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Gender:

A World History
Gender:
A World History

By Susan Kingsley Kent

1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2021

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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kent, Susan Kingsley, 1952 May 9– author.
Title: Gender : a world history / by Susan Kent.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021954 (print) | LCCN 2020021955 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190621971 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190621988 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780190622008 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sex role—History. | Gender identity—History.
Classification: LCC HQ1075. K463 2020 (print) |
LCC HQ1075(ebook) | DDC 305.309—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021954
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021955

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by LSC Communications, United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

Frontispiece: Actress and Union spy

Pauline Cushman in uniform. Library of Congress, 2017659623
For Tarana Burke, who started the #MeToo campaign in 2007, with
admiration and appreciation for her courage and persistence.
Contents

Editors’ Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Introduction: What Is Gender? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Ch a p t e r 1 Patriarchy in the Ancient World, 3000 bce–300 ce . . . . 6

Ch a p t e r 2 The Gender Rules of New Universal Religions,

200–1000 ce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Ch a p t e r 3 Gender and War in the Age of Global Interactions,

1000–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Ch a p t e r 4 Gender and Slavery in the Age of Global Expansion,

1450–1750 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Ch a p t e r 5 Gender and the State in the Age of Revolution,

1750–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Ch a p t e r 6 Gender in the Age of Empires, 1815–1914 . . . . . . . . . 99

Ch a p t e r 7 Gender Politics in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . 116

Epilogue: Challenging Gender Identities . . . . . . . . . . 136

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

2 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

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

What Is Gender 3
use them to sell, argue, justify, or challenge. But it turns out that what
philosophers, religious thinkers, scientists, physicians, psychiatrists,
sociologists, anthropologists, historians, politicians, and educators
have been telling us about gender over the past two thousand years has
changed frequently. That is, these ideas have a history; they change over
time and vary by geographic or cultural context. They are not natural.
We make them up—we construct them, as we say today, and as a society
we usually do so to further a particular political, cultural, economic, or
social agenda.
Gender is almost always embedded in some kind of power rela-
tionship. Just as gender is not natural, it is also not neutral. Ideas about
sexual difference do not just sit around innocently; they are used to
create, justify, uphold, challenge, or resist some kind of power differen-
tial in any given society or era. Usually, but not always, masculinity—
those traits or characteristics we attribute to men— is regarded as
superior to femininity (the qualities we assign to women), and this su-
periority is used to explain why, in most of our societies until the last
century, women did not enjoy the same rights and opportunities as men.
Men have served as the exclusive subject of most of our political, eco-
nomic, and social philosophies; where women have appeared, they have
served as a rhetorical device to emphasize or underscore the rightness
of men to enjoy this, that, or the other right, not to make a case for the
inclusion of women in the enjoyment of rights. For that reason, when
we think of gender, we usually think of it as applying to women. We
tend not to see men as “gendered” creatures, but as the standard against
which the inadequacies or insufficiencies of women are displayed.
We make meaning in the West by contrasting one thing against an-
other. We think and understand by means of creating opposites: night/
day, black/white, old/young, male/female, and the like. We know what
is feminine by contrasting it against what is masculine. That means that
men are gendered too, that they are assigned qualities, characteristics,
assets, behaviors, and traits just as women are, even though we do not
usually pay attention to that because we see those qualities as natural,
as “just the way things are.”
The history of women holds an integral place in gender history,
but it is not its exclusive focus. Gender history incorporates women
and men, masculinity and femininity, and sexual difference generally; it
places men and women in relation to one another. Underlying gender
history is the conviction that gender is not natural or innocent; that what
societies have fashioned as masculinity and femininity has changed over
time; and that by taking these things seriously, we can see how these

4 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

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

What Is Gender 5
Chapter 1

Patriarchy in the Ancient

World, 3000 bce–300 bce

I
n 2007, scientists working with Egyptologists in Cairo discovered
the mummified body of King Hatshepsut, a pharaoh whose reign
had been lost to the ages until 300 bce or so, when an Egyptian
priest and historian, Manetho, recovered her for posterity. Her 1,100-
year absence from the record of the pharaohs, known as the king lists,
had been deliberately contrived, for following a long and successful
rule, all traces of Hatshepsut’s image as pharaoh had been destroyed.
Someone had wanted any memory of her erased, and he—it was al-
most certainly a he—almost succeeded. When the mummies of two
nonroyal women were discovered in tomb KV60 in the Valley of the
Kings in 1903, no one paid any attention to them and the tomb was
resealed.
Archaeologists reopened it three years later; one of the mummies
was identified as the body of Inet, the woman who had served as
Hatshepsut’s wet nurse, and was moved to the Cairo museum. The
other body, that of an obese, middle-aged woman with red hair and
worn teeth, remained where it had been found, on the floor of the tomb
without a coffin. Over a century would pass before the remains of one
of Egypt’s most powerful rulers would be recognized for what they
were, the pharaoh Hatshepsut of the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New
Kingdom. Her discovery confounds what we thought we knew about
power in the ancient world.
Ancient societies ruled themselves according to a system known as
patriarchy, or the rule of the father, in which male heads of households
and states claimed nearly absolute power over women. The story of
Hatshepsut, who presided over a twenty-year period of stability and
economic well-being in Egypt by adopting the persona of a pharaoh, or
king, shows how patriarchy could be manipulated or circumvented. In
taking on the title of pharaoh and ruling as one, Hatshepsut defied all
previous convention.
Of Hatshepsut, the mere mortal, we know little. She described
herself as “more beautiful than anything; her splendour and form
were divine; she was a maiden, beautiful and blooming.”1 The statues
that survive present her as slender, possessing an oval face with a high
forehead; almond-shaped eyes; a small, pointed chin; and a fairly
big nose. She wore the heavy eye makeup we associate with both
Egyptian men and women—the makeup being used to catch and trap
the dust particles that constantly blew across the desert landscape.
Earlier statues depict more softness than later ones; presumably these
were done before she took the throne. Once she did, her appear-
ance changed. She no longer wore the female garb of sheath dress
and queen’s headdress. Instead, she was shown dressed in the tradi-
tional royal short kilt, sporting the crown, collar, and false beard of a
king. Some of the early statues of her reign show an obvious woman
dressed in this clothing of a man—the face is round and somewhat
immature, the body showing breasts and an indented waist. But soon
thereafter Hatshepsut only appeared in the guise of a male, not only
wearing men’s clothing and carrying the accessories of a king, but
also performing functions only men could carry out. The body in
these images was also clearly and explicitly male. Hatshepsut had
turned herself into a king.

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 7
Kingship emerged relatively late in the history of humankind.
Modern human beings emerged some thirty-five thousand years ago,
having evolved from an earlier version of Homo sapiens that had
appeared around two hundred thousand years ago in Africa and
migrated outward into other parts of the world. For millennia they sus-
tained themselves through hunting, fishing, gathering, and foraging, ac-
tivities that required the participation of every member of the small
bands that ranged across various regions. Despite their belief that a di-
vision of labor between men and women characterized these groups of
human beings—men hunting, women gathering and raising children—
historians think they were egalitarian in their social and gender orga-
nization. Because fruits and grains made up the main portion of their
diet, and finding and preparing these items fell to women, it may be
that women enjoyed a high status in these early bands. Some twelve
thousand years ago, in a development that had a profound impact on
humanity, hunting and gathering gave way to a different way of pro-
viding food: the systematic cultivation of crops and the domestication
of animals.
This revolution in agriculture in turn triggered a shift in the way
people lived. Rather than roam across territory in pursuit of game and
grains and berries, they settled down into villages next to the fields
where they tended crops and herds. Surpluses of food enabled the pop-
ulation to grow. Women may well have been the first agriculturalists,
enjoying high status in these early settled communities. Over time, some
members of these new communities, including women, who made the
pots and baskets that would hold and store agricultural products, took
on functions beyond agriculture, becoming artisans who made such
items as textiles, tools, and other necessities. A few individuals began to
capitalize on the surpluses they accumulated beyond the needs of their
families, obtaining more land and wealth and setting off a stratification
of society by wealth and gender unknown to hunter-gatherers.
The development of settled agricultural communities would ulti-
mately bring about the system we call patriarchy. Literally “the rule
of the father” (from the Latin for father, pater), it has an ancient pedi-
gree, arising, it appears, at about the same time that ownership of pro-
perty by individual households became predominant in the societies of
the Near and Middle East around 3000 bce, and later in India, Asia,
Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean. The heads of households, or
patriarchs, in the earliest societies for which we have written records,
may have sought to maintain their control over property by controlling
the actions of the members of their households, especially the women,

8 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 9
their occupation or their role in the economies that undergirded their
societies.
The Mosaic code of the Israelites, whose appearance in the Near
East we date to about the twelfth century bce, ultimately came to make
up the first five books of the Hebrew bible, or Torah; it differed from
those of Mesopotamia and Assyria in seeing transgressions as offenses
not against society or the state but against God, emphasizing the themes
of redemption and salvation of believers in Yahweh, the one true God.
As a small, vulnerable community trying to manage in the midst of
larger powers, Israelites placed a premium on the reproduction of chil-
dren, a crucial element of survival in a dangerous world. The Mosaic
code thus focused heavily on the regulation of marriage as the institution
within which the bearing and rearing of children would take place, and
thus the means by which the survival of Israel could be assured. Some
of the precepts of Mosaic law borrowed heavily from Mesopotamian
and Assyrian codes: the laws treated rape and adultery, for example, as
transgressions against the integrity of the family, not as sins or harms
committed against God or an individual. Society expected all adult men
to marry and father children and to marry as many times as they had
to in order to father children. If a lineage faced extinction owing to the
death of a husband, his brother was enjoined to marry and impregnate
the surviving spouse to ensure that children would be born.
Law codes can go only so far in revealing the nature of gender
relationships, however, and they have to be placed within a larger evi-
dentiary context that often complicates what legal systems alone sug-
gest. Artists’ renderings from the time portray couples and parents and
children as loving and affectionate with one another; letters and other
documents indicate great concern for the well-being of spouses. Indeed,
even within harsh legal regimes, women enjoyed a legal personhood
that gave them rights to property, allowed them to enter into contracts,
and protected their ability to conduct business transactions.
The reign of Hatshepsut in ancient Egypt demonstrates how social
systems based on gender might be manipulated to serve political ends.
She was the daughter of Queen Ahmose and Tuthmosis I, a successful
warrior king who had helped strengthen newly unified Egypt after a
century of foreign rule. Upon his death, Hatshepsut, aged twelve, mar-
ried her half brother, Tuthmosis II, becoming thereby queen consort of
Egypt. Sibling marriage, a common practice among royal Egyptians,
served to strengthen the line of succession (if not the family bloodline)
by cutting down on the number of in-laws and thus possible claimants
to the throne. Hatshepsut bore her brother a daughter, Neferure.

10 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 11
their increased presence in the governance of the kingdom, queens
would not have been permitted to precede the pharaoh in either rank
or function.
Hatshepsut did, however. Crucially, she did so not as queen, but
by taking the title of pharaoh or king. Because queens did not pos-
sess the divinity or power to rule, Hatshepsut made herself into a king,
who did. Above all, she kept her kingdom peaceful and prosperous. To
Egyptians, this prosperity may have proved the most convincing evi-
dence of all that Hatshepsut’s reign was divinely inspired and sustained.
She commenced a series of building projects the likes of which were
unmatched, and she did so to proclaim that she, Hatshepsut the king,
the chosen one of Amen-Re, had restored to Egypt the glories of its past.
Around the doorway of a temple she dedicated to a minor deity, Pakhet,
for example, she had carved the message: “Utterance by Amen-Re, Lord
of the Thrones of the Two Lands. . . , ‘O my beloved daughter Maatkare
[Hatshepsut’s royal name], I am thy beloved father. I establish for thee
thy rank in the kingship of the Two Lands. I have fixed thy titulary.’ ”
In a longer text over the front of the temple, she declared her policy
of restoration and renewal of Egyptian greatness. “I have done these
things by the device of my heart. I have never slumbered as one for-
getful, but have made strong what was decayed. I have raised up what
was dismembered. . . . I have banished the abominations of the gods,
and the earth has removed their footprints.”2 The female king succeeded
in providing for her people a “golden age,” establishing peace, material
well-being, and stability.
Hatshepsut, one of the most powerful leaders the world has ever
known, died after ruling her kingdom for about fifteen years. She was
overweight and diabetic and suffered from both arthritis and osteopo-
rosis. She harbored a malignant tumor in her abdomen. None of these
things killed her, however. Hatshepsut died after a diseased tooth was
extracted from her infected gums; an abscess burst, spreading infec-
tion to the rest of her body. She was mummified in the ancient tradi-
tion of royal burials, her arms crossed across her chest, and laid within
her tomb.3
And then Hatshepsut disappeared from view for over a thou-
sand years. Soon after she died, someone set out on a deliberate cam-
paign to erase her name, her achievements, her memory, and even her
mummified remains from the historical record. At the same time, ev-
idence of Neferure, Hatshepsut’s daughter, also disappeared from the
record. Many Egyptologists have assumed that her coruler, Tuthmosis
III, finally freed of his stepmother’s tutelage, erupted in fury and

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 13
equalization of the marriage portions—the dowries—that brides might
bring to their marriages, making women a kind of placating circulating
commodity. Because rich fathers could not endow their daughters with
greater dowries than poor ones, rich and poor households could ex-
change women in an effort to ameliorate tensions based on wealth, re-
duce the risk of civil war, and establish a peaceful state.
During the classical era (500–323 bce), Athenian Greek women
were segregated and secluded so that they could not be looked upon
by men; they were expected to be silent and to stay out of sight, clois-
tered at home caring for children and the household while men spent
their days in the public spaces of the marketplace or the gymnasium.
Aristotle deemed women useful only for the bearing of male heirs, and
Athenian law required that female children, even if already married,
be married off to their father’s next of kin so that they might produce
heirs for their father’s family (oikos, household). Greek women had
no legal standing of their own, but were considered forever children
in the law’s eyes, the property of their fathers or husbands. They could
inherit or receive property as a gift, but it had to be looked after by
male guardians, and women could not buy or sell property. Regarded
as inferior to men in reason, Greek women were held to be too stupid
even to carry out the buying and selling of goods in the marketplace.

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

14 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y
For Aristotle and countless others across the centuries, women had
no political function, for they—like landless and poor men who did
not enjoy independence and who were classified, in political terms, as
feminine—could not, by their nature, display the self-sufficiency nec-
essary to transcend personal concerns. Self-sufficiency meant freedom
from material necessity, especially of the necessities associated with the
body. Women, for the Greeks, appeared to be all body, creatures in thrall
to their physical organization who could not free themselves as men
could and should strive to do in order to reach the highest good, the
“good life” of politics. Politics, in other words, and the criteria of those
who could participate in the governance of the city-state were explicitly
cast in terms antithetical to femininity. “The relation of male to female
is one of superior to inferior, and ruler to ruled,” wrote Aristotle.4 Where
women for the Greeks, and for many other cultures too, demonstrated
by their weakness of mind, lack of self-control, appetites, and sexual
desires an existence closer to animality than to humanness, men could
show through freedom from material and bodily necessity their ca-
pacity to act politically. Because femininity seemed so close to animality
in its apparent enslavement to bodily needs, and because humanity was
defined by the Greeks in opposition to animality, femininity threatened
men’s status as human beings and their capacity for freedom and au-
tonomy, and had to be suppressed. The polis, where men could best
demonstrate their self-sufficiency, their virtue, and their distance from
femininity, had, in consequence, to be an exclusively masculine realm.
The polis, according to the Athenian general and statesman Pericles,
was where men achieved their highest degree of manliness.
The strict separation of men and women in Athens, in conjunction
with the relatively long period of time men spent before marrying—
usually around the age of thirty, by which time they would have amassed
the resources to become politically and economically independent—
produced an exclusively male public world that tolerated and even
sanctioned homosexuality. Men participated in recreational activities,
debate, eating and drinking, sports, and military training in exclusively
male settings. They were not expected to remain chaste in the years
before marrying, and they found opportunities for sexual activity with
female prostitutes and/or other men. Women, by contrast, usually mar-
ried when they were able to bear children, in their early teenage years.
Aristotle did not regard males and females as possessing biological
traits that were different in kind; instead, like their capacity for ration-
ality, they differed in degree of similarity to one another. He and other
ancient thinkers held that women and men possessed the same genitals,

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 15
with the important distinction that men’s existed outside the body and
women’s on the inside. Reproductive organs in men and women mir-
rored one another and were called by the same name. Herophilus, the
so-called father of anatomy, referred to ovaries and testicles with the
Greek word for “twins,” didymoi. He believed that the fallopian tubes
in women (though he did not call them that), which he regarded as sper-
matic ducts, extended, like spermatic ducts in men, from the didymoi to
the bladder. (They do not.) The Greek physician Galen used the single
term orcheis in his descriptions of both testes and ovaries, a practice that
would not change for centuries. Correspondingly, ancients regarded or-
gasm in women to be as vital to the success of reproduction as it was
in men: orgasm produced the heat in men and women that made con-
ception possible. In this representation, which one historian calls the
“one-sex model,” the anatomy of men and women were analogous to
one another, though not equal to one another in value. Men’s genitalia
were regarded as more important to the generation of life than were
women’s reproductive organs.5
Hermaphrodism— the presence of both male and female sexual
organs or the inability to determine the nature of the sexual organs of
an individual—disturbed this kind of thinking about sexual difference.
Eunuchs, men whose testicles had been destroyed or whose penises had
been amputated, did the same. In the case of hermaphrodites, officials
usually resolved the dilemma by assigning the individual a male gender.
Eunuchs existed in great numbers throughout the Mediterranean and
Eurasian worlds, acting as servants in households and state offices.
Their inability to reproduce reassured heads of households and rulers
that they posed no threat to the position of the patriarch; consequently,
they often held positions of great stature and responsibility. Despite
being unable to reproduce, eunuchs often presented as fully male, with
the secondary characteristics thereof. Many societies tried to outlaw
castration as a way to avoid dealing with the imaginative challenges
posed by eunuchs, but with little success. There would always be men
and women who defied the gender cultures of their societies.
Not all Greeks thought in the same way about sex and gender.
Pericles, for instance, distinguished Athens from another Greek city-state,
Sparta, where, he noted disapprovingly, men sought out manliness “by a
painful discipline” rather than through political life.6 As a warrior state,
Spartan culture emphasized military service, requiring boys as young as
seven to begin training for lifelong devotion to the state. Their educa-
tion stressed obedience, duty, discipline, and courage, and focused on
building up physical endurance and self-control. At the Agoge, or military

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 17
A sixth-century bce Spartan woman undergoes training in preparation for a life
of producing healthy young warriors. Her public presence and the meagerness
of her clothing contrasted sharply with that of other Greek women, who were
often kept indoors and veiled. Ancient Art and Architecture/Alamy Stock
Photo/B10PDF

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

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 19
when Rome was small, but as it expanded into and beyond the
Mediterranean, it could not easily handle all of its new responsibilities.
Increasingly, powerful individuals and political factions emerged who
vied for dictatorial control, introducing a great deal of political insta-
bility in the affairs of the republic. Pompeius the Great, Julius Caesar,
Marcus Antonius, and Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, were
four such men. Their ambitions embroiled allied kingdoms such as
Egypt in dangerous games of intrigue and military conquest. This was
the situation Cleopatra inherited from her father, himself a casualty of
Rome’s internecine strife, in the first century bce.
Cleopatra VII was born in 69 bce, the second oldest of five chil-
dren of Ptolemy XII. The Ptolemaic line had ruled Egypt since its con-
quest by Alexander the Great in 332 bce, which ushered in the great
Hellenistic age. At the time of her birth, the empire established by
Ptolemy I was crumbling, while Rome was fast approaching its ascend-
ancy. Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, an unprepossessing figure by all
accounts, found himself squeezed by the rising power of Rome and the
increasing restiveness of the population of Alexandria, Egypt’s cap-
ital. Romans cast covetous eyes upon Egypt, regarding it as a source
of great wealth—it was, indeed, one of the richest kingdoms in the an-
cient world. Ptolemy XII was forced from his throne by the Alexandrian
populace; in 55 bce, the dictator Caesar sent an expedition to Egypt to
return the pharaoh to the throne. One of the members of that expedi-
tion was Marcus Antonius, one of Caesar’s most able generals. Roman
troops re-established Ptolemy in the palace in Alexandria and at his
directive killed his daughter, Berenike, who had taken power when he
fled three years earlier. Ptolemy rewrote his will, naming his next oldest,
Cleopatra, coheir with his eldest son (who would become Ptolemy XIII).
He also asked that guardianship of his two heirs fall to the Roman
people, a provision that would serve as the legal justification for signif-
icant Roman involvement in Egyptian affairs over the next few years.
At the time she was made coheir with her brother, Cleopatra was
about eighteen years old. She had received an extraordinary education,
even for women of royalty at the time, enjoying access to the unmatched
resources of the library and research center at Alexandria, the envy of
the world. She read and wrote numerous languages—her native Greek
and Latin, to be sure, but also Egyptian (which none of her predecessors
had bothered to learn) and the languages of the peoples adjacent to
Egypt: Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopian, Syrian, Persian, and many others.
She wrote medical treatises and studied history assiduously, possessing
knowledge of Roman affairs, particularly, that probably outweighed

20 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 21
Cleopatra and her son Caesarian pay homage to the Egyptian gods Isis and
Osiris in the temple of Hathor at Dendera, Egypt. The image portrays the earthly
power of Cleopatra and her son as deriving from and continuing the line of
the deities who dominated Egyptian cosmology. Cleopatra greatly expanded
Egypt’s territorial reach, threatening the power of Rome in the first century bce.
Shutterstock/242818003

