GENDER.

The term gender in its current usage challenges the idea of masculinity and femininity as fixed biological determinants. It suggests that there is a voluntaristic aspect to one's sexual role or nature, and especially that women can escape biological destiny to live an existence apart from the family. According to some anthropologists and sociologists, the term not only implies that the relationship between men and women is a social construction but also that this relationship is hierarchical and that sexual difference and the socially imposed division of the sexes are "imperative."

Gender is one of the most restless terms in the English language. It denotes a much-contested concept and a site of unease rather than agreement, drawing attention to the artificiality of what many perceive as "natural behavior." Gender continues to function as a grammatical term and as a euphemism for a person's sex but is now most widely used to refer to the social and cultural aspects of sexual difference. Because of the historical interdependency of theories of mind and body, it is hard to determine where sex ends and gender begins. The initial use of the late modern concept of gender cannot be traced precisely; it began to emerge in the United States during the post-1945 boom in sexology and psychoanalysis. In the 1960s sexologists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists began to separate sex from gender analytically.

BINARIES AND CONFLICTING MEANINGS

Gender categorizations explore the binary division of people into male and female and the patterns of behavior that are associated with each group. A division into male and female bodies thus results in a masculine set of behavior appropriate for bodies classified as male and in a set of feminine traits considered appropriate for bodies defined as female. Sex differences have been explored for at least two hundered years. Even though shifts and changes occurred in the discussion about what constituted male and female identities, certain common themes emerged and are still evident. The most persistent dichotomy views males as rational and capable of universalist thought and females as emotional and bound to the particularities of their bodies. By the late nineteenth century, males and females were seen as opposites and biological facts were supposed to reveal underlying differences. Closer examination of evidence for masculine and feminine traits showed that it was unstable and that categories of distinction overlapped significantly. Strength, endurance, spatial and linguistic ability, and aggression can be weighted toward the male or the female, but there are always members of the other group who outperform members of the group to which the trait is supposedly attached. Apparently, John Stuart Mill's nineteenth-century dictum that we will not be able to discern the natural differences between men and women until we treat them the same socially still holds true to some extent.

SEX CHROMOSOME CHARACTERISTICS

The discovery of DNA in the late nineteenth century, the identification of the Y chromosome in 1905, the unveiling of the famous "double helix" or DNA structure in 1953, and, finally, the mapping of the human genome early in the twenty-first century have enhanced and challenged the notion that gender differences are based on natural divisions between male and female. The insight that biological sex results from a variation in just one chromosome made those categories appear a matter of pure chance and fixed irreversibly by nature. By contrast, studies on the basis of genetic variation reveal a remarkable genetic similarity between males and females, since their genome sequences are about 99.9 percent identical. In the debate following the discovery of the double helix, the supposed objectivity of science itself was challenged and the fact that scientific theories—in all fields—reflect the culture from which they emerge was recognized. Consequently, the distinction between sex and gender based on "natural traits," be they chromosomes, hormones, or brain size, became problematic.

SHIFTS IN ELEMENTS OF THE GENDERED UNIVERSE

Following World War I, the first influential theories on gender were developed by anthropologists, notably the American Margaret Mead. Her descriptions of non-Western societies challenged Western gender roles and thus eventually led to a reappraisal of gender roles that had appeared to be fixed by "nature."

New philosophical approaches after 1945 combined Marxist, Freudian, literary, and anthropological theories. In her 1949 bestseller, The Second Sex, the French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) drew on phenomenological and existential theories to claim that women, in contrast to men, acted in accordance with men's view of them, thus developing an inauthentic identity. In her view, femininity was not a natural condition but rather the result of a bad choice. For existentialists such as de Beauvoir, an authentic life entailed escaping the world of biology. Her suggestion that one's sexual role was a choice and her assertion that women's lives were not predetermined by their "nature" became one of the central foundations of gender theory and were highly influential throughout Western Europe and the United States, where Betty Friedan (1921–2006) spread them in the 1960s.

