Gender As early as 31 March 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, who was attending the Second Continental Congress, urging him to “remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors” (Butterfield etal., 1975, p. 21). Adams's admonitions to her husband had little impact on either the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution. It was not until 1920 that the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, offering women that most basic element of citizenship—suffrage. And, today, despite long years of a concerted drive by women's rights groups to have an amendment guaranteeing equal rights ratified, the Constitution continues to afford women less protection from discrimination than men.

The Supreme Court often is looked upon as ahead of its time, or at least public opinion, in the expansion of rights to minorities. This has not been the case with the rights of women. Instead, as a general rule, the Court has lagged behind societal mores and realities when it has dealt with issues of concern to women.

From the Colonial Period to the Civil War Amendments.

During the colonial period, suffrage was largely determined by local custom and usage. While there are few records of women voting, it is clear that some did, especially large landowners. Once individual states began to draft written constitutions, however, women's suffrage evaporated. Women also were excluded by the gradual shift from gender‐neutral property‐owning requirements to near universal male suffrage. This emphasis on male suffrage also fostered the codification of many of the practices Abigail Adams denounced as contributing to second‐class citizenship for women.

Recognition of their legally inferior status, however, did not come to women overnight. In 1848, in what is widely hailed as the first major step toward female equality under the Constitution, a women's rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Eight years earlier, in 1840, two women active in the American abolitionist movement had traveled to London for the annual meeting of the World Anti‐Slavery Society. After the long and arduous journey, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were denied seating on the floor of the convention solely because they were women. Forced to take places in the balcony, they could not help but begin to see parallels between their status and that of the slaves they were trying to free (see Slavery). They resolved to call a meeting to discuss women's second‐class status, but the antislavery movement and issues in their own lives kept them from sending out a call to Seneca Falls until 1848.

At Seneca Falls, and at a later meeting in Rochester, New York, a series of resolutions and a Declaration of Sentiments were drafted calling for expanded rights for women in all walks of life. Both documents reflected dissatisfaction with contemporary moral codes, divorce and criminal laws, and the limited opportunities for women to obtain an education, participate in the church, and to enter careers in medicine, law, and politics. None of the participants at Seneca Falls or subsequent conventions for women's rights, however, saw the Constitution as a source of potential rights for women. Women's rights activists did, however, eventually see the need to amend the Constitution to achieve the right to vote.

While women continued to press for changes in state laws to ameliorate their inferior legal status, they also continued to be active in the abolitionist movement. During the Civil War, most women's rights activists concentrated on the war effort and abolition. Many who had been present at Seneca Falls or active in subsequent efforts for women's rights joined the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), an association dedicated to abolition and woman suffrage. AERA members saw the issues of slavery and women's rights as inextricably intertwined, believing that woman suffrage would occur when the franchise was extended to newly freed slaves.

Even the AERA, however, soon abandoned the cause of woman suffrage with its support of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. When a majority of its members agreed “Now is the Negro's hour,” key women's rights activists including Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were outraged. They were particularly incensed by the text of the proposed amendment, which introduced the word male into the Constitution for the first time. Although Article II of the Constitution does refer to the president as “he,” the use of the word male to limit suffrage was infuriating to many women. Not only did Stanton and Anthony argue that women should not be left out of any attempt to secure fuller rights for freed slaves, but they were concerned that the text of the proposed amendment would necessitate the passage of an additional amendment to enfranchise women. How right they were. Soon after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution to enfranchise African‐American males previously ineligible to vote. Feverish efforts to have the word sex added to the amendment's list of race, color, or previous condition of servitude as improper limits on voting were unsuccessful. Women once again were told that the rights of African‐American men must come first.

Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, and AERA's support of it, led Anthony and Stanton to found the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869. Its relatively radical demands for the reform of family laws and standards of dress, as well as its support of a well‐known supporter of free love, Victoria Woodhull, led many to deride its more conservative demand for suffrage via a national constitutional amendment.

Litigating for Suffrage.

The National Woman Suffrage Association's advocacy of controversial reforms led to a severe image problem for both the association and its goals. In 1869, to lend credibility to its cause as well as to short‐circuit the possibility of a long battle for a women's suffrage amendment, Francis Minor, an attorney and the husband of a prominent NWSA member, set forth his belief that women, as citizens, were entitled to vote under the existing provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. Minor saw NWSA's possible resort to the courts as a means by which to gain favorable publicity for the organization. Victoria Woodhull's presentation to Congress in 1871, urging it to pass enabling legislation to give women the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, provided the impetus for renewed efforts.

Minor, along with Susan B. Anthony, quickly seized the enthusiasm that Woodhull's suggestion created. Minor urged that test cases be brought to determine if the courts would obviate the need for additional legislative action. A number of legal scholars and judges had publicly agreed with Minor's arguments. Moreover, in rejecting Woodhull's request for enabling legislation, the House of Representatives noted that if a right to vote was vested by the Constitution, that right could be established in the courts without further legislation. More important, the newly appointed chief justice, Salmon P. Chase, had suggested that women test the parameters of the Constitution to determine if they were already enfranchised by its provisions.

Despite Chase's encouragement, prior references to women by the Supreme Court had generally accepted a limited role for them. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), for example, Chief Justice Taney noted, “Women and minors, who form a part of the political family, cannot vote …” (p. 422). Ignoring this discouraging language, NWSA initiated several test cases hoping to have at least one heard by the Supreme Court. Somewhat fittingly, the only one to reach the Supreme Court was Minor v. Happersett (1875), which involved both Minors as co‐plaintiffs; married women then had no legal right to sue in their own names.

Unfortunately for NWSA, before Minor was appealed to the Supreme Court, the justices heard another case challenging gender discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment. Bradwell v. Illinois (1873) involved a challenge to the Illinois State Supreme Court's refusal to admit Myra Bradwell to the practice of law because she was a woman. Bradwell's lawyer based her claim on the Fourteenth Amendment's clause concerning privileges and immunities. Because Bradwell's lawyer was cognizant of the suffrage test cases, he rejected the notion that women were enfranchised under the same provisions. He carefully differentiated the practice of a chosen profession from the right to vote, putting the Court on notice that not even all women were in agreement over the scope and reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite the care he took to disassociate his client from NWSA's tactics, the court ruled 8 to 1 against Bradwell's petition.

The majority opinion in Bradwell—the first pronouncement from the Supreme Court on the issue of gender—was based on two grounds. First, because Bradwell was a citizen of Illinois, the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV, section 2 of the Constitution was held inapplicable to her claim and to apply only to matters involving U.S. citizenship. Second, since admission to the bar of a state was not one of privileges and immunities of U.S. citizenship, the Fourteenth Amendment did not secure that right.2

Far more damaging to women's rights, however, was a concurrence written by Justice Joseph P. Bradley, which is often referred to as the promulgation of the “Divine Law of the Creator.” Writing for himself and two other justices, Bradley observed “a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman” and went on to insist that the “natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. … The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator” (p. 141).

Two years later, in Minor v. Happersett, the Court again ruled against the claim of women's rights. The Court rejected the argument that the judiciary was empowered to read into the Fourteenth Amendment the right of suffrage as a natural privilege and immunity of citizenship. Writing for a unanimous Court, the newly appointed Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite argued that the states were not inhibited by the Constitution from committing “that important trust to men alone” (p. 178). Nevertheless, the Court stressed that women were “persons” and might even be “citizens” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.

All of the gender discrimination cases heard by the Supreme Court during this era involved construction of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, and not the Due Process or Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), argued and decided shortly after Bradwell, the Supreme Court meticulously examined the Fourteenth Amendment. In addition to limiting the constitutional significance of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, the Court concluded that the Equal Protection Clause “is so clearly a provision to that race [the Negro] that a strong case would be necessary for its application to any other” (p. 81). Although the Fourteenth Amendment would be revived as a potential tool for women's rights in the early twentieth century, women had yet to win a favorable decision against sex discrimination from the Supreme Court. While women were gaining greater rights within the family through the passage of state‐level married women's property acts, and were beginning to gain entry into institutions of higher education, the Court stuck rigidly to its interpretation that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was intended primarily to protect African‐Americans (i.e., African‐American males) from discrimination, and it held fast to traditional notions concerning women's proper role in society.

Litigating to Protect Women.

Although the Slaughterhouse Cases did not provide a useful precedent for women seeking to practice law or to vote, the Court's opinion planted the seeds for judicial adoption of a very broad state police power to enact laws to protect the public health, welfare, safety, and morals. This view was accepted in several subsequent cases. In Mugler v. Kansas (1887), however, in sustaining a law prohibiting the sale of intoxicating beverages, the Court built on the Slaughterhouse dissents of Justice Bradley and Stephen Field, announcing that it was ready to examine the substantive reasonableness of state legislation. According to Justice John Marshall Harlan, when state laws involving “the public morals, the public health, or the public safety” were at issue, the Court would “look to the substance of things” so as not to be “misled by mere pretenses” (p. 661). Ten years later, in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), the Court, for the first time, invalidated a state statue on substantive due process grounds. And, in Lochner v. New York (1905), the Court similarly invalidated a law regulating the work hours of bakers.

Until then, the Court rarely looked to the substance of legislation in addressing its validity. The Court's earlier reading of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (or the Fifth Amendment when federal legislation was involved) only guaranteed that legislation be passed in a fair manner, even though it might have an arbitrary or discriminatory impact (see Due Process, Procedural). According to the Court in Lochner, however, state laws would fail unless the provisions at issue were deemed reasonable under “common knowledge.” Thus, the Court refused to accept New York's claim that a ten‐hour maximum‐hour law for bakers was reasonable to ensure the health of bakers. Instead, the Court found that it unreasonably interfered with the employers' and employees' freedom of contract protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and found no “common knowledge” to justify such actions by New York (see Due Process, Substantive).

The importance of common knowledge cannot be understated in chronicling the Court's treatment of gender. Often, “common knowledge” has been a substitute for the personal views of individual justices. As Bradley's “Divine Law of the Creator” opinion made quite clear, that view could easily lead to restrictions on the rights of women.

In the early 1900s, concern about the health, welfare, and morals of women led activists, particularly those closely allied with the growing woman suffrage movement, to press for state laws to upgrade the status of working women (see Police Power). Large numbers of women had begun to enter the labor force out of necessity. Most were confined to low‐paying jobs in substandard conditions, a circumstance highlighted by the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, in which many young female workers lost their lives. Even before that time, however, efforts had begun to improve the working conditions of women and children. And, whether out of civic concern, moral outrage, or a sense of noblesse oblige, beginning in the 1890s, resolutions were adopted annually at suffrage conventions calling for improved conditions for women workers.

The organization most responsible for change, and for the Court's again addressing issues of gender, was the National Consumers' League (NCL). Through the hard work of its national staff and numerous affiliates, the NCL secured maximum hour or other restrictions on night work for women in eighteen states. Its leaders, therefore, immediately recognized how much they had at stake when the Supreme Court decided to review Muller v. Oregon (1908), a case challenging the constitutionality of an Oregon law that prohibited the employment of women for more than ten hours a day. (Muller, the owner of a small laundry, had been found guilty of violating the statute). When Muller was accepted for review and oral argument, the NCL went to work immediately. Its general secretary quickly asked Louis D. Brandeis, the brother‐in‐law of one of its most active members and already a famous progressive lawyer, to take the case. Brandeis did so under one condition—that he have sole control of the litigation, a condition to which Oregon gladly acceded, thus allowing the NCL to represent it in Court.

Numerous state court decisions involving protective legislation for women, as well as the Supreme Court's recent decision in Lochner, made it clear to Brandeis that a victory could be forthcoming only by presenting information or “common knowledge” that could persuade the Court that the dangers to women working more than ten hours a day made them more deserving of state protection than the bakers in Lochner, and by proving that there was something different about women that justified an exception to the freedom of contract doctrine enunciated in Lochner. Brandeis and the NCL would not challenge the Supreme Court's right, under substantive due process, to make that judgment.

At Brandeis's request, NCL researchers compiled information about the possible detrimental effects of long hours of work on women's health and morals, as well as on the health and welfare of their children, including unborn children. Brandeis stressed women's differences from men and the reasonableness of the state's legislation. In fact, his brief had but three pages of strictly legal argument and 110 pages of sociological data culled largely from European studies of the negative affects of long hours of work on women's health and reproductive capabilities. The information presented by Brandeis was not all that much different (except in quantity) from that presented on behalf of New York in Lochner, yet, the Court was persuaded by the contents of what has come to be called the “Brandeis brief.”

In holding that the Oregon law was permissible, the Court unanimously concluded “[t]hat woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence” (p. 241). Such a condition meant the state had an interest in protecting women's health through appropriate legislation. Muller's impact was immediate. State courts began to hold other forms of protective legislation for women constitutional, whether or not they involved the kind of ten‐hour maximums at issue in Muller. Thus, eight‐hour maximum work laws in a variety of professions, outright bans on night work for women, and minimum wage laws for women routinely were upheld under the Muller rationale.

The NCL's efforts to protect women from unscrupulous employers won the approval of the Supreme Court in several additional cases, but then ran into trouble in the early 1920s. In Stettler v. O'Hara (1917), a lower court decision upholding Oregon's minimum‐wage law for women was appealed to the Supreme Court. Forces opposed to governmental interference in contractual rights feared that a decision supporting additional protective legislation would open floodgates to more governmental regulation. Stettler's lawyers argued that a labor agreement between an employer and an employee could not be disturbed by the government. Because the Fourteenth Amendment forbade the state from denying any individual liberty without due process of law, they argued that freedom of contract was protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court had been amenable to this kind of argument, as attested to by its Lochner decision.

