It is also important to remember that normative and intellectual records contain the ideas of only a small share of any population, skewed in most cultures toward elite men. Their ideas were the most significant, because they led to the formal laws and institutions that structured societies, but not everyone necessarily agreed with the powerful and prominent. Some historians argue that women (and in some cases other subordinate groups) had a separate value system in many societies, a special women’s culture and counterdiscourse shared among themselves and transmitted orally. Through this culture they communicated ideas about matters particularly important to them, such as methods of birth control or the treatment of illnesses common in women. This notion of a hidden women’s culture is very attractive to many contemporary women, who may tie it to a search for nonpatriarchal religious traditions; its oral and secret nature makes it impossible either to verify or disprove its existence.
A few sources from women or nonelite men have survived from many of the world’s cultures, but they may be even more unrepresentative than those from elite men because of their singular status. We can compare the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle on the nature of women, for example, and set them within the context of laws and norms in Athens drawn up by male political leaders, but for the ideas of ancient Greek women, we have only a few poems by Sappho and even fewer fragments from a handful of other Greek female poets. These come from areas outside Athens about which we know far less, so that along with being rare, they are much more difficult to contextualize than Athenian works; there are no works by Athenian women at all, however, so Sappho becomes representative for all Greek women over several centuries.
Another interpretive problem arises when we turn to works that are clearly fictional to learn about notions of gender in any culture. Most of what was recorded as “history” until the past several centuries were the stories of rulers and battles; information about gender was sometimes embedded in these accounts, but it was never very extensive. These same cultures have left fascinating sources that focus on the relations between men and women, but these are fictional stories and poems that were often first told orally, then repeated with many variations, and eventually written down. They can tell us a great deal about the values of a culture, but their message can also be mixed or ambiguous, for they are designed both to teach a lesson and to entertain, and thus may both reinforce and subvert the values of the society in which they were produced. In One Thousand and One Nights, a group of stories apparently first written down in Persian and then in Arabic in the late ninth century, for example, the women are veiled and women who are not loyal to their husbands are always punished, but the main character, Shahrazad, is highly educated and saves herself from death by telling her royal husband enthralling stories with cliffhanger endings for 1,001 nights and thus changing his negative opinion of women. Some scholars read this as demonstrating that Arabian women could really be powerful and independent despite limitations, while others stress that Shahrazad is a fictional character meant to amuse people with her boldness and not a model for real women. Such differences of opinion lead some historians to reject stories and poems completely as a historical source, but because the information they contain often cannot be found in official histories or anywhere else, most scholars – particularly those of premodern societies in which all sources are scarce – use them carefully.
Ideas about women and men in any culture are not only expressed in works focusing specifically on gender issues, laws regulating marriage or other sorts of male/female interactions, or fictional descriptions of men and women, but in nearly everything produced by that culture. Notions of gender are often so self-evident to people that they make little comment about them directly and do not recognize where they have gotten their ideas. Intellectual constructs regarding gender and the formal laws that resulted from them both underlay and grew out of everything else considered in this book – work, politics, education, religion, sexuality, the family – for one of the key insights of gender history is how closely notions of gender are interwoven with other aspects of life.
The process through which ideas about gender became informal norms and conventions and then more formal rules and laws differed around the world. In many cultures the development of writing made gender structures more rigid and the differences between men and women greater, but some oral traditions were also extremely harsh and inegalitarian. You will need to keep this diversity among groups, along with the diversity within groups, in the back of your mind as you read this chapter, for there will always be a counterexample from somewhere in the world to each of its generalizations.
The Nature and Roles of Men and Women
Until the development of women’s history, the subjects of most historical studies were men, and the actions and thoughts of men were what made it into the historical record. One would think, then, that it would be easier to discover ideas about men as a group than women as a group, but the opposite is, in fact, the case. Educated men – the authors of most historical sources until very recently – saw women as an undifferentiated group about which they could easily make pronouncements and generalizations. They have thought and written about women since the beginning of recorded history, trying to determine what makes them different from men and creating ideals for female behavior and appearance. When they turned their attention to their own sex, however, they viewed men as too divided by differences of age, wealth, education, social standing, ability, and other factors to fall into a single category. As twentieth-century French feminist theorists put it, men saw women as a group as the Other, an object for their analyses, but saw themselves as the One, about whom generalizations that extended to the whole sex were either impossible or unnecessary.
The differences among men have often provided ways of conceptualizing societies and social or economic groups. In medieval Europe, for example, society was thought of as divided into three groups: those who fought (nobles), those who prayed (clergy), and those who worked (peasants). Women were in some ways part of all of these groups, though they were not technically members of the clergy and they generally did not fight, so that they did not fit this conceptualization exactly and they were rarely included in the many discussions about this tripartite social order. Instead a different tripartite structure was used to think about women, based on their relationship to men: virgin, wife, widow. Women also did not fit later Marxist distinctions between working class and middle class very well, either; married women in many European countries did not own any property independently, so had no direct control of the “means of production” so important in Marxist concepts of capitalism. Such differentiation among men was not limited to works of social or economic theory, but was often reflected (and reinforced) by activities, ceremonies, and practices. In early modern European cities, for example, residents might celebrate a visit by a ruler or a religious holiday with a procession, in which the men of the town marched in groups according to their political positions or occupation; women, if they marched at all, generally did so as an undifferentiated group at the end.
Those who sought to overcome social and status differences also spoke of bringing together different groups of men. Thomas Jefferson’s words in the American Declaration of Independence expresses this as “all men are created equal,” and seventeenth-century English writers wanting to encompass all of society described their audience as “all men and both sexes.” (It is clear from Jefferson’s own writings and from this latter phrase that “all men” did not mean women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory, just as it is clear from Jefferson’s writings elsewhere as well as his actions that he did not really mean “all men” when he used that phrase.)
Although they were very attuned to other sorts of differences, until very recently most discussions of men ignored gender. In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, for example, women were often described as “the Sex,” as if men did not have any. This sense that one group is an unmarked or default category (i.e., that in the case of gender one is always talking about a man unless noted otherwise, as in “woman