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 23
would come after. Its success depended on a powerful military, a vibrant
commerce, an extensive administrative apparatus, and a common cul-
ture that unified an extraordinarily diverse population. The Han found
that unifying culture in the principles of Confucianism.
Confucius’s teachings, compiled by his followers into a collection
entitled The Analects of Confucius in the centuries following his death
in 479 bce, offered a guide to proper living that reflected the chaotic
period in which he lived. Perhaps the single most important precept
concerned the obligation of an inferior person to obey and honor his or
her superior. This dictate started first within the family, where under the
concept of filial piety sons owed their father absolute loyalty and obe-
dience. As the head of the household, his rule was sacrosanct. Similarly,
heads of households in any given locality were expected to swear alle-
giance to their superior, the local ruler, who in turn swore fealty to his
superior, and so on up the line to the emperor, who himself had the re-
sponsibility of upholding the mandate of heaven. The principle of filial
piety, whether at the familial or imperial level, rested on the notion that
government should be conducted by “superior men”; that is, one owed
allegiance and obedience to a superior not because that person came
from a particular family or was the richest or the strongest one around,
but because he had achieved a level of moral character through study
that entitled him to that respect. “Superior men” could command vir-
tuous behavior from their subjects on the basis of their intelligence and
their benevolence, their righteousness. Subjects demonstrated their re-
spect, loyalty, and obedience through elaborate and detailed rituals and
ceremonies.
This was not a one-way street: rulers, whether emperors, provincial
officials, or fathers, had the reciprocal obligation of ensuring the well-
being of their “inferiors.” Confucianism, the ideological foundation of
Han rule, cemented the principle that the welfare of the people stood at
the heart of the mandate of heaven. This did not mean that “the people”
had the right to choose their leaders; it did mean that the emperor and
his officials were expected to further the well-being of his subjects. If he
did not—if he violated the mandate of heaven—the people might legit-
imately turn against him.
Confucian thought presents relationships within a binary frame-
work of opposites—between heaven and earth, inner and outer, superior
and subordinate, noble and humble, ruler and ruled, for example. These
dualities are represented by the concepts of yang and yin, seemingly op-
posite or contrary forces that are in fact in complementary relation to
one another to form an interdependent, interconnected whole. Chinese

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 25
realities in China. Families of nonelite status, for example, quite literally
could not afford the Confucian separations of women from produc-
tive life outside the home. Moreover, a number of long-standing cus-
toms ameliorated somewhat the constraints imposed on higher-status
women by Confucianism. Dowries that women brought to a marriage
were often worth far more than the brideprice paid to obtain a wife.
Significantly, imperial laws acknowledged that dowries were the pro-
perty of wives and were controlled by them; this ownership and control
of property conferred upon women some ability to exercise leverage
within the family. If divorce were to take place, the dowry stayed with
the wife. A man could divorce his wife on one of seven grounds: in-
ability to produce a son, failure to carry out the expected service to
her husband’s parents, illness, theft, promiscuity, jealousy, or gossiping.
These seemingly wide-open opportunities to rid oneself of an unwanted
wife were in fact restrained by three conditions. If a wife had mourned
her husband’s parents, she was considered linked to them forever and
thus not liable to divorce on grounds of failing to serve them; if she
had contributed to her husband’s rise in the world from his young age,
he could not divorce her later in life; and if divorce would leave a wife
homeless and without means of supporting herself, her husband could
not proceed. A woman too might sue for divorce, but doing so could
have painful consequences. She would no longer have any legal claim to
her children; she might well be left without financial or social support;
and her sons would be ritually forbidden from mourning her when she
died. These costs may well have dissuaded many women from ending
brutal or unhappy marriages.
The contributions of women to the well-being of the family may
have translated into meaningful influence within it. A wife and mother
expected to help her husband further his career and look after his
parents and sisters, engaging in activities that might substantially in-
crease her worth in their eyes. If her husband traveled for long periods
of time or became injured or ill and could not look after his affairs,
the responsibility to manage the household and whatever business or
property ventures he was involved in fell to her. In such instances, a
woman’s power and status might be considerably enhanced.
The life and achievements of Ban Zhao show the unevenness of
Confucian gender ideology, at least for women of higher rank. She
hailed from a family of prominent scholars, soldiers, and administrators.
Ban Zhao shared in the literary upbringing of her brothers and cousins,
drinking in the heady scholarly atmosphere of her father’s home. From
her mother she learned literature, culture, and discipline; from her

26 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Pa tr ia r c hy in t h e A n ci e n t Wo rl d 27
enable them to serve their husbands. Modesty and acquiescence were
the best means of securing domestic peace. In the hands of subsequent
generations of Confucian scholars, Nüjie became the standard treatise
on how to educate women for a lifetime of subservience and silence.
Hatshepsut, Cleopatra, Teng Sui, and Ban Zhao proved the excep-
tion to the rule of power resting in the hands of men in the ancient
world. Their talents and skills alone weren’t enough; they often had to
take on a male persona to legitimate their rule. Women, for the most
part, enjoyed little access to power, even as their contributions to the
economies of households and states made it possible for them to survive
and thrive. Patriarchy would endure over subsequent centuries across
the globe, intensified by the emergence of new universal religions that
incorporated and extended its precepts.

28 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

Chapter 2

The Gender Rules of

New Universal Religions,
200–1000 ce

I
n March 203, in the North African city of Carthage, a Roman
woman named Perpetua stood before an arena of howling citizens
and allowed herself to be attacked by a wild heifer. Thrown into the
air by the large horned animal, she picked herself up and walked se-
renely, perhaps in shock, to await her execution by the sword. She bared
her neck to the executioner, an inexperienced gladiator who missed his
target and struck her on the collarbone. Screaming in pain, Perpetua
“took the trembling hand of the young gladiator and guided it to her
throat,” drawing his blade across her neck and killing herself, according
to an eyewitness entrusted with recording the event.1 She was twenty-
one, the mother of an infant boy so recently born that her breasts still
secreted milk as she faced her persecutors. Presumably she had eve-
rything to live for. Why in God’s name would she do such a thing?
For it was in God’s name that she chose her martyrdom—not the gods
that Romans recognized and worshipped, but the God of Jesus Christ,
the risen. Perpetua’s short life offers us a glimpse of the attractions of
Christianity in the early third century ce, when it was still a largely
clandestine practice; the Christian remembrance of her death in subse-
quent centuries provides a foreshadowing of the impact the new reli-
gion would have on understandings about gender in the Mediterranean
after it became the officially recognized religion of the Roman Empire
in 313.
A variety of religions emerged and spread widely across a number
of regions in the period 200–1000, mirroring—and in some instances
advancing— the growth of empires across the Euro- Asian world.
Christianity and Islam, among others, provided the cultural glue that
held disparate peoples together during a time of widespread political
upheaval, but they also acted as a potent agent that rent previously
compatible groups apart. Buddhism, which first appeared in India in the
sixth to fourth centuries bce, migrated to Asia, where it played a large
role in consolidating Chinese imperial expansion. Not surprisingly,
given the deeply personal questions religions sought to address—who
am I, how should I behave in the world, whom should I marry, and
how shall I raise my children?—gender played a significant role in the
formation of universal religions. At the same time, these new belief sys-
tems acted powerfully on understandings about gender, first challenging
earlier expectations for men and women but ultimately reinforcing and
consolidating those views in service to the growing power of state and
religious institutions and hierarchies.
At the time of her birth, Perpetua would have been deposited at
her father’s feet, there to await his decision whether to take her into the
family. Should he have chosen not to accept her, she would have been
left to die, a form of sanctioned infanticide reserved for girls. Roman
law mandated that fathers raise all of their sons, but only one of their
daughters. This control over life and death stemmed from the almost
unrestricted power enjoyed by male heads of households. The paterfa-
milias ruled not just his wife and children but also slaves and even free
servants and others who resided within the household; even adult male
children and married daughters fell under his jurisdiction. Perpetua mar-
ried at about the age of seventeen or so and established a new house-
hold with her husband. Even so, her father’s claim on her remained.
As seems to have been the case in many father-daughter relationships
among the upper classes of Rome, they enjoyed a deep and loving bond
with one another.
Within this society, women of Perpetua’s status devoted their atten-
tion and their energies to the private space of the household. Lower-status
women would not have been able to afford to remain within the home;
their contributions to the survival of their families necessitated that they
labor in fields or workshops or engage in trading activities in the public
world of agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. Perpetua’s activi-
ties would have been focused inward on her family, which consisted of
her parents and two brothers (she had a third brother too, who had died
in boyhood). But as befit a daughter of a high-ranking Roman, Perpetua
spent a good portion of her childhood being formally educated, prob-
ably by her father, so that she would be able to pass down to her sons
the cultural values that Roman citizens were expected to possess and
manifest throughout the course of their own lives.
Among those values, religious devotion held a privileged place.
Countless gods, goddesses, and other deities presided over virtually
every space, linking every area of life to some form of divine power

30 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

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

T h e G e n de r R u l e s o f Ne w U n i v e rs a l R e l i g i o n s 31
A fresco in the catacombs of Priscilla in Rome, from the third century ce, depicts
the various stages of a woman’s life. Scholars believe that the center figure may
show a woman preaching, as she is wearing the vestments of a Christian priest.
Reuters/GM1E9BK01JL01

increasing state support, a situation that altered the relationship of its

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

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

T h e G e n de r R u l e s o f Ne w U n i v e rs a l R e l i g i o n s 33
had created them. “I fail to see what use woman can be to man,” he
declared, “if one excludes the function of bearing children.”3
The emphasis that Augustine and other theologians placed on the
sinfulness of sexuality marked Christianity as different from the Judaic
scriptural tradition from which it hailed. Jews regarded lust as a poten-
tially disruptive force within society if not reasonably restrained, but
within marriage they viewed sex as part of the divine order handed
down to them by God. Having been enjoined by rabbinical scholars
to go forth and multiply, ancient Hebrews tolerated polygamous
marriages. “It is an ancestral custom of ours to have several wives at one
time,” noted the Jewish historian Josephus. Endowed by God with the
physical capabilities to produce and experience sexual pleasure, Jews
approached sex benignly and placed few restrictions on its expression,
at least within marriage. Jesus himself appears to have accepted sex-
uality as part of God’s plan, but early Christians like the apostle Paul
regarded desire as an obstacle in the path of achieving spiritual perfec-
tion. “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman,”
he wrote to the Corinthians, but acknowledged that chastity would be
difficult for many men. “If they cannot control themselves, let them
marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion,” he conceded
in a statement that went on to acknowledge the sacred nature of marital
sex while elevating celibacy above marriage on the ladder of desirable
spiritual qualities.4
Augustine and other theologians went further, making sex a
shameful and sinful act against God. Even within marriage, he declared,
sex debased humanity. It rendered them no better than animals in its
insistent claim on their bodies and faculties, he asserted; it polluted and
degraded humanity. He urged Christians to be chaste within marriage
as they must be outside of it, making celibacy an ideal that all people,
not just women, should aspire to. Sexual desire, in his mind, reflected
the original sin of disobedience to God, and as such was capable of
producing disorders of every kind if left unaddressed. It might lead to
all kinds of trouble, which explains the fact that while he and other
Christian theologians looked disapprovingly upon prostitution, they
conceded that its existence might be necessary to the proper functioning
of society. After all, noted Augustine, “if you remove harlots from so-
ciety, you will disrupt everything because of lust.”5
By the mid-fourth century, Christianity had developed into a pow-
erful force. After Rome fell in 476 to a succession of invasions by non-
Roman peoples, the center of the empire shifted eastward. By 500,
Constantinople, its capital city, sat at the heart of the Roman world.

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

T h e G e n de r R u l e s o f Ne w U n i v e rs a l R e l i g i o n s 35
erupted in violence. The disagreements and the violent repressions of
certain versions of Christianity would, in subsequent centuries, open
the way for the growth of another religion, Islam, into vast portions of
the Euro-Asian world.
Perhaps the most impressive of the new empires of the mind was the
one created in a remarkably short time by the followers of the Prophet
Muhammad. In little more than three decades following his death in
632, Islam had spread beyond its homeland on the Arabian Peninsula
to encompass most of the Middle East. Over the next century, it gained
a solid foothold in such diverse societies and polities as Spain, North
Africa, and Central Asia. Merchants, traders, and scholars from these
areas brought Islam to sub-Saharan Africa as they traveled across long-
established overland trade routes or voyaged by sea across the Indian
Ocean to East Africa. By 1000, the religion of the Prophet Mohammad
dictated the cultural and political landscape of the vast bulk of the Afro-
Eurasian land mass. Only those societies situated on its periphery—
Western Europe and China—lay outside its jurisdiction.
Islam came out of Arabia, in particular out of Mecca, the western
Arabian town where Muhammad lived and worked and received his
first revelations from God. He belonged to the Quraysh tribe, the dom-
inant group in the area that contained within it numerous competing
clans. Some of the Quraysh clans prospered as traders, involved in com-
merce that moved along a north-south line along the western portion
of Arabia, but many others, such as the one to which Muhammad was
born, lived more impoverished lives. He found refuge in the house of
his uncle Abu Talib, worked as a caravan manager on the route be-
tween Mecca and Syria, and then at the age of twenty-five married his
employer, Khadija, a well-off widow fifteen years his senior. Her wealth
provided him the life of leisure that enabled him to spend much of his
time in contemplation. During one such period when he was about
forty years old, the angel Gabriel visited him and told him he had been
chosen to become the messenger of God. Shaken by the encounter, he
rushed to Khadija, who assured him, “This is truly an angel and not a
devil, and you will be the prophet of this people.”6
Mecca served as a pilgrimage site where thousands came to pay
homage to the many gods residing in the Kaaba, a block-shaped shrine
over which a higher god, called Allah—the God—presided. At Khadija’s
urging, Muhammad began to preach the message of Allah: that there
was but one God; that the world would end; that Allah, who had
created the world and the people in it, would judge human beings. If
they accepted Allah’s teachings and submitted to God’s will, the faithful,

36 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

T h e G e n de r R u l e s o f Ne w U n i v e rs a l R e l i g i o n s 37
make it, for the Quraysh had determined to end Muhammad’s challenge
to their status once and for all by ending his life. They lay hidden in the
hills above Mecca until it was safe to go, then made the ten-day journey
to Medina, where Muhammad was greeted as the honored leader of a
new kind of community. Once he was established, he and Abu Bakr had
their families brought to them from Mecca.
Eager to cement the ties between their two families, Abu Bakr
pushed Muhammad to carry out the marriage to his daughter A’isha.
One Islamic treatise recounts that A’isha remembered:
My mother came to me and I was swinging on a swing. . . . She
brought me down from the swing . . . and led me till we stopped by
the door. . . . [T]‌he Prophet was sitting on a bed in our house with
men and women of the [Medinians] and she set me on his lap, and
said, “These are your people. God bless you in them and they in
you.” And the men and women rose immediately and went out, and
the Prophet consummated the marriage in our house.8

She was ten; he was fifty-four.

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

38 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

T h e G e n de r R u l e s o f Ne w U n i v e rs a l R e l i g i o n s 39
great difficulty and occurred only in exceptional circumstances. Women
might be equal in their obligations and religious responsibilities under
Islam, but as the Qur’an put it, “men are a degree higher than women.”9
Women required supervision by men, it was believed, a conviction
that rendered single women suspicious and even dangerous and led to
families marrying off their girls as soon as puberty hit, usually around
the age of nine. By the tenth century, social expectations dictated that
women’s freedom be dramatically curtailed and their proper realm re-
stricted to the private confines of home and family, at least at the upper
reaches of society. (Lower-status urban women and those who lived in
rural areas enjoyed greater scope to move about in the public realm,
a freedom necessitated by the commercial and domestic services they
performed in support of the larger society.) Shari’ah law began to be
interpreted in such a way as to curtail women’s activities in the public
realm and to seclude them from view by strangers, commentators
bending the Prophet’s sayings to achieve this end. By the early years of
the tenth century, religious law—not the social and cultural practices
of ancient societies—had come to be regarded as the justification for
reducing and even eliminating women’s once-active roles in Islamic so-
ciety, even as they continued to possess property and other legal rights.
At about the same time that Islam was establishing an empire of
the mind among vast populations in Afro-Eurasia and Christianity was
emerging as a unifying force in a deeply divided Europe, the Tang dy-
nasty was consolidating its power in China. The fall of the Han dynasty
in 220 ce had led to more than four centuries of warfare and fragmen-
tation, until in 618 an ambitious general, Li Yuan, grabbed the throne
and proceeded to construct an effective central government. Unlike the
Islamic empire, a disparate amalgamation of diverse peoples and forms
of government held together by a deep spiritual commitment, the Tang
Empire comprised a number of religious faiths and cultural practices.
Confucianism and Daoism prevailed in China, and the Confucian
model of rule by the “Son of Heaven” still held sway, but economic,
social, cultural, and intellectual impulses traveling along the Silk Road
from Central Asia, India, and Persia had undermined their hold. The
influences of the Central Asian steppes, especially Buddhism, made deep
inroads in traditional Confucian Han China, and any emperor who
hoped to maintain power had to grapple with this new complexity.
Buddhism provided a connection between India, Central Asia,
China, Korea, and Japan. In the case of Central Asia and China, it
formed a kind of bridge between the disparate cultures that softened the
differences among the peoples of the Tang Empire. All kinds of people

40 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

T h e G e n de r R u l e s o f Ne w U n i v e rs a l R e l i g i o n s 41
affording Tang Chinese women a little greater latitude than they had
known in earlier centuries or would know again in later years. Divorce
on the basis of mutual consent, for instance, became a relatively reg-
ular practice among people of higher rank. In villages along the Silk
Road, women wearing men’s clothing rode horses and went about the
marketplaces and fairs among men without veiling their faces. A his-
tory of the Tang dynasty attributed this development to the rise of Wu
Zetian (who would later take the name of Wu Zhao), the daughter of a
lumber merchant who ruled Tang China first as an administrator under
her incapacitated husband, the emperor Gaozong; then as regent for her
youngest son; and finally as emperor in her own right. “From the time
of Wu Zetian forward,” declared the author of Old Tang History, “hats
and scarves became widely popular and women rarely hid themselves
with veils and gauze.”11
Wu Zhao had entered the court of the Tang emperor Li Shimin as a
concubine at the age of thirteen and quickly became one of his favorites.
She also ingratiated herself with Li’s son and heir, Gaozong; after the
throne passed to him upon the emperor’s death in 649, she gave birth
to a number of sons who stood in the line of succession. Wu solidified
her newfound political influence as the mother of the future emperor
by accusing Gaozong’s wife, the empress Wang, of killing Wu’s infant
daughter. The charge was untrue, but Wu convinced Gaozong of his
wife’s guilt. The emperor deposed Wang in 655 and revoked her royal
status. He then married Wu and made her empress of China.
Five years later, Gaozong fell ill as the result of a stroke, leaving Wu
in charge of the court as administrator. This position gave her powers
equivalent to those of the emperor, and she used them to consolidate her
hold on the court. When Gaozong died in 683, Wu Zhao used her con-
siderable skills and influence to place her youngest son on the throne,
bypassing the elder and more legitimate heirs to the succession. At first
she acted merely as regent for her son, but within a year she claimed
the throne for herself, ruling as empress in her own right for the next
twenty years.
Wu’s background and upbringing fitted her well to rule over an em-
pire as diverse as China had become. She hailed from a merchant family
of mixed Central Asian–Chinese heritage, a situation that enabled her
to understand and to appeal to a constituency beyond that of tradi-
tional Chinese mandarins. She was widely read in a variety of disciplines
and possessed a deep knowledge of Buddhism, the cultural cement
that united so many of her diverse subjects. Under her rule, Buddhism
thrived as never before: Wu promoted the religion by commissioning

42 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y
Wu Zetian became known as Wu Zhao when she was named
empress of China in 690 ce. Wu made Buddhism the state
religion of China, a move that helped her consolidate her
power. Shutterstock/389317600

translations and interpretations of scriptures (called sutras), by ordering

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

T h e G e n de r R u l e s o f Ne w U n i v e rs a l R e l i g i o n s 43
in 692, suppressing Daoism and ordering the conversion—forcibly, if
need be—of Daoists to Buddhism. In 694 she took the final step in
establishing Buddhism as a state-sanctioned religion, moving the admin-
istrative responsibility for dealing with Buddhist monks and nuns out
of the office that dealt with foreign and diplomatic affairs and into that
bureau that dealt with issues concerning Confucianism and Daoism.
Buddhism, this move on Wu’s part announced, was a fully Chinese reli-
gion, not a foreign one.
Wu’s privileging of Buddhism over Daoism grew out of her practical
political needs as the first (and only) female emperor. On a general level,
Buddhism, unlike the deeply patriarchal Confucianism and Daoism, did
not impose restrictions on female rule. More practically, Wu’s subjects
in the non-Chinese portions of her empire embraced the religion and,
not incidentally, the ruler who practiced their faith. The “Four Peoples,”
as those on the western frontier of the empire referred to themselves,
pledged their loyalty to “the Sage,” who addressed their grievances and
fulfilled their needs. She “is compassionate and thoughtful,” wrote the
author of one Buddhist publication, “bestowing only that which is ben-
eficial. She nurtures and fosters, leads and marshals. Before we didn’t
even have thin, unlined garments; nowadays we have thick, many-
layered vestments.”13
More particularly still, Daoism had served to legitimize the House
of Tang as it came to power under Li Yuan in the early years of the
seventh century. Wu’s Tang in-laws, in fact, traced their descent from
the founder of Daoism, Laozi. As the religion of her rivals for power
following her displacement of her eldest son in favor of her youngest,
Daoism would have had little to recommend it; indeed, it undercut Wu’s
claims to be a legitimate ruler. In the face of a Confucianism that de-
based and denigrated women and a Daoism that denied the validity of
her rule, Buddhism filled the breach. It authorized her rule, provided
popular support for her administration, and gave symbolic sanction to
a highly unusual situation. Wu tied herself to the Buddha in a variety
of sculptures and mandalas, linking the sacred representations of the
religion to that of her imperial court. From Buddhism she constructed
a kind of cosmology that endorsed her unprecedented and shocking
actions in taking power. She created a Chinese character for the concept
of human being that represented the process of birth as flowing from
one woman, a function usually presented as the result of the masculine,
dominant, creative yin drawing forth power from the feminine, prop-
erly inferior, receptive yang.