Building on the Court's far‐ranging discussion of women and their physical, social and legal differences from men, Brandeis, again presenting the state's case, structured his arguments similarly to those offered in Muller, stressing the importance of a living wage to the health, welfare, and morals of women. Before the Court could decide the case, however, a vacancy occurred on the Court and Brandeis was appointed to fill it. Stettler was reargued in 1917 with Brandeis not participating. The Court divided 4 to 4, thus sustaining the lower court's decision.

The next NCL‐sponsored case, Bunting v. Oregon (1917), attracted a significant amount of attention. Felix Frankfurter, Brandeis's hand‐picked successor as NCL counsel, used the same kind of arguments Brandeis had used in Muller and Stettler. In a 5‐to‐3 decision (with Brandeis again not participating) the Court extended Muller to uphold an Oregon statute that established maximum hours for all factory and mill workers.

Although the NCL was victorious in these two cases, it had not anticipated the impact that the controversy within the suffrage movement over protective legislation would have on pending litigation. During the early twentieth century, women had come together to lobby for passage and then ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Once it was ratified, attempts were made to secure other rights for women. Women in the more radical branch of the suffrage movement, represented by the National Woman's Party (NWP), proposed the addition of an equal rights amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. Progressives and those in the NCL were horrified because they believed that an equal rights amendment would immediately invalidate the protective legislation they had lobbied so hard to enact.

When Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923) came to the Court, the NWP was ready. Adkins involved the constitutionality of a Washington D.C., minimum‐wage law for women. The NWP filed an amicus curiae brief urging the Court to rule that, in light of the Nineteenth Amendment, women should be viewed on a truly equal footing with men. The division among women concerning equal rights and protective legislation was now exposed to public view. It was a debate that was to be resurrected again and again in the Court and public through the 1990s.

In Adkins, the Court ruled 5 to 4 that minimum‐wage laws for women were unconstitutional thus resurrecting Lochner, which Court commentators thought had been overruled sub‐silentio in Bunting. The Court was unwilling to overrule Muller, and thus simply distinguished it because it involved maximum hours and not wages. Nevertheless, the justices clearly believed that the Nineteenth Amendment conferred more rights upon women than just the right to vote. In noting women's newly emancipated status, the Court undoubtedly was responding at least in part to the pro‐equality arguments offered by the National Woman's Party.

Adkins, unlike Muller, was decided by the narrowest of majorities. But it stood as a good law and as a ringing endorsement of the notion of freedom of contract regarding minimum‐wage laws for women until 1937 (although the Court continued to uphold state maximum‐hour provisions). In West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), the Court finally abandoned its endorsement of substantive due process, explicitly overruled Adkins, and upheld Washington state's minimum‐wage law for women. In hammering in the last nail in the coffin of substantive due process, the Court also appeared to be escaping from the constitutional need to establish a difference between men and women.

While the Court was enunciating a view that men and women were equal as the permissible objects of regulation, clearly they were not. Most states continued to bar or limit night work for women. And while a separate minimum wage for women could no longer be valid, employer practices of clustering women into certain positions at far lower wages than those paid to men continued to exist.

No new cases came to the Court involving women's rights until 1948. The NCL had obtained what it wanted, and the coalition of women's groups that had pressed for suffrage had largely disintegrated. Women were urged to support the war effort and, after the war ended, to return to their homes to their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Thus, few groups were left to press for women's rights in the legislatures or through the courts. The National Woman's Party continued to press for equal rights, and in fact, was able to see a proposed equal rights amendment introduced into every session of Congress after 1923. But it chose to stay out of litigation until the 1970s.

New Attempts to Expand Rights.

In Goesaert v. Cleary (1948) and Hoyt v. Florida (1961), the Court again made it clear that women were not guaranteed additional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment or elsewhere in the Constitution. Although the Fourteenth Amendment is a pledge of protection against state discrimination, over the years the Court generally has applied a two‐tiered level of analysis to claims advanced under its provisions. Classifications based on race or national origin are considered *suspect classifications and are entitled to be judged by a severe test of strict scrutiny. As such, they are presumed invalid unless the government can show that they are “necessary to a compelling state interest” and that there are no less‐restrictive alternative ways to achieve those goals. In contrast, when the Court applies the less stringent level of ordinary scrutiny, which until 1976 included all other legislative classifications, a state need show only a conceivable or reasonable rationale for its action.

Until 1971, the Court routinely applied this minimal rationality test to claims involving discrimination against women. In Goesaert, for example, it sustained a statute that prohibited a woman from dispensing drinks from behind a bar unless she was the wife or daughter of the bar owner. Thus, forty years after Muller, the Court continued to justify differential treatment of women by deferring to a state's special interest in her social and “moral” problems. Under the reasonableness test, some rational basis for the law was all that needed to be shown.

In Hoyt, the Supreme Court accepted sex‐role stereotypes as a sufficient reason to uphold a state statute that required men to serve on juries while women could merely volunteer for jury service (see Trial by Jury). When Hoyt was convicted by an all‐male jury of second‐degree murder for killing her husband with a baseball bat, she argued that her conviction violated her rights to equal protection of the laws and her Sixth Amendment right to be judged by a jury of her peers. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that the Florida statute was not an arbitrary and systematic exclusion of women. Justice John M. Harlan concluded that “Despite the enlightened emancipation of women from the restrictions and protections of bygone years, and their entry into many parts of community life formerly considered to be reserved to men, woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life.” (pp. 61–62)

It was not until the dawn of the most recent women's movement that judicial perspectives on what was reasonable discrimination against women began to change. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded. Soon after, a plethora of other women's rights groups were created. Most of these groups renewed the call for passage of an equal rights amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. While significant lobbying was carried out on that front, some groups, cognizant of the successes that the NAACP had in securing additional rights for African‐Americans through the courts, began to explore the feasibility of a litigation strategy designed to seek a more expansive interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although prior forays into the courts had ended unfavorably, some woman lawyers, in particular, believed that the times had changed enough for the justices (or some of the justices) to recognize that sex‐based differential treatment of women was unconstitutional. Many believed that the status of women and the climate for change was sufficiently positive to convince even a conservative Court that some change was necessary.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), long a key player in the expansion of constitutional rights and liberties, led the planning for a comprehensive strategy to elevate sex to suspect classification status, and thus to be entitled to strict scrutiny. Its first case was Reed v. Reed (1971). Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a member of the ACLU Board, argued the case before the Supreme Court. Her enthusiasm and interest in the expansion of women's rights via constitutional interpretation led the ACLU to found the Women's Rights Project (WRP).

At issue in Reed was the constitutionality of an Idaho statute that required males be preferred to otherwise equally qualified females as administrators of estates for those who die intestate. NOW, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women, and the Women's Equity Action League all filed amicus curiae briefs urging the Court to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit discrimination against women on account of sex. Democratic Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, a major sponsor of the ERA, wrote one of the briefs in which he attempted to apprise the Court of the glaring legal inequities faced by women and to link those inequities, at least in part, to the Court's own persistent refusal to expand the reach of the Equal Protection Clause to gender discrimination. Judicial decisions such as Goesaert and Hoyt, which allowed states to discriminate against women on only minimally rational grounds, made it clear to women's rights activists that a constitutional amendment was necessary if women were ever to enjoy full citizenship rights under the Constitution. But Reed was just a critical first step.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for a unanimous Court in Reed, held that the Idaho statute, which provided “different treatment … to the applicants on the basis of their sex … establishes a classification subject to scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause” (p. 75). With these simple words, the Supreme Court for the first time concluded that sex‐based differentials were entitled to some sort of scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment. But what type of scrutiny? According to Burger, who quoted Royster Guano v. Virginia (1920), the test was whether the differential treatment was “reasonable, not arbitrary,” and rested “upon some ground of difference having a fair and substantial relation to the object of the legislation, so that all persons similarly circumstances will be treated alike” (p. 76). The Court then found that the state's objective of reducing the workload of probate judges was insufficient justification to warrant this kind of sex‐based statute. In fact, according to the Court, this was “the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause” (p. 76). Although the Court did not articulate a new standard specifically, most commentators agreed that sex‐based classification were not to be treated with more than ordinary scrutiny.

This major breakthrough heartened women's rights activists. It also encouraged the WRP to launch a full‐blown test case strategy akin to the one pursued by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund that culminated successfully in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). WRP attorneys jumped at the opportunity to assist the Southern Poverty Law Center of Alabama with the next major sex‐discrimination case to come before the Supreme Court, Frontiero v. Richardson (1973). At issue in Frontiero was the constitutionality of a federal statute that, for the purpose of computing allowances and fringe benefits, required female members of the armed forces to prove that they contributed more than 50 percent of their dependent husbands' support. Men were not required to make a similar showing about their wives.

By an 8‐to‐1 vote, the Court struck down the statute, which gave male members of the armed forces potentially greater benefits than females. More important, though, four justices voted to make sex a suspect classification entitled to the strict scrutiny standard of review. While four other justices agreed that the statute violated the Equal Protection Clause, they did not agree that sex should be made a suspect classification. In fact, three justices specifically noted the pending ratification of the ERA as a reason to wait to allow the political process to guide judicial interpretation.

Three years later, in Craig v. Boren (1976), Justice William J. Brennan, author of the plurality opinion in Frontiero, formulated a different test, known as “intermediate” or “heightened scrutiny” test to apply in sex discrimination cases. Craig involved a challenge to an Oklahoma statute that prohibited the sale of 3.2 percent beer to males under the age of twenty‐one but to females only under the age of eighteen. In determining whether this kind of gender‐based differential violated the Equal Protection Clause, Brennan wrote that “classifications by gender must serve important governmental objectives and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives” (p. 197). He also specifically identified two governmental interests that would not justify sex discrimination: neither administrative convenience nor “fostering ‘old’ notions of role typing” (p. 198) would be considered constitutionally adequate rationalizations of sex classifications. Shedding many of the stereotypes that had been at the core of Muller, Hoyt, and Goesaert, the Court specifically noted there was no further place for “increasingly outdated misconceptions concerning the role of females in the home rather than in the ‘marketplace and world of ideas’” (pp. 198–199). Continuing in this vein, in Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney (1979), the Court even went on to clarify this new standard, noting that any state statute that was “overtly or covertly designed to discriminate against women would require an exceedingly persuasive justification” (p. 273). In Feeney, however, the Court concluded that a veteran's preference law was intended to discriminate against non‐veterans—not women.

This new intermediate standard of review subsequently was used to invalidate a wide range of discriminatory practices including some Social Security, welfare and workmen's compensation programs, alimony laws, age of majority statutes and jury service exemptions. This is not to say that the Court no longer continued to be swayed by sex‐role stereotypes. In Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), for example, the Court considered congressional combat restrictions sufficient to rationalize the exclusion of women from the new draft registration requirements of the Military Selective Service Act (see Conscription). A majority of the Court accepted the government's position that the statutory exclusion of women from combat positions combined with the need for combat‐ready troops was a sufficiently important justification to meet the burden of the intermediate standard of review. And, in Michael M. v. Superior Court of Sonoma County (1981), the Court held that a California rape law, which applied only to males, did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. Justice William H. Rehnquist noted that the state's concern about teenage pregnancy was a sufficiently strong state interest to justify the statute. Rehnquist's opinion pointedly did not apply intermediate scrutiny.

In late 1981, the Court was joined by its first female member, Sandra Day O'Connor. It was not long before she and the other justices were faced with another sex‐based claim made under the Fourteenth Amendment. Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan (1982) involved a state policy that restricted enrollment in one state supported nursing school to females. Writing for the five‐member majority, O'Connor noted that when the purpose of a statute was to “exclude or ‘protect’ members of one gender because they are presumed to suffer from an inherent handicap or to be innately inferior, the objective itself is illegitimate” (p. 725). As one commentator noted, “she out‐Brennaned Justice Brennan” ( Williams, p. 112). For example, not only did she go further than Justice Brennan had in recent opinions by suggesting in a footnote that sex might best be treated by the Court as a suspect classification, she also went on to resurrect the Feeney language saying that the state fell short of “establishing the exceedingly persuasive justification needed to sustain the classification” (p. 724).

Justice O'Connor's strong opinion in Hogan again brought to four the number of justices on the Court who apparently favored some sort of strict standard of review for sex‐based classifications that need “exceedingly persuasive justification” to withstand challenge. The elevation of William H. Rehnquist to chief justice and the appointments of Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter by Republican presidents, however, were taken by supporters of expanded women's rights as a signal that the courts were no longer a viable strategy to see strict scrutiny applied to sex‐based classifications. Thus, supporters of women's rights were heartened by the appointments of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Court by Democratic president Bill Clinton.

In 1994, shortly after Justice Ginsburg's appointment to the Court, J.E.B. v. Alabama was decided. J.E.B. sought review of a lower court decision that had denied his claim that the use of peremptory challenges to exclude men from a jury deliberating a paternity claim against him violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the Court, concluded that the state was unable to provide the exceedingly persuasive justification needed to justify these gender‐based peremptory challenges. The use of gender‐based stereotypes to select a jury pool, said the Court, is prohibited.

By the late 1990s, it had become clear that a narrow majority of the Court had reformulated the intermediate standard of review announced in Craig, replacing a state's need to show that a gender‐based classification “serve important governmental objectives” with the need for a state to show an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for the practice or law. In United States v. Virginia (1996), a challenge to Virginia's maintenance of the male‐only Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Justice Ginsburg, writing for a five‐person majority, used the exceedingly persuasive justification test in a manner “all but indistinguishable from strict scrutiny” (Brake, 1997, p. 35) to find the state support of VMI unconstitutional. Chief Justice Rehnquist's concurring opinion echoed this assessment of the standard used by the majority. At the very least, it appears that gender‐based classification will now be examined more skeptically than under the Craig standard. This “skeptical scrutiny” test recognizes the long history of gender discrimination and seeks to give substance to a standard used by the Court.