By 1980 the idea of the "social construction of gender" was widely accepted by sociologists, anthropologists, and some psychologists. At the same time, some scholars of gender theory took up the psychoanalytic insights of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the somewhat nuanced Freudianism of Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). Scholars such as the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin criticized both Freud and Lacan for advocating sexism yet valued them for describing sexism as a pervasive psychosocial institution, for freeing men and women from biological determinism, and for establishing their psychosexual identity in relation to each other. Other feminist theorists have defended both the invention of psychoanalysis and its paradigms, finding them useful for understanding femininity. Proponents of "French feminism" such as Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) combined Lacanian, structuralist, and other approaches to further contribute to gender theory. Building on the concept of de Beauvoir's "other," these French feminists saw woman not only as one more version of masculinity but also as a fragmented self. In particular, they posed the question of how to write a history of fragmented, "decentered subjects" for whom conventions of historical interpretation did not exist.

Standard interpretations of social and political power were also challenged by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), who downplayed the traditional sense of human agency. Examining the mechanisms of surveillance and regulation in the activities of doctors, the clergy, and government officials, Foucault posited that power relations in the modern state operate primarily through the body.

Poststructuralist versions of gender theory, most notably the writings of the American historian Joan Wallach Scott, largely dismissed Marxist, anthropological, and psychoanalytical approaches because of their essentialist (or at least enduring) characteristics and advocated using Foucault's theories to introduce the concept of gender into political history, where it could serve as a category to analyze how power operates. Poststructuralist scholars such as Scott and the philosopher Judith Butler developed a critique of essentialism, arguing that it was impossible to legitimately claim a group identity based on one's own experience, and of universalism, which posited that women have a quality known as "womanhood" in common.

Scientific research underscored theories that emphasized the arbitrary and invented nature of gender. Scientists such as Ann Fausto-Sterling (b. 1944) demonstrated that it is possible to distinguish five different sexes on the basis of physiological and chromosomal characteristics. Studies of the lives of those born with ambiguously sexed bodies reveal the inability of society to deal with more than two sexes, since parents, teachers, and doctors try to steer them toward identifying themselves as either male or female.

While postmodern theories have been praised for breaking down universalist assumptions, they have also been criticized for their fragmented and partial interpretations. Apparently, "sex" and "gender" cannot be neatly categorized as "natural" and "cultural" but are now seen as intimately related cultural categories used to describe and understand human bodies and human relationships. Sex and gender often overlap, sometimes confusingly so, and the concept of a male or female body in many contemporary societies has become increasingly open to reinvention, be it through drugs, dress, exercise, or surgery. This has resulted in widely different conceptions of masculinity and femininity, so much so that it makes sense to speak of "masculinities" and "femininities." In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, opposing theoretical positions within Western feminism joined together in alliances around particular issues such as reproductive rights, the banning of nuclear power, and the outlawing of pornography.

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL VARIATIONS

In the twentieth century, gender relations underwent dramatic changes in some parts of Europe but remained more static in others. The factors contributing to or inhibiting these changes—notably religion, education, political structures, the gendered nature of work, and the availability of contraceptives—must be taken into account. Along with historical differences, class, race, marital status, and age must be considered.

Battles over the behavior and characteristics of women and men allowed European societies to address other painful issues. A prominent example is the debate about gender roles and "normalcy" that ensued in many European countries after both world wars. Thus, in the wake of World War I, many French perceived a loss of supposedly feminine traditions as a threat to civilization, and after World War II Germans were faced with the everyday tasks of survival but quickly returned to the model of the traditional "breadwinner" family. It was permissible to speak about gender, whereas the question of Germany's responsibility for the war and genocide was unspeakable. In England and France, the percentage of female workers in industry and agriculture rose during World War II, and this phenomenon contributed to the postwar longing for a return to "normalcy."

Another issue that emerged in Europe after both world wars was how to reconstruct gender relationships after men had been away for four years killing, while women had led very different lives. While the experience on the battlefields was similar for the soldiers from different European countries, women's war experiences varied according to country and region—most British and German women, for example, watched the war from afar, whereas their Belgian and French peers were much closer to actually experiencing battle. This often resulted in differing views of soldiers and thus of gender relations in peacetime. Those who had remained at home implicitly or explicitly saw soldiers as killers, and the feminists among them espoused separate spheres after the war. Those few women who had actually seen maimed, hysterical, and infantilized soldiers had a more sympathetic view. European wars of the twentieth century thus complicated gender, with sexologists and other social experts playing a large role in "making peace."

