GENDER

Gender as the idea and practices of differences between men and women functioned on a number of cultural levels and in social practice. The French Revolution of 1789 brought to the fore ideas of gender that had been echoing during the Enlightenment, though the trends in thinking and behavior were often contradictory. A slogan of the Revolution was "liberty, equality, fraternity," and this emphasized the brotherhood behind the ideas of citizenship in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The French Revolution attacked the authority of an absolutist monarch and substituted for him the rule of citizens, who had metamorphosed from the king's subjects. Women during the Revolution asked that they receive the same rights as men, most notably in Olympe de Gouges's celebrated Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791). When the Revolution declared the absolute power of fathers to have ended, there was a simultaneous move to reduce the power of husbands. Both of these tendencies worked to reduce the hierarchy of gender in order to bring a commitment to equality into practice. When France entered into war with Austria and Prussia in 1792, women demanded to enter the army so that they too could perform their civic duty. Again, they emphasized equality rather than gender difference.

resisting gender roles

The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) was an international sensation because it showed gender being contested by a wife, Nora, who senses her ignorance and inferiority and wants to correct the situation. This scene occurs at the end of the play when Nora decides she will leave her husband and children. Her husband's reaction is to try to enforce gender order and codes.

HELMER: Nora, how can you be so unreasonable and ungrateful? Haven't you been happy here?

NORA: No; never. I used to think I was; but I haven't ever been happy.

HELMER: Not—not happy?

NORA: No. I've just had fun. You've always been very kind to me. But our home has never been anything but a playroom. I've been your doll-wife, just as I used to be Papa's doll-child. And the children have been my dolls. I used to think it was fun when you came in and played with me, just as they think it's fun when I go in and play games with them. That's all our marriage has been, Torvald.

HELMER: There may be a little truth in what you say, though you exaggerate and romanticize.

But from now on it'll be different. Playtime is over. Now the time has come for education.

NORA: Whose education? Mine or the children's?

HELMER: Both yours and the children's, my dearest Nora.

NORA: Oh, Torvald, you're not the man to educate me into being the right wife for you.

HELMER: How can you say that?

NORA: And what about me? Am I fit to educate the children?

HELMER: Nora!

NORA: Didn't you say yourself a few minutes ago that you dare not leave them in my charge?

HELMER: In a moment of excitement. Surely you don't think I meant it seriously?

NORA: Yes. You were perfectly right. I'm not fitted to educate them. There's something else I must do first. I must educate myself. And you can't help me with that. It's something I must do by myself. That's why I'm leaving you.

HELMER (jumps up): What did you say?

NORA: I must stand on my own feet if I am to find out the truth about myself and about life. So I can't go on living here with you any longer.

HELMER: Nora, Nora!

NORA: I'm leaving you now, at once. Christine will put me up for tonight—

HELMER: You're out of your mind! You can't do this! I forbid you!

Source: Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House (New York, 1966), 96–97.

gender in the napoleonic code and thereafter

Aside from this sense of equality, there was a countermove toward gender dimorphism that made men and women more distant in social roles. This appeared in the growing popularity of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's work. Many revolutionaries on the left believed, following the sense of Rousseau's Émile and the New Héloïse, that women should not be active in public life. Instead, they should raise their children to be honest and virtuous citizens. No longer were women simply breeding to perpetuate the family lineage, their role as mother became cultural, and this pivotal duty was called republican motherhood. With the writing of the Napoleonic Code in 1803 and 1804 and its spread to other European countries, equality among men and women received a blow, with gender hierarchy emphasized—not equality. Although Napoleon's code of laws allowed brothers and sisters to receive equal inheritances, other parts of the code forbade married women from owning property, including their own wages. Women were not allowed to work or run a business without written permission from their husbands, and a woman could not serve as a witness in court or be a guardian to her own children should her husband die. A woman was required to live wherever her husband determined. Should she commit adultery, she was to be imprisoned and fined. The only time a man could be punished for a similar offense was if he brought a concubine to live in the conjugal household. The Napoleonic Code established the gender framework for the nineteenth century, and that framework highlighted and enforced gender difference.

