion of community and family controls over individual behavior. The war funneled millions of women and men throughout the world into homosocial (same-sex) environments in wartime produc¬ tion and military service, which in turn nurtured more vis¬ ible and demographically larger gay, lesbian, and bisexual urban communities. By the 1950s the landmark study by Alfred Kinsey and his associates, Sexual Activity in the Human Female (1954), documented both lesbian and bisexual desires and behaviors among single and married women in the United States. With the emergence of the gay liberation movement and the lesbian feminist movement in North American and Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions arose between women who articulated lesbian and bisexual sex¬ ual identities. Eventually these conflicts led to the formation of a distinct bisexual movement by the mid-1970s through organizations such as the Bisexual Forum (1975), the San Francisco Bisexual Center (1976), and the Bisexual

SHAFIQ, DURRIYA

27

Resource Center (1993). Since the 1970s, bisexual support groups, activist organizations, publications, and national and international conferences have nurtured bisexual rights movements in Europe and North America and in other parts of the world where feminist movements and sexual liberation movements have taken root, including Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and the Caribbean.

Storr, Merl, ed. Bisexuality: A Critical Reader. London: Taylor & Francis, 1999. Tucker, Naomi, ed. Bisexual Politics, Theories, Queries, and Visions. New York: Haworth, 1995. Weinberg, Martin S., Colin J. Williams, and Douglas W. Pryor. Dual Attraction: Understanding Bisexuality. New York: Oxford Uni¬ versity Press, 1994. Based on eight hundred case studies of bi¬ sexuals in the San Francisco Bay area, this is a useful sociological study on bisexuality in the contemporary United States.

In non-Western countries, bisexual activists have tended to work within the context of umbrella organizations championing the rights of sexual minorities more generally, such as in southern Africa. For example, in 1992 activists in Cape Town, South Africa, founded the influential grass¬ roots organization ABIGALE, the Association of Bisexuals, Gays, and Lesbians. Additionally, in 1997 the Namibian feminist collective Sister Namibia established Project Rain¬ bow, a lobbying group committed to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender human rights. The issues facing bisexuals in the twenty-first century are multifaceted. The serious conflicts that arose during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s between gay and lesbian communities and bisexual communities worldwide—when bisexual men and women were seen as conduits for the spread of the disease—is one example of how biphobia (hostility toward bisexual individuals) challenges the building of effective political coalitions for a greater acceptance of all sexual minorities. Additionally, though scholars, researchers, and bisexual activists continue to articulate differing notions about what constitutes bisexuality (both historically and in the modern era), bisexuals themselves grapple with issues of self-definition, visibility, community building, and political activism.

Melinda Marie Jette

[See also Gender Roles; Gender Theory; Marriage; Sappho; and Transgender/Transsexual.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burleson, William E. Bi America: Myths, Truths, and Struggles of an Invisible Community. New York: Harrington Park, 2005. D’Onofrio, Serana Anderlini, ed. Women and Bisexuality: A Global Perspective. New York: Haworth, 1993. One of the few interdisciplinaiy essay collections offering perspectives on bisexuality beyond Europe and North America. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friend¬ ship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Quill, 1998. A useful overview of relation¬ ships between women in Europe and North America since 1500. Fox, Ronald C. Current Research on Bisexuality. Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park, 2004. Garber, Marjorie. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. A landmark study on bisexuality in modern Western culture since the late 1800s. Hutchins, Loraine, and Lani Kaahumantu, eds. Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. Boston: Alyson, 1991. A popular publication, now a standard text, documenting the views and experiences of bisexual people in North America.