Ideas about the "natural role" of women and men as "nurturers" and "providers" surfaced as well in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the gendered nature of work. The authoritarian regimes in Germany and Italy (and, initially, in the Soviet Union) transformed these ideas into government policy and celebrated work as inherently masculine.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, men's tasks were considered "work" and women's tasks "assistance," "housework" or "women's work." These gender hierarchies were temporarily challenged in times of crisis but generally survived massive economic changes. Elementary education, for example, was considered women's work (with the supervision of teachers reserved for men), except in Germany, where it was defined as a male profession. In Russia, the medical staff was predominantly female, which meant that medicine was low-status, poorly paid work.

Access to education itself was highly gendered. While literacy rates varied greatly across Europe, women's rates of literacy and of secondary schooling were consistently lower than men's at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in the Catholic and rural societies of southern Europe and in Eastern European countries, where the gender gap in literacy did not close until after World War II. While European universities had generally opened their doors to women by the 1920s, fascist regimes succeeded in driving women out of the universities (and the professions).

Social movements were often gendered as well. In the early twentieth century, women marched to demand the vote, access to birth control, legal abortions, and other social rights; food riots, a traditional form of protest among women, continued in times of crisis, most notably during both world wars but also during the Bolshevik Revolution. In some respects, gender tensions increased in the 1920s, and not only in Germany, where male workers were hardened by their military service, frustrated by the abortive revolution, and bitter about inflation and unemployment. In the Weimar Republic, fascists and communists alike organized militant and confrontational marches while women preferred to participate in peace parades, International Women's Day, or similar events.

IMAGERY AND DRESS

Changes in clothing, behavior, and imagery were among the most striking transformations in gender roles. When the twentieth century started out, women's skirts were ankle length, as they had been for over five hundred years. Hemlines started to rise with the beginning of World War I and, while fluctuating throughout the remainder of the century, never returned to ankle length again. Contemporaries were shocked. Not only could they now get a glimpse of the female ankle, but part of the leg, clad in transparent silk stockings, was also revealed. The ideal female figure also changed, from the "hourglass" silhouette produced by a tight corset to a more "boyish" shape. In addition, women started to cut off their hair, which had been considered "woman's crowning glory" but was heavy, hot, difficult to wash, and potentially dangerous when working with machinery or open fire. During the 1920s the "Eton crop" or the Bubikopf (bob) became a fashion standard with young and middle-aged women of all classes, with the English "flapper" as well as with the French gamine. Fashionable women even donned pants for sports activities, and sport idols such as the French tennis player Suzanne Lenglen (1899–1938) and the Norwegian ice-skater (and subsequent Hollywood star) Sonja Henie (1912–1969) pioneered short sleeves and bare legs.

Women who demanded the masculine privileges of short hair, pants, and freedom of movement, and who used cosmetics—which had been associated with prostitutes until World War I—certainly irritated their contemporaries. The fashions of the "Golden Twenties" were short-lived for several reasons. First, the Great Depression impoverished the working class and large parts of the middle classes, and clothing became scarce during World War II, so many women made do with little. Second, the totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union (as well as in Spain and Italy) developed distinct versions of masculinity and femininity, giving rise to more traditional clothing. In Germany, the National Socialists propagated an ideal of femininity that incorporated both traditional and modern elements. The party youth organization for girls stressed gymnastics as well as traditional household training. According to party ideology, "the German woman" was trim and fit (to ensure her reproductive capabilities) but did not smoke or drink, and she wore sensible shoes and clothing (the dirndl made a comeback) and her hair braided in a crown.

Notions of what constituted femininity and masculinity were increasingly polarized in the 1930s and ultimately served the all-out war effort, when soldier-husbands were defending wives and children against the Red Army, and soldier-wives, steadfast and never complaining, awaited their return while educating their children to be good soldiers or mothers. National Socialist doctrine and the speeches of Adolf Hitler sang the praises of brutal men and loving women. Hitler himself considered the masses passionate, weak, and "intrinsically feminine" and derived no small part of his success from styling himself as a swaggering, masculine master who dictated "like a man." This extreme masculinity was perpetrated throughout the party organizations in Germany as well as in other European countries under fascist rule.