The framework by which gender was constructed around male privilege and female inferiority affected all classes and walks of life, making gender into a category that was acted out in everyday tasks and behavior. In this largely agrarian society women often worked as hard as men but had less stature and fewer rights—even when it came to food. Their portions were simply smaller and the esteem in which they were held, lower. Gender also determined the jobs one performed, with men mostly working in the fields and caring for the large animals and with women tending vegetable gardens, the smaller animals, and the dairy. Gender shaped the disparagement of women in rural life. Many a proverb talked about women in the same breath with animals: "A good horse and a bad horse need the spur; a good wife and a bad wife need the rod," common wisdom held. It was not uncommon for there to be sexual assault and battering of women, both of these sanctioned because of the woman's perceived lesser status within the hierarchy of gender. Nonetheless, in multigenerational agrarian households such as those in eastern Europe, senior women determined the assignment of tasks to younger women and had more stature than daughters, daughters-in-law, and younger sisters-in-law. Here, age and status hierarchy coexisted alongside and within gender hierarchy.

Ideas of gender determined the operation of the middle-class home in the nineteenth century. As contact with South Asia, the Middle East, and China grew, an ideology of "separate spheres" for men and women had also developed in the eighteenth century, from which Rousseau's ideology of gender developed. In this theory, which also was a centerpiece of developing republican ideas, men were meant to direct public life and women should be confined to the home—à la the harem or zenana. Great paeans to separate spheres filled volumes of poetry, fiction, and song. "The family is the kingdom of woman—her life," wrote one Russian author at midcentury of the feminized household. In a celebrated novel in verse from the mid-1850s, Coventry Patmore praised women as the "Angel in the House," while John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies (1865) enthused about the delicate women who sweetened life for other family members—particularly the hard-working husband and father. For these reasons, men of letters announced, women should not be educated, work, or participate in public life. Such ideas filtered down to affect the lives of working women, who became virtual pariahs—as the French reformer Flora Tristan (1803–1844) saw it—because they needed to support their families. So while women worked, workingwomen were somewhat disgraced in the larger public eye because of their gendered beliefs. Furthermore, the delicacy imputed to middle-class women by these men of letters contributed to labor-force segmentation. Women, it was said, could do only "delicate" and intricate jobs, with the further thought that the heavy, muscular work of men was more valuable. Yet, gender's hierarchies in the home shaped domestic and working life in tandem. Whereas once there had been more male household servants than female ones, by the end of the nineteenth century domestic service, because it was situated in the feminized home, was predominantly female. It was as poorly paid and as arduous a job as existed because of the long hours—stretching to almost twenty hours per day—and the heavy nature of the work in the days before the invention of household conveniences.

Even dress resonated gender dimorphism, as women's fashions became incredibly elaborate and simultaneously constricting—even dangerous. In the eighteenth century men and women alike in the aristocracy and upper classes had worn wigs, makeup, high heels, corsets, and lacy and luxurious fabrics. Both wore clothing that emphasized sexual characteristics. But this changed along with the changes in gender ideology. Women continued to don increasingly tight corsets, petticoats, and dainty slippers, each of which in its own way was a health hazard. While the hypersexualized shape of these clothes emphasized the sexuality of women's bodies, men, in contrast, abandoned the corsets, high heels, and makeup they had worn earlier in favor of the somber and streamlined black suit. Men's sexuality was more masked as women's was emphasized—both of these in line with the gendered roles that women's place was reproducing in the home while men's was in the public dealing with somber and weighty issues. Middle-class men's appearance testified to their responsibilities, while women's announced their procreativity. As mass armies and imperial power developed in the Europe of the nineteenth century, common men sported sailor's and soldier's uniforms and the elite donned hunting and tropical clothes—all of these associated with the authority and power of masculinity.

industrialization, urbanization, and gender

As Europe industrialized during the nineteenth century, both young men and young women found opportunity in cities. In a society bifurcated at its base by gender, men were paid higher wages than women, who often received wages below subsistence level. Women increasingly found it difficult to find well-paying jobs allowing them to work outside the home. From midcentury on, trade legislation, called "protective," kept women from actually working in a variety of jobs and regulated their hours though not men's. In Britain this legislation was said to protect the unborn fetus, the beginning of governmental concern for embryos, and to keep women out of jobs that would hurt women's health. The irony behind this was that men were actually at greater risk and had higher rates of illness. The regulations thus showed that gender ideology was more important than scientific fact.