SHAFIQ,

DURRIYA (1908 -1975),

a controversial Egyptian feminist of the 1940s and 1950s and founder of the Bint al-Nil (Daughter of the Nile) journal and the feminist organization of the same name. Durriya Shafiq, or Doria Shafik, was born in Tanta, Egypt, into a well-off family. After the death of her mother when she was thirteen, Shafiq attended a French missionary school in Alexandria and later studied in France, earning her license and her Doctorat d’Etat in philosophy from the Sorbonne. While in Paris she chose to marry her cousin, Nur al-Din Ragai, who was also pursuing doctoral studies. The couple even¬ tually had two daughters. Once back in Egypt, Shafiq faced discrimination as a “modern woman” and was refused the academic position she sought at the national university. During the 1940s and 1950s she dedicated herself to the cause of women’s rights as an activist. Shafiq began her work for women’s rights as a protege of Huda Sharawi, the renowned Egyptian feminist leader, but gradually became estranged from Sharawi’s organization, the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU); eventually, in 1945, Shafiq founded her own women’s journal, Bint al-Nil, and an organization, the Bint al-Nil Union, in 1948. The Bint alNil Union was focused mainly on achieving women’s legal and political rights, and it banded together with the EFU for the famous women’s storming of the Egyptian parliament in 1951 to demand full female participation in the life of the nation. In a time of political turmoil and change in Egypt, Shafiq helped lead middle-class Egyptian women in the struggle for political rights. She also threw herself into supporting the guerilla war in the Suez Canal Zone and the wave of demonstrations against the British and the Egyptian monarchy that paved the way for the 1952 revolution. After a period of cooperation with the new regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser—which lasted from 1956 to 1970—she moved to a position of opposition to the government, dramatized by two high-profile hunger strikes: in 1952 her demands included women’s political rights, and in 1957 she called for Nasser’s resignation. After the 1957 hunger strike, Shafiq was placed under house arrest and disappeared from public life. When it became possible for

28

SHAFIQ, DURRIYA

her to return to public activity in the 1970s, she refused to do so, choosing instead an ascetic existence in which she mostly lived alone, wore simple clothes and no jewelry, and was a vegetarian. She focused her energies on her writing, producing memoirs, essays, and a body of poetry. In 1975 at the age of sixty-six she leaped to her death from the balcony of her apartment. Shafiq was a controversial figure for a number of reasons. She was always more comfortable speaking and writing in French than in Arabic thanks to her education in Paris, she was well provided for by her lawyer husband, and she appeared in public impeccably made-up and dressed in the latest European fashions, all of which prompted some members of the press to dub her “the perfumed leader” and “a lady of the salon.” She championed liberal indivi¬ dualism at a time when the ideas of Arab socialism were on the rise, she embraced an uncompromising form of anti¬ communism precisely at the time when Egypt was looking to the Eastern bloc for critical assistance, and she affiliated her organization with the politically conservative wing of the international women’s movement, the American-led International Council of Women. Her calls for Nasser’s resignation came just at the height of his popularity during the Suez Canal crisis. Shafiq’s reputation in Egypt still suffers from the unpopularity of these choices, but there has been some positive reassessment of her overall contri¬ butions to the cause of women’s political rights. [See also Egypt, subentry 1800-Present, and Sharawi, Huda.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Nelson, Cynthia. Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996. Judith

E.

Tucker

SHAH BANO (c. 1912-?), a Muslim woman granted a divorce settlement by India’s supreme court in a landmark case that led to controversy over civil versus religious laws. In the judgment, delivered in April 1985, the court awarded a small maintenance allowance to Shah Bano, a seventythree-year-old Muslim divorcee, to be paid by her husband under the criminal code. Shah Bano had been married since 1932 to Muhammad Ahmed Khan, who married again in 1946. In 1975, on account of property-related disputes between the two wives, Shah Bano and her children moved out from their family home. In 1978 she filed a maintenance suit against her husband in the judicial magistrate’s court. Citing section 125 (“Prevention of Vagrancy and Destitution”) of the criminal code, she pleaded for a monthly maintenance of