Although gender images in Europe's authoritarian regimes displayed similarities, there were also significant differences. The "new Soviet man" of the Stalin era was portrayed first and foremost as the epitome of human capability in the workplace, whereas his female counterpart was expected to exceed expectations both at home and at work. While the "romantic" approach (as characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English), which confined women to the home, remained dominant in western Europe, the Soviet rulers combined it with the "rationalist" approach, which saw women primarily as a vital economic resource. The ultimate "new Soviet woman" was thus both a mother of several children and a Stakhanovite, an industrial worker granted recognition and privileges for exceeding production standards. In the face of male workers' animosity, the regime celebrated women who had mastered technology, such as the tractor driver Praskovya Angelina ("Pasha") or the textile worker Mariya Vinogradova ("Marusya"), in countless newsreels and propaganda campaigns. Those heroines of the field and factory were portrayed as committed to the well-being of society and as dutiful daughters of their "dear father Stalin."

After a period of khaki jumpsuits and heavy work boots, propaganda posters in the 1930s showed women agricultural workers in wide skirts, peasant blouses, and head scarves, an image that in 1941 was transformed into an enormous "Mother Russia" who urged her children to fight the German invaders. This image of woman-as-mother was promoted even when war demanded that she turn into a fighter and killer, as many women did in the Red Army. There were attempts to revitalize the image of Pasha during a rural labor shortage in the 1970s; in the early 1990s, the demise of the woman tractor driver also signaled the end of the Soviet state and the new "chivalry" of emerging capitalism.

Throughout much of western Europe, the fashion immediately following World War II was dictated by scarcity. The abundance of fabric that characterized Christian Dior's "New Look" in the 1950s reflected a longing both for the end of rationing and for a return to traditional gender roles. For the woman who aspired to elegance, cosmetics and accessories such as hats and gloves were indispensable. By the end of the 1960s, the shift dress made its fashion debut and western European women copied the pillbox hats and pink costumes of the American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. In 1964 "Swinging London" took the place of Paris as the European fashion capital. The supershort hemlines of the miniskirt created by Mary Quant were revolutionary—made possible by the invention of pantyhose. The American hippie movement of the late 1960s also inspired new European fashions, especially male fashion, which had remained relatively unchanged for much of the century. Men and women alike now dressed "unisex"—in jeans and oriental-style shirts with colorful sunglasses and accessories bedecked with flowers and beads. The pantsuit became a socially acceptable alternative for women. Hemlines were much discussed in the 1970s, varied widely, and were often combined, as when a miniskirt was matched with a "maxi" coat. Fashion of the 1980s was influenced by the dark colors and ragged clothing of the "punk" subculture that had originated in England, and by the bold hues and luxury seen on the American TV series Dallas and Dynasty. The end of the 1980s saw a return to understated but elegant and refined clothing that fit the needs and the lifestyle of the new "young urban professionals." With the collapse of communism, Western styles spread more widely and more rapidly into Eastern Europe.

CONTRACEPTION

Throughout the twentieth century the advancement of contraceptive technologies and the increasing availability of this information had a significant impact on changing gender relations in Europe. During the nineteenth century, both middle- and working-class families in northern and western Europe had begun to see a large number of children as an economic liability and had realized that smaller families generally meant a higher standard of living. By the turn of the century, similar patterns were established in southern and eastern Europe. At the same time, according to some scholars, the rate of sexual activity increased, most notably among young people and the lower classes. Until the advent of hormonal contraception in the 1960s, birth control methods in the twentieth century did not differ much from those of the nineteenth. Coitus interruptus and abstinence were widespread, especially in working-class families. The invention of the process for vulcanizing rubber in the 1840s increased the artificial means available, though knowledge of and about condoms spread only gradually. The use of "Parisian articles" was still considered something exotic until massive state information campaigns geared toward the soldiers on the battlefields of World War I. The use of the diaphragm spread among middle-class families.