Still, under this standard, the Court has upheld challenged practices as constitutional. In Nguyen v. INS (2001), for example, five members of the Court concluded that a federal law that imposed different requirements for a child's acquisition of citizenship depending upon whether the citizen parent was male or female, did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. Writing in sharp dissent, however, were Justices O'Connor, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, who concluded that the INS had failed to show an exceedingly persuasive justification for the sex‐based classification.

Recognizing the fragile nature of even the heightened middle tier standard of review and the Court's uneven application of its standards, women's rights groups continue to seek the addition of an equal rights amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, an effort that failed earlier. In 1972 Congress passed and sent to the states, a proposed ERA. By 1982, however, its supporters had failed to win ratification of the amendment in the requisite three‐quarters of the states. Most see an ERA as the only way to guarantee that women ever will be recognized as fully equal under the Constitution, but they are not particularly optimistic about its chances of success, although members of Congress continue to introduce it in each session of the Congress.

The Court has never been at the fore in the development of full equality for women. Yet, its decisions clearly add to a climate that frowns on blatant discrimination. Given the increasingly conservative nature of the Court, however, and the increasingly complex patterns of discrimination that are being presented to it, it is unlikely that the scope of constitutional protections for women will grow unless other societal changes take place. Women's active combat roles in the war in Iraq, for example, could possibly foreshadow a Court that would uphold a challenge to the discriminatory provisions of the Military and Selective Service Act.

Moreover, it is important to note that fewer and fewer cases involving constitutional issues of sex discrimination come before the Court each year, perhaps because women's rights groups are using their time and money to fend off challenges to Roe v. Wade (1973) and to keep abortion legal. Moreover, most of the “easy” cases have been decided, and there is fairly uniform application of at least the intermediate standard of review in lower courts. Thus, most cases involving sex discrimination that the Court chooses to hear now involve employment or educational discrimination litigated under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972. In Johnson Controls, Inc. v. International Union, UAW (1990), for example, which involved a company fetal‐protection policy that required women in certain hazardous positions to be sterilized as a condition of their continued employment, the Court ruled unanimously that the company's policies were not valid bona fide occupational qualifications permitted by Title VII. Likewise, in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), the Court found that a school board was responsible for sexual harassment and thus violating Title IX when the school board acted with deliberate indifference.

Bibliography

Deborah Brake , Reflections on the VMI Decision, American University Journal of Gender and the Law (1997), pp. 35‐42.
L.H. Butterfield etal., eds., The Book of Abigail and John (1975).
Ellen Carol DuBois , Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America 1848–1869 (1978).
Sara M. Evans , Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (1989).
Susan M. Hartmann , From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics Since 1960 (1989).
Herma Hill Kay and and Martha S. West , Sex Based Discrimination: Text, Cases, and Materials, 4th ed. (1996).
Naomi B. Lynn, ed., Women, Politics and the Constitution (1990).
Karen O'Connor , Women's Organizations' Use of the Courts (1980).
Wendy Williams , Sex Discrimination: Closing the Law's Gender Gap, in The Burger Years, edited by Herman Schwartz (1987), pp. 109–124.

Karen O'Connor

Gender

Gender is a dichotomous social category that prescribes behaviors, attitudes, feelings, and other characteristics as being appropriate for a male or a female. That is, knowing an individual's gender allows us to place him or her in a distinct social category (male or female) and then judge his or her behaviors based on our expectations for that category. This entry introduces the prominent theories and empirical research related to the conceptualization of gender, gender roles and gender stereo-types, gendered power relations, and the interaction of gender with other social categories.

Conceptualization of Gender

The categorization of people on the basis of their biological sex ultimately leads to questions of difference. Theorists debate whether the differences between men and women are extensive enough to merit the common label of opposite sex. Maximalists believe that the differences between men and women are large and deeply rooted. Minimalists, in contrast, maintain that differences among men and among women are larger than the differences between men and women (Anselmi and Law 1998).

Another topic of debate is the location of gender. Specifically, are we gendered beings, or do we live in a gendered society? The essentialist stance contends that we are gendered beings; that is, gender is located within the individual. Essentialists argue that the behavioral differences between men and women are fundamental and rooted in biological sex differences. Accordingly, research based on an essentialist stance focuses on finding neurological, hormonal, and evolutionary differences between men and women. Because they emphasize the biological, essentialists often do not differentiate between the terms sex and gender. Cross-cultural similarities are used to support the essentialist perspective (Anselmi and Law 1998).

Social constructionists offer the contrasting view that gender is located within social arrangements. Specifically, as people relate to one another in a cultural and social context, gender differences arise that are sometimes related to biological sex differences, but are more often viewed as arising from cultural expectations for what are appropriate behavior and characteristics for females and males. Accordingly, research based on a social constructionist stance focuses on identifying conditions that are associated with similarities or differences across gender. From this perspective, sex is treated as a biological category, and gender is treated as a social category. Cross-cultural differences are used to support the social constructionist perspective (Anselmi and Law 1998).

Janice Bohan (1997) offers a useful analogy in understanding the difference between essentialism and social constructionism. After having a conversation with a person, one might either label the individual as friendly or, alternately, label the conversation as friendly. Labeling the person as friendly is analogous to essentialism, as friendly is viewed as a quality of the person. In another view, labeling the conversation as friendly is analogous with social constructionism, as friendly is viewed as a quality of the social interaction,

A third possibility is that gender is located both within individuals and within cultural and societal arrangements. A few biological differences, such as women's ability to bear children, shape social arrangements and influence social interactions. From this perspective, individuals internalize sociocultural expectations for their assigned gender and then behave accordingly. This view integrates essentialism and social constructionism to form an interactionist conceptualization of gender.

Gender Roles and Stereotypes

Gender roles are "socially and culturally defined prescriptions and beliefs about the behavior and emotions of men and women" (Anselmi and Law 1998, p. 195). Many theorists believe that perceived gender roles form the bases for the development of gender identity. Prominent psychological theories of gender role and gender identity development include evolutionary theory (Buss 1995; Shields 1975), object-relations theory (Chodorow 1989), gender schema theory (Bem 1981, 1993) and social role theory (Eagly 1987).

Evolutionary theories of gender development are grounded in genetic bases for differences between men and women. Functionalists (e.g., Shields 1975) propose that men and women have evolved differently to fulfill their different and complementary functions, which are necessary for survival. Similarly, sociobiologists (e.g., Buss 1995) suggest that behavioral differences between men and women stem from different sexual and reproductive strategies that have evolved to ensure that men and women are able to efficiently reproduce and effectively pass on their genes. These evolutionary-based theories share similarities with the essentialist and maximalist perspectives discussed previously.

In contrast, object-relations theorists focus on the effects of socialization on gender development. For example, Nancy Chodorow (1989) emphasizes the role of women as primary caregivers in the development of sex differences. Chodorow asserts that the early bond between mother and child affects boys and girls differently. Whereas boys must separate from their mothers to form their identities as males, girls do not have to endure this separation to define their identities as females. Chodorow (1989) explains that the devalued role of women is a product of the painful process men undergo to separate themselves from the female role.

Gender schema theory (Bem 1981) focuses on the role of cognitive organization in addition to socialization. This theory postulates that children learn how their cultures and/or societies define the roles of men and women and then internalize this knowledge as a gender schema, or unchallenged core belief. The gender schema is then used to organize subsequent experiences (Bem 1993). Children's perceptions of men and women are thus an interaction between their gender schemas and their experiences. Eventually, children will incorporate their own self-concepts into their gender schema and will assume the traits and behaviors that they deem suitable for their gender.

Alice Eagly (1987) offers yet another explanation of gender development that is based on socialization. Eagly's social role theory suggests that the sexual division of labor and societal expectations based on stereotypes produce gender roles. Eagly (1987) distinguishes between the communal and agentic dimensions of gender-stereotyped characteristics. The communal role is characterized by attributes, such as nurturance and emotional expressiveness, commonly associated with domestic activities, and thus, with women. The agentic role is characterized by attributes such as assertiveness and independence, commonly associated with public activities, and thus, with men. Behavior is strongly influenced by gender roles when cultures endorse gender stereotypes and form firm expectations based on those stereotypes (Eagly 1987).

As Eagly suggests, gender roles are closely linked with gender stereotypes. Stereotypes are "overgeneralized beliefs about people based on their membership in one of many social categories" (Anselmi and Law 1998, p. 195). Gender stereotypes vary on four dimensions: traits, role behaviors, physical characteristics, and occupations (Deaux and Lewis 1983). For example, whereas men are more likely to be perceived as aggressive and competitive, women are more likely to be viewed as passive and cooperative. Traditionally, men have been viewed as financial providers, whereas women have been viewed as caretakers. Physical characteristics and occupations have also been considered consistent or inconsistent with masculine or feminine roles.

Traditional gender stereotypes are most representative of the dominant (white, middle-class) culture. Hope Landrine (1999) asserts that although race and social class may not be mentioned when inquiring about gender stereotypes, most people will make assumptions about these categories. Her research suggests that when race and social classes are specified, different gender stereotypes emerge.

Gender roles and stereotypes affect couple and family interaction. Often, for example, the division of household labor is based on gender. Traditionally, white women in heterosexual couples remained at home and completed most of the domestic labor, while their male partners worked outside the home to provide the family income. Although women have increasingly joined the workforce over the past thirty years, they continue to do the majority of the household labor. Lawrence Kurdek (1993) studied white, heterosexual, gay, and lesbian couples without children. He found that heterosexual and gay couples were more likely than lesbian couples to divide household labor so that one partner did the majority of the work. Lesbian couples were most likely to share domestic tasks or take turns doing the tasks (Kurdek 1993).

Gender roles often become more differentiated when men and women become parents. Overall, women provide more direct care for and spend more time with children (Walzer 2001). This care includes taking responsibility for the mental work of gathering and processing information about infant care, delegating the tasks related to infant care, and worrying about infant health and well-being. In sum, the unequal division of both household labor and childcare, with women doing the bulk of the work, is thought to contribute to the reported lower marital satisfaction for women (Walzer 2001).

Gender roles and stereotypes affect men and women in other ways. Specifically, men and women may be judged by how well they conform to traditional stereotypes. In his theory of masculine gender role strain, Joespech Pleck (1976) asserted that boys and men are pressured to fulfill a standard of masculinity. Boys and men, for example, who do not fulfill the standard often suffer from low self-worth (Pleck; Sonnenstein; and Ku1993). Other lifelong consequences befall men who experience traumatic socialization practices such as rites of passage that entail violence. Even men who successfully fulfill the standard of masculinity suffer psychologically or emotionally from rigid constraints on acceptable parenting roles for men (Pleck; Sonnonstein; and Ku 1993). Richard Lazur and Richard Majors (1995) contend that gender role strain is pronounced with men of color. Men of color must balance the dominant standards of masculinity with their cultures' standards of masculinity in an effort to fulfill both satisfactorily. In addition, men of color must overcome prejudice and other obstacles to fulfill the standards of masculinity. The result is increased gender role strain for men of color (Lazur and Majors 1995). Likewise, white women and women of color may be constrained by standards of femininity, such as the pressure to have children.

Gender stereotypes can also affect men's and women's performance. Stereotype threat is defined as "an individual's awareness that he or she may be judged by or may self-fulfill negative stereo-types about her or his gender or ethnic group" (Lips 2001, p. 33). Research indicates that stereo-type threat can negatively affect performance by increasing anxiety. For example, Steven Spencer, Claude Steele, and Diane Quinn (1999) found that women performed significantly worse than men on a math test when the participants were led to believe that the test would probably produce gender differences. In contrast, women and men performed equally well when the participants were led to believe that the test did not produce gender differences. These findings suggest that negative stereotypes can and do negatively affect performance even when the stereotype has not been internalized or incorporated into the view of the self.

Interaction between Gender and Power

Differences in male and female gender roles are related to the power differential between men and women. Structural and institutional power reside in the forms of access to educational, economic, and political resources and opportunities. In most societies, access to these structural forms of power are aspects of male privilege.

Education, for example, provides people with the power to gather and process information, thus understanding the world in which they live. Although women in North America receive educations comparable to those of men, women in other nations often lack access to education and the power it affords. The United Nations (2000) reported that females comprise two-thirds of the world's 876 million illiterates. For example, under Taliban religious rule, women in Afganistan were not allowed to attend school, and those who attempted to teach them were harshly punished. One of the first responses when Taliban rule ended was the reinstitution of education for women.

Economies provide people with the power to financially support themselves and their families. The United Nations (2000) stated that women's participation in the workforce, although increasing, tends to be limited to a few occupations. In addition, women continue to occupy lower-status and lower-paying jobs. Women also experience greater unemployment than men (United Nations 2000). Fewer opportunities in the job market may partially explain the recent increases in the proportion of poor women in the United States. The United States 2000 Census data show that, compared to men at 9.9 percent, a higher percentage of women (12.5%) reside below the poverty line in all age categories. The differences are even more dramatic when race is included in the calculations. Whereas 8.3 percent of Caucasian American men fall beneath the poverty line, 24.1 percent of African American women fall beneath the poverty line (US Census Bureau 2001). Whether in the United States, or in other countries, women have less economic power than men.