Most women had to have income to support their families, but gender ideology affected their ability to gain it. In the face of the variety of gendered proscriptions blocking them from wellpaid industrial jobs, many did casual work at home such as making toys, doing piecework in sewing, painting buttons, plaiting straw, and similar outwork. This was usually very low paid work, although in some cases women could enlist the entire household to work alongside them. Those women who could not make ends meet on below subsistence pay turned to casual or full-time prostitution to support themselves. Many lived in common-law unions, producing illegitimate children who were disadvantaged, along with their

mothers, by this illegitimacy. Ill health was not uncommon in these conditions, and plays, novels, and operas abounded that testified to the plight of disadvantaged women. Nevertheless, the tears and sentiment these works produced validated the situation rather than leading to its eradication. Charitable groups also arose to aid women in distress.

As trade unions grew in the second half of the nineteenth century, they came to be gendered male. Because so many women toiled in outwork, their participation in union activity was far lower than men's. In addition to dues that low-paid women could not afford, men did not want women in unions because of the workings of gender. Women in jobs, it was said, would drag down men's confidence, and most would not attack the gender privilege on which this labor segmentation rested. Some men in craft unions, stressing the independent and noble masculinity of the artisan, actually endorsed women working in factories. In France, for instance, shoemakers and independent weavers found it unproblematic to send their wives and daughters to work in factories in order to support their own craft existence and gendered dignity as an autonomous worker. Within neighborhoods, however, women's gendered segregation in the domestic sphere promoted the success of unions as they built solidarity around shared tasks, daily crisis management of everyday life concerns, and information sharing while doing work such as laundering together. While men often dominated in the public activity of strikes, gendered divisions called on women to provide behind-the-scenes support—and they did.

In addition to ordinary jobs in factories and work in agriculture, professional and creative jobs were gendered male. Laws kept women from the legal and medical professions and from financial fields such as stockbroking. Women in most countries could not receive professional training or degrees, which made countries such as Switzerland, which did allow women in medical school, magnets for women seeking higher education. When women were allowed into universities in Greece, England, and Germany, riots broke out or women were not allowed to receive degrees. Even when they surpassed men in exams, Oxford and Cambridge Universities did not grant women degrees until well into the twentieth century. In Germany women were often made to sit behind curtains when attending lectures or they were cordoned off behind ropes. Nor were they always allowed into libraries or other repositories. Knowledge was gendered male to such an extent that German men protested women teaching in the new kindergartens that were springing up. As with union opposition to women in factories, these protests came for good reason. When women entered such professions as nursing, librarianship, and teaching, these jobs became degraded according to the hierarchy in the workings of gender. Salaries, status, and the general prestige accorded the job fell once it became categorized as female. The situation was powerfully endorsed in the works of the British naturalist Charles Darwin, who, in his many writings on natural selection and evolution during the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, concluded that women and people of color were far less evolved than white European men.

If science and knowledge were for men, Christianity was increasingly for women as part of the unfolding of gender. In much of eastern Europe in contrast, Jewish men spent great amounts of time studying the Torah and engaging in devotional activities. While both men and women attended Christian churches, as the century wore on men defected to clubs, sports, and other forms of sociability. This pertained to both working- and middle-class men. Women increased their religious commitment through church attendance, religiously based charities including those committed to conversion, and the training of their children in their religious duties. The number of women in religious orders increased far more than did the number of men. The dimorphism was so great that people spoke and worried about the "feminization of religion." There was even more to the gendering of religion in this century to the extent that the authority in Christian churches, whether Protestant or Catholic, remained male. Despite the defection of male parishioners, churches remained a bastion of gender hierarchy because of the small number of men in positions of great authority over increasing numbers of women faithful.

the attack on male privilege

Women and men alike attacked these unequal conditions based on gender from the beginning, when Rousseauian ideas of gender gained currency. The French Revolution itself sparked brilliant tracts such as Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)—a work that resonates down to the present day. In this work, Wollstonecraft equated male privilege with aristocratic privilege, advocating the solution of equal education and equal opportunity for men and women alike. Women attempted to overcome gender inequality, Wollstonecraft maintained, by simpering ways and sexual plots—none of this allowing for the development of rational skills. Wollstonecraft was a child of the Enlightenment, and others simultaneously pushed for a greater recognition of women's superior feelings and the love that women brought to society. These ideas were found in Wollstonecraft's own daughter's work. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) fit this Romantic mold, while other writers such as Germaine de Staël and George Sand celebrated women's goodness, finer feelings, and more highly developed sense of culture—a position

that validated women's inequality by praising their subordinate skills, some believed. To others, women's superior sensibility was the ground on which their claims to equality were based. Major social thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte held similarly Romantic views, and like early feminists they hoped that greater place given to women would make society better—as long as these societies were led by men's great capacities for engineering, technology, and science.