five hundred rupees. To avoid the obligation of payment under this section, Khan divorced Shah Bano by using the irrevocable triple talaq (saying the word three times). In August 1979* the local magistrate ordered that Ahmed Khan pay her a small maintenance payment. Appealing to the supreme court, Ahmed Khan argued that because he had fulfilled his obligations under religious personal laws, Islamic law placed no further maintenance liability on him and that section 125 conflicted with his rights under Muslim personal law. The supreme court dismissed the appeal and confirmed the judgment of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. The supreme court was then asked to rule on the relationship between the pertinent sections of the criminal procedure code of 1973 and religious personal law. The court ruled that section 125, as an element of criminal law rather than civil law, overrides all personal law and is uniformly applic¬ able to all women, including Muslims. This was the final decision in a long series of suits and appeals. The judgment sparked a major political uproar. Outraged religious leaders spearheaded a protest against the threat to Muslim personal law. There was a much smaller campaign in favor of the judgment, dominated by champions of women’s rights and liberal Muslims who sought the reform of personal laws. In 1986, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi attempted to placate the religious leadership by enacting the Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act (MWA), which overrode the judgment and unequivocally excluded Muslim women from the purview of the criminal code, to which all citizens otherwise had recourse. Under the MWA a divorced Muslim woman is entitled to a reasonable and fair provision of maintenance within the three-month iddat period after divorce, to two years of maintenance payments for her children, and to dower and all other property given to her by her relatives, her husband, and her husband’s relatives. If the woman is unable to maintain herself after the iddat, the magistrate can order that she be supported by the relatives entitled to inherit her property, in proportion to what they would inherit under Islamic law. If a woman has no such relatives, the magistrate asks the State Wakf Board to pay maintenance. Some rulings in the state high courts have interpreted the MWA as providing a higher maintenance amount than under section 125 and, more important, as providing lump-sum payments for future security. The government’s defense of the legislation rested on the need to provide protection for minority identity, defined in religious or cultural terms. Several individuals and groups challenged the constitu¬ tionality of the MWA in the supreme court, its violation of several constitutional articles on fundamental rights, and its discriminatory character vis-a-vis Muslim women. In 2001 the five-judge constitutional bench in the case of Danial

SHAHNAWAZM, BEGAM JAHANARA

Latifi v. Union of India ruled that a divorced woman is entitled to a “reasonable and fair provision of maintenance” to be paid by her husband within the iddat period. Signifi¬ cantly, this includes provision in advance for future needs and may also include provision for the woman’s residence, food, clothes, and other articles. The Latifi judgment is important because it provides additional relief to divorced Muslim women by expanding the notion of maintenance to include future needs. It represents a step toward sex equal¬ ity because it establishes a predominantly social—rather than religious—basis for maintenance provisions. By inter¬ preting the MWA in a manner that enhances the rights of women by taking into account gender disparities and social conditions, the court adopted a socially grounded reading that can further constitutional goals and bring personal laws in line with equality and justice. [See also Codes of Law and Laws, subentries Islamic Law and South and Southeast Asia; India; and Marriage, sub¬ entry Laws and Rituals.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baird, Robert D., ed. Religion and Law in Independent India. New Delhi, India: Manohar, 1993. Jeffery, Patricia, and Amrita Basu, eds. Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia. New York: Routledge, 1998. Parasher,' Archana. Women and Family Law Reform in India: Uniform Civil Code and Gender Equality. New Delhi, India: Sage, 1992. Zoya Hasan

SHAHNAWAZM,

BEGAM

JAHANARA (1614-

1681), Mughal princess. Jahanara was the eldest surviving child of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658) and his favorite queen, Mumtaz Mahal. According to the hierarchies of the Mughal domestic sphere, the offspring of the foremost queen enjoyed an elevated status in court. This meant that certain elite women could wield political power and control financial resources. Educated in Persian litera¬ ture and Islamic theology, Jahanara wrote poetry as well as a biography of the Sufi saint Muin ad-Din Chishti. Following the death of Mumtaz in 1631, seventeen-yearold Jahanara became the most important woman in the Mughal court. The title Sahibat al-Zamani (Mistress of the Age) was conferred on her by the emperor, although she was commonly addressed as Begam Sahib. She enjoyed an annual income similar to that of imperial officers (;mansabdars). This included a cash allowance from the imperial treasury and revenues from the pargana (regional subdivision) of Panipat and the port of Surat, a center of overseas trade. Control over resources allowed royal women to enter what was generally considered a sphere of