Similar patterns are apparent in the arena of political power. Governments provide people with the power to voice their needs and wants through voting and holding elected positions. However, women did not have the right to vote in ten of the world's eleven oldest democracies until the twentieth century (Lips 2001). In addition, women are significantly underrepresented in legislative positions. Specifically, in 1998, women filled only 9 percent of the United States Senate seats and 12.9 percent of the House of Representative (Lips 2001).

Some theorists believe that men's greater power and status in societies underlie the differences in gender roles. Social structure theory (Eagly and Wood 1999) postulates that the powerful roles that men hold lead to the development of related traits, such as aggressiveness and assertiveness. Likewise, women who have less access to powerful roles develop traits consistent with their subordinate roles, such as submissiveness and cooperativeness. In sum, the power differential in favor of men may explain why stereotypical male traits are more valued than stereotypical feminine traits.

The existing power differential between men and women can also be manifested within marriages and families. For example, men may actively use their power to avoid sharing the household labor. Women may be relegated to providing more unpaid domestic labor because the gendered structure of their society inhibits their access to economic power.

Findings indicate that men who lack other types of power may compensate by exerting power through violence toward their partners. Women, who often lack economic power and interpersonal power and resources, all too frequently become trapped in increasingly violent relationships. Marital or intimate violence is a worldwide problem. For example, research suggests that one out of four Chilean women are beaten by their partners (McWhirter 1999). Similarly, findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey suggest that almost 25 percent of American women have been sexually and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner. (Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes 2000) Unfortunately, social institutions (legal, religious, medical) have historically supported male perpetrators of domestic violence rather than their female victims, effectively maintaining and reinforcing the power differential.

Interaction between Gender and Other Social Categories

Thus far this discussion of gender has focused on the distinction between men and women. However, this complex social category interacts with other social categories, such as race and socioeconomic status. A person is not simply a man or a woman, but is also defined by his or her membership in other social categories.

Too much of the extant literature on gender has been limited to Western, white, middle-class men and women. Pamely Trotman Reid (1999) states that, "for the most part, theory and empirical study in the psychology of women have failed to recognize many distinctions among women" (p. 337). She specifically criticizes the exclusion of poor women in psychological research. Likewise, women of color have often been excluded in the study of women. Despite such limited research samples, researchers frequently interpret their results as if they describe all men and all women, which can lead to false deductions and conclusions (Weber, Higginbotham, and Leung 1999). Certainly a clearer understanding of gender requires careful consideration of the intersections between gender and socioeconomic class, race, ethnicity, and a plethora of other categories that create and perpetuate power differentials in cultures around the globe.

See also:Childhood; Division of Labor; Family Roles; Gay Parents; Gender Identity; Husband; Intimacy; Lesbian Parents; Names for Children; Play; Power: Family Relationships; Power; Marital Relationships; Sexuality; Sexual Orientation; Stress; Sexuality in Childhood; Wife; Women's Movements

Bibliography

anselmi, d. l., and law, a. l., eds. (1998). questions ofgender: perspectives and paradoxes. boston: mcgraw hill.

bem, s. l. (1981). "gender schema theory: a cognitive account of sex-typing." psychological review 88:354–364.

bem, s. l. (1993). the lenses of gender: transforming thedebate on sexual inequality. new haven, ct: yale university press.

bohan, j. s. (1997). "regarding gender: essentialism, constructionism, and feminist psychology." in toward a new psychology of gender, ed. m. m. gergen and s. n. davis. new york: routledge.

buss, d. m. (1995). "psychological sex differences: origins through sexual selection." american psychologist 50:164–168.

chodorow, n. (1989). feminism and psychoanalytic theory. new haven, ct: yale university press.

deaux, k., and lewis, l. l. (1983). "assessment of genderstereotypes: methodology and components." psychological documents 13:25.

eagly, a. h. (1987). sex differences in social behavior: asocial role interpretation. hillsdale, nj: erlbaum.

eagly, a. h., and wood, w. (1999). "the origins of sexdifferences in human behavior: evolved dispositions versus social roles." american psychologist 54(6):408–423.

kudek, l. a. (1993). "the allocation of household labor in gay, lesbian, and heterosexual married couples." journal of social issues 49:127–139.

landrine, h. (1999) "race x class stereotypes of women."in gender, culture, and ethnicity: current research about women and men, ed. l. a. peplau, s. c. debro, r. c. veniegas, and p. l. taylor. mountain view, ca: mayfield.

lazur, r. f., and majors, r. (1995). "men of color: ethnocultural variations of male gender role strain." in a new psychology of men, ed. r. f. levant and s. pollack. new york: basic books.

lips, h. m. (2001). sex and gender: an introduction. 4th edition. mountain view, ca: mayfield.

mcwhirter, p. t. (1999). "la violencia privada: domesticviolence in chile." american psychologist 54(1):37–40.

pleck, j. h. (1976). "the male sex role: definitions, problems, and sources of change." journal of social issues 32:155–164.

pleck, j. h., sonnenstein, f. l., and ku, l. c. (1993). "masculinity ideology and its correlates." in gender issues in contemporary society, ed. s. oskamp and m. costanzo. newbury park, ca: sage.

reid, p. t. (1999). "poor women in psychological research: shut up and shut out." in gender, culture, and ethnicity: current research about women and men, ed. l. a. peplau, s. c. debro, r. c. veniegas, and p. l. taylor. mountain view, ca: mayfield.

shields, s. a. (1975). "functionalism, darwinism, and the psychology of women: a study in social myth." american psychologist 30(7):739–754.

spencer, s. j.; steele, c. m.; and quinn, d. m. (1999)."stereotype threat and women's math performance." journal of experimental social psychology 35(1):4–28.

walzer, s. (2001). "thinking about the baby: gender and the division of infant care." in men and masculinity: a text reader, ed. t. f. cohen. belmont, ca: wadsworth.

weber, l., higginbotham, e., and leung, m. l. a. (1999). "race and class bias in qualitative research on women." in gender, culture, and ethnicity: current research about women and men, ed. l. a. peplau,s. c. debro, r. c. veniegas, and p. l. taylor. mountain view, ca: mayfield.

other resources

tjaden, p., and thoennes, n. (2000). extent, nature, andconsequences of intimate partner violence: findings from the national violence against women survey. available from http://ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/181867.pdf.

united nations. the world's women 2000: trends andstatistics. available from http://www.un.org/depts/unsd/ww2000/index.htm.

united states census bureau. (2001). annual demographic survey. available from http://ferret.bls. census.gov/macro/032001/pov/new01_000.htm.

kelly rice wood

sharon scales rostosky

pam remer

GENDER

When considering issues of aging, gender must be considered as an integral component. The Census Bureau estimates that the number of women age sixty and older in the world will double between the years 2000 and 2025. In 2000, in developed countries, one in ten persons was a woman age sixty or older. This is projected to increase to one in seven by 2025. While developed countries may have higher percentages of older women, developing countries actually have higher numbers of older women, with faster growth rates for older women than more developed countries.

The different life experiences of women and men are reflected in several key demographic measures. Primary among these is the skewed sex ratio at older ages—there are a far greater number of older women than older men. This phenomenon is directly related to higher life expectancy and lower death rates among women. However, older women do experience their own set of health problems, and older women are more economically disadvantaged than older men. They are also more likely to live alone. On the other hand, women have stronger social support systems than men.

Sex ratios

Figure 1 presents sex ratios for three age groups throughout the world. The sex ratio is the number of males per 100 females. At birth, the sex ratio is generally around 105. In other words, there are more male babies born than female babies. This pattern is found in almost all societies. In the middle ages of the life course, there tends to be almost equal numbers of men and women, but by age sixty-five, the sex ratio is skewed heavily in favor of females. Generally, based on the world average, there are one-third more females than males age sixty-five and older. However, there are regional differences. In Asia, Latin America, and Africa there are about one-fifth more older females than older males, while in Europe there are almost two-fifths more older women. There is more detailed information for the United States, in which the sex ratio falls below 50 for ages eighty-five to eighty-nine, indicating that there are more than twice as many females as males in this age range. For those over one hundred years old, the sex ratio is a mere twenty-one—that is, there are twenty-one males per one hundred females. This pattern of highly skewed sex ratios is the result of gender differences in life expectancy, which are discussed in the next section.

Life expectancy and death rates

It is well known that women live longer than men. Exactly how much longer? And does this advantage continue as people age? In 2000, the average life expectancy for women worldwide was sixty-eight years, while for men it was sixty-four years. Nevertheless, the difference between women and men in life expectancy varies throughout the world. In developing countries women live, on average, three years longer than men. The difference is only two years in sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast, women live an average of seven years longer than men in developed countries. The difference in life expectancy tends to decrease at older ages. At age sixty, the difference ranges from one to four years (see Table 1).

In most countries, there are additional differences in life expectancy based on race, class, and other social-status differences. In the United States, for example, overall life expectancy at birth is 79.2 years for females and 73.6 years for males. However, there are important race differences: life expectancy for white women is 79.8 years; for black women, 74.7 years; for white men, 74.3 years; and for black men, 67.3 years. Therefore, it is white women who have the largest advantage in life expectancy, while black men lag 12.5 years behind. However, the difference between white women and black men decreases to five years by age sixty-five, when white women are expected to live 19.1 more years and black men 14.2 more years.

Although both black and white women have longer life expectancies than their male counterparts, the differences decrease at later ages, especially among blacks. While black women are expected to live 7.4 years longer than black men at birth, by age sixty-five the advantage in life expectancy is only 3.2 years. Similarly, white women's advantage decreases from 5.5 years at birth to 3.2 years at age sixty-five. It is also interesting to compare the similarities (and differences) between black women and white men. Although life expectancy is similar for these two groups, there are differences in death rates. Black females have higher death rates than white males at ages under five years old, with the difference being especially great under one year old. Black females also suffer higher death rates from thirty-five to sixty-four years old. However, at age sixty-five and older, the death rate for white males surpasses that for black females. Indeed, at age eighty-five and older, black females have lower death rates than white females and black males have lower death rates than white males.

The importance of the gender difference in life expectancy is obvious: if women live longer than men then there will be more older women than older men. This has several implications for individual women as well as for society. For individual women, it is likely to mean outliving one's spouse, living alone, and poorer economic conditions, as fewer resources are used to cover more years.

These gender differences in life expectancy lead to inquiries about what older men and women are dying from. In the United States, for those forty-five years old and older, the top two causes of death for both women and men are heart disease and cancer, though the death rates from these diseases are higher for men. At the younger ages (forty-five to sixty-four years old), men have higher death rates for nine of the ten leading causes of death, the exception being cerebrovascular diseases (stroke). It is interesting to note that the death rate for causes with large social-behavioral components, such as accidents, liver disease, HIV infection, and suicide, are two to six times greater for men than women in this age group. For those age sixty-five and older, the leading causes of death are similar for women and men, though men have higher death rates from heart disease, cancer, and pulmonary diseases and women have higher rates from cerebrovascular diseases and Alzheimer's disease.

In addition, although women generally experience lower death rates than men, they suffer from higher rates of several chronic conditions, including arthritis, high blood pressure, cataracts, chronic sinusitis, hay fever, varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, asthma, hemorrhoids, frequent indigestion, and migraines. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to experience hearing impairments, heart conditions, orthopedic impairments, diabetes, visual impairments, tinnitus, and dermatitis.

Why do these differences exist? Surely, part of the reason lies in biology. Males have higher death rates than females at all ages, even before they are born (miscarriages disproportionately occur with male fetuses). These biological differences are likely to be exacerbated by social factors. Men are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors, such as driving faster, which lead to higher death rates from accidents. Men are also more likely to smoke and drink alcohol, increasing their risk of lung cancer and liver disease, among other diseases. Finally, men tend to neglect their health more than women, as witnessed by fewer visits to the doctor. The smaller differences that exist in developing countries are likely to be due to harsher living conditions for all.

Economic status and retirement

Men enjoy an economic advantage over women, and older men are no exception. Older men have completed more years of school, are more likely to be in the labor force, and are less likely to be living in poverty than older women. Table 2 shows economic activity rates for older women and men. The economic activity rate is the percentage of people who are engaged in paid activities or are available to work in such activities. In every region, older men are more likely to be economically active than older women. However, in Europe, Canada, the United States, and central Asia, participation rates are low for both men and women. In contrast, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest activity rates for both women and men. Finally, large gender differences in activity among older individuals exist in western Asia, northern Africa, and Central America.

In the United States, labor-force participation rates peak at 93.2 percent for men twenty-five to thirty-four years old while women's participation rates peak at 77.1 percent for thirty-five to forty-four year olds. Between ages fifty-five and sixty-five, men's labor force participation rates drop to 68.1 percent and women's rates fall to 51.2 percent. Finally, those sixty-five years old and older have low rates of participation. Still, men are almost twice as likely to be in the labor force at this age (16.5 percent versus 8.6 percent).

Of those with an income, men have higher incomes than women. When median income peaks (at forty-five to fifty-four years old), women are making 55 percent of what men make. Both men's and women's median income decreases at older ages, though women's decreases faster initially. The big drop in men's median income occurs after age sixty-four. In 1998, men age sixty-five and older earned a median income of $18,166, while the median income for women age sixty-five and older was only $10,504. Related to their lower income, 13 percent of women age sixty-five and older live below the poverty level, compared to 7 percent of their male counterparts.

Among those who are employed, women and men tend to retire at similar ages, with the median age being around sixty-three for both women and men. Often, retirement is hastened by the retirement of one's spouse, though this reason is cited more often by women. An exception is when wives are not employed during the child-rearing years. These wives often retire later than their husbands, perhaps making up for time spent out of the labor force. Husbands also retire faster when they have Social Security income or a pension. On the other hand, wives retire faster when their husbands' income is high. Women's economic well-being does tend to be more influenced by their husbands than vice versa. For example, widowhood is more likely to increase poverty for women than for men. In fact, a man's economic well-being may actually improve when his wife dies.