Socialist ideas of gender also gained currency after midcentury. As developed in the work of Karl Marx and the Manchester factory owner Friedrich Engels, the inequality of women stemmed from the institution of private property. Private property caused the subordination of women because property owners, especially those in the middle and upper classes, needed a guarantee of paternity so that their property would pass to legitimate heirs. Engels outlined the theory in great detail in his germinal work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). Gender inequality would disappear, Engels maintained, once socialism had been realized in society and accomplished its main goal of abolishing private property. After that, there would be no need for the repression of women. This theory influenced socialist parties across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although women were active in socialism because of the promised gender equality, some women, such as Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), the major German activist, attacked feminism as an ideology for gender equality that would benefit only the middle classes. Socialism, these women maintained, would help everyone economically as well as politically.

Gender increasingly shaped political imagery and political issues, especially with the rise of organized feminism after midcentury. Although Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901) served as Britain's monarch despite the guarantee of male privilege in the common law, the royal family simultaneously played the role of middle-class couple in which a wife obeyed and worshipped male authority. In their carefully staged photographs, they abandoned royal garb for those of the gendered social elite: the queen looked adoringly at Prince Albert, while he struck commanding poses—thus aligning themselves with gender expectations. In other cases, the queen's rule had real and palpable consequences, as Parliament used the fact of a female monarch to continue to drain the monarchy of power. Some members of the middle class, however, drew inspiration from Victoria's rule to contest the gender order. Women activists saw Victoria radiating the force of womanhood, and they worked all the more for more egalitarian laws about marriage, property ownership, and work. Barbara Smith Bodichon (1827–1891) and Bessie Parkes (1829–1925) were but two who claimed that gender hierarchy needed to be reversed in all of these spheres, and the cause of gender equality was advanced by Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869)—a book translated into the major European languages and read around the world. In England in 1882, the Married Women's Property Act consolidated women's ownership of property, including their wages, and later in the century women gained the right to divorce and to guardianship of their children. These reforms ended some of the economic and social prerogatives awarded men because of their privileged status in gender theory.

The final stage in the prewar struggle against the ideas and practices of gender hierarchy came with the creation of organized national and international suffrage movements. National suffrage societies were strongest in Great Britain, though the feminist movement had hundreds of thousands of adherents in France, Germany, and most of the rest of Europe. But in countries such as France and Germany feminists took different approaches to ending the lack of esteem and rights for women and the concomitant privilege of men. In Germany women fought for the right to Bildung—that is the acquisition of general humanistic self-development through education and cultivation of the mind. In France, while the majority of women eschewed suffrage, they worked for gender equality across the board, for example through legal, educational, and institutional reform. The end result of the feminist and suffrage movements was not only legal change and eventually the vote (the first occurred in Finland in 1906), but also a louder, more widely heard voice on behalf of gender equality, although there were those, such as Francesco Crispi, prime minister of Italy late in the nineteenth century, who maintained that instead of filling out ballots "women's hands were meant for kissing."

blows against gender inequality at the turn of the century

By the end of the nineteenth century a "new woman" had appeared in the middle and lowermiddle classes to challenge by her very way of life strict gender roles. These women held jobs, sometimes lived in boardinghouses apart from the supervision of their families, and led independent lives and often maintained their single status. In some countries there was seen to be a "surplus women" problem, so large was the number of single women. There were other eye-catching aspects to the new woman: some smoked, wore slim and more practical clothing, and ventured forth in cities doing philanthropic work on their own. Some played sports such as soccer. The new woman was a phenomenon that disturbed the gender order, although it would not be until after World War I with the advent of the "flapper" or garçonne (in France) that new womanhood was seen as having spread to the working class.

What many of these independent or new women did was increasingly bold by the gender norm stressing female chastity and male sexual adventurism. Women such as Maria Montessori not only went to medical school to develop their professional capacities, they also had children out of wedlock, often refusing to be cramped in the confines of inegalitarian marriage. Novels abounded describing, usually sympathetically, the decisions single women made to flaunt the conventions of gender. Journalists were often less understanding, as they denounced the more public appearance of prominent homosexuals. Heterosexuality mirrored the gendered norm of male control of and superiority to women. The increasing publicity given to single-sex couples—both male and female—brought down the wrath of the press in its role as one of the guardians of gender. Not surprisingly, however, members of the homosexual entourage of the German kaiser sent letters to one another maintaining their superiority to heterosexuals because they needed no contact whatsoever with inferior beings—that is, women. This was a time when, simultaneous to the endorsement of gender equality by some, political and intellectual leaders such as those in the kaiser's entourage equated the lowness of the Jew with that of women. Anti-Semitism and misogyny in gender norms went hand in hand as the twentieth century opened.

