Studies of the social construction of beauty and its links to gender include Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Susan R. Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (2nd edn., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
For discussions of motherhood and fatherhood, see Clarissa W. Alkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden, eds., Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1997); Ralph LaRossa, The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Heléna Ragoné and France Winddance Twine, eds., Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, and Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 2000); Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (New York: SR Books, 2002); Lynn Trev Broughton and Helen Rogers, eds., Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Marian van der Klein et al., eds., Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare and Policy in the Twentieth Century (London: Berghahn, 2012); Rhiannon Stephens, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Oyeronke Oyewumi, What Gender Is Motherhood?: Changing Yoruba Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jodi Vandenburg-Daves, Modern Motherhood: An American History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014); Jürgen Martschukat, American Fatherhood: A History (New York: NYU Press, 2019).
Almost every book in this list, as well as most of those suggested in the other chapters, refers to ideologies prescribing difference or inequality. Some recent overviews include Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice (London: Robinson, 2019) and Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
On feminism, good places to start are Estelle B. Freedman, The Essential Feminist Reader (New York: Modern Library, 2007); Lucy Delap, Feminisms: A Global History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020); or Bonnie G. Smith, ed., Routledge Global History of Feminism (London: Routledge, 2021). More detailed studies include: Chilla Bulbeck, Re-orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Post-colonial World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, UK: South End Press, 2000); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd edn., New York: Routledge, 2000); Bonnie Smith, ed., Global Feminisms since 1945: Rewriting Histories (New York: Routledge, 2000); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Valentine M. Moghadam, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin, eds., The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (New York: Anchor Books, 2004); Joyce Green, ed., Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (New York: Zed Books, 2007); Karen Offen, ed., Globalizing Feminisms, 1789–1945 (London: Routledge, 2010); Amanda Lock Swarr and Riacha Nagar, eds., Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (New York: SUNY Press, 2010).
For some of the newest currents in feminism, see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (New York: Anchor Books, 2015); Amrita Basu, Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms (2nd edn., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2017); Nicola Rivers, Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Lynn Fugiwara and Shireen Roshanravan, eds., Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2018); June Eric-Udorie, ed., Can We All Be Feminists?: New Writing from Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 Others on Intersectionality, Identity, and the Way Forward for Feminism (London: Penguin Books, 2018); Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman, eds., Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (2nd edn., London: Seal Press, 2019).
CHAPTER THREE
Early Human History (to 3000 BCE)
Studying early human history on any topic means relying primarily on material remains: tools made from hard materials; fossilized bones, teeth, and other body parts; evidence of food preparation, such as fossilized animal bones with cutmarks or charring; holes where corner-posts of houses once stood; rock art and pigments; bits of pottery and metals. To this, scholars add evidence from linguistics, primatology, ethnography, neurology, and other fields, reports from ethnographers and missionaries, and written sources from cultures that existed centuries later in the same area. Physical remains gave the earliest human era its name – the Stone Age. Nineteenth-century scholars divided this further, into the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic Era (to about 9500 BCE), during which food was gained largely by foraging, followed by the New Stone Age, or Neolithic Era (about 9500 to 3000 BCE), which saw the beginning of plant and animal domestication.
Using material evidence to analyze gender is difficult. By themselves, tools and other objects generally do not reveal who made or used them (though sometimes this can be determined from the location in which they were found), nor do they indicate what they meant to their creators or users. Tools made of hard materials survive far longer than those made from softer materials such as plant fibers, sinew, and leather, or from organic materials that generally decay such as wood, which gives us a skewed picture of early technology and lifeways. Evidence gets rarer and more accidental in its preservation the further back one goes, so interpreting the partial and scattered remains of the early human past involves speculation. This is particularly true for gender and other social and cultural issues.
This chapter reviews the basic outline archaeologists, paleontologists, and other scholars have developed about early human history, although just as in physics or astronomy, new finds spur rethinking. It surveys some generally accepted ideas about gender roles and relationships, as well as key controversies about them, beginning with the evolution of hominids and ending with debates over the origins of patriarchy.
Early Hominids
The eighteenth-century European scientists who invented the system we now use to classify living things placed humans in the animal kingdom, the order of Primates, the family Hominidae, and the genus homo. The other surviving members of the hominid family are the great apes – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans – and the family includes a number of species that have become extinct.
Between seven and six million years ago some hominids in Africa began to walk upright at least some of the