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

T h e G e n de r R u l e s o f Ne w U n i v e rs a l R e l i g i o n s 45
Chapter 3

Gender and War in the

Age of Global Interactions,
1000–1500

I
n 1159, forces of the Japanese emperor sent thirteen- year-
old
Minamoto Yoritomo, whose father had risen up against the court,
into exile in the eastern portion of the main island. There he
languished for twenty years, lacking office, position, armed retainers,
and land. He was a nobody. In 1180, however, things turned around for
him when a claimant to the throne, Prince Mochihito, called on warriors
to help him regain it from usurpers. Yorimoto took this opportunity to
make his own call for fighters, promising that he would guarantee their
lands and rights against encroaching imperial authority if they would
pledge their loyalty to him. Yorimoto’s declaration amounted to the
creation of a state administered by and for warriors, and it resounded
triumphantly across the countryside, drawing support from thousands
of soldiers and setting off a series of civil wars. Yorimoto parlayed
his strength in the east into a concession from the imperial court that
recognized what came to be called the Kamakura shogunate—a gov-
ernment of warlords who claimed to “protect” the emperor in the cap-
ital city of Heian and thus legitimated their military rule. Their armed
retainers, called samurai, would exemplify the ideal of masculinity to
which men of other classes would aspire.
The shogunate survived not because of Yorimoto, however, but be-
cause of his wife, Masako. Upon his death in 1199, tensions and conflicts
among samurai and the emperor spilled over into civil war. Masako,
although she had no formal power, mobilized her family connections
to ensure the continuity of the Kamakura shogunate. She had her
seventeen-year-old son, Yoriie, heir to Yorimoto’s position, killed in
1203, and replaced him with her second son, Sanetomo. Along with her
brother, Yoshitoki, she systematically eliminated rivals to their power
and reduced them to the status of vassals, subjects who owed service to
their overlord. When Sanetomo proved ineffective and weak, Masako
probably had him murdered, opening the way for Yoshitoki to take con-
trol of the shogunate. In 1221, the emperor, Go Toba, then proclaimed
him an outlaw, hoping thereby to rally samurai to his side. Masako
took decisive action, presenting herself to a large crowd of samurai as
the symbol of and spokeswoman for her husband’s achievements, and
reminding them of the hardships and humiliations they had suffered
under the imperial regime before he had taken them to war against it.
She exhorted them to follow her in the struggle against the emperor.
Inspired and energized by her words and vision, they did, trouncing
Go Toba’s warriors and consolidating the Kamakura regime. Masako
served as the true leader of the shogunate until she died in 1225.
The years between 1000 and 1500 saw tremendous changes in
demography, economic prosperity, technology, and social and polit-
ical structures, events that facilitated widespread interaction between
cultures across the globe. Trade and commerce across the Afro-Eurasian
world flourished, bringing peoples into contact with one another and
exposing them to new ideas, practices, and technologies from other re-
gions. But even as these long-distance encounters enabled increasing
cross-cultural communication and exchange, they and other prominent
dynamics of the era—most especially conflict, conquest, and sustained
warfare—promoted the development of separate and distinct cultures.
By the end of the fourteenth century, regions began to be delineated in
terms that we would regard as sources of identity—“Europe,” “China,”
or “India,” for example. These national identifications, in turn, would
contribute to dynamics that perpetuated and expanded conflict and
fighting. War became the arena in which notions and ideals of gender
were most prominently expressed.
The nature of warfare changed dramatically in those five hundred
years. In the period from 1000 to 1200 or so, an elite force of mounted
warriors in the employ of local lords or chiefs fought relatively small
battles, accompanied by footmen carrying pikes, and assisted in their
efforts by lengthy sieges of fortified strongholds. Starting in the middle
of the thirteenth century, the utilization of gunpowder (invented in
China in the tenth century) gradually made these tactics and methods
obsolete and ushered in new ways of fighting. Now large armies of
men armed with muskets and cannon could be put into the field by
monarchs looking to centralize and expand their power at the expense
of local lords. The changes took some time to play out, but as they did,
they altered gender expectations in societies across Eurasia and, in at
least once instance, the lands across the Atlantic.

Gender an d Wa r in the A ge of G l o b a l I n t e ra ct i o n s 47
The establishment of the Kamakura shogunate at the end of the
twelfth century marked the beginning of military rule in Japan. The em-
peror and his court still existed and took care of civil matters, but mil-
itary governors—called shogun—in the provinces provided the actual
administration, protecting the countryside from bandits and usurpers,
collecting taxes from the farmers, and overseeing the working of the
land generally. During this period, the figure of the warrior took center
stage. Samurai served the governors in return for land or other forms of
material compensation, providing the military might the shogu needed
to maintain his power and control.
Attaining the position of samurai required extensive and rigorous
training in horsemanship, use of the bow and arrow, and swordplay.
Young boys started learning their martial skills early, often along-
side their sisters, who would not expect to fight on the battlefield but
who would be ready to protect their households should the need arise.
Mounted archery, in particular, formed a crucial aspect of their training;
samurai practiced it daily in an exercise known as yabusame. Instituted
by Yoritomo after he became concerned that samurai possessed

The fourteenth-century Japanese samurai Kusonoki Masashige defended the

Kamakura shogunate against attempts to overthrow its rule. Samurai represented
the masculine warrior ideals of military prowess, loyalty, self-discipline, and honor.
Shutterstock/1231878799

48 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender an d Wa r in the A ge of G l o b a l I n t e ra ct i o n s 49
an empire bigger than the Romans, Greeks, Persians, or Chinese had
achieved after centuries of trying. He did it by putting his daughters at
the heads of armies and making them queens of the lands they seized.
Without them, the Mongol Empire would not have existed nor endured.
The royal women of Mongolia were a tough lot. They refused to
accept the customs foisted on women in the adjacent “civilized” lands
of China or Central Asia, eschewing seclusion, the veil, or the prac-
tice of bound feet that crippled Chinese women and immobilized them.
Mongolian women rode horses, entered wrestling matches with men,
and became skilled with the bow and arrow. When not at war, royal
women wore extravagant and intricate headdresses over two feet in
height, which gave them a commanding presence at court and “a great
luster when they are on horseback,” as one witness reported.1 When
war came, they exchanged their headdresses for a helmet, gathered their
arms, mounted their horses, and led their troops into battle. Some of the
reputation Mongols enjoyed for fierceness derived from the presence
and effectiveness of women on the battlefield.
Genghis Khan valued in people a quality called baatar, the capacity
and willingness to act quickly and decisively without regard for one’s
own personal interest or safety. He saw it in his teenaged daughter,
Altani, when one night she leapt into action to save his youngest son,
four-year-old Tolui. A Tatar kidnapper bent on avenging the death of
his kinsman at the emperor’s hand had entered her grandmother’s ger
(yurt), grabbed the boy, and raced away. Altani rushed out after him
just as the man raised his arm to plunge a knife into the boy’s neck.
“With one hand she seized his plaints”—the braids draped over his
ears—“and with the other she seized the hand that was drawing the
knife,” recounted the chronicler of the Secret History of the Mongols.
“She pulled it so hard that he dropped the knife.” Guards who had
left their post at the ger returned just at that moment and killed the
Tatar. Though they tried to claim credit for saving Tolui, Genghis Khan
wouldn’t have it. He did promote them, but “the chief merit went, by
general consent, to Altani” for her heroic efforts.2 And he made sure
everyone knew it.
Genghis Khan sought out those who had baatar and placed them
in positions of authority and responsibility as he consolidated the lands
of the Mongols and conquered other territory and peoples. In addition
to his daughter Altani, at least six more of his daughters—Alaqai, Al-
Altun, and others whose names have not come down to us—possessed
it. His four sons, drunken louts with but indifferent fighting skills and
virtually no other qualities to recommend them, did not. When it came

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

Gender an d Wa r in the A ge of G l o b a l I n t e ra ct i o n s 51
and liaisons to their tribes and helped the great khan make decisions
that had long-lasting effect on their societies.
Genghis Khan assigned his daughter Alaqai Beki the central role in the
invasion of China in 1211–15. At the time of her marriage, he instructed
her to “be determined to become one of my feet,” making it clear that she
would help to lead the military conquest. “When I am going on an expe-
dition, you should be my helper,” he exhorted her. “When I am galloping,
you should be my steed.”3 Genghis Khan’s plans for China saw Alaqai’s
sisters enter into marriage alliances: Al-Altun married into one of the
Uigher clans of western China, while another, unnamed, sister married
Arslan Khan of the Karluks in what is Kazakhstan today. Yet another
daughter, also unknown to us, married Tokuchar, who was killed during
a campaign in Nishapur in eastern Iran, part of Genghis Khan’s conquest
of Central Asia. His widow ordered that the city be destroyed and its
inhabitants executed. “She left no trace of anything that moved,” reported
a chronicler of the attack, striking terror in the hearts of Muslims across
the region. Tales of this ruthless, barbaric infidel woman spread rapidly,
filling listeners’ heads with images of charred ruins and of skulls stacked
high in pyramidal shapes.
The Mongol conquest of Central Asia in the years 1219–24 per-
manently undermined the Middle Eastern Muslim states’ previous
dominance of commercial affairs in the region and placed the lands
through which the Silk Road ran firmly in the hands of Genghis Khan’s
daughters. They established a system of relay stations along the route
that provided protection and allowed for far larger caravans to pass
through, vastly enlarging and speeding up trade. They broke down
obstacles and built new routes, ultimately creating a system that made
it possible for merchants and traders to travel for thousands of miles on
a single trip. Each sister ran a particular operation of the enterprise that
enabled them to cooperate rather than compete with one another. One
might deal in Chinese silks, while another traded exclusively in tea or
spices. They fashioned a financial consortium that facilitated commerce.
Alaqai devised a system of governance over China and the other dispa-
rate territories of the empire that made Mongol rule possible and turned
the Silk Road into the greatest trading venture the world had ever seen.
The success of Genghis Khan’s daughters excited envy and re-
sentment in his sons. Upon the emperor’s death in 1227, his third son
Ogodei became khan. He continued the conquests of his father, sending
armies into Russia, into Korea, and deeper into China. But he wanted
the lands held by his sisters and sisters-in-law, and he embarked on a
campaign of sexual terror to get them. When his sister Checheyigen,

52 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender an d Wa r in the A ge of G l o b a l I n t e ra ct i o n s 53
The early masculine ideal represented by knighthood emphasized
the intimate relationship between physical violence and men’s honor,
a dynamic that often encouraged brutality, cruelty, and the senseless,
indiscriminate, and horrific spilling of blood. The Christian church had
long sought ways to control or contain the violence of this group, in
part by promoting a different masculine model of the holy monk and
in part by threatening the excommunication of knights who fought on
certain days of the week. These methods proved ineffective, but in the
twelfth century, clerics hit upon a means of bringing the warrior into
closer affinity with the spiritual elements of manliness identified with
the church. Through a series of Crusades, they fastened the attractions
of war and violence to the defense of Christianity, assigning to knights
the specific responsibilities of liberating the Holy Land from “infidel”
Muslims. Ideal knighthood now took on the additional qualities of
fighting for a cause greater than one’s personal honor or enrichment; it
suggested an obligation to support and defend Christianity. No longer
simply fighting men in armor, knights could now regard themselves and
be seen as servants of a spiritual and moral order.
This merging of spirituality and war became embedded in the code
of chivalry, a set of expectations for knightly behavior that emphasized
military prowess, loyalty to one’s superiors, piety, generosity to one’s
peers and followers, and courteous respect for women. This last element
in turn became the core foundation of what historians and literary critics
refer to as “courtly love,” a stylized approach to romance that combined
sexual desire with high moral or spiritual fulfillment. At a time when
marriages were political or economic arrangements, not unions based
in companionship or emotional sustenance, courtly love allowed for an
expression of passion—if not sex itself—by a knight to a woman not his
wife. Courtly love and chivalry combined to venerate women (at least
upper-status women) and, in the hands of medieval writers, added to the
figure of the masculine ideal the capacity for devotion to and protection
of women. It gave them, in other words, an inner life, an emotional life to
go along with the outer life of the man of arms. As Andreas Capellanus,
a French courtier, described it in De amore libri tres in 1184:
It is the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with
every feeling of delight. This kind consists in the contemplation of
the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as the kiss and
the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting
the final solace, for that is not permitted for those who wish to love
purely. . . . That is called mixed love which gets its effect from every
delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus.5

54 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Finally, increased political centralization in the fourteenth and fif-

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

Gender an d Wa r in the A ge of G l o b a l I n t e ra ct i o n s 55
possessed sufficient wealth to put guns and huge numbers of armed
men in the field. By the time of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453)
between England and France, the manly ideal knight had become a di-
vinely inspired warrior fighting on behalf of a national cause.
Although warfare and masculinity were intricately wrapped up with
one another in the five hundred years following 1000, fighting was not
the exclusive prerogative of men. Owing to the nature of warfare in the
first centuries of the period, women had the opportunity to participate
fairly significantly in combat. When not participating in the individual
combat that was tournament jousting, knights usually engaged in small
battles as part of a tiny band of fighters on behalf of a lord to whom they
pledged loyalty. Even larger battles were fought merely by a large agglom-
eration of these small bands. Warriors, in other words, tied to a lord and
his household, were part of what we should understand to be a domestic
military organization. They lived in the lord’s hall or castle; they ate with
him and his family; they trained on his grounds. The female members of
the household interacted with knights continually, gaining knowledge, ex-
perience, and perhaps even skill from their dealings. While men were off
to war, high-born women were expected to step in to protect and defend
the interests of the lord. Indeed, as historian Christine de Pisan advised
noblewomen in her early fifteenth-century The Treasure of the City of
Ladies, the wife of a lord “ought to know how to use weapons and be
familiar with everything that pertains to them, so that she may be ready
to command her men if the need arises. She should know how to launch
an attack or to defend against one, if the situation calls for it. She should
take care that the fortresses are well garrisoned.”6 Knights who knew the
women of the household well through long-time acquaintance and inter-
action likely responded to their leadership with respect.
Women also went on crusade: some at the heads of armies of knights
they had raised in response to the call of the pope; some employed as
washerwomen and suppliers of food, water, and other necessaries; some
as camp followers performing a variety of functions, including servicing
the sexual requirements of the crusaders. For their contributions they
earned a share of the booty won in battle. We have a few descriptions
of women actually fighting. A Muslim historian reported the story of
an elderly man who participated in the storming of a Christian trench
in 1191. He described a woman archer “wrapped in a green melluta
[mantle]” standing behind the rampart of the trench, “who kept
shooting arrows from a wooden bow, with which she wounded sev-
eral of our men. She was at last overpowered by numbers; we killed
her, and brought the bow she had been using to the Sultan, who was

56 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender an d Wa r in the A ge of G l o b a l I n t e ra ct i o n s 57
mentally incapacitated French king—on the throne rallied the demor-
alized armies. Joan donned armor, sword, and standard; mounted her
horse; and led her troops to raise the siege of Orléans. Having placed
Charles VII on the throne of France, she moved on to take back sig-
nificant territory in the Loire valley, utterly transforming the military
dynamic and enabling France to oust the English from their lands in
Normandy and Aquitaine. Joan of Arc was a soldier, a fighter above
all else, who strategized, planned, commanded, and victoriously led her
troops in battle. She learned to fight on horseback, to handle a lance
and a sword, and to use the new gunpowder technology effectively. “She
could ride a horse wielding a lance as well as a more experienced sol-
dier could,” observed one noblewoman who witnessed her training. The
duc d’Alençon remarked that “everyone marveled . . . that she acted so
wisely and clearly in waging war, as if she was a captain who had the
experience of twenty or thirty years; and especially in the setting up of
artillery, for in that she held herself magnificently.”8
Throughout her campaign to put the dauphin on the throne and to
expel the English from French lands, Joan dressed as a man. In part her
choice of clothing served the end of her military campaign. As she put
it, she “would never for anything swear not to arm herself and wear
men’s clothes.” But more than that, cross-dressing seems to have been
a way for her to establish her identity, for she wore men’s clothes eve-
rywhere after 1429, not just in battle, until her execution twenty-eight
months later. In court, in prison, even in church, she presented herself
in the raiment of men, justifying her transvestism by asserting that “It
pleases God that I wear it; I do it on the command of our Lord and in
his service.” When the English denied her access to communion unless
she conformed to conventional female dress codes, Joan refused, telling
her jailers “that she preferred to die rather than to abjure what she had
done at the command of our Lord.”9
French soldiers rallied to Joan in the many thousands. Through
her purity, her devotion to God, her martial prowess, her undaunted
courage, and her love of country—all of those qualities that made her
the ideal knight—she inspired in them a loyalty that few other gen-
erals in history can boast. But in her enemies, the gender- bending
overlooked by her followers provoked hatred, humiliation, and charges
of monstrosity. The Duke of Bedford regarded her as “a disordered and
defamed woman, dressed in men’s clothing and base in conduct,” a
woman “abominable to God.”10 Indeed, after the Burgundians captured
her in 1431 and sold her to the English, she was tried for, found guilty
of, and burned at the stake for heresy for wearing men’s clothing.

58 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

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

The warfare convulsing Eurasia marked societies in other parts of

the world as well. In the lands across the Atlantic Ocean the people
many call the Iroquois—the Haudenosaunee, or “people of the long-
house”—engaged in a protracted period of warfare that ultimately gave

Gender an d Wa r in the A ge of G l o b a l I n t e ra ct i o n s 59
way to a peace that officially sanctioned a prominent and substantial
role for women in their society. Sometime around 1000 bce, peoples
from the southwest of what would become called America migrated
north-and eastward to lands just south of the Great Lakes, in modern-
day New York State. Their trek coincided with a shift in their methods
of securing sustenance from hunting to a more settled agriculture, espe-
cially in cultivating corn, beans, and squash. These activities produced
significant conflict among the peoples of the longhouse, ultimately
bringing about civil war among them. Two factions emerged, fighting
an ideological war over which system of provision would prevail, and
although men and women fought on both sides, the conflict was pro-
foundly gendered: men identified with hunting, women with agricul-
ture. As it intensified, the hunting group, led by an Onondaga chief and
shaman by the name of Adodaroh whose rage had slipped over into
insanity, began to resort to cannibalizing their enemies. According to
Haudenosaunee tradition, the terror that followed as the Cannibals and
the Cultivators battled one another compelled Sky Mother, the divine
founder of the people, to send her son to end the fighting and establish
peace among the rival camps.
The Peacemaker, as he is still called, enlisted the help of two others,
Jigonsaseh, or Corn Mother, leader of the Cultivators, and Ayonwantha
(who has come down to us as Hiawatha), a member of the Cannibal
bloc. He first approached Jigonsaseh, listening to her accounts of how
the Cannibals had violated a fundamental obligation of war recognized
by all parties to it up to this time. During wartime, clan mothers of
every village were expected to sit on the paths and roads used by the
war parties and provide food for the passing warriors, in return for
which their villages escaped attack. “Even though we have fed their
young men in passing,” she told him, according to one account, “they
have not done their duty by us, leaving us unharmed. Instead, they have
burned our fields and roasted our children in the fires. We must now
ring our towns with palisades and post young men to guard our fields.
Even so, no one is safe, for the Cannibals come in the night to steal
from our numbers.”11 The Peacemaker presented his plan for peace
and discussed how the two of them might implement it. He proposed
the creation of Kaianeraserakowa, the Great and Binding Law of Peace.
In return for his promise that women would enjoy considerable rights
under the new law, Jigonsaseh accepted his suggestion that she take
advantage of the obligation of women to feed warriors to spread the
word. She would tell all of those she fed and sheltered about the Great
and Binding Law of Peace if he would accept the corn way of life.

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

Gender an d Wa r in the A ge of G l o b a l I n t e ra ct i o n s 61
advance by clan mothers. In this way balance, that first principle of the
Haudenosaunee way, prevailed in matters of gender as in all others.
The ideal of balance among the Haudenosaunee, as among virtu-
ally all of the four hundred tribes that existed in pre-Columbian North
America, allowed for a vastly different array of gender possibilities
than Europeans knew. Many Native American tribes recognized and
honored members of their societies who presented a gender identity that
was neither male nor female but a kind of combination of both. Called
berdache by the Europeans who encountered them after the French
word connoting homosexuality, many Native Americans today prefer to
use the term two spirit to describe and address them. Most often these
were men who adopted women’s roles, functions, dress, and styles, but
two spirit women also existed, taking on the roles and dress of men as
hunters and chiefs. Native Americans regarded—and still regard—two-
spirit men and women as possessing special powers given to them by
the creator. They enjoyed a distinctive prestige among the members of
their communities.
Berdache or two-spirit men and women played a significant part in
warfare as actual warriors themselves or as the carriers and purveyors
of supernatural powers that would help the tribe in battle. Among the
Lakota and Ojibway, for example, warriors about to go into battle en-
gaged in sexual relations with two-spirit men as a means of enhancing
and strengthening their masculinity. As one account had it, Ojibway
men turned to sex with the two-spirit Ozaw-wen-dib (Yellowhead) so
as to “acquire his fighting ability and courage, by having intimate con-
nection with him.”13 When the Europeans arrived, they noted with ap-
prehension the presence of fierce two spirits among the Timucua Indians
of Florida, the Karankawa and Coahuiltic Indians of the Texas Gulf
Coast, and Tuscarora forces; they learned quickly to fear their courage
and fighting skills.14
After five hundred years of nearly constant warfare in Eurasia and
beyond, the qualities, attributes, and esteem attached to peoples involved
in military conflict became central to gender identities in societies and
cultures across the globe. From Japanese samurai to Christian crusaders,
those who fought offered a model of masculinity that informed their
societies and cultures for centuries to come. Always, however, the ideals
of proper manhood in any given period or place faced defiance from
men and women who refused to conform to gender expectations. War
both sharpened and challenged the identities of those who fought them
and, just as powerfully, those who did not.