29

male authority: the commissioning of buildings, mosques, and gardens. Jahanara participated in major architectural projects in the new Mughal capital, Shahjahanabad, built along the banks of the Jamuna in Delhi. She was the patron of at least five important buildings there. The pulse of Shahjahanabad—the bazaar of Chandni Chowk (“moonlight square”)—was designed by Jahanara. European travelers described the visibility of women at the Mughal court who mediated in political conflicts of the time, as Jahanara did in the armed struggle among the four sons of Shah Jahan for the throne. Feminine agency in these descriptions is invariably refracted through ascriptions of a sexual nature. In the case of Jahanara, the spinster prin¬ cess, these amounted to (unsubstantiated) speculation about an incestuous relationship with her father, the em¬ peror. Marriage within the Mughal imperial formation served as a means of building alliances and cementing hier¬ archies among rival families. Giving a daughter in virilocal marriage meant the acceptance of a relationship of lifelong subordination to the groom’s kinfolk, who might belong to a rival power. This explained the resistance of Mughal em¬ perors to the marriage of their daughters. It is indicative of Jahanara’s political authority that she was instrumental in arranging the marriages of three of her brothers. Some travel accounts yield insights into the domestic world of the Mughals. According to the Italian writer Niccolao Manucci (1639-1717), for example, Jahanara suffered severe burns when she tried to rescue a dancer whose muslin dress had caught on fire—an incident that offers a sense of the close bonds that existed among women at the court, despite the formal hierarchies governing the household. During the war of succession among the sons of Shah Jahan, the emperor was kept prisoner in the Agra Fort ,by his son Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707). Jahanara spent eight years in captivity with her father, but eventually she was reinstated to a position of dignity and power at the court. Jahanara was buried under a simple tombstone in the Nizamuddin complex of New Delhi. [See also India; Islam; Mahal, Mumtaz; and Roshanara Begam.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blake, Stephen P. “Contributors to the Urban Landscape: Women Builders in Safavid Isfahan and Mughal Shahjahanabad.” In Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety, edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly, pp. 407-428. Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1998. Butenschon, Andrea. The Life of a Mogul Princess: Jahanara Begam, Daughter of Shahjahan. London: Routledge and Sons, 1931. Nath, Renuka. Notable Mughal and Hindu Women in the 16th and 17th Centuries A.D. New Delhi, India: Inter-India Publications, 1990. Monica Juneja

30

SHAJAR AL-DURR

SHAJAR AL-DURR (d. 1257), sultana of Egypt, the most famous female ruler in medieval Islam, who ruled Egypt independently for three months in 1250. She was a Turkish slave and the favorite concubine of the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt al-Salih Ayyub, who upon the birth of their son Khalil freed her and married her. Soon afterward their son died. In 1249, in the midst of the Crusaders’ invasion of Egypt, al-Salih also died. With her husband’s army com¬ mander Fakhr al-Din and his chief eunuch Jamal al-Din Muhsin, Shajar al-Durr formed a council that decided to conceal her husband’s death until al-Malik al-Mucazzam Turanshah, another of al-Salih’s sons whom he had appointed as his successor, could return to Egypt. Soon after al-Muczzam’s arrival in Egypt, the Mamluk army defeated the Crusaders and captured the French king Louis IX. When in 1250 al-Mucazzam himself was mur¬ dered by disaffected soldiers (according to some sources at Shajar al-Durr’s instigation), Shajar al-Durr was elected sultana with the support of her husband’s military comman¬ ders and Turkish slaves (Mamluks). Widow of a sultan and mother of a deceased son, she ruled for about eighty days in her own right, her rule being sanctioned by the two most prestigious signs of power (unheard of for a Muslim woman of the time): her title was imprinted on coinage as “Queen of the Muslims” and was broadcast during the Friday sermon, according to some reports, with the addition of “protector of the world and of religion.” Continuing a tradition of female architectural patronage, well attested in Egypt during the Fatimid period, Shajar al-Durr, to mark her status, commissioned in 1250 a monu¬ mental tomb as annex to the mosque and madrasa complex of Najm al-Din. She proved a good mediator and strategist, especially in repulsing King Louis IX, negotiating his ransom, and regaining the territory the Crusaders held in Egypt. Her status was never acknowledged by the Abbasid caliph or by the Syrian Ayyubid princes, reportedly on the basis of her gender and her slave origin. Hence as a result of external pressure, she abdicated, and the sultanate was given to one of her former husband’s Mamluk commanders named al-Mucizz Aybak, whom she later married. For some chroni¬ clers, as the sultan’s wife she continued to be the de facto ruler of Egypt; for others, she remained an active player on the political scene until 1257, when, because he took a second wife, Shajar al-Durr had her second husband killed. This marked the end of her career and of her life. Al-Mucizz Aybak’s son successfully gathered support, and he became sultan with the name of al-Mansur. He immedi¬ ately had Shajar arrested, and some two weeks later her unclothed body was found in the moat of the Cairo citadel. She was eventually buried in her own mausoleum. Shajar’s story still inspires literary and historical narra¬ tives, and her life, embellished by almost legendary details,

has served as a paradigm for nationalist, feminist, and other agendas. Most scholars argue that her role as sultana was a result of the political ascent of the Turkish Mamluks and their cultural