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Gender Regimes in Western Societies from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Didier Lett
Didier Lett*
Affiliation:
University Denis-Diderot(Paris 7)
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Abstract

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The concept of gender has become such an important subject in international historiography over the last two decades that it might appear odd to devote an entire dossier of the Annales to the topic. However, the relative success of this field of research may also conceal ambiguities in both the intellectual project underlying the term as well as its reception in the social sciences. For certain authors, undertaking a history of gender has meant writing a history of women. Though this form of history now enjoys proper recognition, it is still depreciated in two ways: on the one hand, it is qualified as a militant—and therefore unscholarly—history; and, on the other, it is criticized according to some vague argument claiming that no matter how it is labeled—“gender” or “women”—the inquiry is already dated. Without a doubt, the now canonical expression “history of women and gender” has generated real confusion among those scholars who are not particularly engaged with the field.1

Type
Gender Regimes
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 391 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2012

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Violaine Sebillote Cuchet, who helped me prepare this dossier.

References

1. In France, the essential reference book is Françoise Thébaud’s Écrire l’histoire des femmes (Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS éd., 1998). It was reedited in 2007 with the title Écrire l’histoire des femmes et du genre (Lyon: ENS éd., 2007). Laura Lee Downs’s book Writing Gender History (London: Hodder Arnold, 2004) perfectly complements Thébaud’s work, offering a useful comparison between French and Anglophone historiography. This movement has only recently been acknowledged in French historiography textbooks. As recently as 1999, Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, and Patrick Garcia’s textbook Les courants historiques en France, 19e-20e siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999) devoted only two of its 332 pages to gender (pp. 282-283). However, there is an entire chapter entitled “History of Women, History of Gender,” by Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (1:208-19), in the latest study of historiography in France: see Delacroix, Christian et al., eds., Historiographies. Concepts et débats (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 2 volsGoogle Scholar. The “and” has been dropped here. Even though both fields of research are grouped together in the same chapter—highlighting an obvious kinship—, it is nonetheless understood that they are not necessarily fused in a permanent conjunction.

2. These expressions are employed in an informal and derogatory manner by many French academics, often without reference to precise methodologies. See Lear, Andrew and Altman, Meryl, “The Unspeakable Vice of the Americans,” Iris, the Newsletter of the Lambda Classical Caucus (Fall 2010): http://eugesta.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/spip.php?article61 .Google Scholar

3. Stoller, Robert J., Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity (New York: Science House, 1968)Google ScholarPubMed.

4. Oakley, Ann, Sex, Gender and Society (London: Maurice Temple Smith Ltd., 1972)Google Scholar.

5. Scott, Joan W., “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91-5 (1986): 1053–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and also included in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

6. It took a long time for the term to be used in French. Sociologists and philosophers, followed by a few historians, have more willingly spoken of the “social difference between the sexes” (“différence sociale des sexes”) or of the “social relations of sex” (“rapports sociaux de sexe”), expressions that insist gender is the result of a social construction and which invite one to assimilate relations between the sexes to other social relations (such as relations of production). These expressions reveal the persistence of Marxist models in the social sciences. In the field of history, it was not until the very end of the 1980s that the word “genre” (meaning “gender”) timidly made its appearance in the titles of journals or anthologies. It was first used in two journal issues—“Le Genre de l’histoire,” Les Cahiers du Grif 37/38 (1988) and “Femmes, genre, histoire,” Genèses 6 (1991)—as well as in an interdisciplinary conference held in 1989 from which the papers were published two years later: see Hurtig, Marie-Claude, Kail, Michèle, and Rouch, Hélène, eds., Sexe et genre. De la hiérarchie entre les sexes (Paris: Éd. du CNRS, 1991)Google Scholar. It began to be more frequently employed at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Association Mnemosyne (Association pour le Développement de l’Histoire des Femmes et du Genre) adopted it in 2000, and, in September 2002, it figured in the title of a conference organized at the University of Rennes 2: see Capdevila, Luc et al., eds., Le genre face aux mutations. Masculin et féminin du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Rennes: PUR, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 2003, the journal Vingtième siècle published a special issue entitled Histoire des femmes, histoire des genres, edited by Raphaëlle Branche and Danièle Voldman. Since then the term has been increasingly employed. Nonetheless, it is rarely used in medieval history: http://shmesp.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/biblio . In March 2011, only eight titles employing the term “genre” (in the sense of “social sex”) could be found in the titles of publications indexed by the SHMESP site (Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur Public). With regard to ancient history, the sample extracted from the online database produced by L’Année philologique. Bibliographie critique et analytique de l’Antiquité gréco-latine includes only thirteen article or book titles bearing the term “genre” (meaning “gender”). This encompasses works published between 1991 and 2008 (posterior publications are not indexed). Apart from one 1991 publication, the other twelve date between 2003 and 2008.