62 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

Chapter 4

Gender and Slavery in the

Age of Global Expansion,
1450–1750

I
n 1724, hundreds of men and women who had escaped enslavement
on the plantations of Jamaica began a series of attacks on British
settlers and soldiers, seeking to end the system of slavery on the
island. The runaway slaves would come to be called Maroons in the
1730s, after the Spanish cimarrón, for “fugitive, gone wild,” terms usu-
ally applied to domestic animals who wandered out of their enclosures.
The so-called First Maroon War lasted for fourteen years, during which
time the British suffered significant losses and were compelled to sue for
peace. Under the generalship and strategic guidance of an obeah spirit
woman named Queen Nanny, the Maroons fought their numerically
superior foes to a standstill. Nanny directed her fighters to use drums
and an abeng—a cow horn capable of making many different sounds—
to send messages to Maroon communities across long distances in the
mountains of Jamaica to alert them of British movements. This enabled
fighters to position themselves well in advance of any attack. Arrayed in
branches and leaves so as to resemble trees, the Maroons camouflaged
themselves and were able to ambush the scarlet-clad soldiers with near
impunity as they labored up narrow, twisting, difficult paths to try to
reach villages on the mountaintops. British losses mounted steadily and
seemingly endlessly, until finally in 1738 officials instituted talks with
leaders who headed the Windward Maroons.
The resulting treaty, the Articles of Pacification, recognized the
Maroons as freed men and women and as owners of the lands they
claimed and settled. In return, they agreed to help the British put down
slave revolts and to run down and return to authorities any enslaved
persons who had escaped their masters. The men and women under
Nanny’s leadership, the Leeward Maroons, were incensed when they
learned of the pact: Nanny in fact ordered that the British messenger
who brought the offending news be beheaded. Ultimately the Leeward
Maroons gave way and accepted the peace, though the women of the
community continued to wear bracelets and anklets made of the teeth
of slain British soldiers as a mark of their defiance. The fierce resistance
of the Maroons of Jamaica provides a glimpse of a rare aspect of the
experience of slavery for the millions and millions of men, women, and
children who fell prey to the institution in lands across the world.
Although slavery long predated it, global expansion during the
centuries following 1450 accelerated and intensified the institution.
Under the Mongol Empire, for example, a widespread network of eco-
nomic, intellectual, and cultural connections linked the various regions
of Eurasia to an extent never known before. The disintegration of the
empire in the late fourteenth century opened up the opportunity for
other states to flourish and to grow into empires in their own right. In
Europe, ambitious monarchs in Portugal, Spain, Russia, and Austria
centralized power in their territories and emerged ready and able to
expand their commercial and military reach. The Ottoman, Mughal,
and Qing Chinese Empires in Central and South Asia followed suit, as
did a number of large states in sub-Saharan Africa such as Abyssinia,
Kano, Kongo, Mali, and Songhai. In every instance, empire building
and territorial conquest involved a concomitant expansion of slavery.
The two went hand in hand, extending the enslavement of men, women,
and children to lands all over the globe. For millions of people over
thousands of years, slavery determined the shape and feel of their lives
as men and women.
Slavery took different forms in different societies of the world,
and the variations often created distinctions in the status and gendered
experiences of enslaved people. In places like Mesoamerica prior to con-
tact with Europeans, and in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, a kin-or
exchange-based system prevailed in which outsiders were brought into
a group to expand its numbers or as part of a social or political alliance.
In some of the Islamic and Asian empires, states organized and ran slave
systems designed to further their interests, whether those interests were
religious, economic, military, or some combination. In the Americas after
1500, the system of slavery enabled private individuals to profit from
the forced labor of captives. Variations within each framework existed,
depending on time and place, and often they overlapped, but each also
possessed distinctive characteristics. Enslaved men and women brought
into a community through capture or exchange might readily become
full-fledged members of the group, with all the rights inherent therein;
certainly their children would be considered part of the community.
Because the goal of this system was to increase population, females

64 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender an d S l a ve r y in the A g e o f G l o b a l E x p a n s i o n 65
countless millions. Leaders at every level of society, from the household
to the imperial palace, especially valued enslaved women, owing to their
capacity to bear children and expand the numbers of often-endangered
populations.
Shari’a law provided explicit safeguards to enslaved women who
bore the children of their owners. They became umm walad—mothers
of children—once they gave birth and could not be sold away, not le-
gally anyway. Nor could their children. Upon the death of their owners,
umm walad and their children gained their freedom. The enslavement
of some women made it possible for other women—the family members
of prosperous, official, elite, and royal households—to be secluded, a
condition regarded as a sign of their prestige and status. Muhammadu
Rumfa, the king who instituted Islam across a wide range of West Africa
in the second half of the fifteenth century, established the seclusion of
his wives, daughters, and concubines—sexual slaves—as part of his
rule. Islamic law gave Muslim males, no matter their class, the right to
unlimited sexual consort with their female slaves (unless they were mar-
ried), making all enslaved females potential concubines. Concubines
sometimes could parlay their sexual services into a degree of protection
and status—indeed, sometimes great status—but concubinage required
women to provide those sexual services without giving them any choice
in the matter. Concubines, like all enslaved women, possessed no legal
or customary rights like those of free women.
In the Ottoman Empire, which stretched from southern Poland in the
north to southern Sudan in the south and from the western regions of the
Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, the military might and administrative
capacity that made such expansion possible derived from the enslave-
ment of men from all over the known world. Ottoman officials turned
mostly to Christian boys captured in war or seized from conquered ter-
ritories to establish a military force known as Janissaries. One such cap-
tive, Konstantin Mihailović of Serbia, recounted his experience in 1455,
when Ottoman troops took the city of Novo Brdo. After ordering all the
families of the city out of their homes, Mihailović reported,
the Emperor himself sorted out the boys on one side and the females
on the other, and the men along the ditch on one side and the women
on the other side. All those among the men who were the most
important and distinguished he ordered decapitated. The remainder
he ordered released to the city. . . . The boys were 320 in number
and the females 74. The females he distributed among the heathens,
but he took the boys for himself into the Janissaries, and sent them
beyond the sea to Anatolia, where their preserve is.1

66 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Over time, Janissaries, despite being an enslaved army and forced

to convert to Islam, became part of the upper ranks of society; families
often offered up their sons voluntarily so that they might enhance their
status. This proved to be relative, however, as elite slaves—called kul, or

Gender an d S l a ve r y in the A g e o f G l o b a l E x p a n s i o n 67
“the Sultan’s servants”—did not possess the rights of free subjects and
could not pass down any privileges or property they had acquired in the
course of their lives.
In India, in an interesting twist, the skills and leadership of an
Ethiopian man enslaved as a boy kept the dynamic and powerful Mughal
Empire from expanding into the Deccan plateau for a number of years.
The boy who would grow up to become Malik Ambar—malik referring
to the leadership role Ambar would attain—was born in the middle of
the sixteenth century to a family growing food and tending livestock in
the eastern portion of Ethiopia. Captured at about age twelve in 1560,
he was sold by slavers, changed hands a few times as he was moved
through Arabia, and ultimately ended up in Baghdad in the service of
a merchant named Mir Qasim. Qasim educated Ambar, facilitated his
conversion to Islam, and brought him along when he traveled on busi-
ness. Ambar learned to read and write in Arabic and may have even
had some Persian; he came to understand accounting and finance and
proved useful enough to Qasim to persuade the merchant to bring the
twenty-year-old Ambar with him when he went to India in 1571.
They arrived in the western Deccan region, an area in south central
India inhabited largely by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians, and
ruled over by Muslims hailing originally from central Asia. There Ambar
would have witnessed the presence of numerous other Abyssinians, both
enslaved and free, serving as soldiers and even as army commanders,
and taken in the lesson that sufficient talent and skill could enable an
enslaved man like himself to advance socially, politically, and militarily.
Shortly after his arrival, in fact, Ambar was purchased from Qasim by
the peshwa (prime minister) of the Sultanate of Ahmednagar, Changiz
Khan, himself a former slave who had risen to great heights. For three
years Khan showed Ambar the ropes, advising him in the ways of the
court and the army. Ambar’s connections to the soldiers made it pos-
sible for him to organize a mercenary army when, in 1574, assassins
killed Khan and the peshwa’s widow set him free.
Armies composed of enslaved Africans found great favor among
Indian princes of the Deccan at this particular historical moment, for
the Mughals who had conquered the north of India looked to the re-
gion for a logical extension of their power. States on the periphery of the
Deccan in particular, such as Ahmednagar, faced special danger from
Mughal invasion. In 1595, the ruler of the sultanate, Nizam Shah, asked
Ambar to return to defend the state’s main fort located in the capital;
Ambar did so and took advantage of the need for defense to build up
a loyal and powerful military force in the countryside. Some five or

68 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender an d S l a ve r y in the A g e o f G l o b a l E x p a n s i o n 69
Then in an unprecedented event, in 1534 he married her and moved
her into his residence, acts totally out of keeping with the conventions
governing the harem, concubinage, and Ottoman court life. The repre-
sentative of the Genoese Bank of Saint George witnessed the wedding,
writing, “this week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary
event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Sultans. The
Grand Signior Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave-
woman from Russia, called Roxalana [sic], and there has been great
feasting.”2
No actual law barred the marriage and freeing of a concubine, but
the situation caused deep distress at court and in the public square.
A Venetian page in the palace described the atmosphere created by
this most unusual state of affairs. “Such love does [Sulëyman] bear her
that he has astonished all his subjects that they say she has bewitched
him; therefore they call her Ziadi, which means witch. For this reason
the Janissaries and the entire court hate her and her children likewise,
but because the sultan loves her, no one dares to speak. I have always
heard every one speak ill of her and of her children.”3 The fact that
Hürrem became one of Sulëyman’s most trusted political advisors and
confidantes made her even more unpopular.
A final class of slaves played a significant part in the administration of
the Ottoman and other Muslim and Asian empires. Eunuchs—men who
had been castrated—formed a valuable part of state administrations.
Because they could not reproduce, they could not threaten the ruling dy-
nasty with rival claims to the throne, and for that reason, they could be
entrusted with protecting the royal household. Eunuchs were much in
demand by royal and high-status households, despite the Islamic injunc-
tion against castration. The high cost of purchasing eunuchs enhanced
their status, and they could often be found at the highest levels of gov-
ernment. Such was the case for Beshir Agha, an Abyssinian slave who
rose to become chief eunuch of the Ottoman imperial harem in the early
eighteenth century.
Eunuchs hailing from the Caucasus or other parts of Eurasia tended
to undergo castration in the form of removal of the testicles, a process
that eliminated their ability to sire children but not to engage in sexual
intercourse. African eunuchs, on the other hand, and especially those
from Abyssinia, who were the most highly prized, suffered radical cas-
tration of the testicles and the penis. In either case, these were gruesome
operations, and mortality rates could rise to upward of 90 percent.4 Few
adult men agreed to risk such odds, even if the rewards might be spectac-
ular, so by far the majority of victims of castration were boys who had

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

Gender an d S l a ve r y in the A g e o f G l o b a l E x p a n s i o n 71
the male child of a concubine could even aspire to chiefdom. Sometimes
concubines enjoyed the status of wives: this might occur in instances in
which high-status women were given to conquerors as part of a peace
treaty.
Malintzin’s Mayan community must have regarded her as a high-
value asset, because when it was defeated in battle by Spaniards under
the command of Hernán Cortés in 1518, its leaders included her in
the group of twenty women it tendered to the Spanish as a sign of its
submission to him. Cortés had them baptized, gave them Christian
names, and parceled them out to his captains for their pleasure. Cortés
must have shared the Mayans’ estimation of Malintzin, for he gave her
to the most important member of his expedition, Alonso Hernández
Puertocarrero, a man whose high-ranking family back in Spain was in a
position to raise the status of the conquistador.
But Puertocarrero’s possession of Malintzin proved short-lived, owing
to her extraordinary talents as a linguist. She had learned the language of
the Mayans with whom she lived and, while traveling with the Spaniards
following their defeat, had picked up Spanish as well. When emissaries
from the great chief Moctezuma arrived at Cortés’s camp and demanded to
speak with him, none of the Spaniards could understand them. Malintzin
did, and she must have calculated that her future with Puertocarrero—
who might at any moment tire of her or die, leaving her at the mercy of
any Spaniard who wished to claim her—was not worth remaining silent.
She spoke up, and immediately everything changed for her. According to
his secretary, Cortés promised her “more than her liberty” if she served
as his intermediary with the Aztec leader.5 She agreed to translate the
conversations between Cortés and Moctezuma’s men, making herself in-
dispensable and earning the admiration and respect of the Spanish. Some
began to call her Doña Marina, according her the rank of noblewoman.
Over the next few years, Malintzin proved her inestimable value as
Cortés’s troops expanded the power of imperial Spain across the lands
of Mexico. Conquest involved more than the simple overpowering of
indigenous peoples by military means. The Spanish had to negotiate
with the conquered peoples; they had to instruct them in the ways of
their new condition, to tell them what was expected of them. Malintzin
performed effectively in the role of translator not just of words, but of
ways of life as well. She drew on her deep understandings of the vastly
different Aztec, Mayan, and Spanish worlds to convey to each party
what the other was thinking, and in so doing she enabled local peoples
to accommodate and work with the Spanish. In one poignant and ironic
interaction, the Tlaxcalan people, who fell to Cortés’s sword on his

72 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender an d S l a ve r y in the A g e o f G l o b a l E x p a n s i o n 73
the peoples of Africa and Asia, the Amerindians he encountered had
been isolated from the rest of the world, a situation that rendered them
far more vulnerable to depredation and conquest by Europeans, who,
after the so-called gunpowder revolution, possessed the capacity to
overpower indigenous people.
The use of enslaved Africans was in part a consequence of the anni-
hilation of Amerindian peoples through disease. Lacking a labor force
drawn from local peoples, plantation owners turned to purchasing men
and women captured from Africa. By 1650 or so, they had imported
sufficient numbers of enslaved Africans to the West Indies that the
plantation economies of tobacco and then sugar were able to flourish.
The growing commerce in sugar, especially, necessitated a larger and
larger workforce, which was supplied by the trade in enslaved Africans.
Between 1600 and 1650, some ten thousand men and women per year
were forcibly transported to the New World from Africa. Most of those
went to Brazil and to the Spanish colonies of the South American main-
land. Between 1650 and 1700, that number had doubled to twenty
thousand per year, more than half of whom went to the French, English,
and Dutch islands of the Caribbean. By 1800, trade in enslaved Africans
had grown to sixty thousand per year.
Life on the plantations was harsh. Enslaved men and women worked
in the fields from dawn to dark, with breaks only for meals. If they lost
tools or failed to meet production quotas, they were whipped and oth-
erwise abused. Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican planter, recorded the
punishments he meted out in 1756 for a variety of transgressions. “Had
Derby well whipped,” he wrote in January, “and made Egypt shit in his
mouth.” Seven months later he recounted whipping “Hector for losing
his hoe; made New Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.” Thistlewood
regularly raped the enslaved women under his control, and he often lent
them out to overseers for their own “use” of them as “wives.”6 These
injuries and indignities characterized the violent nature of the institu-
tion of chattel slavery, in which enslaved persons had no rights and no
redress for the harm done to them.
Enslaved men and women could enjoy little in the way of family
life, even in those colonies— Spanish, Portuguese, and French— that
allowed them to marry. The Catholic Church permitted marriage be-
tween enslaved men and women, even in cases where the owner refused
them the possibility; masters in these jurisdictions also could not sep-
arate families by selling members or sending them away. These laws
were more often observed in the breach, however, and British colo-
nial officials did not recognize marriage among enslaved persons at

74 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender an d S l a ve r y in the A g e o f G l o b a l E x p a n s i o n 75
together. But the absence of fathers did not mean that these families
were not patriarchal, at least in New England. In Boston, for example,
an enslaved woman named Jane Lake, owned by Deborah Thayer, and
an enslaved man named Sebastian, owned by John Waite, married in
1700. Thayer insisted that Sebastian provide the earnings of one of his
six workdays toward “the support of . . . his intended wife and her
children, if it should please God to give her any.” Waite refused this pro-
vision, offering instead to “allow Bastian Five pounds, in Money p[er]
annum towards the support of his children p[er] Jane.”8 Thayer agreed.
Both parties to this arrangement implicitly recognized that any chil-
dren born to the couple belonged to Thayer, but they also assumed that
Sebastian had the responsibility of paying for their upkeep. Interestingly,
Waite paid the five pounds per year to Sebastian rather than to Thayer,
and she, for her part, made no bones about this.
The following year, the couple’s newborn daughter, also named
Jane—and named, significantly, by Sebastian—was baptized in the First
Church in Boston. Her father carried her down the aisle and held her
up to the congregation as the minister anointed her with water: fathers
“holding up” their infants before the Lord had long been an important
Puritan tradition. Despite the fact that little Jane belonged, legally, to
Deborah Thayer, the Boston community gave Sebastian the right to act
with authority as her father. Moreover, Jane and daughter Jane took
Sebastian’s name, even though he did not have a surname. They became
“Basteens” rather than Lakes— Jane’s surname— or Thayers. These
aspects of patriarchal control seem to have been readily expected by
Boston’s white and black populations alike, despite the conditions of
enslavement that made Jane and Sebastian’s family mother centered.
Enslaved men and women constantly resisted the conditions of their
lives and made strenuous attempts to ameliorate them. These efforts
ranged from passivity to refusal to work, to escape, to violence, to out-
right revolt. Work slowdowns and the misplacement of tools could al-
leviate the endless toil and tedium for a short time, but such resistance
might also bring down harsh physical punishment upon the heads of
those who tried it. Women could do little to avert sexual depredations
by overseers and masters, even less those by their male partners, unless
they took the drastic and fatal step of attacking their attackers. Some
did, and they suffered terrible consequences. Women sometimes adopted
reproductive strategies to alter their situations, turning to abortifacients
such as the peacock flower to abort children they could not bear to see
brought up in slavery.

76 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y
The Massachusetts (Colony) General Court House of Representatives printed this
broadside advertisement for a runaway slave from Watertown, Massachusetts, in
1776. During the American Revolution, the British promised freedom to Africans
who escaped their captivity and joined the Loyalist troops. Library of Congress,
rbpe03900400
Slavery distorted the expectations societies had for how men and
women should live and introduced experiences based on gender that
did not prevail among nonslave populations in those same societies.
Hürrem, Malik Ambar, Beshir Agha, and Malintzin represent a
tiny, tiny minority of men and women enslaved in the Eurasian and
Mesoamerican worlds. Malintzin’s unlikely journey from child of an
indigenous noble family, to Mayan slave and concubine, to right-hand
woman to and mistress of the Spanish conquistador, and finally to noble
landowner in her own right cannot in any way be considered typical,
nor can that of Hürrem or Ambar. Indeed, we know about their lives
only because they were so unusual. All of them possessed remarkable
talents, demonstrated superb judgment, and made astute decisions, and
these qualities enabled them to succeed the way they did. They were
able to make use of them, however, because the systems in which they
were enslaved as youth were relatively “open.” Kinship-or exchange-
based slavery sometimes allowed for opportunities for a kind of normal
gendered life that state-sponsored or chattel slavery did not. The planta-
tion system of chattel slavery that characterized the Americas following
the arrival of Europeans after 1492 ushered in an entirely different in-
stitution of slavery, one in which few people could thrive and prosper.

