Examples & Case Studies Flashcards
The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier
Kathleen M Brown, 1995
Powhatan Confederacy, Algonquian
Jamestown, 1609
George Percy, a diarist, “doe all their drugerie”
Differences between how native Algonquian speaking Na of the Powhatan Confederacy were understood by english settlers (and in turn understood English settlers) in terms of their gender roles - women did agriculture, men did hunting/fighting - aristocrats vs peasants. Failure to fulfills proper gender roles legitimised for the English their dominance over the subordinate men.
Name a historian of women who acknowledges that not all women are white
Antoinette Burton - Burdens of History, 1984
Study of the relationship between liberal middle-class British feminists, Indian women, and imperial culture 1865. Demonstrated how British women’s suffrage campaigners, position w/i an imperial civilising mission, saw Indian women as “the white feminist burden”, “helpless victims” needing aid from more powerful British sisters.
Name a historian of women who builds in representations of women - i.e. “gender” - into their work
Penny Summerfield, 1998
42 oral histories of women who did war work during the Second World War - effects of Second World War on women’s sense of themselves - interaction between text and cultural representations
An example of female agency w/i oppression
Henrietta Leyser
Study of medieval women
Centrality of gossip for rural & urban women
Aided in construction of women’s sense of identity
Oral transmission of words, opinions, stories, legends
Seriousness of gossip
Defamation was assessed w/ more regulation than assault in the rolls of Warboys, Huntingdonshire
An example of the variety of experiences of gender w/i in the category of women
Peasant women vs aristocratic women:
Eileen Power’s 1926 distinction between women of different classes (all Christian wives)
Judith Bennett - marital status, religion, legal status, ethnicity, sexual status, region.
Different gender of widows:
- Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204):
> imprisonment - rebellion 1173-1174 - Gervase of Canterbury.
> Richard I & John - settled John’s rebellion, ensured the election of archbishop Hubert Walter, organised the improvement of English coastal defences, performed homage on John’s behalf for duchy of Aquitaine.
> Emma Huntyngton - ran her husband’s apothecary on his death, 1362.
One-sex > two-sex body
Thomas Laquer
Thomas Laquer - Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990) - before 1800 prevailing mediecal belief was that women and men were the same, but women have organs inverted. Humoural balance difference - heat. Post 1800 - biological difference.
- Vesalius’ De Fabrica, 1543
- 12th century surgeon - Ambrose Pare - “swift & violence movements” or sexual encounters - pubescent girls > penises - generated enough heat to become men.
Criticisms of one-sex > two-sex body
Elites; reception of texts. Simultaneously throughout history.
Helen King, 2013 - Hippocrates (c.460-c.370 BC, Greek physician, ‘Father of Modern Medicine’, different textured flesh as source of sexual difference, making women unlike men.
Hippocrates’ case of woman named Phaethousa, “wife of Phytheas”, 4th century BC - husband dies - stops menstruating - grows a beard, & dies, despite H’s attempts to “feminise her” - registered by H as if she were a woman, presented later as female, male, hermaphrodite.
Male menstruation
John L Beusterein - 17th c beliefs about Jewish men menustration - Jewish body supposedly leaked impure blood, like women - 1686 - Juan de Quinones - King Philip IV - “every month they suffer from a blood flow as if they were women”
Lyons in the Rabble
Clare Lyons, Sex among the rabble (2006) Connects the American Revolution & the development of Philadelphia's emergent middle class > regulation of gender systems & systems of sexual behaviour - policing mechanisms controlling non-marital sexual behaviour of African Americans and lower sorts. Constructing class difference through normative sex.
Thomas Hall
Thomas Hall, 1629, Warrakoyack, Virginia: trial for laying w/ a servant-maid, developed into a case about Hall’s gender.
- Trajectory of gender presentation, explained in local court in Jamestown: christened ‘Thomasine’ (women’s clothes); brother joins army, Thomasie “Cut of[f] his heire and Changed his apparel into the fashion of man”; end of military service, back to “woeman’s apparel” - female identity, needlework; sail to Virginia > man.
- Issue: Captain Nathaniel Bass, Warraskoyack’s most prominent resident, “where hee were man or woe-man” - replied that he was both.
- Policing gender: married women searching Hall’s body as night; Bass orders female clothing; married women search again, with Hall’s master, Atkins, no female genitalia, asks Hall to be put into male apparel. Group of local men attacked Hall, exposed his genitalia. Eventual solution: men’s breeches, female accessories, male impotence & history of female identity > give up privileges of manhood.
- Hall’s account of his body - had what appeared to be a small penis, “hee had no use of the man’s parte” - Bass - female clothing.
- Kathleen Brown: gender “malleable as a change of clothes” - when questioned, narrative of employment, apparel, Christian names - visible signs of gender, actively authored & manipulated.
Women’s suffrage example
Traditional view: focus on women; work on men - anti-suffragists - Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres (1978) - united by a belief that women were biologically unsuited to political life - female temperament, physique and intellect.
Henry James, Liberal MP, 1871: women “do not possess equal political capacity” to men.
1883: “Because they are not fit. You do not allow persons weak of mind to vote. It is because they are not fit.”
Not explained by physiological beliefs.
Reflecting on masculinity;
opportunity to associate themselves with dominant codes of masculinity;
what women are not statements about what men are;
threat to their masculinity os higher b/c it is more dependent on the idea that being involved in politics one has to be a man.
HJ - hard-headed man of business - defender of women’s right to be in the home - lifelong bachelor, v attached to his mother.
Men excluded from politics:
- 1832 Reform Bill - 12.4% to 18.4%, doubled w/ Second Reform Act, 60% in Third.
- Charles Newdegate - “uncertain, fluctuating, impulsive, arbitrary”; Edward Leathem; concern in both.
Ideal of masculine independence; own home; dominance of women and children; own politics; own religion; dual exclusion of working men & women inevitable.
Gendering antiquarianism
Republic of letters - antiquarianism as a manly pursuit - masculine qualities, identification w/ gendered ideals, b/c military/political/patriotic ideals of Roman & Gothic history - only women antiquarian to publish something in 18th century, Elizabeth Elstob the Saxonist, described by her contemporaries as possessing a “masculine mind”.
Lyndal Roper
Reformation - based on the idea religious up-heavels in Europe in sixteenth century affected women - but this affects role of men - marriage lauded over other life-styles - neutralising perceived threat of unmarried women. Changed common perception of celibate clerics as sexually pure > deviants, sexual purity achieved through marriage.
Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket
H. M. Thomas
Archbishop of Canterbury & Henry II of England (1154-1189) - 1160s - ongoing debate on king’s rights over the church - Becket defied the king’s wishes and left the country in exile, returned in 1170 - immediately murdered. Contemporary responses against Becket / B’s own actions - need to associate self w/ normative masculinity - clergymen - violent or sexual maleness - muscular Christianity. Clerics third gender (R. N. Swanson).
- “Stand manfully with me in the fight, take up weapons and the shield and rise to my aid.”
Gendered insults
Edmund Burke, French Revolution, constructed in terms of an opposition to the sexual perversions of working class women against the gentle femininity of Marie-Antoinette.
Martin Luther’s attack on Pope Paul III - “Her Sodomitical Hellishness, Pope Paula III” - Cassius Dio’s (c.235) account of Boudicca (d.60/61) mocking the Emperor Nero (first century AD) for his effeminacy.