7. See: Christin, Olivier, ed., Dictionnaire des concepts nomades en sciences humaines (Paris: Métailié, 2010)Google Scholar; Morsel, Joseph, “De l’usage des concepts en Histoire médiévale,” De l’usage de (Paris: Collections Ménestrel, 2011), http://www.menestrel.fr/spip.php?rubrique1551&lang=fr Google Scholar.

8. In French, this expression is used in the social sciences, particularly in sociology. It seems to have several meanings. Referring to Robert W. Connell’s work, Lorena Parini uses this expression to designate “particular assemblages according to the political space being analyzed (States, regions, communities, etc.)” within the “gender system” (“that is, how the social relations of sex are organized around certain crucial issues: reproductive control, the sexual division of knowledge and labor, access to the sphere of politics”). See Parini, Lorena, Le système de genre. Introduction aux concepts et théories (Zurich: Seismo, 2006), 35 Google Scholar. For Robert W. Connell’s use of this term, see Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 53-54. Lorena Parini insists on the micro-social and relational aspect of the notion of “gender regime” in contrast to that of “gender system.” Despite having originated in an American feminist sociological tradition (in which one can find the notion “gender regime,” sometimes also translated into French as “equality regime”), this expression is also used by French scholars to alert public authorities to the importance of social relations between the sexes when formulating the social policies of welfare states. For instance, Olivier Giraud and Barbara Lucas write: “In its widest sense, the notion ‘gender regime’ is supposed to encompass the entire set of social structures that influence the sexual division of social roles” (see Sylvia Walby, 2001). This notion complements the prolific amount of writing produced in the 1980s and 90s analyzing the interactions between gender relations and the various forms and modes of operation of welfare states. See Olivier Giraud and Barbara Lucas, “Le renouveau des régimes de genre en Allemagne et en Suisse : bonjour ‘néo maternalisme’ ?” in special issue “État, Travail, Famille. ‘Conciliation’ ou conflit?” eds. Jacqueline Heinen, Helena Hirata, and Roland Pfefferkorn, Cahiers du Genre 46 (2009): 19. Irène Théry uses the term in quotation marks in a sense close to the one I propose: in her view, these regimes vary according to the kinds of relations activated by various participants in a situation. See Théry, Irène, “Pour une anthropologie comparative de la distinction de sexe,” in Ce que le genre fait aux personnes, eds. Théry, Irène and Bonnmère, Pascale (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2008), 32 Google Scholar.

9. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who was the first scholar to employ the term “gender” in English, immediately linked the word “gender” with the word “identity” in his expression “gender identity.” See Stoller, Sex and Gender.

10. See the foundational article by Barraud, Cécile, “De la distinction de sexe dans les sociétés : une présentation,” in Sexe relatif ou sexe absolu? De la distinction de sexe dans les sociétés, edsGoogle Scholar. Alès, Catherine and Barraud, Cécile (Paris: Éd. de la MSH, 2001), 23–99 Google Scholar. It demonstrates that kinship terms express gender relations in a different manner depending on the bonds that unite two persons: absolute, relative, and undifferentiated sex. See Irène Théry’s commentaries and perspective in La distinction de sexe. Une nouvelle approche de l’égalité (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 511–19 Google Scholar. The relational dimension at the heart of kinship has been particularly well studied by Strathern, Marilyn, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Théry, , La distinction de sexe, 246 Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., 228.