78 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y
Chapter 5

Gender and the State

in the Age of Revolution,
1750–1850

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

Deborah Sampson, in the guise of Robert Shurtliff, donned men’s clothing, enlisted
in the army, and fought for independence during the American Revolution. She
earned a pension for her contribution to the cause. Leon Abdalian Collection,
08_01_000406

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

Gender a n d the S ta te in th e A g e o f R e v o l u t i o n 81
qualities that justified their participation in political life. These qualities—
summed up in the term virtue, from the Latin vir (“man”)—occupied a
central place in eighteenth-century British, French, American, and Latin
American economic and political theory. The concept of virtue came
out of Aristotelian and Renaissance republican traditions of citizenship,
which saw in participation in civic life the sole means through which
men (and it was only men and men of independent wealth) could achieve
their full human potential. It signified the capacity of human beings to
govern themselves, to subordinate private interest to the public good.
In the eighteenth century, owning landed property was the mark of the
virtuous citizen. Because ownership of land and possession of indepen-
dence could be enjoyed only by men, citizenship and virtue were mas-
culine entities. Those holding nonlanded property—goods, stocks, bank
deposits, and the like—did not qualify. Moreover, the gendered nature
of virtue and property as masculine logically entailed upon possessors
of nonlanded property a feminine quality.
As the commercial revolution astronomically increased the amount
of consumer goods available for purchase to more and more people,
observers railed against the “luxury” it seemed to be instilling in the
populaces of European and American societies. Commentators identified
luxury with passions and desire, qualities regarded as antithetical to the
stability and independence required of those who looked after the public
good. Represented as feminine, luxury threatened to undermine the vir-
tuous nature of the political realm; the owners of nonlanded wealth and
the purchasers of new consumer goods who emerged in the process of the
commercial revolution constituted feminized beings, subject to appetites
that undermined independence and virtue. Men’s involvement in commer-
cial economic activity called into question their manliness and thus their
fitness for political power. As the English clergyman John Brown put it in
a 1757 screed blaming Britain’s loss to France in the War of the Austrian
Succession in the 1740s on the moral corruption of its leaders, “The luxu-
rious and effeminate Manners in the higher Ranks, together with a general
defect of Principle, operate powerfully, and fatally . . . to have fitted us for
a Prey to the Insults and Invasions of our most powerful Enemies.”3
Enlightenment thinkers recognized that commercial life and virtue
as understood in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were not
compatible with one another. Philosophers devised a series of theories
that sought to make them so, seeking to turn the passions and desires
associated with consumption into “interests” that served the nation as a
whole. Enlightenment thinkers spoke frequently of “the polished nations”
of Western Europe, whose increased commercial activity and therefore

82 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender a n d the S ta te in th e A g e o f R e v o l u t i o n 83
But women’s newly recognized influence with men was effec-
tive only insofar as women exercised it through example or through
gentle persuasion, moralists insisted, and their behavior should in no
way suggest that they were not fully subordinate to their husbands,
functioning under their beneficent but watchful gaze within their
proper sphere of the home. The new recognition of women’s impor-
tance to society, in other words, carried with it many prescriptive
constraints on women’s behavior, and would have significant ide-
ological power to contain their activities in later decades. Women
should expect “to command by obeying,” decreed James Fordyce in
the wildly popular Sermons to Young Women, published in 1765,
“and by yielding to conquer.”6 Only in this way could the reforma-
tion of male manners be brought about and sensibility inculcated
in men. An ideology of separate spheres—for men the rough-and-
tumble life of work and politics, for women the domestic realm of
home, family, and the cultivation of morality—took hold among the
middling classes of Europe and America and would influence their
societies in profound and long-standing ways.
It is important to realize, however, that this was an ideology—a
prescription—and not necessarily a description of how people actu-
ally lived. Significant numbers of respectable middling women worked
throughout the eighteenth century, either in their own trades or in the
shops of their husbands. They continued to trade in luxury goods such
as silks, tea, chocolate, or chinaware; they prepared and sold food and
drink; they acted as nurses and midwives; they undertook all manner
and kind of needlework; and they took paying boarders into their
homes. In fact, not much changed in either the kinds of work women
performed or in the proportion of women working over the course of
the eighteenth century.
What did change was the meaning that was attached to women’s
work. While upper-and middle-class women were being transformed, ide-
ologically speaking, into the embodiment of virtue over the course of the
eighteenth century, representations of plebeian, or lower-ranked, women
were changing too. At the beginning of the eighteenth century they
constituted the industrious, productive, invaluable contributors to family
and national wealth; by the end of the century, plebeian women came to
be regarded as coarse, profligate, and degraded. Portrayed as shameful,
suspect, and even criminal, working women were depicted as posing a se-
rious danger to the nation’s moral, physical, and economic health.
Middling and lower-ranked women took responsibility for work
located around the cottage while men went off to labor in the fields

84 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender a n d the S ta te in th e A g e o f R e v o l u t i o n 85
industry to domestic service to the earliest factories, the valuation placed
on the work women performed dropped dramatically.
The middle-class domestic ideal called for women to stay at home
to look after the needs of their husbands and children. These new soci-
etal attitudes could not prevent women from working, for necessity was
a harsh taskmaster, but they had enormous consequences nonetheless.
If the definition of “worker” no longer included women, if “workers”
were men, then men could easily displace women in areas of work that
were traditionally theirs. Women who had to work to feed themselves
and their families found it nigh impossible to command employment
that paid a wage sufficient for them to do so. “Women’s work,” by def-
inition, paid poorly and was by its nature intermittent. The negative
connotations attached to women’s work also placed enormous pressure
on men and women to live up to a standard of exclusively male bread-
winning that few working families could afford. The ideology of sep-
arate spheres, then, had a powerful, if uneven, impact on the men and
women of various ranks. Where it depicted middling and upper-ranked
women as nearly divine in character and elevated them to a level of in-
fluence they did not have before, it reduced working women to nearly
subhuman status. The picture of the virtuous “angel in the house,” as
the middle-class woman would be called in the nineteenth century,
required her mirror image, the degraded, brutish, immoral working
woman. William Lecky, in his History of European Morals, published
in 1869, recognized that the despised working woman, often depicted
as a prostitute, made not just the representation of the pure woman pos-
sible, but actually secured her saintliness in very real ways. “Herself the
supreme type of vice,” he wrote,

she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her the
unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted,
and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think
of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony
or remorse and despair. On that degraded and ignoble form are
concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with
shame.9

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

86 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender a n d the S ta te in th e A g e o f R e v o l u t i o n 87
class that ruled Britain and commanded its armies with an opportu-
nity to redeem itself. Humiliated by upstart citizen militias in America,
the men who led the British army found themselves cast as effemi-
nate poseurs who had nothing to contribute to the nation and only
undermined its strength. War with France gave them a second chance
to present themselves as manly and heroic leaders, and they took it up
with a vengeance, contributing to a cult of heroism that surpassed vir-
tually all previous instances in intensity and display. Men such as Lord
Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar, set themselves apart from others of their
own status, and certainly those of a meaner station, by touting their
patriotism, their courage, and their honor—their manliness. At a time
when the “other ranks,” the enlisted and conscripted men described by
the Duke of Wellington as “the very scum of the earth,” were regarded
as unreliable, uncivilized, and even dangerous, the elite military class
presented itself as the protectors of the nation and the progenitors of
imperial expansion. Men only slightly lower down on the social scale
joined in the celebration of heroics as well, taking up positions in the
army and navy in a burst of patriotism and pride. Manliness and mili-
tary service had become intricately connected with one another.
The liberal revolutions drew on Enlightenment thought that
extrapolated the ideas of the scientific revolution about the universe
to social and political life. Just as the universe could be shown to be
governed by laws of nature, philosophers insisted that society and its po-
litical expression or government were also governed by laws of nature. It
was possible to understand the operations and characteristics of nature
through the exercise of reason, natural philosophers asserted. If applied
to human relations, reason would reveal that political systems and di-
vision of societies along unequal lines were unnatural. Moreover, the
use of reason would enable humans to discover natural institutions and
relations; once found, people would naturally conform to them and find
peace, harmony, and happiness. As Baron de Montesquieu put it, laws
should be in relation to the climate of each country, to the quality
of its soil, to its situation and extent, to the principal occupation
of the natives, whether husbandmen, huntsmen, or shepherds: they
should have relation to the degree of liberty which the constitution
will bear; to the religion of the inhabitants, to their inclinations,
riches, numbers, commerce, manners, and customs. In fine they
have relations to each other, as also to their origin, to the intent
of the legislator, and to the order of things on which they are
established; in all of which different lights they ought to be
considered.10

88 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender a n d the S ta te in th e A g e o f R e v o l u t i o n 89
In October 1789, French women marched to Versailles during the French
Revolution to bring the king and the National Assembly to Paris, where they
could be watched by the Parisian populace. Their actions helped to ensure the
capitulation of the king. Augustin Challamel, Histoire-musée de la république
Française, depuis l’assemblée des notables (Paris: Delloye, 1842)

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

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

Gender a n d the S ta te in th e A g e o f R e v o l u t i o n 91
In France legislators began to pass laws that removed women from
the public sphere of politics: they banned women’s clubs and forbade
them from membership in men’s clubs; they prohibited women from
attending public meetings; and they barred them from gathering in
groups. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 went further to implement a
society based on separate spheres for men and women, establishing
laws that reinstituted the patriarchal nature of the family. Women lost
the legal personhood and the rights that they had gained just a dozen
years earlier: they could not sue or be sued; they could not testify
in court; they could not control their property. In short, they were
shunted back into the private sphere of home and family, where their
duties consisted of maintaining domestic peace and tranquility. In the
United States, just as states were in the process of enfranchising more
and more white men, they began to explicitly outlaw women from
voting.
The radical politics of the American and French Revolutions, the de-
velopment of free trade practices in commerce and industry, the factory
system and a new division of labor, the creation of class society—all of
the elements and characteristics we identify with the rise of liberalism
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries acted to destabilize and ul-
timately overthrow the old order of landed elites. In the course of all
this upheaval, a new gender order was established too, for liberalism
carried with it the promise and the threat of equality between men
and women. For many people, however, such a prospect could not be
tolerated. “Reason is mature,” wrote one French commentator in 1794,
“it is serious, it is austere, and these qualities cannot be associated
with a young woman.”14 The potential contradiction between, on the
one hand, a liberal ideology that had legitimated the dismantling of
aristocratic power and authority and the enfranchisement of middle-
class and later working-class men and, on the other, the denial of the
claims of women to full citizenship was resolved by appeals to bio-
logical and characterological differences between the sexes. Doctors,
scientists, clergymen, and politicians began to establish definitions of
femininity whose qualities were the exact opposite of those that had
warranted widespread male participation in the public sphere. Men
possessed the capacity for reason, action, aggression, independence,
and self-interest. Women inhabited a separate, private sphere, one suit-
able for the so-called inherent qualities of femininity: emotion, pas-
sivity, submission, dependence, and selflessness, all derived, doctors
and politicians claimed insistently, from women’s sexual and reproduc-
tive organization.

92 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Gender a n d the S ta te in th e A g e o f R e v o l u t i o n 93
L’Ouverture wrote a constitution abolishing slavery and he set himself
up as governor for life. In January 1804, the general who had led the
Saint Domingue army of ex-slaves, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, declared
the independent, sovereign state of Haiti.
The experience of nearly continuous warfare throughout the
1790s and into the 1800s, along with the constant threat of inva-
sion by European powers, resulted in an emphasis on militarism as
the mark of Haitian masculinity. The figure of the black general be-
came a national icon; that of the rebel slave morphed into the cit-
izen soldier defending the nation against those enemies who would
re-enslave the Haitian people. Women had no place in this kind of
iconography except as the object of protection by warriors. The first
constitution excluded women from voting or holding office, and it
explicitly established the new country as a model of patriarchy. “No
one is worthy of being a Haitian,” asserted Article Nine, “if he is not
a good father, a good son, a good husband, and above all a good
soldier.”17
The Haitian Revolution marked the first statewide emancipa-
tion of enslaved peoples of the modern era. In the early nineteenth
century, the revolt of a number of South American colonies against
Spain similarly offered enslaved men the opportunity to join armies
in exchange for their freedom. As in Haiti, the new republics placed
a premium on the military male, as the revolutionaries styled them-
selves as manly, virile fighters for independence from an enfeebled,
effeminate Spain. Despite the fact that many women, enslaved and
free, fought against the Spanish, the revolutions were described as
male affairs, and the new constitutions that granted South American
men independence and political rights explicitly barred women from
enjoying them. As in the United States, France, and Haiti, South
American republics envisaged themselves as patriarchal republics
modeled on Rome.
In 1807, Britain outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and then,
in 1833, the institution of slavery itself. These actions resulted from
a decades-long campaign carried out by evangelical Christians and
humanitarians. Women played a crucial role in the abolition fight, as
they urged Americans and Britons to consider the suffering and in-
humane conditions imposed on enslaved peoples by their fellow
countrymen and countrywomen. The moral basis of antislavery
appeals—sympathy for others, pity, compassion, the so-called feminine
qualities associated with sensibility—dovetailed nicely with the traits
purportedly possessed by women.18 Britons found slavery incompatible

94 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Abolitionist literature of the 1780s often featured an enslaved

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

Gender a n d the S ta te in th e A g e o f R e v o l u t i o n 95
Evangelicals and liberals understood enslaved people to be part of the
human family of man. The model of a universal human family enabled
abolitionists to think in terms of equality before God and to see slavery
as an abomination, but this imagined family structure closely resembled
that of British families, in which a father ruled over his dependent wife
and children. Within it, enslaved males occupied the position of children
who would have to be guided and educated into manhood, which could
not be attained until they enjoyed property in themselves and thus inde-
pendence. Enslaved women required schooling in the ways of separate
spheres ideology; they would have to learn to depend on, serve, and
be subservient to their husbands and fathers.20 As an article in a Cape
Town, South African newspaper put it, “Freedom . . . offers something
in addition to personal enjoyments. The Freeman become the Head of a
Family. . . . The Father, however poor, however overlooked or despised
by the world, is now an object, in one place at least, not only of love but
reverence. There is now a circle where, if he chooses, he may reign as
King.”21 Emancipation in the British colonies served the purposes of em-
pire, as did that in the French colonies, where the revolutions of 1848
brought about immediate abolition of slavery.
The early supporters of women’s rights frequently characterized
women’s position in society as analogous to slavery; many of them, in
fact, like the Americans Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and
Susan B. Anthony, had come to their feminist positions after having
served at length in the antislavery campaign. Without the means to
become financially independent of men, women would forever be
locked into the same situation of vulnerability to abuse from men as
enslaved Africans experienced at the hands of their masters. The mar-
riage contract, in particular, buttressed by the legal systems of Europe
and America, gave husbands complete possession of their wives’ bodies.
Throughout the nineteenth century women and their male allies chal-
lenged the legal, political, and social limitations placed on women,
seeking property rights, education and employment opportunities, and
the right to divorce, insisting that rather than protecting women in the
domestic sphere of home and family, these legal disabilities exposed
them to the brutalities of the world at large.
The most radical challenge of the women’s movement to patriar-
chal control consisted of demands for enfranchisement on the same
lines as men. The campaign for the vote was designed to eliminate the
notions of separate spheres and “natural” differences between the sexes
insisted on by domestic ideology. In the United States, a convention of
women held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 passed unanimously

96 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

The delegates to the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York,
in 1848 included both men and women. The Role of Honor listed those who
endorsed the “Declaration of Sentiments” calling for women’s equality with men.
Library of Congress, scrp4006701
all of the resolutions calling for property rights, guardianship of chil-
dren, inheritance rights, and the like. The clause demanding women’s
suffrage, on the other hand, barely achieved a majority of votes. Soon,
however, votes for women became the mainstay of the American femi-
nist movement, as a resolution passed at an 1856 national convention
noted: “Resolved, that the main power of the woman’s rights movement
lies in this: that while always demanding for woman better education,
better employment, and better laws, it has kept steadily in view the one
cardinal demand for the right of suffrage: in a democracy, the symbol
and guarantee of all other rights.” Former teacher and temperance ad-
vocate Susan B. Anthony joined with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an ardent
antislavery activist, to spearhead the movement for women’s suffrage
that began after the Seneca Falls convention and lasted for more than
sixty years. A few French women led by the utopian socialist Jeanne
Déroin, a feminist journalist who was jailed for her opinions, demanded
the vote in 1848 from the newly established provisional government;
its demise at the hands of Louis Napoleon cut short the question of
women’s suffrage as well. The women’s suffrage campaign in Britain
began in 1866 when the election of John Stuart Mill to Parliament made
it possible to introduce legislation enfranchising women.
The economic and political revolutions of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries produced the material and cultural resources with
which the West established itself as a dominant player in the world at
large. Convinced of their moral superiority, exemplified especially by
their gender order of separate spheres and their treatment of women,
and armed with the economic and technological means necessary, the
previously insignificant countries of Europe and the United States
emerged ready, willing, and able to take on the rest of the world. Over
the next seventy-five years, Europeans would bring their notions of a
proper gender order to lands far beyond their shores and assess the
qualities of peoples there on the basis of how far they accorded with
Western ideas about masculinity and femininity.

98 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

Chapter 6

Gender in the Age

of Empires, 1815–1914

O
n February 11, 1892, Major Fukushima Yasumasa left his of-
fice at the Japanese embassy in Berlin, mounted his horse, and
set out on a sixteen-month journey across Eurasia. He intended
his trip to be a reconnaissance mission that would provide Japan with
the intelligence necessary to counter the threat of Western expansion
into areas Japan considered its sphere of influence. “In my most humble
opinion,” Fukushima wrote home to his superiors in January 1891, “the
greatest threat and imminent danger is Russia. We must obtain all of
the information that we can pertaining to Russia’s eastward expansion
plans as quickly as possible.”1 He rode through Germany and Poland
and into Russia, crossing the Ural Mountains into Asia on an 8,700-
mile journey on horseback. He was particularly eager to see for himself
the progress Russia had made on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, whose
construction had begun in Vladivostock in April 1891.
Strong spring storms hampered his travel and frightened his horse.
When he reached the Urals, hot summer temperatures and biting
insects, along with the depredations of bandits and thieves, compelled
Fukushima to travel at night. Howling wolves alarmed both horse and
rider and made the nighttime riding a daunting experience. In Siberia, he
encountered whole villages ravaged by cholera; their inhabitants would
not or could not offer him hospitality. He struggled through swampland
that threatened to entrap his horse. In September, Fukushima reached
the Altai Mountains on the border of Russia and China and faced ex-
treme cold as he ascended along the steep rocky pathways. Food was
scarce. Snow fell on September 22, rendering the trail icy and treach-
erous as he descended the mountain into Outer Mongolia.
By December he reached Lake Baikal, riding through deep snowfields
in extreme cold. The worst months of the Siberian winter lay ahead,
with temperatures falling to fifty degrees below zero. In February, the
baying of a wolf spooked his horse; Fukushima, only half into his saddle
at the time, was dragged along the ground by his mount. He struck his
head on a large block of ice and fell unconscious with a gaping wound.
After a number of days in bed, Fukushima recovered, and he entered
Manchuria on March 20, 1893. A week later, traveling through grassy
plains, he and his horse got caught up in the black smoke and flames of
a brush fire caused by spontaneous combustion. In April he contracted
what could have been malaria and lay unconscious for ten days. While
he recuperated, the seasons turned, bringing spring rains and impassable
muddy roads. Through May and June he rode through China, Korea,
and back into Russia, reaching Vladivostok on June 12.
Fukushima arrived back in Japan at the end of June 1893. His
adventures and tales of derring-do on the Asian continent, widely cov-
ered in the press, made him a national hero at a time when Japanese
statesmen had come to be seen as effeminate imitators of Western values,
colonized betrayers of a manly Japan. “In one fell swoop,” wrote an
Osakan newspaper, “this stalwart fellow of five lands and two seas has
astonished us all and elevated the good name of Japanese men. What’s
more, he has made our nation’s pride shine among the Great Powers.”2
Young men hankering to prove their manliness flocked to what was fast
becoming Japan’s imperial frontier on the Asian continent, seeking to
emulate their country’s new military hero.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, and especially after
1870, the industrialized countries of Japan and the West embarked on
an intensive program of imperial expansion. Justifications for the taking
and administering of lands and people rested upon notions of funda-
mental difference among those doing the imperializing and those being
colonized. Gender stood at the heart of these ideas of difference, serving
both to represent the character and identities of colonizers and colonized
and to legitimize actions taken by imperialists on behalf of and against
“their” subjects. Justifications for empire moved from the mission to ed-
ucate lesser peoples in the ways of civilization and self-government in the
first half of the nineteenth century to assertions that Asian and African
peoples were inherently incapable of exercising the self-control neces-
sary for governing themselves in the second half. In the process of that
transition, colonized and nonwhite peoples became increasingly depicted
as feminine. Representations of empire took on the image of masterly,
manly Europeans, Americans, and then Japanese exercising control over
irrational, impulsive, weak-willed, effeminate peoples.
These ideas derived from Enlightenment thought, which posited
that although there may once have been a common origin for and unity
of humankind, differences of climate and geography had intervened to
create a variety of separate peoples who looked different; spoke dif-
ferent languages; had different histories; and enjoyed different cultural,

100 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

social, legal, and political practices. As philosopher Adam Ferguson
claimed in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society:

The burning ardours, and the torturing jealousies, of the seraglio

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

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

Ge n d e r in t h e A g e o f E mp i re s 101
of Ranks, African and Asian societies “entertain very gross ideas con-
cerning those female virtues which, in a polished nation, are supposed to
constitute the honour and dignity of the sex.”4
Climatic theories assumed that all human beings shared a common
origin, that they were similar to one another in their capabilities, and
that education could raise inferior peoples up to a level of civilization
that would justify their freedom and even self-government. Such notions
undergirded the abolitionist movement in Europe and the United States
and informed Britons’ claims that their presence in India was part of
a mission to bring “civilization” and self-government to that ancient
land. In the second half of the nineteenth century, under the impact of
Social Darwinism, harsher and more rigid ideas about race challenged
and overcame such a liberal view. Social Darwinists applied Charles
Darwin’s ideas about the survival of the fittest—describing how ani-
mals evolved—to human society. During the late 1850s and 1860s, such
Social Darwinists began to describe racial and ethnic differences in ab-
solute, biological terms, so that people of non-European backgrounds
were construed as utterly different from their European or Japanese
overlords—indeed, unable ever to become like them.
The outbreak of the Indian Rebellion in 1857 helped to usher in
this profound change in attitudes about racial difference from a liberal
view to far more conservative assertions of the irremediable, biological
nature of racial differences and inequalities. The rebellion broke out in
May 1857, when Indian soldiers of the Bengal army—called sepoys—
rose up against their British officers. The rebellion spread across much
of northern India, attracting alienated groups from all parts of society.
For more than a year, Hindus and Muslims, merchants and landowners,
princes and peasants fought against and in many cases defeated local
British authorities, until it seemed that they might be able to oust the
British altogether. They did not, but it took at least fourteen months
before the army that had remained loyal to Britain, made up predom-
inately of the “manly” warrior “race” of Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, and
Nepalese Gurkhas, was able to re-establish control in large parts of
Oudh and the Punjab and to reassert their authority over the subcon-
tinent as a whole. The British admired the Indians they considered es-
pecially martial; they attributed to them a manliness that other South
Asians, especially Bengali Hindus, lacked.
The effeminacy of Bengali men, in the thinking of eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century theorists, entailed a sexual appetite and debauchery
of enormous proportions. Savagery had for centuries connoted a pro-
miscuous sexuality that reduced indigenous peoples to the level of the