While upper- and middle-class women seem to have had better information about and access to contraceptive devices (as well as to comparatively safe abortions), until the 1970s poor women had to rely on clinics operated by radical doctors or sex reformers. Facing almost universal hostility from the medical community, the Dutch physician and feminist Aletta Jacobs (1854–1929) opened the world's first birth control clinic in Amsterdam in 1882 and had become an internationally respected authority on contraception by the 1920s. A few northern European nations allowed birth control means to be dispensed in a limited manner during the interwar years. Jacobs's clinics were never legal, but there were only a few government attempts to close them. The situation was somewhat similar in Germany until 1933 and in Denmark, where the novelist Thit Jensen and the socialist Marie Nielsen advocated birth control and sex education in schools. Although sex education did not materialize in most European countries until well after World War II, increased literacy and better scientific knowledge about women's ovulatory cycles allowed more effective practice of the rhythm method. British feminists and sex reformers also battled over access to birth control. The government prevented them from distributing contraceptive information on grounds of obscenity until 1930. Even though contraceptives were nominally available in a few northern European cities, women had difficulties obtaining them in smaller towns well into the 1950s and 1960s.

The history of birth control is epitomized by a gap between policy and practice, which certainly widened in the twentieth century. Until the 1960s, governments throughout Europe—democratic, communist, and fascist alike—promoted population growth and restricted access to contraception. In 1920 France took the lead by outlawing abortions as well as information about and the sale of contraceptives; penalties for abortionists and their clients were increased in 1923 and 1939. In Germany, the National Socialists outlawed birth control immediately after they seized power and increased penalties for abortions among "Aryans" (while forcing the "racially unfit" to submit to sterilization). Throughout Eastern Europe, contraceptive devices were either unavailable or of poor quality well into the twentieth century, which at times forced Soviet women to rely on abortions as their chief method for avoiding childbirth. Even in the early twenty-first century, birth control techniques varied considerably, depending on custom and available options. Surgical sterilization, the birth control pill, IUDs, and the morning-after pill became available throughout Europe. Generally, Western European women seemed to prefer the birth control pill, while many Eastern Europeans distrusted it.

After an initial surge after World War II, birth-rates continued to decline throughout Europe. Couples restricted their fertility even in Catholic societies, where contraception and abortion remained illegal. Only extreme policies were able to reverse this trend, as in Romania, where the birthrate nearly doubled between 1966 and 1967 because of stringent antiabortion laws. Nevertheless, faced with new levels of adolescent sexual activity, concerned about the spread of disease, and pressured by feminist movements, most European governments moved toward legalizing birth control in the 1960s. Change was most dramatic in Catholic countries such as France, where the sale of contraceptive devices and the dissemination of contraceptive information were legalized in 1968, and Spain, which followed suit in 1978. Yet contraceptives remain illegal in Ireland even in the early twenty-first century.

Reproduction rates in many European countries were near their all-time lows in the first years of the twenty-first century. Many marriages remained childless, some involuntarily, and the two-parent family was no longer the norm. Single parenthood (meaning chiefly single motherhood) was on the rise throughout Europe and was widely socially accepted. New contraceptive technologies not only altered motherhood but also the way it was represented. The spread of birth control and legalized abortions in the last third of the twentieth century resulted in more autonomy for many women in every aspect of their lives and not only with respect to reproduction and sexuality, as better availability of "choice" shifted gender relations in profound ways.

GAYS AND LESBIANS

In the twentieth century, Europeans started to reconsider homosexuality, which had been regarded as a disorder. As with the shifting senses of the term gender, the coining of new words and their changing usage offer important clues: the terms drag (to connote cross-dressing) and lesbian (to refer to female homosexuals), for instance, date back to the 1870s and thus predate Oscar Wilde's 1895 trial for homosexual acts, an event considered decisive in redefining the acceptable boundaries of gendered identity. The use of such terms as homo and queer (to refer to homosexuals) entered the English language in the 1920s. These linguistic shifts imply that modern gay and lesbian identities emerged from a complex interaction of subcultural values and practices on one hand and of attempts at control by the state and the professions on the other. Whereas homosexual was a term sometimes used by doctors and antivice campaigners, gay men commonly identified themselves as queer in the 1910s and 1920s. By the 1940s, when the cultural climate had turned more hostile, queer had acquired a different meaning, implying a passionate emotion, and homosexuals came to prefer gay, a word that was much more guarded: outsiders would not readily understand what "having a gay time" meant. The 1990s saw a strategic redeployment of the word queer to connote a form of political activism and to qualify a theory of literary and cultural criticism.