13. During the 1980s, Anglophone historians were the first to draw attention to the necessity of articulating sex within other categories like class or race. See: Jones, Jacqueline, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar; Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, eds., Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987)Google Scholar. This approach already aimed at not enclosing individuals within fixed identities, instead inviting reflection on the entire set of social relations. In the first issue of the journal Gender and History in 1989, Gisela Bock emphasized the necessity of considering gender as one category amongst others and refused an “imperialism of gender.” See Bock, Gisela, “Women’s History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate,” Gender and History 1-1 (1989): 7–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. During a 1992 conference held in Paris following the French publication of Histoire des femmes en Occident, Claude Mossé highlighted the trap of easy recourse to the category “women”: “Should one grasp the experience of the female slaves of antiquity by describing them first as women and then as slaves?” See Mossé, Claude, “L’Antiquité. Lecture critique du tome I de l’Histoire des femmes ,” in Femmes et Histoire, eds. Duby, Georges and Perrot, Michelle (Paris: Plon, 1993), 19–24 Google Scholar, and particularly pp. 23-24. In 1997, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber posed the same question with regard to women in the milieu of the Florentine magnates of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: “In the eyes of contemporaries and within social practices, is there a sexual identity that can escape the differentiations introduced by belonging to a particular social group? For example, were there specifically feminine characteristics that justified a certain treatment of women in the city? Or, inversely, were class attributes more important than sexual attributes, and did they contribute to constituting social profiles that encompassed and effaced sexual differences?” See Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Identité de sexe, identité de classe : femmes nobles et populaires en Italie (XIVe-XVe siècles),” in L’histoire grande ouverte. Hommages à Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, eds. Burguière, André, Goy, Joseph, and Tits-Dieuaide, Marie-Jeanne (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 395 Google Scholar.

14. This is but one example amongst many. The authors of the preface state: “For reasons of space, we have not been able to include articles on periods previous to 1500.” See Shoemaker, Robert and Vincent, Mary, eds., Gender and History in Western Europe (London: Arnold, 1998), vii Google Scholar.

15. Thébaud, Écrire l’histoire des femmes; Downs, Writing Gender History.

16. The Mnemosyne Prize is awarded by the Association Mnemosyne annually for a Masters thesis in the history of women and gender. Amongst the sixty-six remaining theses, there were thirty-three in modern history (19%), twenty in ancient history (11.5%), and fourteen in medieval history (8%).

17. A textbook addressed to high-school teachers edited by the Association Mnemosyne now includes all academic periods of history. See Dermenjian, Geneviève et al., eds., La place des femmes dans l’histoire : une histoire mixte (Paris: Belin, 2010)Google Scholar. A textbook for antiquity also exists: see Boehringer, Sandra and Sebillotte Cuchet, Violaine, Hommes et femmes dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine. Le genre, méthode et documents (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011)Google Scholar. A textbook on the end of the Middle Ages (twelfth-fifteenth centuries) is forthcoming.

18. For the medieval period, especially from the Gregorian reform onwards, ecclesiastical discourse emphasized the clergy/layman division more than that of men/women. The clergy, who could only be men, were considered members of a superior order of society because they did not have any fleshly ties, having taken the vow of chastity when they became priests. The second category encompassed men and women as inferiors to the clergy.

19. Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

20. For critiques and debates provoked by Laqueur’s work, see: Steinberg, Sylvie, “Sexe et genre au XVIIIe siècle. Quelques remarques sur l’hypothèse d’une fabrique du sexe,” in Ce que le genre fait aux personnes, eds. Théry, Irène and Bonnmère, Pascale (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2008), 197–212 Google Scholar; Jaulin, Annick, “La fabrique du sexe, Thomas Laqueur et Aristote,” Clio. Histoire, femmes et societies 14 (2001): 195–205 Google Scholar; and Cadden, Joan, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Scholars working on pre-modern periods can easily demonstrate that the “novelties” identified by Laqueur were in the early stage of development, if not already in place, much earlier. Prior to the eighteenth century, there were many ways of describing the body, and writers already had recourse to biological explanations in the observation of anatomical and functional differences in the matter of procreation. In the Preface to the 1992 French edition of his work, Thomas Laqueur himself, aware of these critiques, agreed that there were early indications of the model of the two sexes before the eighteenth century and that traces of the unisexual model can be found afterward: “Two models have always been available, and one has never been completely abandoned in favor of the other.” Laqueur, Thomas, La Fabrique du sexe, trans. Gautier, Michel (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), vi Google Scholar. Nonetheless, these nuances do not destabilize the system and evolution proposed by Laqueur.

21. Laqueur, Making Sex, 62.

22. Steinberg, “Sexe et genre,” 201. Philippe Descola has shown that in the West, the weight of the opposition between nature and culture only became central beginning in the eighteenth century. In his eyes, naturalism was a characteristic of the Enlightenment. See Descola, Philippe, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005)Google Scholar.