102 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

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

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

Ge n d e r in t h e A g e o f E mp i re s 103
In story after story, British women and girls were stripped of their
clothes, sexually molested, and thrown to the masses for further abuse.
One clergyman claimed in a letter to The Times that he witnessed
Indians taking

48 females, most of them girls of from 10 to 14, many delicately

nurtured ladies,—violated them and kept for the base purposes of the
heads of the insurrection for a whole week. At the end of that time
they made them strip themselves, and gave them up to the lowest of
the people to abuse in broad daylight in the street of Delhi. They then
commenced the work of torturing them to death, cutting off their
breasts, fingers, and noses, and leaving them to die. One lady was
three days dying.5

Certainly British women and children, as well as British men, died at

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

104 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

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

Ge n d e r in t h e A g e o f E mp i re s 105
of the universe. The survival of the fittest is an absolute truth in the
conditions of the modern world.”7
For other Europeans, conflict offered the most effective means of
strengthening the citizens of a nation. In the eyes of many who embraced
Darwin’s notions of the survival of the fittest, war constituted a posi-
tive good, an arena in which men could be hardened and those who
were unfit could be selected out and prevented from procreating, and
thus passing on inferior or degenerate traits to a subsequent generation.
Through war, the “effeminate” could be weeded out, the manly pre-
served. “The stimulus of a great patriotic excitement,” wrote one apol-
ogist for war and empire, “the determination to endure burdens and
make sacrifices, the self-abnegation which will face loss, and suffering,
and even death, for the commonweal, are bracing tonics to national
health, and they counteract the enervating effects of ‘too much love of
living,’ too much ease, and luxury, and material prosperity. . . . Strength
is not maintained without exercise.”8
Africa, and especially African women, had long exemplified for
Europeans ideas of difference, strangeness, diversity, and disorder.
The earliest European travel writings about Africa drew upon notions
of gender and sexuality to convey the sense of outlandishness that
European explorers experienced as they came in contact with African
societies for the first time in the fifteenth century. Many precolonial
African cosmologies relied on a model of gender relations that was du-
alistic in nature. That is, unlike in Western theories of origin and so-
cial order, women were not perceived to be defective or deficient men.
Certainly they were regarded as lacking in certain male characteristics,
but men, similarly, were understood to be lacking in certain female
aspects; this situation made it necessary to combine male with female
elements to ensure that the world worked as it was designed to. Within
a cosmology gendered in this way, conceptions of law and authority
might very well require the fusion of male and female power. Among
the Yaka of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for in-
stance, and the Yoruba of present-day Nigeria, kingship rituals involved
a chief enacting a birth, an event that connected him with the fertility
of women. The power of reproduction undergirded the political au-
thority of the chief; indeed, his distinction from and superior position
in relation to his subjects depended on the fact that he possessed both
masculine virility and feminine fecundity. The Luba of the Congo Basin
believed that the spirits of their kings resided in the body of a female
spirit medium; only a woman, they judged, possessed a body “strong
enough” to contain a royal spirit. They invested their new kings with

106 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Ge n d e r in t h e A g e o f E mp i re s 107
African.”11 So overwhelming was the sexuality of African women in the
minds of British men that it exceeded all bounds. “If they meet with
a [white] Man,” traveler William Smith averred in a 1745 account of
his experiences in Guinea, “they immediately strip his lower Parts and
throw themselves upon him.”12
The conflation of primitive savagery and sexuality appeared early
on in the stories about Amazons who inhabited West Africa, and
Europeans used those stories to justify violence against those who
resisted British and French efforts to expand their control of the area.
Tales of “scantily attired” tattooed female soldiers in Dahomey brought
home to Britain by adventurers and government officials excited the
colonial imagination about Africa and African women. Ever since the
late seventeenth century, armed, uniformed, disciplined women had
served as palace guards to the king of Dahomey. By the time Europeans
arrived in the eighteenth century, they had taken on the functions of
warriors. Their size, strength, and demeanor led Europeans to dub them
“Amazons,” after the ancient Greek stories of savage women warriors.
The gender and sexual disorder exemplified by Amazon women could
be readily adduced by their “masculine physiques” and unwomanly
traits. “Such . . . was the size of the female skeleton, and the mus-
cular development of the frame,” observed explorer Richard Burton in
1863, “that in many cases femineity [sic] could be detected only by the
bosom.”13
Europeans regarded Amazons as superior to male soldiers in disci-
pline, skill, loyalty, effectiveness, and ruthlessness. By the late nineteenth
century, stories circulated widely in Britain of Amazons who engaged in
horrific hand-to-hand combat using sharpened fingernails and razors to
kill, mutilate, and then eat their foes, and of women who brought back
the scalps, genitals, and internal organs of their fallen enemies to display
as trophies. As Burton’s widow claimed, Amazons were “crueler and
fiercer than men,” creatures who tortured their prisoners and cut open
the bellies of pregnant women.14
Their martial prowess introduced complexity and contradiction
into the notion of manly, martial races. Dahomean women trained hard
and often; in 1861, a French missionary watched one of their training
exercises. “At a given signal,” he wrote, “they throw themselves with in-
describable fury upon the bank of thorns, cross it, leap upon the thorny
house, retire from it as if driven back, and return three times to the
charge—all this with such rapidity that the eye can scarcely follow them.
They clamber over the thorny obstacles as lightly as a dancer vaults upon
a floor, and that though their naked feet are pierced in all directions with

108 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh was the leader of the Amazon troops of Dahomey in 1851.
Women warriors fought fiercely on behalf of the Dahomean kings; descriptions
of them by European travelers cemented their image as bloodthirsty savages
in the minds of the British public. Frederick E. Forbes, Dahomey and the
Dahomans: being the journals of two missions to the king of Dahomey, and
residence in his capital, in the year 1849 and 1850 (London, 1851), vol. 1, facing
23. Library of Congress, 05014405
the sharp thorns of the cactus.” Their training stood them in good stead
on the actual battlefield. British Commander Frederick Forbes, who was
in West Africa as part of an antislavery naval squadron, watched an
attack by Dahomean forces on the city of Atakpame in 1840. Most of
the inhabitants fled, but some four hundred defenders of the city fought
back tenaciously, “kept the Dahomeans in check, killed many, [and] put
the males to the rout.” It was the Dahomean women who determined
the outcome, Forbes noted. “Had it not been for a rally of the amazons,
[the defenders] would have discomfited the Dahomean army.”15 During
the French war against Dahomey in 1892, the women warriors, who
made up about one-third of the army, fought courageously and tena-
ciously, harassing French troops as they made their way into the hinter-
land. The French reported the women’s exploits in fulsomely positive
terms, impressed by their willingness to attack and attack again the
dug-in French forces. Ultimately, the Europeans prevailed, deeply cut-
ting into the women’s numbers, eventually compelling them to retreat,
and establishing French rule in the colony.
We generally think of imperialism as a Western phenomenon, but
in Asia, Japan proved the equal of the European and American colonial
powers. In 1853, as part of its program of expansion that would ulti-
mately become a full-blown imperial enterprise by the end of the cen-
tury, the United States sent a fleet under the command of Commodore
Matthew Perry to “open” Japanese ports to trade with the Western
powers. The inability of the Tokugawa shogunate to prevent the intru-
sion, and its willingness to sign what many regarded as a humiliating
treaty with the United States, led to its downfall at the hands of disgrun-
tled samurai warriors and the establishment of imperial court rule in
1868. The Meiji restoration, as it was called, disrupted the Japanese so-
cial, economic, and political order as reformers sought to transform the
country from a feudal society into a liberal capitalist one. Government
officials believed that their best route to preserving Japanese power lay
in imitating the West, in adopting the technologies, values, and lifestyles
of Europeans and Americans. Japanese gentlemen took to wearing the
costume of Western men, including the high-collared shirts that became
a caricature of Westernization. “High collar” gentlemen garnered de-
rision and scorn from those, mainly samurai, who saw in such mim-
icry the mark of effeminacy. These critics adopted an oppositional style
of dress and conduct, fashioning themselves as tough, primitive, foul-
mouthed “barbarians.” One university student spoke for many, many
others when he decried his fellow students’ desire to emulate the West.
“I feel they have become too civilized,” he complained. “They have lost

110 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

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

Ge n d e r in t h e A g e o f E mp i re s 111
In 1900, Major General Yasumasa Fukushima (holding binoculars) led Japanese
troops in an invasion of China. Japanese imperial incursions into China and Korea
helped to rehabilitate a masculinity that many contemporaries felt had been under
assault when Japan became susceptible to Western influences following the Meiji
Restoration of 1868. Ironically, in this painting Fukushima wears a Western-style
uniform and is consulting with a British army officer. Ishimatsu Nakajima, The
Japanese Army under Major General Fukushima Advancing with the Allied Armies
toward Tʻien-chin, China, Library of Congress, 2009631625

became business owners and managers and held positions of authority

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

112 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Ge n d e r in t h e A g e o f E mp i re s 113
George Catlin’s painting of a dance honoring “two-spirit” men, called berdaches
by Europeans. Men who dressed like and took on women’s roles held high status
in Native American cultures; they also played an important role in warfare.
George Catlin, Dance to the Berdash, 1835–1837, oil on canvas, Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr., 1985.66.442

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

114 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Ge n d e r in t h e A g e o f E mp i re s 115
Chapter 7

Gender Politics in the

Twentieth Century

I
n 1951, a Kikuyu woman named Elizabeth Gachika took an oath
of allegiance as a “freedom fighter” to Mau Mau, a guerrilla move-
ment against the British and those loyalist Kikuyu who supported
the colonial government in Kenya. The next year, following the as-
sassination of loyalist Chief Maruhiu, some of her neighbors named
her to British officials; she was arrested and jailed for three months
in Nairobi. Upon her release, she journeyed to the forest where rebels
from Kiambu, Meru, and Nyeri districts had established a camp from
which they conducted assaults on Britons and loyalist Kikuyus. For a
year Gachika smuggled food into the camp, cooked, and performed
largely domestic tasks for the fighters. In 1953, she became a soldier
herself.
“I went with the men on raids,” she told an interviewer later in her
life. At one point, the soldier she was on patrol with lost his nerve and
“refused to shoot” at enemies they encountered. So she “took the gun
and shot and then we ran away.” Gachika and another woman “would
go to look for Europeans and if they yelled we would shoot them. We
were the ones who fought for freedom,” she insisted. “The work of
killing people like Waruhiu was the work of women and girls. Women
were doing a lot of work. Girls are very tough.”1
During a gun battle with the British, Gachika was shot and captured.
She was sent, her wounds untreated, to Kamiti prison, where “hard
core” Mau Mau women were detained. There she would have been
forced to do hard labor, digging up trees, quarrying stone, and carrying
it long distances on her head to supply the road building undertaken
by colonial officials. She would have been poorly clothed and insuf-
ficiently housed and fed. Infractions of the rules brought down harsh
punishments: beatings, rape, withholding of food. As another detainee
described Kamiti, it “was a hell prison. Some were dying, some were
beaten to death, sometimes they died after work. We were happy when
someone died because we said ‘Now she is free.’ ”2
The drama and intensity of Gachika’s ordeal was not uncommon
in the context of the momentous events of the twentieth century. Two
world wars, the Russian Revolution, massive depression, decoloniza-
tion, and the Cold War generated intense political debates and struggles
across the globe. Gender was never far from the center of politics in the
twentieth century, playing a central part in such political movements as
communism, fascism, anticolonialism, and feminism.
The Great War of 1914–18 unsettled gender relations in virtu-
ally all the belligerent countries that fought it, as women went into
the factories and took up positions that enabled the war effort to go
on. The disruption continued into the 1920s and 1930s, as worldwide
phenomena such as the emergence of the “modern girl” and massive
unemployment among men owing to depression seemed to threaten
their masculinity. A backlash ensued, causing a reversion to prewar
gender arrangements—or at least a yearning for them—among the
Western nations. Fascism, a radical nationalist, expansionist ideology,
emerged within this context. In place of the blurring of gender lines
and roles that marked so many societies in the interwar period, fas-
cism promoted clear distinctions between male and female. In German,
Italian, and Japanese portrayals of masculine and feminine, there was
pronounced sexual difference, not ambiguity or androgyny. That was
true even when, as in times of necessity or emergencies such as war,
the actual behavior of men and women did not necessarily conform
to them.
Fascism placed an inordinate emphasis on manliness. At its heart
stood the figure of the warrior: hard, brave, intrepid, single-mindedly
devoted to serving the nation. The manliness of the fascist ideal stood
in stark relief against his gendered—and racialized—others, Jews and
colonized peoples who were portrayed as weak, soft, irresolute, and
venal. The possibilities of being corrupted by femininity or racial
inferiors required that the new fascist man stick to men of his own kind,
to eschew the institutions and locales of those whose presence might
compromise him with temptation or contamination. Home, school,
family, the marketplace—these posed threats to manliness by virtue of
the women and Jews who inhabited them. Instead, fascists promoted
the exclusively male environment of the military, where men bonded
with each other in their dedication to the nation and remained free
of feminizing influences that might taint or weaken them. Male com-
radeship, fascists believed, provided the scaffolding around which the
building of the state should take place.

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 117

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

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

118 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 119

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

120 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

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

Conditions on the Long March tested the endurance and courage

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

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 121

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

122 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

A statue memorializing the efforts of ordinary Chinese men and women in

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

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 123

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

124 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 125

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

126 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

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

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 127

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

128 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

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

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 129

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

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

130 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

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

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 131

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

132 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 133

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

On March 8, 2017, thousands of women and men turned out to march in

celebration of International Women’s Day in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Similar
marches and protests took place all over the world. Shutterstock/599208032

134 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

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

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 135

Epilogue: Challenging
Gender Identities

I
n November 2016 in British Columbia, Kori Doty gave birth to
Searyl Atli Doty. Kori, a nonbinary trans person, refused to allow
the infant to undergo a genital inspection for the purposes of
registering Searyl as a boy or a girl on a birth certificate or a health
card. “It is up to Searyl to decide how they identify,” Doty declared,
“when they are old enough to develop their own gender identity. I am
not going to foreclose their choices based on an arbitrary assignment
of gender at birth based on an inspection of their genitals.” Kori had
not been given that opportunity as a newborn, having been assigned
a gender on the basis of “assumptions [that] were incorrect, and
I ended up having to do a lot of adjustments since then.” Searyl did
receive a health card designating the baby’s sex as “U”—presumably
standing for “unspecified” or “unknown”—but to obtain a birth cer-
tificate for Searyl, Kori would have to choose a gender designation
for the baby. Doty and seven other complainants brought a case to
British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal requesting that gender
designations be removed from all new birth certificates; Doty argued
that “requiring a gender marker” infringed upon Searyl’s rights “as
a Canadian citizen to life, liberty and security of the person.”1 The
government of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, started is-
suing gender-neutral birth certificates in May 2018.2 British Columbia
did the same shortly thereafter, giving people who do not identify as
either male or female the option of placing an “X” in the gender field
of their applications for identity cards, driver’s licenses, and birth
certificates.3
The conventional categories of male and female, man and woman,
and masculine and feminine have throughout history been refused by
people who took on identities that did not correspond to their biolog-
ical sex. In some instances, such gender nonconformists received the
affirmation of their societies and communities. In India, a community of
men called the hijra wear women’s clothes and behave as women as part
of their worship of the Bahuchara Mata, the Mother Goddess. They
subject themselves to castration, making themselves eunuchs—neither
men nor women—and taking on the persona of a third gender. They
do this in furtherance of their identification with the goddess, and they
enjoy the recognition and approval of their communities as they preside
over religious and ritual events.
In Southeast Asia, blurred gender definitions figured prominently
in religious ceremonies. Men who dressed as women and women who
dressed as men in ritual performances placed themselves outside the
realm of the merely human and in that of the divine. Their cosmologies
compelled them to take on personas that transcended those of male and
female as part of their obligation to protect and defend the spiritual
interests of their communities. Transvestism, in other words, was sacred
among people such as the Bugis and the Ngaju Dayak of Southeast Asia.
More often, however, men and women who refused to present
themselves in conformity with their biological sex provoked scorn,
fear, and hatred. Joan of Arc was tried and put to death for the act
of wearing men’s clothing and refusing to abandon her male persona.
That particular response should probably be regarded as extreme and
unusual, though violence against transgender people has never gone
away and in many places transgender folks face serious threats. In the
twenty-first century, however, transgender people have won significant
victories in the courts and have made remarkable cultural advances
in countries around the world. We appear to have arrived at a histor-
ical moment where the opprobrium attached to transgender folks is
dissipating. Argentina, Denmark, India, Iran, Norway, Australia, New
Zealand, Nepal, Germany, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, France,
Canada, Colombia, Ireland, South Africa, and Malta legally recognize,
in some form, transgender people. In the United States, Oregon and
California have followed suit. As Human Rights Watch’s 2016 World
Report noted, we seem to have turned the tide in regard to accepting
people whose understandings of their gender identities do not match
their biological sex.4 Indeed, in 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled in
a 6-3 decision that LGBTQ and trans people cannot be discriminated
against.
This is not to suggest that societies have fully accepted transgender
people. Many countries outlaw “posing” as the opposite sex and jail
people who are transgender. Verbal and physical assaults occur with
regularity. Between 2007 and 2014, according to the Trans Murder
Monitoring Project, 1,731 transgender people were murdered across
the world; many, many more suffered torture, mutilation, and injuries

C ha l l e n gin g G e n d e r I d e n t i t i e s 137
falling just short of death. A number of states in the United States have
passed so-called bathroom bills that require trans men and women to
use the lavatory corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate. In
response, however, organizations representing some of the most male-
oriented, even macho institutions in the country promised to boycott the
states that refused to change these laws. The National Football League
(NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National
Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), along with major banking,
commercial, and entertainment interests, have pressured legislatures in
conservative states to alter their stances.
One particular incident in the United States provides a measure
of just how far transgender rights have progressed: in late July 2017,
President Donald Trump tweeted that transgender people would not
be permitted to serve in the military. Surprisingly, some of the most
conservative Republicans in the country— Senator Richard Shelby
of Alabama and Representative Ileana Ros- Lehtinen of Florida —
immediately responded that anyone who wished to serve America in
the armed forces, no matter their sex or gender, should be welcomed,
not excoriated. “You ought to treat everybody fairly and give everybody
a chance to serve,” Shelby told CNN. “No American, no matter their
sexual orientation or gender identity, should be prohibited from honor
+ privilege of serving our nation,” tweeted Ros-Lehtinen.5
This change in the cultural acceptance of changing gender definitions
has occurred with astonishing speed. In part it is a result of feminist
movements opening up and expanding societies’ understandings of gender
as a category of identity that is fashioned or constructed, rather than
a category whose characteristics are present at birth and determine our
lives. This change did not come easily or smoothly. Many early second-
wave feminists resisted regarding male-to-female transgender people as
women, and the issue provoked dissension and division within the move-
ment. In 1973, Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker at the West Coast
Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, refused to accept singer Beth Elliott
as a woman. “I will not call a male ‘she,’ ” Morgan declared angrily and
dismissively. “Thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society,
and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman’; one walk down the
street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he
may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain?
No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.”6
Today certain elements of the radical feminist movement, including
such prominent figures as Sheila Jeffreys, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Janice
Raymond, protest the inclusion of male-to-female transgender people

138 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

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

C ha l l e n gin g G e n d e r I d e n t i t i e s 139
Signs designating public restrooms for all genders, New York and California,
2020. Their appearance in venues throughout the world reflect rapid changes in
attitudes toward transgender and nonbinary people. Shutterstock/553276315,
Photographs by Drew Anderla, Salma Ismaiel, and Ryan Kaldari

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

140 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

Acknowledgments

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

33,000 bce
Modern humans emerge and expand beyond Africa, arrange themselves in egalitarian
groups of hunter-gatherers

10,000–3,000 bce
Agricultural revolution and settled communities create social hierarchies based on
wealth and gender

3000 bce
Development of patriarchy in Near and Middle East creates male-dominated societies

1752 bce
Babylonians produce Hammurabi’s Code, placing legal restrictions on women’s
behavior

1500–1457 bce
Hatshepsut reigns in Egypt as a king

500–323 bce
Athenian democracy prizes politics as the highest good for men; Spartans emphasize
martial virtues of both men and women

200s bce
Han dynasty consolidates power in China on the basis of gendered Confucian princi-
ples of filial piety and yin/yang distinctions

51–30 bce
Cleopatra reigns in Egypt
106 ce
Ban Zhao’s Nujie (Lessons for Women), laying out how women should attain ideal
womanhood, appears in China

350 ce–onward
Christian fathers develop concepts of sexuality as sinful, women as embodiment of sin

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

650 ce–onward
Islam expands to other lands and closes down opportunities for women

660–705 ce
Wu Zhao reigns as empress of Tang China, promotes Buddhist precepts that validate
her right to rule

1000–1300
Emergence of knightly ideal of masculinity and the conventions of courtly love
in Europe
1180
Kamakura shogunate established in Japan; samurai warriors become prominent figures
in Japanese governance and become ideal of Japanese masculinity

1206–24
Genghis Khan’s daughters enable him to rule extensive Mongol Empire in Central Asia

1260–94
Khubilai Khan rules Mongol Empire with help of his mother, Sorghaghtani Beki, and
sister, Chabi

1429
Joan of Arc leads troops to place Charles VII on French throne

1431
Joan of Arc burnt at the stake for dressing as a man

Sometime between mid-twelfth century and late fifteenth century

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

1518–24
Malintzin serves as interpreter and sexual partner to Hernán Cortés during the con-
quest of Mexico