Gay men were persecuted in many European countries throughout the twentieth century, most severely under authoritarian regimes. Female homosexuality was generally ignored until the beginning of the century, when the writings of sexologists as well as popular discourse started to reflect a new weariness with lesbianism, which resulted in a curtailing of the range of behavior allowed to (privileged) women. Novels and films now emphasized the dangers of lesbian teachers in girls' schools and urged mothers to protect their daughters from female (and male) sexual aggression. Crushes on other women, a boyish or mannish style of dress, and even the ambition to pursue a career were seen as warning signs of "sexual inversion." In the 1920s lesbians appeared in western (and eastern) European medical and popular discourses. While the life of lesbians in Paris and Berlin has often been romanticized, limits were certainly placed on it. Although female homosexuality was not persecuted outright, lesbians in the cosmopolitan centers of Europe were still watched by the police and their clubs were periodically raided.

Lesbians had been active in European feminist movements throughout the twentieth century, but their sexual orientation had usually been ignored, sometimes denied. The British suffragist Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958) was a lesbian who dressed mannishly and fell in love with the author Virginia Woolf. The German feminists Anita Augspurg (1857–1943) and Lida Gustava Heymann (1868–1943) lived in a lesbian relationship for decades. In the late 1960s the culture and society of male and female homosexuals increasingly came out into the open. Building on traditions of the first gay movement of the 1920s, a new gay liberation movement formed alongside the U.S. civil rights movement and the worldwide protest against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The women's liberation movement embraced the issue of open and legitimate lesbian relationships, and by the late 1970s society's general acceptance of male and female homosexuals had become a goal of both movements. In the 1980s and 1990s the politics of gay and lesbian groups shifted toward AIDS research and the right for homosexual couples to marry and adopt.

"Second wave" feminism also explored whether lesbians were "naturally" feminists (and vice versa), with some lesbians claiming that only lesbians were true feminists. Lesbian separatism demanded the demise of heterosexual relationships altogether, a demand that raised many perplexing questions. Ultimately, moderation replaced militancy and lesbian and heterosexual feminists found common ground. Second wave feminism must be credited with acknowledging the contributions of lesbian feminists, and specifically with a new perspective on society that eventually extended to the whole women's movement: their viewpoint took woman as the "center," not the "other," the standard, not the variant, and provided a crucial tool for analyzing all of European culture and society.

THE VEXED QUESTION OF MASCULINITY

The study of masculinity developed as a notable component of gender theory. Like femininity, masculinity was increasingly seen as a constructed, social, and not necessarily natural set of characteristics. Scholarship on men and masculinity in Europe was relatively scarce in the early twenty-first century, certainly lagging behind the developments in the United States, yet there were some partial and tentative results concerning such issues as boyhood, fatherhood, working-class masculinity, and crime.

Studies of masculinity and modernity traced the emergence of a masculine ideal to the growth of a commercial and industrial bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Masculinity essentially required an intense struggle of man against himself and his body, which was subject to self-discipline and restraint. Any emotion was to be held in check, and the differences between masculine and feminine traits were sharply emphasized and had to be kept firmly in their proper place. Although masculine ideals underwent many local modifications, some of the same features occurred throughout Europe and did not start to break down in western Europe until the 1950s.

In addition to on the warfront, questions of masculinity were also posed elsewhere. In the twentieth century, European men of all classes increasingly sought recreational outlets to display their masculinity. Sports provided not only a way for educating boys to be men but also an opportunity for adults to participate on the field and as spectators. Early in the century, youth movements such as scouting offered boys an opportunity to develop their masculinity outside the female-dominated school environment. Masculine aggressiveness was asserted much more explicitly in the emerging fascist movements, which combined the masculinity of party boots and uniforms with the promise to return women to their traditional roles and more traditional clothing.

Gender differentiations certainly became less pronounced in the second half of the twentieth century. With women's increasing participation in the workforce, the breadwinner justification for masculinity diminished, even though male superiority in the workplace was still widespread. Couples started to share consumer interests, family vacations, and sometimes housework. Male-female relationships became more informal and less committed, not the least because of the availability of birth control. A large family was no longer a sign of sexual prowess. It must be kept in mind, however, that not only was late-twentieth-century maleness defined by a complex interplay between recent changes and persevering traditions, but that these definitions varied greatly between Stockholm and Naples, Moscow and Paris.

See alsoBeauvoir, Simone de; Feminism.

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Anja SchÜler