24 Theorizing Gender Historical Roots of Contemporary Theory 25 was not necessarily a constricting one.It could recognize the women's citizenship.When John Stuart Mill wrote in The Subjection complexities of passion and treat them with great subtlety.Witness of Women,'Under whatever conditions,and within whatever limits, the theme of frustrated love from the romance of Tristan and Isolde,through Dante's story of Paolo and Francesca,to Shake- men are admitted to the suffrage,there is not a shadow of speare's Romeo and /uliet.Yet the well-spring of these stories was justification for not admitting women under the same',the phrasing much more often a dilemma of conflicting obligations than a marked a decisive shift in the terms of argument.The logical presumption was now for equality.By the turn of the century in curiosity about motive.Similarly the discussion of sex by theo- logians and philosophers was intended to lay down what people some colonies of settlement on the fringes of the capitalist world (Wyoming,Utah,New Zealand,Colorado,South Australia, ought to do,rather than consider why they did something else. Idaho),white women did have equal voting rights,and the struggle The first major change in this framework followed the corrosion for the suffrage in countries of the industrial centre was well under of the belief that God laid down a path for women and men to way. follow.Among intellectuals of the Enlightenment we find the same To speak of a 'secular moralism'is not to deny that religious topics as before,but now secularized.There is a debate about the moralism continued.It is a striking fact that nineteenth-century moral justification of prevailing gender arrangements and North American feminism only became a mass movement when especially in the newly invented literary form of the novel-drama tied in with religion,especially in the form of the Women's about the lives of people who bent the rules.The framework of a Christian Temperance Union.It is equally striking how the secular moralism,with Society in the place formerly occupied by God,could admit a fair range of positions,among them early reaction against feminism and gay liberation in the United States in the late 1970s was closely tied to fundamentalist Protestantism. feminism and libertarianism.The shock of the French Revolution pushed this debate suddenly in a radical direction.In both France The history of ideas about gender is far from being a succession of neatly defined stages.However radical a new development, and England clear statements of the 'rights of women'were earlier frameworks are carried forward with it. published in 1791-2,hard on the heels of the 'rights of man'.The Yet the Enlightenment did see a basic restructuring of the field text best known to English-speaking readers,Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women,laid heavy stress on the distortion of argument and by the end of the nineteenth century a second restructuring was under way.The doctrine of equal rights fuelled of women's moral character by the oppressive conditions under a feminist mobilization in Europe and in North America and other which women lived.The same historical moment saw the bitter colonies of settlement.By the 1920s women in these countrics had satire of conventional sexual morality by the Marquis de Sade in searched out,attacked and often broken the worst of their formal Justine,who went on in the monumental fulielte to explore the libertine sexuality that became possible when divine law was or legal disabilities,most notably in suffrage,property ownership and access to education.At the same time the concept of equal wholly replaced by human will. rights led to a different kind of question.If the subordination of For a good while these remained the high-water marks of sexual women was not natural or just,how had it come about?How was radicalism.The reaction against the French Revolution was legitimist in sexual as well as class terms.Most nineteenth-century it sustained?These are no longer questions of ethics but empirical intellectuals were hostile to Wollstonecraft and Sade if they knew questions-and in the framework of secular moralism,empirical questions about 'society'.The logical consequence of the doctrine of them at all.But the secularization of the moral argument about gender did stick.In the high tide of liberalism it took the form of of rights,then,was a social science of gender. In one sense this had been evident from the start.Wollstonecraft a doctrine of equal rights,a claim for citizenship.When the first political mobilization of women on a significant scale began,at spent much of her time discussing how women's moral character was formed.She attributed women's character to their education, the Seneca Falls convention in the United States in 1848,it was centred on this doctrine.Within the liberal and utilitarian in the broad sense,and argued for reforming both.In the same vein early socialists like Robert Owen noted how women's and framework it became increasingly difficult to see any objection to men's characters were distorted by oppressive conditions and
26 Theorizing Gender Historical Roots of Contemporary Theory 27 deduced a need for educational as well as economic reform.A and moralists and made it a question ofobservation and comparison thread of sex egalitarianism ran through the Utopian socialist of the behaviour of different species.More,biologists became movement of the early nineteenth century.It became part of the interested in why sex existed at all,and gradually developed mainstream socialist tradition through the writings of August an account of the evolutionary advantages given by sexual Bebel and Friedrich Engels.In Engels this current met the reproduction.Though one spin-off from Darwinism has been the speculative history of kinship being constructed by theorists like naked ape'claim that men's supremacy over women is an Morgan (Ancient Society)and Bachofen (Mother Right).Engels's evolutionary law,in the long term the effect has been unsettling famous Origin of the Family,Private Property and the State rested on for patriarchy.Merely by offering explanations of sexual behaviour, ethnography