1521–58
Concubine Hürrem becomes the mother of Suleyman the Magnificent’s four sons, and
the Ottoman emperor’s most trusted advisor

1724
Start of First Maroon War against the British in Jamaica under the leadership of Queen
Nanny

1750–1890
Ideas about separate spheres for men and women and the passionlessness of women
dominate Western European and American societies

1780s–90s
The concept of “republican motherhood” informs women’s political activities in France
and the United States

1782–83
Deborah Sampson serves in Continental Army in the guise of “Robert Shurtliff” during
the American War for Independence

October 1789
During the “October Days” of the French Revolution, women march to Versailles to
return the king and the National Assembly to Paris

1791
Thomas Paine publishes The Rights of Man; Olympe de Gouges publishes A
Declaration of the Rights of Woman

1792
Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

1804
The Napoleonic Code helps to reinstate patriarchal rule in France

144 Ch ronolog y
1848
Women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York

1856
Women’s suffrage campaign begins in the United States

1866
Women’s suffrage campaign begins in Great Britain, challenging the notion of separate
spheres for men and women

1868–78
Meiji restoration encourages Japanese to emulate Western gender ideals

1880–1905
Europeans justify their colonization of Africa using representations of gender and
sexuality

1914–18
Great War requires women in all European countries to participate in war effort, dis-
turbing traditional gender roles for women

1917
Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia assert deep commitment to gender equality

1918
British women over the age of thirty get the vote; women in Weimar Germany get
the vote

1920
American women get the vote

1922–45
Fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Japan assert deeply conservative ideals of mascu-
linity and femininity

1926–40
Stalin’s regime backtracks on gender equality and introduces legal restrictions on di-
vorce, birth control, and abortion

October 1934–October 1935

Women make up significant contingent of participants of Mao’s Long March in China

1939–45
Total war in Europe and the Pacific requires the contributions of virtually all women to
the war effort

1944
French women get the vote

1952–60
Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya recruits women against British colonial rule

1920–50s
Feminist movements appear in Japan, China, Egypt, and India

1960s
Second-wave feminism emerges in the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe

1963
Equal Pay Act enacted in United States

Ch ro n o l o g y 145
1964
Title VII outlaws employment discrimination in the United States

1970
Equal Pay Act enacted in Great Britain

1972
Title IX outlaws discrimination in education in the United States

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

1977
United Nations General Assembly urges March 8 as UN Day for women’s rights and
world peace, setting the stage for annual International Women’s Days

1980s
Rise of global feminism enlarges the movement’s agenda and participants

1995
United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, declares that
women’s rights are human rights

Late 1990s
Awareness and tolerance of LGBT people expands in many parts of the world
Backlash against rights of LGBT people emerges; religious conservatives fund homo-
phobic campaigns

2000s
Awareness and tolerance of transgendered people expand across the globe

2015
US Supreme Court legalizes same-sex marriage

2020
US Supreme Court makes discrimination against LGBTQ and trans people illegal

146 Ch ronology
Notes

INTRODUCTION

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

C H AP TER 1

1. Joyce A. Tyldesley, Hatshepsut: The Female Pharaoh (London: Penguin Books,

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

C H AP TER 2

1. Quoted in Joyce E. Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a

Young Roman Woman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 143–47.
2. Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion, 171, 172, 174, 175.
3. Quoted in James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 65, 85.
4. Quoted in Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 52, 60.
5. Quoted in Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 106.
6. Quoted in Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni
Split (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 32.
7. Quoted in Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1992), 50.
8. Quoted in Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 51.
9. Quoted in Guity Nashat, “Women in the Middle East, 8000 BCE to 1700 CE,”
in A Companion to Gender History, ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-
Hanks (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 235.
10. Quoted in Jess Nossiter, “ ‘Gender Trouble’ in Early Buddhism,” International
Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture 11 (September 2008): 165–84, 169.
11. Quoted in N. Harry Rothschild, Wu Zhao, China’s Only Woman Emperor
(New York: Pearson, 2008), 13.
12. Quoted in Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 138.
13. Quoted in Rothschild, Wu Zhao, 138.

CHAPTER 3

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

CHAP TER 4

1. Konstantin Mihailović, Memoirs of a Janissary, trans. Benjamin Stolz (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), 99.

148 Notes to pa g e s 4 1 – 6 6
2. Quoted in Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the
Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 61–62.
3. Quoted in Peirce, The Imperial Harem, 63.
4. Rudolph T. Ware III, “Slavery in Islamic Africa, 1400–1800,” in The Cambridge
World History of Slavery, vol. 3, AD 1420–1804, ed. David Eltis and Stanley
L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 58.
5. Quoted in Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the
Conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 41.
6. Quoted in Hilary Beckles, “Black Masculinity in Caribbean Slavery,” in
Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses, ed.
Rhoda E. Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2004),
234, 237.
7. Daniel Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington,
DC: United States Department of Labor, 1965); Jacqueline Jones, “ ‘My Mother
Was Much of a Woman’: Black Women, Work, and the Family under Slavery,”
Feminist Studies 8 (Summer 1982): 235–69, 252. One of the most influential
responses to Moynihan came from Herbert G. Gutman in The Black Family in
Slavery and Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1976).
8. Quoted in Gloria McCahon Whiting, “Power, Patriarchy, and Provision: African
Families Negotiate Gender and Slavery in New England,” Journal of American
History 103 (December 2016): 583–605, 589.

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

N o t e s t o p a g e s 7 0 –9 4 149
18. Claire Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870
(London: Routledge, 1992); and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British
Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992).
19. .See Catherine Hall, “ ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains . . . to Afric’s Golden
Sand’: Ethnicity, Race and Nation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England,” Gender
and History 5, no. 2 (1993): 212–30.
20. .See Catherine Hall, “Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England
in the 1830s and 1840s,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al.
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 240–70.
21. Quoted in Diana Patton and Pamela Scully, “Introduction: Gender and Slave
Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” in Gender and Slave Emancipation
in the Atlantic World, ed. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005), 13.

CHAPTER 6

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

150 Notes to page s 9 4 – 1 0 8

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

C H AP TER 7

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

No t e s t o p a g e s 1 1 0 –1 2 7 151
14. Quoted in Taeko Shibahara, Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist
Movement before World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2014), 100.
15. Quoted in Charlotte Weber, “Between Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern
Women’s Congresses of 1930 and 1932,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies
4, no. 1 (2008): 90.
16. Quoted in Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and
Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 2001), 18.
17. See Barbara Caine, English Feminism, 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), afterword.
18. Ángela Ixkic Bastian Duarte, “From the Margins of Latin American
Feminism: Indigenous and Lesbian Feminisms,” Signs 38, no. 1 (September
2012): 153.

EP ILOGUE

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

152 Notes to pa g e s 1 29 – 1 39
Further Reading

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

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS GENDER?

Kent, Susan Kingsley. Gender and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

CHAPTER 1: PATRIARCHY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, 3000 bce–300 ce

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Roller, Duane. Cleopatra: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Rosenlee, Li-hsiang Lisa. Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Tyldesley, Joyce. Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh. London: Penguin, 1998.

CHAPTER 2: THE GENDER RULES OF NEW UNIVERSAL RELIGIONS, 200–1000 ce

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1992.
Kuefler, Mathew. The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian
Ideology in Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity.
New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Rothschild, N. Harry. Wu Zhao, China’s Only Woman Emperor.
New York: Pearson, 2008.
Salisbury, Joyce E. Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman
Woman. New York: Routledge, 1997.

CHAPTER 3: GENDER AND WAR IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL INTERACTIONS,

1000–1500
Cleary, Thomas, ed. Code of the Samurai: A Modern Translation of the Bushido
Shoshinshu of Taira Shigesuke. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1999.
Devries, Kelly. Joan of Arc: A Military Leader. Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999.
Edgington, Susan B., and Sarah Lambert, eds. Gendering the Crusades.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Mann, Barbara Alice. Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas. New York: Peter
Lang, 2006.
McLaughlin, Megan. “The Woman Warrior: Gender, Warfare and Society in Medieval
Europe.” Women’s Studies 17, no. 3–4 (1990): 193–209.
Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America.
New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000.
Weatherford, Jack. The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of
Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire. New York: Crown, 2010.

CHAPTER 4: GENDER AND SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL EXPANSION,

1450–1750
Berry, Daina Ramey, and Leslie M. Harris, eds. Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming
Intimate Histories in the Americas. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018.
Eltis, David, and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. The Cambridge World History of Slavery.
Vol. 3, AD 1420–1804. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Foster, Thomas A. Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019.
Klein, Cecilia F., ed., Gender in Pre-Hispanic America. Washington, DC: Dumbarton
Oaks, 2001.
Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

CHAPTER 5: GENDER AND THE STATE IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION, 1750–1850

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

154 F ur th er Re a din g
Zagarri, Rosemarie. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early
American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

CHAPTER 6: GENDER IN THE AGE OF EMPIRES, 1815–1914

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

CHAPTER 7: GENDER POLITICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

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

F u rt h e r R e a d i n g 155
Yoshiaki, Yoshimi. Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during
World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

EPILOGUE: CHALLENGING GENDER IDENTITIES

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

156 F urth er R e a din g

Websites

African Women on the Internet GLBT Historical Society

www.library.stanford.edu/all/?q=African+ www.glbthistory.org/
Women+on+the+Internet&op=Search Located in San Francisco, the GLBT
Part of Stanford University’s library Historical Society is home to the
holdings. Provides links to resources Dr. John P. De Cecco Archives &
pertaining to African diaspora women Special Collections, one of the most
and African women south of the Sahara. extensive archives in the world con-
cerning LGBTQ people.
American Women: A Gateway to Library
of Congress Resources for the Study of History in Focus: Gender
Women’s History and Culture in the www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Gender/
United States websites.html
www.lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/ Created by the Institute for Historical
index.html Research in London, with links to a
Produced by the Library of Congress, wide range of websites treating gender
the site makes it possible to search the and sexuality across much of the
print publication American Women: A English-speaking world.
Library of Congress Guide for the
Study of Women’s History and Culture H-Women
in the United States (Washington, www.networks.h-net.org/h-women
DC: Library of Congress, 2001). It Part of the broad and diverse H-net
provides links to the digitized material program, H-Women provides a plat-
pertinent to American women located form for discussions about research
on the Library of Congress website. and teaching; the state of the field of
gender history; and historiography.
Fordham University’s People with a
History: An Online Guide to Lesbian, The Women’s History Network
Gay, Bisexual, and Trans* History www.womenshistorynetwork.org/
www.sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/ The Women’s History Network,
Offers documents, texts, and images headquartered in London, advocates
treating the history of lesbians, gay for women’s history through a variety
men, bisexuals, and transgendered of functions such as publishing a peer-
people across the globe in all chrono- reviewed journal, holding conferences,
logical periods. and offering means of networking. It
provides up-to-date information about
Fordham University’s Women’s History other agencies and activities promoting
Sourcebook women’s history as well.
www.sourcebooks.fordham.edu/women/
womensbook.asp
An invaluable collection of materials
pertaining to gender in the ancient,
medieval, and modern world, covering
the entire world.
Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

abolitionism, 94–96, 95f, 102 Amen-Re, 12

abortion, 126–29, 132–33 American Revolution
Abu Bakr, 37–38 citizen-solider ideal and, 87
Abu Talib, 36, 37–38 liberalism and, 86–87, 92
Abyssinia, 64 Sampson’s experience as a soldier in,
Adams, Abigail, 89 79–81, 80f
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 138–39 slavery and, 77f
Adodaroh, 59–61 women’s roles in, 89, 91
Africa. See also specific countries The Analects of Confucius, 24
anticolonial campaigns in, 116, 124–26 Anthony, Susan B., 96–98
cosmologies during pre-colonial era Antonius, Marcus, 19–20, 21–23
in, 106–8 Aristotle, 14–16, 17
the Enlightenment and, 101–2 Arslan Khan, 52
European imperial regimes in, 105–6, Articles of Pacification (Jamaica), 63–64
107–10, 116, 124–26 Asante, 107
Islam in, 35–36, 65–66 Asia. See also specific countries
kingship rituals in, 106–7 the Enlightenment and, 101–2
sex in, 107–8 Japanese imperialism in, 110–13
slavery in, 64–66, 73 slavery in, 64–65, 73
trans-Atlantic slave trade and, 73, 74 Assyrian law codex, 9–10
women chiefs in, 107 Athens (ancient), 13–15
agriculture Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 138–39
first systematic cultivation of crops and, 8 Augustine of Hippo, 31–34
Haudenosaunee and, 59–60 Australia, 126, 137
patriarchy and, 8–9 Austrian Empire, 64
slavery and, 65–66, 74 Ayonwantha (Hiawatha), 60–61
women’s work in, 8, 85–86
Ahmose (queen of Egypt), 10 baatar (decisiveness), 50–51
A’isha, 37–39 Ban Zhao, 26–28
Al-Altun, 50–51, 52 Basteen, Jane, 75–76
Alaqai Beki, 50–51, 52 Basteen, Sebastian, 75–76
Alençon, Duc d’, 57–58 Bedford, Duke of, 58
Alexander the Great, 17, 19, 20 berdache (nonconforming gender identity
Ali Talib, 37 among Native Americans), 62, 113,
Allah, 36–37, 38–39 114f. See also two spirit people
All India Women’s Conference, 131 Berenike (queen of Egypt), 20
Altani, 50–51 Binney, Barnabas, 79–81
“Amazons” (women warriors in Dahomey), birth control, 128–29, 132–33
108–10, 109f Botés (two-spirit persons among Crow
Ambar, Malik 68–69, 78 Indians), 113–15
Brazil, 74–75 feminism in, 120–21
British Empire. See also Great Britain Han dynasty in, 23–25, 26–27, 40, 53
Africa and, 1–3, 107–10, 116, 124–26 Japan and, 111–12, 121, 129
India and, 102–5, 131 Long March (1930s) in, 120–23
Jamaica and, 63–64, 74 marriage in, 25–26, 120–21
masculinity and, 104–6 masculinity and, 119–20
Mau Mau uprising (Kenya, 1950s) and, Mongol Empire’s invasion of, 52–53
116, 124–26 Qing Dynasty and, 64
Nigeria and, 1–3 Red Army in, 122
slavery and, 63–64, 74–75 sexual relations in, 119–20
Brown, John, 82 Tang Dynasty and, 40–45
Brutus, 21 Christianity
Buddhism anti-Semitism in, 35–36
Buddha and, 40–41 Augustine of Hippo and, 31–34
bushido code of conduct for samurai the Crusades and, 54, 56–57
and, 49 heresies suppressed in, 35–36
Central Asia and, 40–42 marriage and, 34
China and, 29–30, 40–41, 42–44 martyrdom and, 29, 31–33
Confucianism and, 40–41, 45 masculinity and, 35, 54
origins of, 29–30 patriarchy and, 33–34
patriarchy’s declining influence in, Perpetua’s devotion to, 29, 30–33
40–41, 44 Roman Empire and, 33–34
Wu Zhao and, 42–45 sex and, 34
Bugis, 137 Christine de Pisan, 56
Bull Snake, 113–14 Cleopatra VII (queen of Egypt)
Burton, Richard, 108 Antonius and, 21–23
ascension to the throne of, 21
Cady Stanton, Elizabeth, 96–98 Caesar and, 21
Caesar, Julius, 19–20, 21 children of, 21–23
Caesarian, 22f education of, 20–21
Canada, 136 Egyptian territory and influence expanded
Capellanus, Andreas, 54 under, 23, 28
the Caribbean, 63–64, 74–75 image at temple of Hathor of, 22f
Carothers, J. C., 125 Ptolemaic Dynasty and, 20
Cassius, 21 Roman civil war (44 BCE) and, 21
Catholic Church, 34–35, 74–75. See also Roman critics of, 23
Christianity suicide of, 23
Catlin, George, 114f Coahuiltic Indians, 62
Central Asia, 39, 40–42, 52 Code of Hammurabi, 9–10
Chabi, 53 “comfort women” (forced sex workers in
Changiz Khan, 68 Japanese Empire), 113, 118–19
Chang Kai-shek, 120–21 commercial revolution, 81–83
Charles VII (king of France), 57–58 Confucianism
Checheyigen, 52–53 The Analects of Confucius and, 24
Cheyenne Indians, 113–14 Buddhism and, 40–41, 45
China bushido code of conduct for samurai
Buddhism in, 29–30, 40–41, 42–44 and, 49
communism in, 120–23, 123f Dong Zhongshu and, 24–25
Confucianism in, 23–26, 27–28, filial piety and, 24
40–42, 44, 45 Han Dynasty and, 23–24
Daoism in, 40, 42–44 masculinity and, 119–20
divorce in, 25–26, 41–42 Nüjie (Lessons for Women)
European imperial presence in, 119–20 and, 27–28

160 Index
patriarchy and, 23–26, 27–28, royal women in, 11–12
40–42, 44, 45 socialist revolution (1952) in, 130–31
reciprocal obligations in, 24 women’s rights in, 11, 18–19
Tang Dynasty and, 40, 41–42, 45 women’s suffrage and, 129–31
yang and yin framework of opposites in, Egyptian Feminist Union, 129
24–25, 40–41 Emeruwa, Mark, 1
Constantine (emperor of Rome), England, 55–56, 57–58, 59f. See also Great
31–32, 34–35 Britain
Constantinople, 34–36 the Enlightenment, 81, 82–83, 88, 100–2
Constitution of the Five Nations Equal Pay Act of 1963 (United States), 132
Confederacy (Great and Binding Law of Equal Pay Acts of 1970 and 1975 (United
Peace, Haudenosaunee people), 60–62 Kingdom), 132
Constitution of the United States, eunuchs, 16, 67f, 70–71, 136–37
86–87, 89–90 Eve (Book of Genesis), 33
Corn Mother (Jigonsaseh), 60–61
Cortés, Hernán, 72–73 fascism, 117–19
courtly love ideal in medieval Europe, Fatima (daughter of Muhammed), 37
54, 55f femininity. See also feminism
Crook, George, 113–14 abolitionism and, 94–96
Crow Indians, 113–15 African pre-colonial cosmologies
The Crusades, 54, 56–57 and, 106–7
agriculture and, 85–86
Dahomey, 108–10, 109f Athens of antiquity and, 15
Dance to the Berdash (Catlin), 114f class and, 84–87
Daoism, 40, 42–44 commerce and, 3, 82, 84
Darwin, Charles, 102, 105, 106 domesticity and, 83–84, 86–87, 128
De amore libri tres (Capellanus), 54 The Enlightenment and, 101–2
Declaration of Independence (United fascism and, 117
States), 89–90 imperialism and, 100, 102–5,
de Gouges, Olympe, 91 107–8, 111–12
Déroin, Jeanne, 96–98 medical theory in the nineteenth century
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 93–94 and, 92–93
divorce feminism
ancient Egypt and, 11 anticolonialism and, 129, 131
China and, 25–26, 41–42 anti-pornography campaigns and, 133
French Revolution and, 90–91 birth control and, 128–29, 132–33
Islam and, 39–40 in China, 120–21
Soviet Union and, 127–28 in the developing world, 134–35
domesticity, 83–84, 86–87, 128 in Egypt, 129–31
Dong Zhongshu, 24–25 equal pay and, 132
Doty, Kori, 136 in India, 131–32
Doty, Searyl Atli, 136 in Japan, 128–29
marriage and, 131
Egypt. See also Cleopatra VII; Hatshepsut second wave feminism and,
anticolonialism in, 129 132–33, 138–39
Constitution of 1923 in, 129–31 Seneca Falls Convention (1848) and,
division of labor in, 11 96–98, 97f
feminism in, 129–31 Soviet Union, 127
Islam and, 39 transgender people and, 138–39
marriage in, 18–19 women’s suffrage movement and, 87,
Ptolemaic Dynasty and, 20 96–98, 126
revolution (1952) in, 130–31 workplace discrimination and, 132
Roman Empire and, 19–20, 21–23 Ferguson, Adam, 100–1

Index 161
Finland, 126 Haddon, Celia, 132–33
First Maroon War (Jamaica, 1730s), 63 Hague, William, 125–26
First World War (1914-18), 117 Haitian Revolution, 81, 87, 93–94
Forbes, Frederick, 108–10 Hammurabi (emperor of Babylonia), 9–10
Fordyce, James, 84 Han dynasty (China), 23–25,
Four Peoples (followers of Wu Zhao), 44 26–27, 40, 53
France. See also French Revolution Hathor, 18–19
empire of, 74–75, 108–10 Hatshepsut (pharaoh of Egypt)
feminism in, 132 death of, 12
Franco-Prussian War (1870) and, 105–6 discovery of mummified body
Haitian Revolution and, 93–94 (2007) of, 6
Hundred Years’ War and, 55–56, 57–58, 59f historical erasure of, 6, 12–13
masculinity and, 105–6 in male guise, 6–7
Napoleonic Wars and, 87–88, 93–94 marriage to Tuthmosis II, 10
republican ideology, 94 patriarchy circumvented in rule by, 6,
War of the Austrian Succession and, 82 10–11, 12, 28
women’s suffrage in, 96–98, 126 physical appearance of, 6–7
French Revolution relief at Temple of Hatshepsut of, 7f
citizen-solider ideal and, 87 Tuthmosis III and, 12–13
liberalism and, 86–87, 92 Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), 59–62, 89–90
marriage laws and, 90–91 He Di (emperor of China), 26–27
natural rights doctrine and, 91 Henson, Maria Rosa, 119
patriarchy and, 90–91, 92 hermaphrodism, 16
women’s role in, 89, 90f Herophilus, 15–16
Fukushima Yasumasa, 99–100, 111, 112f He Zizhen, 122
Hiawatha (Ayonwantha), 60–61
Gachika, Elizabeth, 116–17 hijra (community of men in India who
Galen, 15–16 behave as women in worship
Gannett, Benjamin, 79–81 practices), 136–37
Gaozong (emperor of China), 41–42 Hindu Code (India), 131
Genghis Khan. See also Mongol Empire homosexuality, 15, 62, 133–34, 143
alliances through marriage arranged Horace, 23
by, 51–52 Hundred Years’ War (England and France,
baatar (decisiveness) prized by, 50–51 1337-1453), 55–56, 57–58, 59f
Central Asia conquests of, 52 Hürrem (Aleksandra Lisowska),
China invaded (1211) by forces of, 52–53 69–70, 78
cosmology of, 51
daughters of, 50–53 Ibn al-Althir, 56–57
Germanic tribes of antiquity, 34–35 Igbo, 1–3
Germany imperialism
fascism in, 117–18 anticolonialism and, 116, 124, 129
feminism in, 132 British Empire and, 1–3, 63–64, 74–75,
Franco-Prussian War (1870) and, 105–6 102–6, 107–10, 116, 124–26
women’s suffrage in, 126 femininity and, 100, 102–5,
Go Toba (emperor of Japan), 46–47 107–8, 111–12
Great Britain. See also British Empire; French Empire and, 74–75, 108–10
England Japan and, 100, 105–6, 110–13
abolitionism in, 94–96 masculinity and, 102–3, 104–6, 107–8,
American Revolution and, 87–88 110–12, 115, 124–25
Napoleonic Wars, 87–88, 93–94 rape and, 102–5, 103f
War of the Austrian Succession and, 82 slavery and, 64, 65, 74
women’s suffrage in, 96–98, 126 Social Darwinism and, 102, 105–6
gunpowder, 47, 57 Spanish Empire and, 65, 72, 74–75, 78