Marital status, living arrangements, and social support

In every region, at least one-third of older women are widowed (see Table 3). Rates of widowhood are especially high in northern Africa and central Asia, where almost three-fifths of older women are widowed. In contrast, widowhood is much less common among men around the world. For example, only 7 percent of men in sub-Saharan Africa outlive their wives. In Africa, older women are over six times more likely to be widowed than older men.

Gender differences in marital status tend to increase with age. In the United States, at ages forty-five to fifty-four years old, the majority of both men and women are married (see Table 4), and only 7 percent of women and 9 percent of men in this age group have never been married. Widowhood is rare for men (1 percent) and very uncommon for women (4 percent). On the contrary, this age range represents the age at which the highest percent of women and men are divorced, with 18 percent of women and 14 percent of men being divorced. The picture changes considerably for those seventy-five years old and over. While the majority of men are still married at this age, only 30 percent of women in this age group are married. Instead, fully 60 percent of women seventy-five and older are widowed. In fact, the percentage of women widowed at ages seventy-five and older is 2.5 times greater than the percentage of men widowed.

Because women tend to be the survivors of marriage, they are also more likely to live alone or with someone else. This can be seen by looking at household headship. In every region of the world, women age sixty and older are more likely than older men to be household heads. In fact, almost one-half of older women in Europe are household heads. In the United States, women sixty-five years old and over are as likely to live alone as with a spouse, with 41 percent in each type of living arrangement. In contrast, only 17 percent of men sixty-five and older live alone, while 73 percent live with a spouse. In addition, only 10 percent of these men live with someone other than a spouse, compared to 18 percent of women this age.

Marital status can affect receipt of social support from children. Men who are divorced suffer disruptions in their relationships with their children, especially with their daughters. This may have consequences for caretaking, since disabled parents are more likely to receive care from their daughters. Widowhood may also have negative consequences for men's support networks. Men who are widowed receive less support from their children than those who are still married. In addition, women who are widowed more often develop friendships than men who are widowed, and women are more likely to receive support from friends. Even among older persons who are unmarried and childless, women receive more support than men. Generally, children report better relationships with their mothers than with their fathers. This may be due to the fact that women are more active in maintaining intergenerational relationships. Therefore, although older women are more likely than older men to find themselves widowed and living alone, they seem better equipped to manage their lives on their own, with some help from family and friends.

Gender roles

Do gender roles relax or persist at older ages? This is an often debated question. It has been argued that men become more feminine and women more masculine as they age, and the idea that men become more sensitive and family-oriented while women become more assertive and confident is a popular one. Many older men tend to look back on their lives and think of such things as time missed with children when they were younger. On the other hand, older women's images of themselves tend to be higher, in terms of self-esteem and confidence, than those of younger women. These women feel that they can be more forceful in doing what they want.

An alternative explanation to reversed roles is the idea that roles may not change that much, but rather that roles may be more easily expressed at older ages. In other words, those who engage in more traditional roles at younger ages will continue to express traditional gender roles, while those who have more egalitarian views at younger ages will find it easier to express these views at older ages. Therefore, older ages provide more flexibility in enacting people's true gender roles. It seems that there is less pressure to behave in ways that conform to gender stereo-types at older ages.

Future gender differences

After decades of widening, the gap between men and women in life expectancy showed some signs of narrowing at the end of the twentieth century. In 2000, the gap in the United States was about two years less than it was in 1970. As a result, a less skewed sex ratio at older ages may emerge, though it will certainly remain weighted toward females for a long time to come.

As for economic roles, it is widely known that women's labor force participation increased dramatically over the last decades of the twentieth century. Female labor force participation rates in the United States increased from 43 percent in 1970 to 60 percent in 1998. The increase was especially dramatic among women forty-five to sixty-four years old, the ages right before retirement. Participation rates for this age group went from around one-half to three-quarters between 1970 and 1998. However, there have also been important changes in men's labor force participation. Over the last few decades of the twentieth century, men's labor force participation rates declined, with larger declines at older ages. Between 1970 and 1998, participation rates for men fifty-five to sixty-four years old decreased from 83 percent to 68 percent, while rates for men sixty-five and older decreased from 27 percent to 17 percent. These changes suggest that more recent and future cohorts of women will be better off economically as they enter old age. Fewer women will be financially dependent on their husbands or other family members. At the same time, more and more men may need, or at least benefit from, their wives working.

Changing family roles may also be important for different cohorts of aging men and women. Although a relatively small number of those sixty-five and older are divorced, the percentage increase between 1980 and 2000 in the United States was fairly large (from 3.4 percent to 7.1 percent for women and from 3.6 percent to 6.1 percent for men). This will likely have important implications—especially for older men, since fathers who are not married to their children's mother tend to receive less support from their children. In addition, it will be interesting to see if changing roles at home among younger couples translate into more egalitarian arrangements among older couples in future cohorts.

Gayle Kaufman

See also Feminist Theory; Genetics; Inequality; Marital Relationships; Population Aging; Retirement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aquilino, W. S. "Later Life Parental Divorce and Widowhood: Impact on Young Adults' Assessment of Parent-Child Relations." Journal of Marriage and the Family 56 (1994): 908–922.

Barer, B. M. "Men and Women Aging Differently." International Journal of Aging and Human Development 38 (1994): 29–40.

Belsky, J. "The Research Findings on Gender Issues in Aging Men and Women." In Gender Issues Across the Life Cycle. Edited by B. R. Wainrib. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1992. Pages 163–171.

Brubaker, T. H., and Brubaker, E. "Family Care of the Elderly in the United States: An Issue of Gender Differences?" In Family Care of the Elderly: Social and Cultural Changes. Edited by J. I. Kosberg. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992. Pages 210–231.

Burkhauser, R. V.; Butler, J. S.; and Holden, K. C. "How the Death of a Spouse Affects Economic Well-Being After Retirement." Social Science Quarterly 72 (1991): 504–519.

Cooney, T. M., and Uhlenberg, P. "The Role of Divorce in Men's Relations with Their Adult Children After Mid-Life." Journal of Marriage and the Family 52 (1990): 677–688.

Dervarics, C. "The Coming Age of Older Women." Population Today 27 (1999): 1–2.

Gendell, M., and Siegel, J. S. "Trends in Retirement Age by Sex 1950–2005." Monthly Labor Review 115 (1992): 22–29.

Hardy, M. A., and Hazelrigg, L. E. "The Gender of Poverty in an Aging Population." Research on Aging 15 (1993): 243–278.

Henretta, J. C.; O'Rand, A. M.; and Chan, C. G. "Gender Differences in Employment After Spouse's Retirement." Research on Aging 15 (1993): 148–169.

Kohen, J. A. "Old but Not Alone: Informal Social Supports Among the Elderly by Marital Status and Sex." The Gerontologist 23 (1983): 57–63.

Marks, N. F. "Midlife Marital Status Differences in Social Support Relationships with Adult Children and Psychological Well-Being." Journal of Family Issues 16 (1995): 5–28.

GENERATION

See Cohort change; Age-period-cohort model

Gender

THE SECOND-WAVE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

GENDER AND ELITISM: WHOSE “PERSONAL IS POLITICAL”?

COMPLICATING AND DESTABILIZING GENDER

GLOBALIZING GENDER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In The Second Sex (first published in 1949), the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir led the way in distinguishing biological anatomy and chemistry from socialized gendered expectations: “One is not born but rather becomes a woman” (de Beauvoir 1953, p. 249). For de Beauvoir, being a female did not constitute being a woman. Rather, one’s biological makeup is subscribed with a social-cultural shaping of one’s gendered characteristics; for women this is the development of appropriate feminine behaviors. Though the term is highly contested and laden with political implications, at its most basic level gender is used to describe socially constructed characteristics of masculinity and femininity, whereas sex is used to describe one’s biological makeup (chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive/sexual anatomy).

THE SECOND-WAVE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

The distinction between sex and gender was an essential element for many issues addressed during the second-wave feminist movement (1960-1995). Though immensely diverse, many feminist schools of thought did agree that characteristics associated with femininity in the United States created norms and roles that oppressed women by limiting their access to public space and economic opportunities. Discussions of gender during the second-wave feminist movement often attempted to overturn what the scholar Harold Garfinkel described as the “natural attitude” towards gender (1967, p. 122)—the common belief that the gender dichotomy is a natural distinction between the two sexes. This assumption, according to activists, perpetuated inequality for women. In understanding the creation of the natural attitude, many feminists turned to the structure of the family and women’s connection to childbearing. Woman’s biological ability to give birth, combined with industrial changes, had led to social expectations of woman as nurturer, domestic caretaker, and other roles traditionally associated with the private sphere. Dichotomously, man’s inability to give birth and his larger physical makeup had led to social expectations to fulfill the role of protector, provider, and roles traditionally associated with the public sphere.

For feminists, these gendered characteristics, complicated by an array of other factors, had perpetuated a division of labor that empowered men and disempowered women. Men’s more active and dominant roles created an unequal relationship between the sexes that gave rise to an oppressive ideology both within the home and, more broadly, within institutionalized sexism. Overall, the most prominent goal of the second-wave feminist movement was to bring about a sense of gender equality. Concerns such as motherhood, beauty regimes, and domestic upkeep were seen as essential components of a public discussion about expectations of femininity that focused on issues of equal access to the workplace, equal pay for equal work, and an overall attempt to allow women to have control over their lives and their bodies. Theories on how to deal with this hierarchal division of labor were vastly varied. For example, Marxist feminists saw the capitalistic economic structure as inherently patriarchal. Thus, attempts at more equal power relations between men and women were reliant upon a restructuring of the economic system. Conversely, more conservative feminists, who constituted the liberal feminist school of thought, looked more closely at ways to reform the current system to allow for more women within the public sphere. These various feminist schools reflect the differences in conceptualization and approach to the concept of gender. Some feminists worked relentlessly to prove that both men and women could be rational, active members of public space, challenging the preconceived notion that masculine gendered characteristics are inherent to men. Others fought to revalorize qualities of femininity, attempting to recognize the power of women’s roles as well as the usefulness of feminine approaches in public space. What united many of the perspectives was a desire to engage in a larger public discussion about issues of masculinity and femininity and how they influence the daily lives of women and men.

GENDER AND ELITISM: WHOSE “PERSONAL IS POLITICAL”?

Since the beginning of the second-wave movement, the meaning of the term gender has been disputed. Despite some public understanding of the second wave’s fight for gender equality for women, the movement was fractured, with discontentment from many sides. For example, although Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) was commended for its attack on women’s limited role as domestic caretaker, her analysis was criticized for its elitism. Although Friedan called attention to the oppression rooted in gendered expectations and roles, her white, heterosexual, middle-class perspectives were specific to a single group of women. Such criticisms called into question the stability of the category woman. Do all women share a similar experience? Questions of race, class, and sexual orientation brought forth recognition that gender expectations and gender identity were not the same for all women, nor were they the same for all men.

Though cross-cultural comparisons were used to draw attention to the socialization of gender roles and expectations, many second-wave feminists still failed to recognize the cultural differences within their own communities. As gender expectations and what it means to be a woman were debated, critics began to question the assumption that all women shared the same experiences. In her 1981 book Ain’t I a Woman, the literary scholar bell hooks discussed the racism that circulated and continues to circulate in feminist literature. She identified the struggle for black women to find a space of visibility within a movement embedded in racism. Her analysis, and those of other critics, draws attention to both the racial and economic advantage embedded in the positions of many noted feminists of the second wave. Theorizing about “women” when in actuality only discussing the experiences of white women exemplified this privileged perspective. Core issues such as beauty and domestic expectations were far removed from racially oppressed women whose economic and social positions typically demanded out-of-home labor. As hooks pointed out, the racism within the women’s movement coupled with the sexism in the civil rights movement left little to no space for a public debate about the experiences and oppression of black women.

Compounding the criticisms of racial and economic privilege were the objections voiced by members of the lesbian feminist school of thought, who pointed out the homophobia inherent in the women’s movement. The notion of a shared sisterhood of all women provoked anger from those women who felt their experiences differed and their perspectives were silenced. Often, core discussions of gender focused on social expectations of men and women as they function in heterosexual relationships. Lesbian feminists pointed out the institutionalization of heterosexuality and the unwillingness of many heterosexual feminists to challenge this unequal power dynamic.

Overall, there was a sense from critics that discussions of power within the second-wave feminist movement were oversimplified. Many feminists failed to recognize that they could be both oppressed and oppressor, thus ignoring the intersections of race, class, and sexual orientation in a society that privileges white, male, middle- or upper-class status, and heterosexuality.

COMPLICATING AND DESTABILIZING GENDER

As gender became a more common topic of discussion in both academic institutions and activist forums, its unstable and complex nature was a frequent part of debate. Attempting to move past the charges of elitism and oversimplification, scholars such as Joan Scott defended the usefulness of gender as an analytic category. Scott maintained that gender is not constant, but rather constantly shifting and changing as it operates in multiple fields (1986). She argued that discussions and studies utilizing gender as an analytic category must be carefully understood based on context and history. Her analysis defended its usefulness while simultaneously complicating the power dynamics that intersect with gender construction.

Similarly, the gender scholar Judith Butler significantly contributed to the complication of a theoretical understanding of gender. Her Gender Trouble (1990) is foundational in pointing out the intricate connection between gender and sexuality. Butler drew attention to the policing of heterosexuality through gender norms, arguing that a core component of the current gender system, which calls women to be highly feminine and men to be highly masculine, is as much about upholding heterosexuality as it is about policing public space. Additionally, Butler is noted for her theory of gender performativity, which holds that gender is maintained through performative acts that naturalize and create an appearance of an internal essence. Her position can be understood as an extreme social constructionist stand that sees both sexuality and gender as constitutive of our practices, policies, language, and overall daily norms.

