Within the past several decades this situation has changed dramatically, and the study of men as gendered beings has exploded in many academic fields, including history, literature, psychology, sociology, religion, and many others. Because of the long tradition of viewing men as differentiated, and because diversity of experience is such a strong emphasis in current gender scholarship, these studies generally use the plural “masculinities” rather than the singular “masculinity.” They emphasize that all men construct their masculinity in relation not only to women, but also in relation to other men, and that groups of men also vary widely in their ability to shape their own masculinity depending on their position in racial, class, and other power structures. Men who were leaders in modern Ghana, for example, developed notions of masculinity shaped by local community standards, but also by the ideas of missionaries and colonial officials. The new scholarship on masculinity is thus innovative in its recognition that men have and do gender, but traditional in its emphasis on difference. Although it is the exact counterpart to masculinity, “femininity” has generally not caught on as a term of scholarly study, perhaps because it is still seen as more restrictive and less open to variation than masculinity. “Femininities” is even less common, unless it is paired with “masculinities.”
Though studies of ideas about men have only recently been labeled as such – rather than as studies of a gender-neutral “man” or simply as “intellectual history” or “philosophy” – the fact that the male experience has been normative has often skewed the way that women have been viewed. This can be seen most dramatically in scientific and medical works. In ancient Greece, almost all philosophers and scientists agreed that men were superior, and that heat was the most powerful force in the body and a source of gender difference; women’s lack of heat was seen as the reason they menstruated (men “burned up” unneeded blood internally) and did not go bald (men “burned up” their hair from the inside). But they differed among themselves as to the reasons for gender differences and the role of each sex in conception and reproduction, differences that continued over the many centuries in which their ideas were viewed as authoritative. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and his followers generally held that women produce no semen or anything comparable, and so contribute nothing to the form, intellect, or spirit of a fetus; their menstrual blood simply produces the matter out of which the fetus is formed. Aristotelians tended to view human anatomy and physiology on a single scale, describing women as imperfect or misbegotten males, whose lack of body heat had kept their sex organs inside rather than pushing them out as they were in the more perfect male. The historian Thomas Laqueur has labeled this the “one-sex model” and noted that as late as the anatomies of Andreas Vesalius in the sixteenth century, female sex organs were depicted as the male turned inside out. In this view, females were born when something was less than perfect during conception and pregnancy, but could occasionally become male later in life through strenuous exercise or unusual heat; males never became female, however, for nature, according to Aristotle, always strives for perfection. Because both women and men were located along the same continuum, certain women could be more “manly” than some men, and exhibit the qualities that were expected of men such as authority or self-control.
The later philosopher and physician Galen (129 CE–c. 216 CE) and his followers believed that women also produce semen that contributes to the form of the fetus, though they thought this was colder and less active than that of the male and that the father was still the more important parent. Galen is credited with more than 500 works, and his ideas and writings were copied, translated, and taught within the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and later the Islamic world. His idea that both men and women produce seed became part of what historians have labeled the “two-sex” model, which held that men and women were equally perfect in their sex, distinct and complementary.
Ideas similar to Aristotle’s developed in India, though with a more religious cast. In the body of religious texts known as the Vedas, composed between 1500 and 500 BCE, the idea developed that all fetuses are male until malignant spirits turn some of them into females. Male-producing ceremonies were introduced (which are sometimes still performed), held during the third month of pregnancy.
In China, the Huangdi Neijing (translated as “The Yellow Emperor’s Manual of Corporal Medicine” or “The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon”), a collection of medical treatises compiled perhaps as early as the second century BCE, divided the life force (qi) that flowed through the body along with blood into two basic principles of operation, yin and yang. Yin generally represents darkness, cold, wetness, night, passivity, the moon, contraction, and the female, and yang light, heat, the sun, activity, expansion, day, and the male. These two are not completely dichotomous, however, for, to be complete, each yin must contain some yang, and vice versa. The Huangdi Neijing views the organ system (zang) Kidney as controlling reproduction, as it was associated with water and various watery substances were involved in conception and reproduction. It viewed the male contribution to conception as Essence, which was materially identified with semen, but also seen as a life-giving vitality and linked to cosmological processes. The female contribution is Blood, which encompasses not simply the blood that nourishes the fetus but also breast milk and other fluids. Both were essential, but Essence was what gave life, a position similar to that of Galen: “at fourteen a girl’s Kidney qi is flourishing . . . her menses flow regularly and she can bear young . . . at sixteen a boy’s Kidney qi is abundant, and he comes into his reproductive capacities; his seminal essence overflows and drains; he can unite yin and yang and so beget young.”[4] Like the ideas of Galen, the Huangdi Neijing became the fundamental source for medical ideas and treatments over a huge area for thousands of years, including not only China but also Korea, Japan, and southeast Asia.
In some parts of the world, such as several indigenous North American groups, a stress on the complementarity of the sexes led to fairly egalitarian economic and social arrangements. Similarly, at some points in pre-Columbian Mayan history, ideas about gender complementarity appear to have led to power and privileges being inherited bilaterally. In Europe, however, the spread of the Galenic model after 1600 led instead to the idea that gender differences pervaded every aspect of human experience, biological, intellectual, and moral. This occurred at the same time that physicians and scientists began exploring the reasons for differences among humans, and, not surprisingly, shaped the results of their experiments and measurements. Male brains were discovered to be larger than female, male bones to be stronger. When it was pointed out that female brains were actually larger in proportion to body size, female brains were determined to be more child-like, for children’s brains are proportionately larger still. In the nineteenth century, new fields of knowledge such as psychology and anthropology often gave professionals and officials new languages to describe and discuss gender distinctions. They located gender differences much more clearly in the body than had earlier thinkers, for whom the differences between men and women derived primarily from their social role or place in a divinely created order.
Ideas about gender differences based in the body were interwoven with those about racial differences as European countries developed colonial empires: white women were viewed as most likely to incorporate female qualities viewed as positive, such as piety and purity, while nonwhite (especially Black) women were seen as incorporating negative female traits, such as disobedience and sensuality. White men, in this view, were more rational because of their sex and their race, while nonwhite men were more likely to demonstrate negative or ambiguous male qualities such as anger or physical prowess. The relations between gender and racial – and also class – hierarchies were worrisome, however. It was clear to most Europeans who stood at the top of the hierarchy – white men – and who at the bottom – nonwhite women – but the middle was more ambiguous. Were hierarchies of race easier to overcome than those