162 Index
United States and, 105–6, masculinity and, 100, 110–12, 118–19
110–11, 113–15 Meiji restoration (1868) in, 110–11,
women’s roles in, 111–12 112f, 128
Inanna, 9 samurai warriors in, 46, 48f, 48–49,
India 62, 110–11
British imperial presence in, 102–5 Taiwan and, 111–12, 113
Buddhism and, 40–41 women’s suffrage in, 128–29
feminism in, 131–32 Jaramillo, Juan, 73
Hindu Code in, 131 Jefferson, Thomas, 89–90
independence (1947) of, 131 Jeffreys, Sheila, 138–39
marriage in, 131 Jews, 33–34, 35–36, 117
Mughal Empire and, 64, 65, 68–69 Jigonsaseh (Corn Mother), 60–61
rebellion (1857) in, 102–5 Joan of Arc, 57–58, 59f, 137
sepoy soldiers in, 102, 103f Josephus, 34
slaves as soldiers in, 68–69
Inet, 6 Kahengeri, Gitu wa, 125–26
inheritance laws, 90–91, 96–98, 131 Kaianeraserakowa (Great and
Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), 59–62, 89–90 Binding Law of Peace among
Ishimoto Shidzue, 128–29 Haudenosaunee), 60–62
Ishtar, 9 Kamakura shogunate
Isis, 18–19, 22f (Japan), 46–48, 49
Islam Kano Empire, 64, 65
in Africa, 36, 39, 65–66 Karankawa Indians, 62
in Asia, 36, 39 Kenya, 116–17, 124–26
The Crusades and, 54, 56–57 Kenyatta, Jomo, 124–25
divorce laws and, 39–40 Khadija, 36–37, 38
equality emphasized in, 36–37 Khubilai Khan, 53
Hijra (migration to Medina) in, 37–38 Kikuyu, 116, 124, 125
marriage and, 38–39, 69 Kipling, Rudyard, 111
Muhammad and, 36–39 knighthood in medieval Europe
origins in Arabia of, 35–36 courtly love ideal and, 54, 55f
Ottoman Empire and, 67–68, 69, 70 the Crusades and, 54, 56–57
Qur’an and, 38–40 elite social status and, 53
Shari’ah law and, 38–40, 65–66 Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453)
slavery and, 64–68 and, 55–56
veiling of women and, 38–39 loyalty to the monarch and, 55–56
women’s role in public life in, 38–40 masculinity and, 54, 62
Israelites (ancient), 10 Kongo, 64
Italy, 117–18, 132 Korea, 40–41, 49–50, 52–53, 111–13
Kusonoki Masashige, 48f
Jamaica, 63–64, 74
Janissaries (Ottoman military force), 66–68, Lakota Sioux, 62, 113–14
67f, 70 Laozi, 44
Japan Latin American revolutions, 81, 94
Buddhism and, 40–41 law codes
China and, 111–12, 121, 129 Assyrian law codex and, 9–10
“comfort women” (forced sex workers) in Code of Hammurabi and, 9–10
empire of, 113, 118–19 Mosaic code, 10
fascism in, 117–19 Napoleonic Code and, 92
feminism in, 128–29 Shari’ah law and, 38–40, 65–66
imperialism and, 100, 105–6, 110–13 Leakey, Louis, 125
Kamakura shogunate and, 46–48, 49 Lecky, William, 86
Korea and, 111–13 liberalism, 86–87, 92, 94–95, 118

Index 163
Lienu zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary knighthood in medieval Europe
Women, Liu Xiang), 26–27 and, 53–57
Li Shimin, 42 male breadwinner model and, 86
Lisowska, Aleksandra (Roxelana; Hürrem), Roman Empire and, 35
69–70, 78 samurai warriors of Japan and, 100,
Liu Xiang, 26–27 110–12, 118–19
Li Yuan (emperor of China), 40, 44 slavery and, 75
Long March (China, 1930s), 120–23 Social Darwinism and, 106
Louis Napoleon, 96–98 Sparta and, 16–17
L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 93–94 warfare and, 15, 16–17, 35, 56, 62,
Luba, 106–7 82, 87–88
Lucan, 23 Mau Mau uprising (Kenya, 1950s),
116, 124–26
Mali Empire, 64 Mayans, 71, 72
Malintzin (Aztec slave), 71–73, 78 May Fourth Movement (China,
Manchuria, 111–12, 113 1919-21), 120
Manetho, 6 Mecca (Arabia), 36–38
Mao Zedong, 122 Medina (Arabia), 37–38
Mara, Jane Muthoni, 125–26 Meiji restoration (Japan, 1868), 110–11,
Maroons (fugitive slaves), 63–64 112f, 128
marriage. See also divorce Mesopotamia, 9, 10
Athens of antiquity and, 13–14 Mihailović, Konstantin, 66
China and, 25–26, 120–21 Mill, John Stuart, 96–98
Christianity and, 34 Millar, John, 101–2
dowries and, 13–14, 25–26 Mochihito (prince of Japan), 46
Egypt and, 18–19 Moctezuma, 72
European colonists and Native Americans Mongol Empire. See also Genghis Khan
joined in, 73 Central Asia conquests (1219-24) of,
feminism and, 131 49–50, 52
French Revolution and, 90–91 China invaded (1211-15) by, 52–53
India and, 131 mass rapes during the succession battle
Islam and, 38–39, 69 (1237) in, 52–53
Mosaic code and, 10 royal women’s active role in, 49–53
polygamy and, 34, 38, 120 Montesquieu, Baron de, 88
same-sex marriage and, 139 Moreau, Jacques-Louis, 93
slavery and, 74–76 Morgan, Robin, 138
Soviet Union and, 126–28 Mosaic code, 10
Sparta and, 17 Mott, Lucretia, 96
Masako (Kamakura shogunate leader), Moundang, 106–7
46–47, 49 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 75
Masashige, Kusonoki, 59f Mughal Empire, 64, 65, 68–69
masculinity Muhammad (Prophet of Islam)
abolitionism and, 94–96 early life of, 36
Athens of antiquity and, 15–17 hijra (migration) to Medina (622 CE)
Christianity and, 35, 54 of, 37–38
citizenship and, 81–82, 87, 92 marriages and wives of, 36–38
The Enlightenment and, 101–2 on marriage within Islam, 38–39
eunuchs and, 16, 70–71 preaching by, 37–38
fascism and, 117–18 revelations of, 36, 38–39
Haitian Revolution and, 94
imperialism and, 102–3, 104–6, 107–8, Nanny (Maroon fighter in Jamaica), 63–64
110–12, 115, 124–25 Napoleonic Code, 92

164 Index
Napoleonic Wars, 87–88, 93–94 The Passion of Saints Perpetua and
Native Americans. See also specific groups Felicity, 31–33
epidemic disease during Columbian ex- Paterson, John, 79–81
change among, 74 patriarchy
European imperial violence and, 73–74 agricultural societies and, 8–9
two-spirit people (those with Buddhism and, 40–41, 44
nonconforming gender identity) among, Christianity and, 33–34
62, 113–15, 114f Confucianism and, 23–26, 27–28,
US government and, 114–15 40–42, 44, 45
warfare and, 62, 113–14 Hatshepsut’s circumvention of, 6,
women’s role in public life among, 61–62 10–11, 12, 28
natural law doctrine, 88–89, 91 law codes and, 8–9
Neferure (princess of Egypt), 10, 12–13 male heads of households’ power in, 6, 9,
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 131 30, 40–41
Nelson, Lord, 87–88 Napoleonic Code and, 92
New Culture Movement (China, Roman Empire and, 19, 23, 30–31, 32–33
1920s), 120 women treated as subordinate in, 6, 9, 15,
New Zealand, 126, 137 19, 25–26, 28, 30, 40–41
Ngaju Dayak, 137 Paul (Christian apostle), 34
Nigeria, 1–3, 138–39 The Peacemaker (Haudenosaunee
Nitobe Inazō, 111 people), 60–61
Nizam Shah, 68–69 Pericles, 15, 16–17
Norway, 126, 137 Perpetua
Nüjie (Lessons for Women, Ban Christian devotion of, 29, 30–33
Zhao), 27–28 marriage of, 30
Nwamuo, 1–2 martyrdom of, 29, 31–33
Nwanyeruwa, 1–2 patriarchal culture of Roman Empire and,
Nyingi, Wambuga wa, 125–26 30–31, 32–33
Nzili, Paolo, 125–26 Perry, Matthew, 110–11
Persia, 39, 40
Octavian, 19–20, 21, 23 Petzoldt, William, 115
Ogodei Khan, 52–53 Plutarch, 16–17
Ogu Umunwaany (“Women’s War,” Nigeria, polygamy, 34, 38–39, 120
1929), 1–3 Pompeius the Great, 19–20
Ojibway Indians, 62 pornography, 133
Okugu, 1–2 Portuguese Empire, 64, 65, 73, 74–75
Origen, 33–34 Prempe I (Asante king), 107
Osh-Tisch, 113–14 Pretty Shield, 113–15
Osiris, 22f prostitution, 34, 129
The Other Magpie, 113–14 Ptolemy XII (king of Egypt), 20
Ottoman Empire Ptolemy XIII (king of Egypt), 20–21
concubinage in royal court of, 69–70 Ptolemy XIV (king of Egypt), 21
early modern expansion of, 64, 65, 66 Puertocarrero, Alonso Hernández, 72
eunuchs in, 70
Islam and, 67–68, 69, 70 Qasim, 68
Janissaries (military force) in, 66–68, Qing Dynasty (China), 64
67f, 70 The Qur’an, 38–40
slavery in, 64, 65, 66–68, 67f, 69–70 Quraysh clan (Arabia), 36, 37–38
Süleyman I and Hürrem in, 69–70
rape
Pahket, 12 British suppression of Mau Mau uprising
Paine, Thomas, 91 and, 125–26

Index 165
rape (Cont.) Sanger, Margaret, 128–29
the Crusades and, 57 Sargent Murray, Judith, 89
imperialism and, 102–5, 103f Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh, 109f
Japanese occupation of countries in World Seneca Falls Convention (1848),
War II and, 118–19 96–98, 97f
Mongol Empire succession battle sepoy (Bengali soldiers in India), 102, 103f
(1237), 52–53 Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 (Great
Red Army’s defense during Long March Britain), 132
against, 122 sexual relations. See also reproduction
slavery and, 66, 69, 71–72, 73, 76 adultery and, 9, 10
Raymond, Janice, 138–39 in China, 119–20
reproduction Christianity and, 34
abortion and, 126–29, 132–33 The Enlightenment and, 101–2
birth control and, 128–29, 132–33 imperialism and, 102–3
Herophilus on, 15–16 Judaism and, 34
Japanese culture and, 128 medical theories of the nineteenth century
Long March (China) and, 122 and, 93
royal succession and, 69–70 samurai warriors and, 49
slavery and, 64–66, 71–72, 75, 76 sexual revolution of 1960s and, 132–34
transgender people and, 136 two-spirit people and, 62
Riazanov, David, 127–28 Shafiq, Duriyya, 130f, 130–31
Robertson, William, 82–83 Shari’ah law, 38–40, 65–66
Roman Empire Shelby, Richard, 138
Christianity and, 29, 31–35 shogun (military governors in imperial
civil war (44 BCE) in, 21 Japan), 48
Egypt and, 19–20, 21–23 Shurtliff, Robert (Deborah Sampson),
fall of Rome (476 CE) and, 34–35 79–81, 80f
Germanic invasions of, 35 slavery
masculinity and, 35 abolitionism and, 94–96, 95f, 102
patriarchy in, 19, 23, 30–31, 32–33 in Africa, 64–66, 73
religious devotion to Greco-Roman gods agriculture and, 65–66, 75
in, 30–31 in ancient Greece, 16–17
Roman Republic as predecessor of, 19–20 in Asia, 64–65, 73
Rosebery, Lord, 105–6 British Empire, 63–64, 74–75
Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana, 138 The Caribbean and, 63–64, 74–75
Rumfa, Muhammadu, 66 children in, 64–65, 66, 75
Russia, 64, 99, 117, 126–27. See also death rates in, 74–75
Soviet Union domestic work in, 71–72
emancipation of individual slaves and,
Sampson, Deborah (Robert Shurtliff), 66, 69–70
79–81, 80f escapes and attempted escapes from,
Sampson, Ephraim, 79–81 76, 77f
samurai warriors (Japan) eunuchs and, 70–71
bun (cultural attainment) and, 49 families in, 75–76
bushido code of conduct, 49 Haitian Revolution and, 93–94
masculinity and, 46, 48f, 49, 62, 110–11 imperialism and, 64, 65, 74
Meiji Restoration and, 110–11 Islam and, 64–68
sex and, 49 Maroons (escaped slaves) and, 63–64
shogun (military governors) and, 48 marriage and, 74–76
yabusame training exercises and, 48–49 masculinity and, 75
Sanetomo (Kamakura shogunate in Mesoamerica, 64–65, 71–73, 78
leader), 46–47 military service and, 64–65, 66–68

166 Index
in the Ottoman Empire, 64, 65, 66–68, Tuscarora Indians, 62
67f, 69–70 Tuthmosis I (king of Egypt), 10
punishment and, 74, 76 Tuthmosis II (king of Egypt), 10–11, 13
reproduction and, 64–66, 71–72, 75, 76 Tuthmosis III (king of Egypt), 11, 12–13
sexual coercion and rape in, 66, 69, two-spirit people (Native Americans with
71–72, 73, 76 gender identity that is neither male nor
Spanish Empire and, 65, 72, 74–75, 78 female), 62, 113–15, 114f
trans-Atlantic slave trade and, 73, 74
in the United States, 75–76, 77f United States
women in, 64–65, 66, 71–73 American Revolution and, 79–81, 80f,
Smith, Adam, 82–83 86–88, 89, 91, 92
Smith, William, 107–8 constitution of, 86–87, 89–90
Social Darwinism, 102, 105–6 Declaration of Independence and, 89–90
Solon, 13–14 feminism in, 132
Songhai Empire, 64 imperialism and, 105–6, 110–11, 113–15
Songhay Empire, 64, 65 Native American reservations
Sorghaghtani Beki, 53 and, 114–15
Soviet Union, 127–28. See also Russia republican ideology, 94
Spanish Empire slavery in, 75–76, 77f
expansion in early modern era of, 64, 73 transgender people in, 137–38
Latin American revolutions and, 81, 94 women’s suffrage in, 89–90, 92, 126
Mexico and, 72–73, 78
slavery and, 65, 72, 74–75, 78 veiling of women, 9–10, 17–19, 38–39, 50
Sparta, 16–17, 18f
Stalin, Joseph, 127–28 Waite, John, 75–76
Sulëyman I (Ottoman emperor), 69–70 Wang (empress of China), 42
Sumer, 9 warfare. See also specific conflicts
gunpowder and, 47, 57
Taiwan, 111–12, 113 knighthood in medieval Europe and,
Tang Dynasty (China) 54, 55–57
Buddhism and, 40–41, 42–44 masculinity and, 15, 16–17, 35, 56, 62,
Daoism and, 42–44 82, 87–88
Li Shimin and, 42 samurais and, 46, 48f, 48–49, 62, 110–11
Wu Zhao and, 41–45 two-spirit people and, 62
Teng Sui (empress of China), 27, 28 women engaged in, 56–58, 79–81, 80f,
Thayer, Deborah, 75–76 108–10, 113–14, 116, 122–23
Thistlewood, Thomas, 74 War of the Austrian Succession, 82
Thomas Yellowtail, 115 Wellington, Duke of, 87–88
Timucua Indians, 62 Wilkinson, Eliza, 89
Tlaxcalan people (Mexico), 72–73 Williamson, Henry, 114–15
Tokuchar, 52 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 87, 91
Tolui, 50 Woman Wang, 121–22
transgender people Women’s Indian Association, 131
eunuchs and, 136–37 women’s suffrage movement, 87, 96–98, 126
feminism and, 138–39 World War II, 119
hijra and, 136–37 Wu Yuqing, 120–23
legal rights for, 136, 137 Wu Zhao (Wu Zeitan)
military service among, 138 Buddhism and, 42–45
reproduction and, 136 Confucian critics of, 45
two-spirit people and, 62, 113–15, 114f Four Peoples and, 44
violence against, 137–38 Li Shimin’s imperial court and, 42
Trump, Donald, 138 statue of, 43f

Index 167
Wu Zhao (Wu Zeitan) (Cont.) Yoriie, 46–47
as Tang Dynasty empress, 42–45 Yoritomo, Minamoto, 46–47, 48–49
women’s role in public life and, 41–42, 45 Yoruba, 106–7
Yoshitoki, 46–47
Yaa Akyaa, 107
Yahweh, 10 Zaynab, 38–39
Yaka, 106–7 Zhu De, 122

168 Index
NEW OXFORD WORLD Susan Kingsley Kent is an Arts &
HISTORY Sciences Professor of Distinction in
the Department of History at the
University of Colorado, Boulder. She
is the author of The Global 1930s
(2017) with Marc Matera, A New
History of Britain: Four Nations
and an Empire (2016), and Queen
GENERAL EDITORS Victoria: Gender and Empire (2016),
among others.
Bonnie G. Smith
Rutgers University
Anand A. Yang
University of Washington

EDITORIAL BOARD
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Ohio State University
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University of Illinois, Chicago
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Gender A World History

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Gender A World History

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Gender:

By Susan Kingsley Kent

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Frontispiece: Actress and Union spy

Introduction: What Is Gender? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Ch a p t e r 1 Patriarchy in the Ancient World, 3000 bce–​300 ce . . . . 6

Ch a p t e r 2 The Gender Rules of New Universal Religions,

Ch a p t e r 3 Gender and War in the Age of Global Interactions,

Ch a p t e r 4 Gender and Slavery in the Age of Global Expansion,

Ch a p t e r 5 Gender and the State in the Age of Revolution,

Ch a p t e r 6 Gender in the Age of Empires, 1815–​1914 . . . . . . . . . 99

Ch a p t e r 7 Gender Politics in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . 116

Epilogue: Challenging Gender Identities . . . . . . . . . . 136

Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

2 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

4 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

Patriarchy in the Ancient

8 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

10 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

20 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

26 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

28 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

The Gender Rules of

30 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

increasing state support, a situation that altered the relationship of its

36 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

She was ten; he was fifty-​four.

38 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

40 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

translations and interpretations of scriptures (called sutras), by ordering

Gender and War in the

The fourteenth-​century Japanese samurai Kusonoki Masashige defended the

48 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

52 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

54 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

Finally, increased political centralization in the fourteenth and fif-

56 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

58 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

The warfare convulsing Eurasia marked societies in other parts of

62 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

Gender and Slavery in the

64 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

66 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

Over time, Janissaries, despite being an enslaved army and forced

68 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

72 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

74 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

Gender and the State

82 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

84 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

86 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

88 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

92 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

94 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

Abolitionist literature of the 1780s often featured an enslaved

96 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

98 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

Gender in the Age

100 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

The burning ardours, and the torturing jealousies, of the seraglio

102 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

48 females, most of them girls of from 10 to 14, many delicately

Certainly British women and children, as well as British men, died at

104 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

106 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

108 Gender: A Wor l d Histo r y

110 Gender : A Wo r l d Histor y

became business owners and managers and held positions of authority

112 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

114 Gender : A Wor l d Histo r y

Gender Politics in the

Ge n d e r Po l itic s in the Tw e n t i e t h Ce n t u ry 117

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ch a p t e r 1 Patriarchy in the Ancient World, 3000 bce–300 ce . . . . 6

Ch a p t e r 6 Gender in the Age of Empires, 1815–1914 . . . . . . . . . 99

She was ten; he was fifty-four.

The fourteenth-century Japanese samurai Kusonoki Masashige defended the

Sometime between mid-twelfth century and late fifteenth century

October 1934–October 1935

CHAPTER 1: PATRIARCHY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, 3000 bce–300 ce

CHAPTER 2: THE GENDER RULES OF NEW UNIVERSAL RELIGIONS, 200–1000 ce

CHAPTER 5: GENDER AND THE STATE IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION, 1750–1850

CHAPTER 6: GENDER IN THE AGE OF EMPIRES, 1815–1914

abolitionism, 94–96, 95f, 102 Amen-Re, 12