that was soon superseded and as historiography was evolutionary biology entrenched the idea that these patterns were obsolete when it was written (see chapter 7 below).But it remained in need of explanation,that they were somehow problematic. important because it crystallized once and for all the idea of The scientific impact on the field of argument deepened with relationships between men and women as a social system with the advent of doctors interested in sexuality and gender and the a definite historical trajectory.The argument dramatized the creation of a semi-medical speciality which later came to be called differences between gender relations in the remote past,in known 'sexology'.Medical and medico-legal case histories provided the history and in the hoped-for future.Engels tied the trajectory of first base for an exploration of the forms of human sexuality as a gender to the dynamics of class,but the basic idea did not depend natural phenomenon.The first monument of this work was on this link. Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (first edition 1886,numerous What Engels still took for granted,as did all the reformers of expanded editions later),which catalogued with horrified fascin- that generation,was the naturalness of the categories of women' ation the many forms of 'degeneracy from transvestism and and 'men',and indeed the conventional attributes of women and homoeroticism to eating shit and liking to be whipped.The men.Radical doctrines of equal rights could easily coexist with anthropology of sexual variation was developed much more lovingly highly conventional views about 'true womanhood',about the by Havelock Ellis,whose Sexual Inversion,the first volume of Studies proper work of women and men and about their heterosexual in the Psychology of Sex to be published,appeared in 1897.But the destiny.Women's suffrage campaigners at the turn of the century central figure in this movement of thought was undoubtedly routinely argued that the public realm needed the moral uplift, Sigmund Freud. domestic virtues and nurturance that were the natural attributes Particularly in 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality',Freud's of women.Along this track it was easy for upper-class feminism arguments wrecked the notion of natural fixed characters for the to merge into charity or moral surveillance of the poor,in the two sexes.His emphasis on 'bisexuality'in human emotions,and kindergarten movement and campaigns for infant health and his insistence on the importance of conflict within emotional life, mothercraft centres,eugenics,domestic science teaching and the made it difficult to see any pattern of sexual character as completely like. settled.More,in his analyses of the 'Oedipus complex'he showed how patterns of emotion in adulthood could be grasped as resolutions of the conflicts of development,and how different Science and Radicalism childhood situations could twist and reconfigure every aspect of emotional life. These assumptions of naturalness were nevertheless challenged Freud's importance in the history of ideas was not so much in from several directions.One was evolutionary biology.Charles popularizing the theme of sex,which a good many others Darwin's Descent of Man in 1874 offered a detailed account of were also doing.It was in providing a method of research- sexual selection'as a mechanism of evolution alongside the'natural 'psychoanalysis'itself-which generated masses of new information selection'emphasized in the Origin of Species.In his unemphatic about emotional life and human development,and led to a focus style Darwin took the issue of sex out of the hands of theologians on the life history as the unit of analysis rather than the species
28 Theorizing Gender Historical Roots of Contemporary Theory 29 the body or the syndrome.The psychoanalytic life history forced The issues raised by the Utopian colonies in the early part of attention to the details of relationships,the configurations of the century,and by socialist theorists of the mid-century,gained families,in short to the social contexts of emotional growth. extra force in the context of the 'new unionism'of the 1880s and Psychoanalysis thus produced detailed and sophisticated accounts 1890s,the unionization of unskilled workers.Attempts to form of femininity and masculinity as psychological forms constructed unions of working women ran into obstacles that were not met by social processes.Ironically this was not Freud's intention-he when unionizing men.Partly this had to do with direct resistance clung to the hope of biological explanations of psychology -but from men:unions controlled by men often would not accept the logic of his methods led inevitably towards the social. women members.It also had to do with the specific kinds of paid The concept of bisexuality was one of Freud's devices for work that women were usually employed to do,in domestic service understanding homosexual attraction.This was a standing problem and food and clothing industries,and with the demands placed for accounts of gender which based everything on biology or on on them for work in their own homes by husbands and other the attraction of opposites.And it was a 'problem'whose salience relatives. was increasing,as the late nineteenth century sharpened the social Women in the socialist movement,for example Clara Zetkin, definition of homosexuals'as a group apart.This was partly by argued that socialist ideas and practices must be rethought to deal new forms of criminalization (one of whose first victims was Oscar with the oppression of working-class women.They assumed that Wilde),partly by medical definitions of homosexual behaviour as the sexual division of labour could be changed and began pathology and partly by the political and cultural response of organizing to do it.In the first decade of the twentieth century homosexual people themselves.Authors such as Karl Ulrichs in strong women's movements developed in the socialist parties in the 1860s and 1870s,and more famously Magnus Hirschfeld from Germany,the United States and elsewhere.Under their pressure, the 1890s on,had one foot in scientific sexology and the