Both Scott and Butler echo the reflective position taken by many gender scholars in the last decades of the twentieth century. The desire to complicate gender and illuminate its instability is found in works that addressed the realization that gender cannot be equated with woman. Masculinity studies became much more common, and indeed expected when addressing issues of gender, and gender literature and courses more frequently recognized the gendered nature of every individual. Most gender literature focused on femininity and oppression; however, a look towards masculinity revealed the limiting role placed upon many men who are primarily defined by success in the public realm. Expectations of aggression, detachment, and control are problematic for both men and women. The antisexist male activist Jackson Katz has since 1993 created high school and college-based educational programs, which include videos and lectures that focus on the construction of masculinity in the United States and the violence inherent in many male-gendered norms. The aim is to liberate not only women but also men from limited roles and expectations; recognizing that all individuals are gendered allows for a more complete understanding of how the patriarchal system is maintained. Privy to earlier criticisms, scholars studying masculinity are acutely aware of the vast differences in norms and expectations across racial and class divides.

Many gender scholars have called for an understanding of gender that moves beyond basic binary discussions of masculinity and femininity to a greater understanding of transgendered issues and the fluidity of gendered identities. The twenty-first century has brought more frequent discussions and practices that illustrate at least a partial public understanding of “gender bending.” Public populations are often not familiar with the work of Butler who calls for disruptions of gender expectations. However, cross dressing, transexuality, and overall gendered norm violations are infiltrated in media and other mainstream elements of United States culture. Thus, the public is both exposed and often partially aware of transgendered or gender bending practices. Overall, gender has come to be understood as unstable, allowing for resistance, reinforcement, or recreation of gender identity and expectations in a multitude of ways.

For women who identify with the third wave of feminism, this unstable and complex view of gender is central. Though there still is dispute over whether or not a new wave has indeed emerged, many young women active in gender discussions claim a third wave of feminism whose focus is on creating a solidarity that recognizes difference. In its discussion of difference, coalitions, and popular culture, this third wave, thought to have begun in the mid-1990s, both veered away from and built upon the second-wave movement. Although “third wavers” are as diverse in their positions as the feminists who preceded them, there is a general sense that the movement needs to be privy to difference and to build coalitions with other activist movements, because many gendered issues entail struggle against racism, homophobia, class privilege, and imperialism simultaneously. Additionally, although earlier movements criticized popular culture and many of the feminine-gendered expectations, some third wavers distinguish their understanding of gender by claiming power in their sexuality and femininity, seeking ways to co-opt patriarchal ideologies for their own empowerment. This is exemplified in debates over wearing high heels and makeup and embracing one’s feminine sexuality. Some third wavers argue that the pop star Madonna does not represent female oppression, but rather sexual agency. This position strays from the second wave’s desire to free women (typically and critically, mostly white women) from such beauty expectations.

GLOBALIZING GENDER

Twenty-first-century feminism is as diversified as ever, but earlier charges of elitism, both national and international, have produced feminist schools of thought that seek to better understand gendered issues on a global scale. Many postcolonial feminist scholars seek ways to create a feminist solidarity that addresses global concerns while recognizing racial, economic, regional, national, and religious differences. A leader in academic discussions about transnational gender issues is feminist postcolonial theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty. In Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003) she provides a summary of her feminist position, which argues for economic stability worldwide for all individuals. Her vision is antiracist and anticapitalist and seeks to create democratic participation through a more complex and reflective solidarity.

Also illustrating a global commitment to gender equity are the many transnational feminist networks such as the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, which “advocates for women’s equality in global policy. It seeks to empower women as decision makers to achieve economic, social, and gender justice, a healthy, peaceful planet, and human rights for all” (2004). This desire to address issues of gender globally comes with a great deal of cultural reflexivity and international collaboration. Global scholars and transnational feminist networks seek to acknowledge and manage issues of difference that arise in multicultural coalitions. Despite these challenges, twenty-first-century gender scholars and activists find it increasingly difficult to ignore globalization and the fact that worldwide gender inequity involves a multiplicity of economic, environmental, ethnic, and many other postcolonial factors.

Although gender research has followed numerous threads, the intellectual compass seems to be pointing toward a focus on global issues. This recent direction is frequently freighted with a complicated theory of power and difference that requires a highly reflective researcher who can represent such issues without colonizing the voices of those they study. Despite shifts in the focus of gender research, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have proven the importance and longevity of gender as an essential topic of political and social discussion.

SEE ALSO Feminism; Gender, Alternatives to Binary; Gender Gap; Gender Studies; Glass Ceiling; Inequality, Gender; Patriarchy; Sexuality; Transgender

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beauvoir, Simone de. [1949] 1953. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Connell, Robert W. 2002. Gender. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

hooks, bell. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Scott, Joan W. 1986. Gender: A Useful Category for Historical Analysis. American Historical Review 91 (December): 1053–1075.

Tong, Rosemarie. 1998. Feminist Thought. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO:

Westview Press. Whelehan, Imelda. 1995. Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to “Post-Feminism”. New York: New York University Press.

Women’s Environment and Development Organization. 2004. About Us. http://www.wedo.org/aboutus.aspx.

Wood, Julia T. 2005. Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture. 6th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Erin Foley-Reynolds

Gender. This entry consists of two articles, each of which deals with the issue of gender and the military from a different perspective. The first, Male Identity and the Military, examines the concept of men as warriors and protectors. The second, Female Identity and the Military, emphasizes the relationship that women have had to war and the military. For more detailed related discussions, see Combat Effectiveness, Gays and Lesbians in the Military, Gender and War, Military Ideals, Sex and the Military, Sexual Harassment, Women in the Military.Male Identity and the MilitaryFemale Identity and the Military
Gender: Male Identity and the Military Male identity in the United States, except in certain pacifist groups, has generally been closely tied to the socially defined role of warrior and protector. Throughout American military history, the manipulation and exploitation of this gender identity has been among the most important means of persuading men to join the service or informally coercing them to participate. This process has served three major purposes: first, it draws huge numbers of men into uniform without having to resort to widespread physical coercion by the state; second, it serves a military useful role by defining behavioral standards that make for effective combatants and contribute to post‐service reintegration; and third, the gender roles fostered by the military bolster and legitimize gender roles in society as a whole. The agents of this manipulation have been as diverse and pervasive as their message, including politicians, military leaders, commercial interests, and religious and educational institutions.

The creation of male gender identity has been tied explicitly to a warrior role and military service for the local community and the state. That this was a product of the natural order went virtually unchallenged throughout the colonial and early national periods, and military service for men was explicitly tied to rights and obligations of citizenship. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, with the rise of industrialization and urbanization, the closing of the frontier, slowly expanding roles for women, and the influence of social Darwinism, this assumption came into question. To reaffirm it, some Americans like Theodore Roosevelt openly embraced war with Spain in 1898 in part to restore the individual and collective masculine virtues apparently eroded by modern, materialistic, urban society.

The twentieth century has witnessed a dynamic of ever stronger attacks on traditional, polarized gender identities, and increasingly extreme retrenchments of the male warrior identity. As women's roles in the workplace and the military expanded with national mobilization in two world wars, they directly challenged the underlying assumptions of male‐warrior exclusivity. If women were allowed to step into uniform, as temporary auxiliaries in 1917, in segregated branches of the armed forces in 1943, and integrated into the force beginning in 1978, their specialties and geographic assignments were still carefully circumscribed away from combat in efforts to protect the male‐warrior status.

As the reserved male domains shrank, definitions and defense of those domains became more polarized. When the military as a whole was an exclusively male sphere, there was no need to draw gendered distinctions within it, but as women entered the military, gendered distinctions sharpened between the warriors and supporting personnel. This also marked the rise of concern over sexual orientation, which threatened further to subvert the traditional male identity. In training and indoctrination of male recruits, gendered behavior emphasized boundaries and fostered extreme behavioral standards. The hypermasculine ideals espoused and often embodied by drill instructors and unit leaders fostered effective battlefield performance, especially among various airborne, amphibious, and aviation elite forces. But while such indoctrination served short‐term institutional needs and provided individual affirmation of male gender values, it also promoted behavior increasingly incompatible with gender relations in society as a whole. This has been seen in dramatic fashion in the last twenty years with the integration of the services and the incremental lifting of many restrictions on women serving in combat.

The integration of women in the military has exposed the false premise of the traditional male gender identity, which insists that the role of warrior and protector must be an exclusive province of men. The myths that have long underpinned this identity are deeply interwoven into the fabric of American society, and efforts to redefine gender roles have encountered widespread resistance from many sources. If men are no longer to hold exclusive control of sanctioned organized aggression and violence, then the basis for individual and collective roles and behavioral standards will require fundamental change, such change is unlikely to come about without intense and protracted conflict.

Bibliography

Morris Janowitz and and Roger Little , Sociology and the Military Establishment, 1959; 3rd ed. 1974.
Jean Bethke Elshtain , Women and War, 1987.
Judith Hicks Stiehm , Arms and the Enlisted Woman, 1989.
Elisabetta Addis, Valeria E. Russo, and Lorenza Sebesta, eds., Women Soldiers: Images and Reality, 1994.
Linda Bird Francke , Ground Zero: The Gender War in the Military, 1997.
Melissa S. Herbert , Camouflage Isn't Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military, 1998.

Craig M. Cameron

Bibliography

Cynthia H. Enloe , Does Khaki Become You?: The Militarization of Women's Lives, 1983.
Eva Isaksson, ed., Women and the Military System: Proceedings of a Symposium Arranged by the International Peace Bureau and Peace Union of Finland, 1988.
Susan Jeffords , The Remasculization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War, 1989.
Judith Stiehm , Arms and the Enlisted Woman, 1989.
Rhonda Cornum and and Peter Copeland , She Went to War: The Rhonda Cornum Story, 1992.
Jeanne Holm , Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution, 1992.
Miriam Cook and Angela Woollacott, eds., Gendering War Talk, 1993.
Judith Stiehm, ed., It's Our Military, Too!: Woman and the U.S. Military, 1996.

Judith Hicks Stiehm

gender Apart from its narrow application in languages that assign masculine/feminine/neuter status to linguistic terms, gender is a category used to differentiate women and men, boys and girls, male and female, masculinity and femininity. Increased attention to gender as a category of analysis, particularly in the social and behavioural sciences, has coincided with the rise of academic feminism. The category itself has undergone many revisions over time, but is typically employed to distinguish sex from gender in the following way: there are clear biological differences (sex differences) between men and women, and those biological differences serve as the basis for the social construction of different roles for men and women (gender differences), though these may vary from one culture to the next. Although biological difference does not necessitate the roles assigned to men and women, it enables differential social relations which are then often (mis)understood to be ‘naturally’ determined by biology. Recently, this formulation of the relation between sex and gender has been challenged as endorsing ‘gender essentialism’ (see below).

Gender as sex

That men and women have different natures is an ancient idea, but in the nineteenth century it gained the epistemological authority of medicine and science as the idea became an object of formal investigation. Victorian science placed particular emphasis on what it identified as the weaker constitution of women, and fluctuated between assigning to them either through-going sexual passivity (attributed to bourgeois women) or rampant promiscuity (attributed to lower-class women and women of colour). However it was characterized in medical or biological terms, and women's nature was said to be decidedly inferior to that of men. The emergence of the science of psychology seemed to confirm women's inferiority by locating female pathology in a psychosomatic nexus. Freud is an exemplar of the view that female ‘hysteria’, characterized by a complex interweaving of physical and mental disorders, results from somatizing unfulfilled sexual fantasies. While Freud was certainly ready to admit that both men and women suffer from mental disorders, his overall approach was that the ‘anatomical differences between the sexes’ determine gender-typed psychopathologies. The rigid adherence to the biological model enforced the belief that homosexuality was pathological, as well. Sexual desire for the ‘opposite’ sex was thought to be a sine qua non of normal gender identification. The ‘mannish woman’ or the ‘effeminate man’ could only be understood as forms of deviance.

In the early twentieth century, Margaret Mead was among the first explicitly to forge a distinction between sex understood as a biological category, and sex or gender roles understood as a social category. Mead's ethnographic study, Sex and Temperament in Three Societies (1935), argued that, ‘many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of head-dress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.’ This prying apart of sex and gender forms the basis for feminist efforts to displace biologically based assumptions about women's inferiority and/or the ‘naturalness’ of the maternal role. For feminism, gender becomes a critical category by means of which women's degraded status can be understood and transcended.

Feminism and gender

Early (1970s) feminist sociology and anthropology sought to identify how those with female bodies are solicited into particular gender roles that are then seen as stereotypical. An explosion of research proposed both that (i) gender stereotyping occurs at all levels of social and cultural organization; and that (ii) the analytical tools by means of which different disciplines organize knowledge are themselves permeated by gender bias. Sherry Ortner (1972), for example, argued that because women's reproductive functions are associated with nature, and because nature is subordinated to culture (which is associated with men), it follows that women are assigned a status subordinate to that of men. Carol Gilligan (1982) argued that cognitive–developmental categories employed by the dominant research on moral development assumed the superiority of categorical over relational thinking. Since men are more likely to reason categorically, and women rationally, it follows that women's moral reasoning will be deemed deficient in relation to that of men. This would explain why moral authority is granted to men in both the public and the private spheres, as both the Judge and the Father. Gilligan attempted to develop an analytical framework that re-evaluated the development of women's moral reasoning in light of the particular contexts of women's experience. Thus, she juxtaposed women's ‘ethic of care’ to men's ‘ethic of justice’, and argued that the former is just as structurally complex as the latter.

