This disruption of well-known categories and paradigms ultimately included the topic that had long been considered the proper focus of all history – man. Viewing the male experience as universal had not only hidden women’s history, but it had also prevented analysis of men’s experiences as those of men. The very words used to describe individuals – “artist” and “woman artist,” for example, or “scientist” and “woman scientist” – encouraged one to think about how being female affected Georgia O’Keeffe or Marie Curie while overlooking the ways that being male shaped the experiences of Michelangelo or Picasso or Isaac Newton. Historians familiar with studying women increasingly began to discuss the ways in which systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men, and by the early 1980s to use the word “gender” to describe these systems. (“Gender” derives from the Latin word genus, meaning “kind” or “type,” and originally referred to types of nouns, of which there were three in Latin: masculine, feminine, and neuter.) At that point, they differentiated primarily between “sex,” by which they meant physical, morphological, and anatomical differences (what are often called “biological differences”) and “gender,” by which they meant a culturally constructed, historically changing, and often unstable system of differences. Most of the studies with “gender” in the title still focused on women – and women’s history continued as its own field – but a few looked equally at both sexes or concentrated on the male experience, calling their work “men’s history” or the “new men’s studies.”
Historians interested in this new perspective asserted that gender was an appropriate category of analysis when looking at all historical developments, not simply those involving women or the family. Every political, intellectual, religious, economic, social, and even military change had an impact on the actions and roles of men and women, and, conversely, a culture’s gender structures influenced every other structure or development. People’s notions of gender shaped not only the way they thought about men and women, but the way they thought about their society in general. As the historian Joan Scott put it in an extremely influential 1986 article, “Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”[1] Thus hierarchies in other realms of life were often expressed in terms of gender, with dominant individuals or groups described in masculine terms and dependent ones in feminine. These ideas in turn affected the way people acted, though explicit and symbolic ideas of gender could also conflict with the way men and women chose or were forced to operate in the world.
Historians were not the only ones to begin using the concept and word “gender.” It spread in other academic fields and then into ordinary speech, becoming the accepted replacement for “sex” in many common phrases – “gender roles,” “gender distinctions,” and so on.
Along with a focus on the gendered nature of both women’s and men’s experiences, some historians turned their attention more fully in the 1980s to the history of sexuality. “Sexuality” is a modern word used to describe the range of acts related to erotic desire, romance, and reproduction, and the meanings attached to them, and some scholars choose to avoid it for earlier periods, arguing that it is anachronistic. But investigations of the past are always informed by more recent understandings and concerns, and using modern concepts can often provide great insights. Thus most scholars use “sexuality,” while recognizing the enormous diversity on all matters relating to sex across time and space.
Just as interest in women’s history has been part of feminist political movements, interest in the history of sexuality has been part of the gay liberation movement that began in the 1970s. The gay liberation movement encouraged the study of homosexuality in the past and present and the development of gay and lesbian studies programs, and it also made both public and academic discussions of sexual matters more acceptable. Historians have attempted to trace the history of men’s and women’s sexual experiences in the past and, as in women’s history, to find new sources that will allow fuller understanding. For example, they realized that the idea that everyone has a “sexual orientation” as a part of their identity developed historically and was culturally constructed. (For more on this, see the section “Modern Sexuality” in Chapter 8.) The history of sexuality has contributed to a new interest in the history of the body, with historians investigating how cultural understandings of the body shaped people’s experiences of their own bodies and also studying the ways in which religious, medical, and political authorities exerted control over those bodies.
World and Global History
The subtitle of this book, “global perspectives,” highlights another development in history over the past half century: the growth of world, global, and other types of history that use a wide spatial lens. Until the last half of the twentieth century, most professional history – that is, history written by people trained at universities – focused on nation-states, and especially their political and military history. But during the 1960s, scholars and teachers began to challenge nationally organized histories. In North America, area studies programs at universities increasingly trained people to study many parts of the world, some professional historians began to write works with a broad scope, and college instructors and high school teachers created courses in world history. In Europe, the study of diplomacy gradually widened into imperial, international, and what was termed “overseas” history. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America critiqued much existing world and international history as overly centered on Europe, and posited different centers or called for a more polycentric world history. The 1990s brought other new directions, including transnational history, Atlantic World history, borderlands histories, connected history, world systems history, diasporic history, and many others. Some historians began to describe their field as global history, to reflect the increasing integration of world regions into a single system through globalization, though other historians (including me) see world and global history as largely the same.
Like women’s and gender history, world and global history have had their own debates and controversies about conceptualizations, inclusion, and scope. Courses often began as ones on various “civilizations” around the world considered separately, which tended to promote a binary model of “the West and the rest,” with an overemphasis on the West that in the 1980s came to be labeled “Eurocentrism.” Gradually many of those teaching world history rejected that model in favor of one that emphasized connections, interactions, and multipronged comparisons. Today world historians tend to de-emphasize individual nations or civilizations, and focus instead on regions defined differently, including zones of interaction, or on the ways in which people, goods, and ideas moved across regions through migration, conquest, and trade. Most world historians think that history should be studied on a range of chronological and spatial scales, including, but not limited to, very large ones.
Until about 2000, there was little connection between the history of women, gender, and sexuality and world/global history. In part this was because both of these fields developed at the same time as revisionist interpretations arguing that the standard story needed to be made broader and much more complex. Each disrupted a topic that was seen as the natural and proper focus of historical scholarship: heterosexual man on the one hand, and the nation on the other. Thus both have been viewed by those hostile or uninterested as “having an agenda.” Both concentrated on their own lines of revision, so did not pay much attention to what is going on in the other. In addition, world/global history tended to focus on large-scale political and economic processes carried out by governments and commercial elites. Most of the people involved were men, but how gender shaped their experience was not evaluated, as the emphasis was on material rather than cultural factors: ships, guns, trade goods, factories, railroads, satellites. Women’s history also initially had a strong materialist wing, with many studies of work and political