Gender norms were affected as birth control became more available to men and women alike by the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of rubber condoms and the diaphragm. Knowledge of women's ovulatory cycle was more widespread, and this too affected gender. These innovations brought fatherhood and motherhood—key components of gender definitions—under attack. For one thing, between 1880 and 1930 fertility dropped drastically in most of Europe, lessening women's role as reproducers. Simultaneously, obligatory public schooling began to take hold, removing children from parental care for extended periods of time. Schools came to teach children the skills once taught by parents of both sexes. Boys followed in their father's footsteps less often than before, especially as many agricultural and artisanal jobs were industrialized and the attendant skills were no longer required. The role of father as paterfamilias and mother as nurturer for perhaps her entire life weakened ideas of gender, especially since the time of Rousseau. Before World War I, many spoke of a "crisis of masculinity" in the face of the new woman and her place in a growing service sector, legal reforms that reduced some male privileges such as the right to take a wife's property to keep her economically impoverished, and the expansion of state power. The decline of small agriculture during this period reduced the number of men who could have control over an extended domain.

Gender resonated both at home and abroad through imperialism. The image of the virile hunter, adventurer, and conqueror filled the media and found its way into popular novels and stories. Although he had much criticism to offer, Rudyard Kipling memorialized rugged soldiers, wise administrators, and the rough and ready European common man who braved the seas in a variety of capacities. Many European men kept concubines from local peoples and lived outside the standard European family when working abroad. These situations were seen in novels such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), which portrayed many toughminded male characters, an equally forceful African woman, and a clueless white woman back in Belgium. When governments began allowing or even insisting that men take their families to the colonies, it used to be maintained that women were the worst imperialists and they were the ones who turned imperialism into a nasty business—again a highly gendered interpretation based on the wisdom of the imperialist male and the stupidity of the imperialist female. Moreover, men, it was said, lived lovingly among the local folk, although scholarship now shows the exploitation behind the concubinal relationship. Colonial societies often urged women to go to the colonies, first, to do their gendered duty of civilizing the European man living on his own, and, second, to help build the white presence in the colonies by breeding with men there the superior Caucasian race. In an unexpected turn of events, imperialism was another of those situations that offered opportunities for gendered resistance. Men often did not have to behave as responsible breadwinners, and they could and did flaunt the norms of Western heterosexuality by engaging in sexual relationships with men when they were beyond the purview of European scrutiny. Women found sexual

freedom: the case of the English lepidopterist Margaret Fontaine (1862–1940), who traveled the world quite alone before World War I, reveals a life of adventure—including sexual adventure—and escape from the gendered confines of domesticity. Fontaine was one of many hundreds—male and female—for whom the colonies offered freedom from gendered proscriptions.

At the turn of the century intellectuals and scientists joined those who contested gender in their daily lives. Theories such as those of the physicians Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud came to maintain that sexual and gender behavior were not sanctioned by a divinity. Ellis in his pioneering work Sexual Inversion (1896) claimed that homosexuality was not a moral issue but rather a natural act and even a part of personality. Freud wrote many works addressing gender issues, but his theories in general suggested that there was no one pattern for being male and female. Before World War I, then, there were changing practices and theories about gender. Some hoped that the war would clarify the transitional situation, restoring men's masculinity and God-given privilege and reasserting women's natural inferiority and domestic role. The gendered results of the war are still being debated.

See alsoBourgeoisie; Comte, Auguste; Conrad, Joseph; Darwin, Charles; Ellis, Havelock; Engels, Friedrich; French Revolution; Freud, Sigmund; Gouges, Olympe de; Ibsen, Henrik; Kipling, Rudyard; Labor Movements; Marx, Karl; Mill, John Stuart; Montessori, Maria; Napoleonic Code; Saint-Simon, Henri de; Sand, George; Shelley, Mary; Staël, Germaine de; Suffragism; Victoria, Queen; Wollstonecraft, Mary; Working Class.

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Bonnie G. Smith