other in working-class organizations cautiously began exploring co-operat- the movement to liberalize social attitudes and laws.Hirschfeld's ive childcare,public laundries,communal living arrangements Scientific Humanitarian Committee expressed the blend nicely. and community-controlled education as practical forms of the The immediate outcome was a naturalistic theory of homosexuality, socialization of childcare and housework.For a short while this the idea of a 'third sex'.This ran counter to the direction Freud became the policy of the revolutionary government in the Soviet was taking,and so far as it supposed a physiological basis for Union,urged on by Alexandra Kollontai. homosexual preference,can now be regarded as falsified.It was It did not last.With Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the a politically defensive idea,a reply to denunciations of homosexuals freezing of Western socialism after the 1920s,these policies were as moral degenerates.Yet in the context of the early twentieth completely marginalized.(By 1937 George Orwell could include century it had force as the only explanation of the stability of 'feminists'with sandal-wearers,nudists and vegetarians in a list homosexual desire over a lifespan.In this sense it added to the of unwanted cranks haunting socialist conferences.)Socialist voices questioning the taken-for-grantedness of the dichotomous feminism had,nevertheless,made a theoretical breakthrough.It sex categories. had placed what we now call the 'sexual division of labour'on the Freud lacked,notoriously,a theory of social structure.If the agenda for analysis and explanation,as firmly as the question of conventional family were taken as a given,both his analysis of sexuality had been placed there by Darwin and the sexologists. psychosexual development and his medical treatments could become a defence of the patriarchal status quo.They certainly did among his followers,especially after the emigration of psychoanaly- Sex Roles and Syntheses sis to North America in the 1930s.Freud himself was a kind of libertarian but not a political radical-and it was mostly among The ebbing of the radical tide in the 1920s drained practical radicals that the conventional family,and especially its division of urgency from these debates about gender.In the next generation labour,came into question. the main developments were academic.The 'woman question'in
30 Theorizing Gender Historical Roots of Contemporary Theory 31 politics had already produced a response from the new sciences between social structure and the emotional dynamic of sexuality. of psychology and sociology.One line of research asked what were Malinowski,truer to Freud,centred his argument on the functional the psychological differences between women and men and how necessity of repression and the elaboration of kinship customs as they were caused.Starting in the United States about the turn of a means to that end.Mead was more interested in the emotional the century,'sex difference'research gradually accumulated in colouring of a whole culture,and her approach was formative in huge quantity,though highly variable quality.In the 1930s this the 'culture-and-personality'school of American anthropology. tradition intersected with the new technology of standardized Perhaps the most important effect of their work was simply to attitude and personality tests,in attempts to measure 'masculinity/ document the range of ways in which different cultures dealt with femininity'directly as a psychological trait.Paper-and-pencil scales sex and gender.The exotica of life in the Trobriand Islands, of masculinity and femininity (M/F)were devised and soon put Samoa and New Guinea dramatized for Westerners the idea of to work diagnosing gender deviance. social scripting;it was difficult in the face of this to take any Gender-scaling was on the face of it neutral as to the sources aspect of gender relations for granted. of the characteristics being 'scaled'.Academic social science was By the mid-century a number of intellectual currents were addressing that question on other terms.Jessie Taft developed the converging and the stage was set for reflective synthesis.Three idea of women's cultural marginalization,an approach notable theorists published major works,covering remarkably similar because it placed power and exclusion at the centre of a social issues,within five years of each other;one starting from field analysis of gender.The main line of academic thought,however, anthropology,one from theoretical sociology and one from existent- followed another path with the propagation in the 1930s of the ial phenomenology.With them the social analysis of gender took concept of 'social role'.The notion of a socially provided script for its contemporary form. individual behaviour,first learned and then enacted,was easily Mead's Male and Female,Talcott Parsons's essays in Family applied to gender. Socialization and Interaction Process and Simone de Beauvoir's The By the 1940s the terms 'sex role','male role'and female role' Second Sex had very different intellectual programs and politics were in use.By the end of that decade American sociologists such That perhaps makes what they had in common more notable.All as Mirra Komarovsky and Talcott Parsons had spelt out a took a psychoanalytic view of the making of personality.All.tried functional theory of sex roles and the cultural contradictions to integrate this (though on different terms)with analysis of the surrounding them.These ideas converged with the growing division of labour conceived mainly in terms of sex roles or gender industries of counselling,marriage guidance,psychotherapy and roles.Parsons was most systematic about this,as 'role'had become welfare case work.The concept of a normative 'sex role'and a fundamental term in his general sociology.In all three authors various patterns of 'deviance'from it became enormously influen- the sense of the social contingency of sexual character and gender tial,providing a practical warrant for intervention to straighten out relations had gone very deep.Mead's deliberate cross-cultural deviants,and theoretical justification for the helping