Feminists made analogous claims concerning the gendered nature of the subject matters and the methodologies of other fields. Evelyn Fox Keller (1978) argued that the very terms of scientific investigation — objectivity, disinterestedness, rationality — are themselves highly invested in a masculinist regime of domination and control over nature (including women). According to Keller, the relatively small number of women scientists reinforces the genderization of science by excluding women's ways of knowing from its arena. Feminist literary theorists scrutinized the literary canon for its exclusion of women writers, and for its masculine preoccupations (the pursuit of power, women, and whales). By analyzing representations of women in literature, and by unveiling the work of women writers, feminist scholarship revealed both the gendered nature of literature and our gendered ways of reading it. These approaches to the study of gender, sometimes called ‘gender standpoint theory’, assume that women's ‘identity’ can be defined and demarcated, and that the world is constituted in unique ways by women's ‘subjectivity’.

Gender essentialism and beyond

Apart from a general conservative backlash against the disruption to business as usual, feminist critics themselves offered counterexamples to the presuppositions that seem to underlie gender standpoint theory, that is, that women are universally subordinated to men, that men and women are always differentially associated with culture and nature respectively, that nature and culture are universally distinct categories, that male and female are universally distinct categories, and finally, that the category of woman is a stable category in and of itself. Cross-cultural evidence, for example, has been marshalled to show that there are widespread differences in the ways that reproductive labour is apportioned between men and women. Other critics have demonstrated that race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity must be interposed with gender in order to account for the cultural and historical variability of social relations and subjectivities. Given the effects of racism on the distribution of material and symbolic resources, the category of woman cannot be applied univocally to white women and to women of colour. Similarly, ‘queer theory’ has challenged the assumption that gender provides a singular axis of sexual orientation. Along these lines, Monique Wittig (1991) argues that, understood in relation to the categories of sexual difference, lesbians are not women. How many genders might there then be?

Thus, revisionist accounts of gender attempt to displace ‘gender essentialism’, the view that women's experience and embodiment can be distilled into a unified form of subjectivity. Some theorists replace gender essentialism with the idea that subjectivity is not fixed by intersecting social categories (gender, race, etc.) but is ‘positional’, ‘provisional’, and ‘performative’. According to this view, the initial feminist impulse to distinguish sex and gender must be resisted because, though it attempts to break the ideological tie between the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’, it in fact reproduces the categories of man and woman at the level of the sexed body. Judith Butler (1990) argues that sex construed as a biological category is as heavily socially constructed as gender, and that biological sex itself is a gendered category. According to Butler, while feminist analysis successfully identified the social practices that produce gender as a category of identification, they have failed to see that sex itself is produced as a category that precedes gender. Butler's postmodern conception of gender draws on the assumption that nothing exists prior to systems of representation, thus it is wrong to think that gender identity is inscribed on a pre-existing sexed body. According to this view, the meanings attached to the female body as an object of scientific scrutiny are determined not just by the practices of science, but in conjunction with other cultural and economic formations, for example, global capitalism, the mass media, institutional racism, or homophobia. Gender, as such, is best seen as a heuristic category, a means of investigating the variability and contingency of our understanding of sexual diference.

Meredith W. Michaels

Bibliography

Fausto-Sterling, A. (1985). Myths of gender: biological theories about men and women. Basic Books, New York.
Rosaldo, M. Z. (1980). The use and abuse of anthropology: reflections on feminism and cross-cultural understanding. Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(3).

Gender

Sources

Two Worlds. The historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has compared women’s and men’s roles in early British American society to a checked fabric of contrasting threads that could make a whole cloth—or a whole society—only when woven together. Men and women lived portions of their lives in separate, complementary spheres, but their daily experiences overlapped at many significant points. Within the colonial household women were expected to occupy a position of subordination to the authority of their husbands, who were conceived to be the heads of house and family in a system known as patriarchy. The realities of day-to-day living may have resulted in more-mutual cooperation than the ideal suggests. While men dominated the political and legal life of the world outside the household, women were not excluded from larger social life. Only men could vote and hold office, while women were seen as perpetual dependents and therefore excluded from the political life of the community. Distinctive patterns of gender relations emerged in different areas, however, according to the ethnic background of the colonists and the circumstances of colonization. In New England, which was settled by family units, a rough imbalance in the numbers of women and men permitted many European patterns of gender relations to be imported with minor adaptations. New Netherland and the Chesapeake area, by contrast, were settled initially by single males. The imbalance between men and women resulted in much more adaptation. In New France a similar situation coupled with the trading nature of the colony resulted in significant intermarriage with the Native American population. Gender relations in the Spanish borderlands were marked by the presence of mixed-race marriages within a rigid social hierarchy.

Sexual Hierarchy. Throughout the European colonies of North America women occupied a subordinate place both legally and culturally. A woman in English colonial society operated as a feme covert: she could act as her child’s guardian or as manager of the family’s property, but she could receive pay for her labor only in the name of her husband. Single women might own property by inheritance or purchase, but marriage laws usually required them to transfer their property to their husband as the head of the household formed by their marriage. Dutch and French colonial law and custom likewise relegated

women to a subordinate social position, though in practice this hierarchy often broke down. In the Spanish borderlands the sexual hierarchy was both strongly asserted by men and resisted by women. The Virgin of Guadalupe came to symbolize for Spanish American women the ideals of charity, good mothering, and devoted wifeliness. La Malinche, a Native American woman who had been Hernán Cortés’s translator and mistress, came to symbolize the betrayal of these ideals in Spanish borderland tradition.

Work. The patterns of work for women and men changed over time throughout the European colonies in America. Most free women in the English colonies lived and worked on farms, where they usually divided with men the responsibility of managing the household and making a livelihood. Both might participate in the plowing and planting of a field, the harvesting and processing of the crops, or the care of livestock and poultry. Pioneer couples in New France shared tasks of clearing land and establishing a household. English men, however, tended to avoid domestic tasks such as food preparation and the tending of young children, sticking instead to the tasks of tilling land, mending fences, and maintaining buildings. As the farm became established, Anglo-American husbands and wives tended to divide other tasks more clearly. Men might herd and shear sheep, for example, while the women carded, spun, and wove or knitted the wool into fabric. Life in Franco-American households, by contrast, never became so sharply separated. Farming and the production of goods were tasks shared by the entire household.

Opportunities. In British colonial towns and cities trade and commerce were dominated by men as well, but women carried on significant commercial activities. Sometimes a woman ran a family shop during her husband’s absence or owned outright a tavern or retail shop. A Dutch colonial woman likewise assumed the management of a husband’s business during his absence and often operated it successfully upon his death. In New France a man’s career in the military or government might provide his wife or daughter an opportunity to begin a lucrative business of her own. New France boasted women among the leading ranks of entrepreneurs: Agathe de Saint Père established Montreal’s textile industry; Mesdames de la Tour and Joybert shipped furs from Acadia; and Louise de Ramezay ran a large Montreal lumber operation. A wife on a Spanish American hacienda often served as her husband’s accountant, ran the estate in his absence, and frequently assumed the entire operation at her husband’s death. Anglo-American midwives—women who assisted mothers in childbirth—provided a more humble but indispensable paid service in colonial health care. Their duties regularly carried them outside their own homes and families to tend to the needs of others, and their knowledge of health matters often extended beyond their skills in midwifery to treatments and herbal remedies for many ills. African women who were brought to the colonies as slaves were often put to work in tobacco or rice fields alongside men and expected to accomplish nearly as much daily work. In domestic work and trades, however, African men’s and women’s tasks were distinguished. Only men could become artisans, while women were put to domestic tasks such as cooking, nursing, and spinning.

Community of Women. In British American society females formed nurturing communities among themselves apart from the community of males. Older women in New England watched over the behavior and well-being of younger women, giving them advice, counsel, and protection in their dealings with husbands, children, and other members of the community. Religious groups such as Quakers and Baptists gave women formal authority over the conduct and welfare of young girls. Quaker women even held special meetings to deal with offenses such as unsupervised weddings, marriages to non-Quakers, and sexual relations before marriage. Offenders who refused to repent in these meetings could be cast out: forbidden to attend any further meetings or to associate with other Quakers. Women often came together at the birth of a child as well. While midwives took charge of delivering the baby, female neighbors and relatives would gather to assist, offer support, socialize, and celebrate or commiserate together as circumstances required. Less is currently known about the kinds of communities formed by women in non-English colonies, but the Roman Catholic Church did provide for two types of female community not found in Protestant colonies: convents and hospitals. Women could enter convents and devote their lives to serving the church. Daughters of rich colonists often brought with them their dowries—the portion of family wealth set aside to support them in their marriages. With this money they often established comfortable lives for themselves as nuns. They also provided important services in social welfare through hospitals that cared for the sick and indigent. French nuns ran such hospitals at Louisbourg, Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Montreal, and New Orleans. Spanish colonial laywomen as well as nuns centered much of their lives around the church or mission, participating together not only in religious processions or celebrations but also in mundane tasks such as cleaning sanctuaries and priests’ robes and maintaining buildings.

Sources

Carol Berkin, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996);

Clio Collective, Quebec Women: A History (Toronto, Canada: Women’s Press, 1987);

Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1991).

Gender. To paraphrase the historian Joan Scott, “gender” is most usefully understood as an analytical category of historical thought.Although usage in this way dates only from the mid‐1980s, it has largely displaced the analytical category from which it developed: the social history of women. The concept of “gender” brings together the many ways in which the distinctions between male and female operate in history. Put simply, it focuses on the history of concepts of “masculinity” and “femininity” rather than on the history of men and women. Together with the categories “race” and “social class,” “gender” forms the modern conceptual triad for analyzing the structures and workings of power and inequality in American society.

“Gender” has two long‐standing meanings: an element of grammar and a colloquial, polite equivalent for “sex.” With the revival of feminist thinking in the 1970s, “gender” became a term for distinguishing biological sexual differences from the historically variable and socially imposed meanings attached to those differences. This distinction underscored the fact that the biological differences between the sexes did not have inherent, inescapable meanings for people's lives. The proliferation of this usage in subsequent decades was a measure of the spread of the feminist claim that sex roles are socially imposed and largely arbitrary, and that they can and should be changed.

By the mid‐1980s, when the concept of “gender” became increasingly common among historians, the first wave of modern historical writings about women was almost two decades old. Inspired by the 1960s burgeoning of social history, this scholarship had focused on the lives of people long ignored by historians. The proliferation of scholarship on women's experience concentrated on those very activities with which women were identified and which therefore had long been considered historically insignificant: family, domesticity, kinship, emotion, private life. The dominant framework for women's social history initially reflected the nineteenth‐century ideology of “separate sexual spheres” and the monumental divide it created between men's and women's lives; the historian's job was to investigate the women's side of the divide.

By the mid‐1980s, however, historians began to realize that the social‐historical information they were gathering on women needed to be supplemented with answers to other kinds of questions: how and why distinctions between men and women developed, operated, and changed in history; how and where men (as well as women) were positioned on the sexual divide; how “experience” was shaped by the wide range of women's class and racial backgrounds; and how discoveries about women could be made to change understandings of the core of U.S. history, rather than remain in a scholarly ghetto. The neglect of the ideological sources and functions of the “separate spheres” model of women's history, historians concluded, had led to a superficial and too literal description of social life and sexual difference.

These concerns resulted in the replacement of the category of “women's history” with the history of gender. This new focus has been producing scholarship that addresses historical topics left relatively untouched by the women's social‐historical scholarship. Work, citizenship, even military service, all historical areas associated with men, are being examined for the ways they assumed and helped to shape the historic divide between the sexes. Historians are asking whether anything women workers did was ever really considered “skilled labor,” or if the meaning of the term shifted depending on where women were located in the wage‐labor force. Gender‐conscious studies on citizenship in the era of Revolution and Constitution examine how the exclusion of women shaped the self‐understanding of American republicans and their faith in their own civic virtue.

Scholarship organized around the concept of “gender” rather than that of “women” has also proved better able to address the relations of racial power. For example, historians of the South in the decades after Reconstruction, adopting an analytic approach informed by the new emphasis on gender, traced how postbellum upheavals in power relations between the races, as well as the efforts of former slaves to realize their freedom and to re‐create their communities, led to dramatic shifts in the relations between men and women and tremendous conflicts over sexuality, culminating in the lynching epidemic late in the nineteenth century.
See also Domestic Labor; Feminism; Historiography, American; Race, Concept of; Racism; Republicanism; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Social Science; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Gayle Rubin , The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter, 1975, pp. 157–210.
John Scott , Gender and the Politics of History, 1988.
Linda Kerber et al. , Beyond Roles: Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender in the Early Republic, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 46 (July 1989): 565–85.
Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, 1991.
Gail Bederman , Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, 1995.

Ellen C. DuBois

gender According to Ann Oakley, who introduced the term to sociology, ‘“Sex” refers to the biological division into male and female; “gender” to the parallel and socially unequal division into femininity and masculinity’ (see Sex, Gender and Society, 1972
). Gender draws attention, therefore, to the socially constructed aspects of differences between women and men. But the term gender has since become extended to refer not only to individual identity and personality but also, at the symbolic level, to cultural ideals and stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and, at the structural level, to the sexual division of labour in institutions and organizations.