professions'as contrasts dramatized the point most.But it was also assumed a whole.'Sex role'has remained the central category of academic by Parsons,who in carlier cssays had laid emphasis on the thought about gender ever since,with the sex-difference literature modernization of the female role in American society,and by de gradually slipping under the 'role'rubric as well. Beauvoir,who attempted a phenomenology of different kinds of In the meantime psychoanalysis had stirred anthropology in femininity.Yet all three theorists tried to limit the free play that new directions.Freud and his follower Geza Roheim argued that a complete sociologizing of gender would imply.Parsons did this the Oedipus complex was universal,some form of it appearing in by appeal to functional imperatives of society,Mead (the most every culture.In the 1920s and 1930s writers like Bronislaw conservative on this issue)by appeal to some rather ill-defined Malinowski in Sex and Repression in Savage Society and Margaret biological regularities in human development and de Beauvoir by Mead in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies drew on the self/other structure of relations between men and women.All their own fieldwork to argue a general case for a connection three defined gender patterns mainly in terms of relationships
32 Theorizing Gender Historical Roots of Contemporary Theory 33 within the nuclear family,which all took to be,effectively, seen several transformations within a field of debate,and this is universal. basically what happened around 1970.There was a reconfiguration What de Beauvoir saw,and the others did not,was the dimension of a wide intellectual field around the themes of power and of power running through these relationships.Mead and Parsons, inequality.Its impulse was a reconnection between theory,which to put it in a phrase,synthesized the field of gender around the had become largely academic,and radical politics.The existence idea of custom and social stability.De Beauvoir synthesized it and strategic problems of sexual liberation movements defined the around the subordination of wemen. central issues for a new generation of theorists.The theory of Tn the short term the former was the-more influential approach. gender thus became,to a degree it rarely had before,a strategic Parsons's analysis of the family,particularly his distinction between theory,centering on how,and how far,the social relations of expressive'and 'instrumental'roles,laid the basis for a conservative gender could be transformed.Even if most of the issues were long- sociology of gender which took its place in the great expansion of established,they were now being questioned with an intensity and American social science in the 1950s and 1960s.Its themes were depth that made the analysis of gender the most disturbing force the necessity of the nuclear family,the problems of personal on the whole cultural scene. adjustment to sex roles and techniques of intervention to keep the One of the first effects of feminism on academia was simply to family in good repair.With 'family'and 'sex role'conflated,the increase the volume of sex-role and sex-difference research.In actual focus of most of the resulting research was women as wives- 1969 sex-role studies accounted for 0.5 per cent of articles and-mothers (the 'female role').Sex-difference and gender-scaling published in sociology journals;by 1978 they accounted for 10 studies continued and were generally taken to confirm the role per cent,around 500 titles a year.Eleanor Maccoby and Carol paradigm.Despite Parsons's prestige,the area remained rather an Jacklin's massive compilation The Psychology of Sex Differences,which academic backwater during these decades.It produced some cautiously advanced social-moulding ideas,shows the volume of notable pieces of field research,such as Komarovsky's Blue-Collar research being done in the United States in the early 1970s.In Marriage and Young and Willmott's Family and Kinship in East 1975 a specialized journal appeared,called Sex Roles.The field London.While these studies had considerable influence in social subdivided into specialities:socialization (Maccoby's interest); work and sometimes on social policy,they had little impact on men's roles as distinct from women's (Joseph Pleck's in The Myth social theory or the intellectual world of social science in general. of Masculinity);androgyny (popularized by Sandra Bem);and It was not until the arrival of the new feminism at the end of the therapies concerned with gender adjustment ('assertiveness train- 1960s that a wider interest in gender was kindled,and then it ing'for women,and for men a kind of masculinity therapy was Simone de Beauvoir's perspective that became central. promoted by growth-movement psychologists such as Herb Gold- berg in The Hazards of Being Male). With the exception perhaps of the androgyny literature,there Feminism and Gay Liberation was not much intellectual novelty in this literature (for reasons to be explored in chapter 3).There was however a highly significant In the context of this history,the research and the theoretical politics.The sex role approach provided the theoretical ideas that work inspired by feminism and gay liberation in the 1970s was underpinned liberal feminism,the most influential form of feminism not as novel as many activists believed.A number of its concerns in the United States at least.Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystigue were already widely debated:the nature of femininity,the power (1963)criticized Parsons and Mead,but her call for women's relations between women and men,the socialization of children, emancipation was made from within the same framework.What the dynamics of desire.The domain of the argument,we may say, is needed for reform,in Friedan's argument,is a change of women's had been mapped out.Yet it would be equally wrong to see the identity and expectations. new wave of theorists as simply replaying old themes,or as In liberal feminism generally,women's disadvantages are attri- rediscovering an eternal feminism.The history sketched above has buted to stereotyped customary expectations,both held by men