In the 1970s, sociological and psychological interest was focused upon demonstrating that gender exists; that is to say, upon showing that the differences and divisions between men and women cannot be accounted for by biological difference, and that the culturally dominant ideas about masculinity and femininity are stereotypes which correspond only crudely to reality. It was shown that there are huge cross-cultural variations in ideas about gender and in the roles of men and women. There were studies of the ways in which baby boys and girls are turned into adult men and women by the processes of socialization in child-rearing, education, youth culture, employment practices, and family ideology. At the structural level, there were studies of the unequal division of labour in the household, even between women and men who both have full-time jobs outside, and of discrimination in employment, where sex (rather than individual skills and qualifications) plays a large part in determining types of job and chances of promotion. More recently, interest has turned to the changing formations of gender at the cultural level. Much of this work has been interdisciplinary, drawing upon anthropology, history, art, literature, film, and cultural studies to explore issues such as the interconnections between ideas of racial purity, White women's sexual purity, and Black masculinity in the United States; or the myth of motherhood as natural and universal. Much of this literature is reviewed in Sara Delamont's The Sociology of Women (1980).

There have been two major kinds of criticism of the concept of gender. The first is that it is based upon a false dichotomy between the biological and the social. This relates to a general criticism that sociology has tended to see the social as disembodied, with the infant as a tabula rasa upon which socialization may write at will, to produce social consciousness and action (as in the work of Émile Durkheim). Following the more recent writings of Michel Foucault, sociologists are now less inclined to take the body for granted, and to see it rather as an object of social analysis, recognizing that the social meaning of the body has changed through history. But in a sense this too can be another means by which biology is discounted and biological science dismissed as merely a social discourse. One criticism of the sex versus gender distinction has been Foucauldian, denying that there is a biological difference—sex—that is in any sense outside of the social. On the other hand, there is the criticism that would reassert biological difference as being extra-social, and argue against a view of gender that discounts the true significance of the body. The sex/gender distinction, it is said, is linked to a particular form of feminist politics that seeks the eradication of gender and a move towards androgyny; it leaves little space, for instance, for other feminist concerns with the biological politics of menstruation, contraception, reproductive technology, abortion, or the management of childbirth.

The second kind of criticism relates to the way in which the concept of gender focuses on differences between women and men at the expense of power and domination. Some writers would prefer to use the term patriarchy as the main organizing concept, in order to keep the question of power to the fore, both analytically and politically. There are many problems with this term, but the important one to note here is that it conflates sex and gender by treating a biological category as a social one: women and men are treated as pre-constituted groups in the description of patriarchy, and the biology of procreation is often used in the explanation of it.

On a lighter note, ‘gender’ has been criticized as a prudish way of avoiding the word ‘sex’. This is clearly not the case when it is used correctly in sociology, but it is true that it has entered everyday speech in this sense, when people talk (for example) about ‘the opposite gender’. Some sociologists, too, are guilty of this when they refer to ‘gender roles’ or ‘gender discrimination’.

The term gender can be used fruitfully with some awareness of these problems. If it is recognized that there is a need to consider biological difference and structures of power in relation to the elaborate social construction of difference, then the concept of gender has the great advantages that it encourages a study of masculinity as well as femininity, the relations between the sexes as well as the social position of women, and a recognition of historical and cultural variety and change rather than a universalizing analysis. See also DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR; FAMILY, SOCIOLOGY OF; GENDER SEGREGATION (IN EMPLOYMENT).

Gender

Sources

Working Together. Survival in the colonies required strenuous labor from both men and women. Often working side by side, they performed tasks conforming to the gender roles of preindustrial society. Typically, women’s work was grounded in the family and men’s work in the more public market economy. Yet women’s work was not confined to the four walls of the home.

FEME SOLE/FEME COVERT

Traditional English common law made clear distinctions between single or widowed women and married women. Single and widowed women, or feme sole, had legal property rights similar to men. They could own property, retain wages, write wills, and file legal suits. Upon her wedding day a married woman, or feme covert, lost her separate legal identity and became one with her husband. Feme covert status restricted married women’s legal rights. That status meant that women could not sue, be sued, own property, or give away property. Their property immediately belonged to their husbands. In some cases women could ask the courts for the status of feme sole if their husbands agreed. Women would make this request if they wanted to open a shop and be a trader. Such women could sell merchandise and collect debts without their husbands’ daily involvement. A feme sole claimed the right to control her property and collect debts, but she removed herself from her husband’s legal protection. In other words she exposed herself to legal suits by other people.

Source: Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1981).

Family Economy. Women’s responsibility for family

“housework” included baking, childcare, cleaning, nursing, sewing, and washing. The home’s environs included the outdoors, where wives gardened, milked cows, and raised poultry and swine. Outdoor tasks included chipping ice from the well, chopping wood, and hauling water. Skills in butter churning, candle making, cheese making, knitting, and spinning provided her family with both necessities for daily use as well as commodities for exchange. In a barter economy women traded these manufactured goods for supplies that they could not produce. While men typically cleared the fields and cultivated their crops, women assisted during the harvest season. A critical role that some women pursued was that of nurse. They could treat burns, fevers, frostbite, and rashes as well as the daily ailments that families suffered. The more skilled practitioners could make ointments, salves, and syrups for the comfort of family and friends. Women learned the art and skills of housework and nursing from other women: mothers taught daughters; aunts taught nieces; and older women taught younger neighbors. The placement of young women in the homes of elder women increased the productivity of individual families and provided the training ground for continuous family economies.

Market Economy. Little written evidence of women’s contribution to the market economy exists because their transactions were informal or made under the names of their husbands. Sporadic references in diaries, correspondence, and account records reveal routine and often crucial activity of women in the market economy. In 1709 the Reverend Gideon Johnston wrote, “Were it not for the Assistance my wife gives me by drawing of Pictures... I shou’d not have been able to live.” The cash she earned for her portraits was essential to her family’s survival. Just as Henrietta Johnston sold her artwork, other women sold the candles, soap, clothes, yarn, and cheese they produced, along with the milk, eggs, and vegetables they gathered. Women managed shops, sold millinery goods, and supervised inns and taverns. In an urban setting women could earn wages. In a Philadelphia hospital in 1762, women worked as nurses, clothes washers, chimney sweeps, potato diggers, cooks, maids, whitewashers, soap makers, and bakers. Women earned roughly half the wages of men, and if they were married, then those wages belonged legally to their husbands. Husbands could rely on their wives to replace them if they needed to be away for a short time. Women who served as “deputy husbands” admirably filled the place of their husbands but invariably returned to their primary position in the home. Women who outlived their husbands could continue the family business as blacksmith, silversmith, newspaper editor, butcher, cabinet maker, shoemaker, tanner, cooper, or planter. An important role unique to women was that of midwife. Whether earning wages or bartering with neighbors for goods and services for the delivery of babies, midwives blended women’s roles by sustaining the family well-being and by augmenting the family economy.

Sources

Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton, eds., “To Toil the Livelong Day”: America’s Women at Work, 1780-1980 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987);

Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1981);

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983);

Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience, second edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).

GENDER. A grammatical distinction, in which such PARTS OF SPEECH as nouns, adjectives, and determiners are marked as MASCULINE and FEMININE (as in French and Spanish), or masculine, feminine, and NEUTER (as in German, Latin, and Greek). In such languages, these parts of speech when being used together must agree in gender: the feminine endings in the LATIN phrases illae feminae bonae (nominative: those good women), masculine endings in illi viri boni (nominative: those good men) and neuter endings in illa oppida bona (nominative: those good towns). Distinctions in grammatical gender match some but not all natural gender distinctions and extend them to many items which have no natural gender: French une pierre, a stone (feminine). There can sometimes be considerable discrepancies between grammatical and natural gender: German das Mädchen (the girl) and das Kind (the child) are both neuter.

In English, grammatical distinctions of gender are mainly confined to the third-person singular PRONOUNS, personal, reflexive, and possessive (she/her/hers/herself versus he/him/his/himself). The terms non-personal, and neuter are used for it/its/itself. A contrast of personal and non-personal is also found with the relative pronouns who/whom versus which. She/her is widely used to refer to a ship or other means of transport (She runs well before the wind), to a country (England will never forget those who gave up their lives for her), and sometimes to machines (She sounds rough; maybe the engine needs tuning). A baby or young child (especially when the sex is not known) is sometimes referred to as it: ‘You don't have to hit a child to abuse it’ (charity advertisement). Plural they/them is genderless, being used for people and things. Its use with singular reference for people (Ask anybody and they'll tell you), a historically well-established usage which operates against the strict rules of concord, is common, especially in spoken language, but arouses controversy and is considered a solecism by purists.

Some natural-gender distinctions between pairs of nouns show a derivational relationship (bride/bridegroom, hero/heroine), but most have no morphological connection (father/mother, uncle/aunt, mare/stallion). Some feminine endings are criticized as pejorative and sexist, especially by feminists: authoress, poetess, usherette, stewardess appear to be more disliked than actress, waitress. In recent years, conscious attempts have been made to use the unmarked or masculine term for both sexes: with little difficulty in such statements as Emily Dickinson is a great poet, more controversially in She's a waiter/steward. Such awkward usages are often avoided by neutral or unisex terms like flight attendant. Where terms exist that include -man (as in chairman), non-sexist alternatives like chairperson, chair are controversial and unstable, especially in the UK, although they are making some headway in the US. See GENDER BIAS, NOUN, SEXISM.

gender [Lat. genus =kind], in grammar, subclassification of nouns or nounlike words in which the members of the subclass have characteristic features of agreement with other words. The term gender is not usually considered to include the classification of number . In French, for example, there are two genders, feminine and masculine, marked by the form of the articles la and le [both: the]. Most French nouns referring to males are masculine ( le garcon [the boy]), and most referring to females are feminine ( la fille [the girl]), thus conforming to natural gender. Other words are placed in either gender, e.g., le jardin [the garden] and la table [the table], being instances of grammatical gender. In German, Russian, and Latin there are three genders, called masculine, feminine, and neuter. Scandinavian and Dutch languages have in addition to these three a "common" gender, which combines, and often distinguishes between, masculine and feminine. A genderlike distinction between animate and inanimate is widespread, e.g., in Algonquian languages of North America and the Andamanese of the Bay of Bengal. Some Bantu languages have 20 genderlike noun classes. English nouns may be divided into gender classes according to the personal pronouns they take. Nouns referring to males take he and nouns referring to females take she. Most English nouns referring to objects that cannot be classified by sex take the pronoun it, although exceptions exist; ships, for example, are sometimes referred to as she. The grammatical device of concord, or agreement, is bound up with gender distinctions. By it one word bears a formal signal to show its relationship to the word it accompanies or modifies; thus, in la viande, the form of la shows that it is related to a word of the feminine gender class, and it may be said to agree with, or be in concord with, viande. While in most Indo-European languages gender involves nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, in Semitic langauges and some Slavic languages even verbal forms must agree with the gender of their subjects. Although gender is present in many languages, it is far from universal. In English a few words retain gender inflection (e.g., actress, executrix ), but since the 12th to 15th cent. English has dropped most of the gender distinctions characteristic of its ancestor languages.

gen·der / ˈjendər/ • n. 1. Gram. (in languages such as Latin, Greek, Russian, and German) each of the classes (typically masculine, feminine, common, neuter) of nouns and pronouns distinguished by the different inflections that they have and require in words syntactically associated with them. Grammatical gender is only very loosely associated with natural distinctions of sex. ∎  the property (in nouns and related words) of belonging to such a class: adjectives usually agree with the noun in gender and number. 2. the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones): traditional concepts of gender | [as adj.] gender roles. ∎  the members of one or other sex: differences between the genders are encouraged from an early age. ORIGIN: late Middle English: from Old French gendre (modern genre), based on Latin genus ‘birth, family, nation.’ The earliest meanings were ‘kind, sort, genus’ and ‘type or class of noun, etc.’ (which was also a sense of Latin genus).

gender In linguistics, any of several categories into which nouns and pronouns can be divided for grammatical purposes. In some languages, adjectives or verbs may take different forms to agree with the different genders. A three-gender system, with categories labelled masculine, feminine and neuter, exists in such languages as German, Latin and Russian, while a two-gender system, with masculine and feminine, operates in such languages as French and Welsh.

gender †kind, sort; (gram.) any of the three ‘kinds’, masculine, feminine, and neuter, of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. XIV. — OF. gendre (mod. genre) — Rom. *genero, f. L. gener- GENUS.

GENDER

This entry consists of the following articles:

GENDER.

This entry includes two subentries:

gender •bedder, cheddar, Edda, Enzedder, header, Kedah, shedder, shredder, spreader, tedder, threader, treader, Vedda •elder, Griselda, welder, Zelda •addenda, agenda, amender, ascender, attender, bender, blender, Brenda, contender, corrigenda, descender, engender, extender, fazenda, fender, gender, Glenda, Gwenda, hacienda, Länder, lender, mender, offender, pudenda, recommender, referenda, render, sender, slender, spender, splendour (US splendor), surrender, suspender, tender, Venda, weekender, Wenda •parascender • bartender •homesteader • newsvendor •spot-welder •abrader, Ada, blockader, crusader, dissuader, evader, fader, grader, Grenada, invader, masquerader, Nader, parader, persuader, raider, Rigveda, Seder, serenader, trader, upgrader, Veda, wader •attainder, remainder •rollerblader •Aïda, bleeder, Breda, breeder, cedar, conceder, corrida, Derrida, Elfreda, Etheldreda, feeder, follow-my-leader, interceder, interpleader, kneader, leader, Leda, Lieder, misleader, pleader, reader, seceder, seeder, speeder, stampeder, succeeder, weeder •fielder, midfielder, wielder, yielder •outfielder • bandleader • ringleader •cheerleader • copyreader •mind-reader • sight-reader •stockbreeder • proofreader •newsreader