Gender (Arguments)

Question 1

What major scholarly developments is the study by John Tosh - A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (1999) grounded in?

Answer 1

1) the broadening of women’s history to embrace the history of gender - enabling an understanding of the family as a system “embracing all levels of power, dependence and intimacy”
2) the development of an economic and social history that views domesticity as an integral feature of modernity - an essentially nineteenth-century invention different from just domestic life

Question 2

R. W. Connell - Gender and Power 1987 - key theory development

Answer 2

• Emphasised gender is a large-scale social structure not just a matter of personal identity

Question 3

R.W. Connell - Masculinities 1995, 2005 - key theory

Answer 3

• Develops concept of hegemonic masculinity
• Hegemonic masculinity is defined as a practice that legitimizes men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of the common male population and women, and other marginalized ways of being a man
• Conceptually, hegemonic masculinity proposes to explain how and why men maintain dominant social roles over women, and other gender identities, which are perceived as “feminine” in a given society
• Idea that there is a normative, peak man, that everyone aims to be

Question 4

What influences R.W. Connell’s ideas and theory?

Answer 4

• She is a trans woman - impacts her view of gender
• Clearly rooted in Gramscian ideas of cultural hegemony
• Directly mapped from class onto culture

Question 5

What are some critiques of Connell’s hegemonic masculinity concept?

Answer 5

• Some say it homogenises masculinity
• Some critique the absence of race in the original discussion
• If you remove the gender binary, do not need to be a “man” to adopt masculinity i.e. Thatcher - social constructs

Question 6

What is the significance of Connell revisiting work on masculinity in 2005 10 years later?

Answer 6

• Addressing all the criticisms

- Shows still something which is being discussed and debated

Question 7

Why does B Griffin critique Tosh’s work?

Answer 7

Says Tosh’s framework is outdated because gender is everywhere

Question 8

Simone de Beauvoir (1949) The Second Sex - Key Ideas

Answer 8

• One is not born but becomes a woman
• Radical idea of gender as constructs
• Discusses how women have been treated throughout history and how socially imposed situational constraints
• Doesn’t consider that man is also a social construct

Question 9

Significance of context de Beauvoir writing in

Answer 9

• Post-war France
• Women just been given the vote 1944
• WWII lots of gendered violence vs women in France reactionary
• Can’t see that masculinity is a construct because seems like from her perspective men are benefitting from patriarchy because of her middle-class privilege

Question 10

How did women’s history emerge in the late 1960s and 1970s? (in Britain)

Answer 10

• 1968 revolutionary - students movements in Europe, sexual revolution, civil rights in the US - women becoming involved and organising but often marginalised
• Leads to development of and consolidation of second-wave feminism which peaks in 1970s
• Women’s history emerged from the 1960s/1970s women’s rights movement
• Firmly rooted in the political, sp. left-wing tradition
• Ties between feminist politics and women’s history in late 1960s and 1970s was esp. strong

Question 11

What is the historical context of the emergence of women’s history in the 1970s? (4)

Answer 11

• C. this time women were beginning to get jobs in academic history depts, previously had been rare, e.g. Lincoln’s first woman fellow appointed in 1980
• Margaret Thatcher’s elected UK’s 1st woman PM in 1979
• Rowbotham and co also being pushed to sidelines of New Left movements by male ‘comrades.’
• Male social historians disparage suggestions to look at women’s history

Question 12

Sheila Rowbotham (1974) Hidden From History - historical context and historiographical significance and content (5)

Answer 12

• Focused on rediscovery of lives of women in the past - set up Ruskin History Workshops after male social historians laughed at her suggestion to look at women’s histories
• At this point - inextricable link between commitment to women’s history and the women’s movements aims - not the same now
• Rowbotham and co also being pushed to sidelines of New Left movements by male ‘comrades.’
• Debt to Marxism focused the historical debate on certain issues more than others i.e. mostly looking at how class and sex, work and the family, personal life and social pressures hindered women’s struggles for equality
• In Hidden from History, she examined British women’s history from the 17th century to 1930 from a Marxist viewpoint. For Rowbotham, the history of British women could best be defined through class oppression, the Industrial Revolution, and sexism.

Question 13

Historical and Historiographical context of the 1980s in European gender history field (6)

Answer 13

• Shift to gender history
• Fragmenting of Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain
• Critique of the inadequacies of the “add women and stir” supplementary approach to history
• Challenges of universality of womanhood
• Some scholars worried shift would result in abandonment of tangible experiences
• New emphasis on discourse, cultural construction, and gender systems undeniably threatened the emphatic, rigid categorisation of women’s history and accounts of their tangible experiences so central to 1960s/70s

Question 14

bell hooks (1981) Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism - THEORY AND ARGUMENT

Answer 14

• Examines the effect of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s
• Argues convergence of sexism and racism during slavery contributed to Black women having the lowest status and worst conditions of any group in American society
• White female abolitionists and suffragists often more comfortable with Black male abolitions such as Douglass
• Southern segregationist and stereotypes of black female promiscuity and immorality caused protests whenever Black women spoke
• Stereotypes set during slavery still affect Black women today
• Black nationalism was largely a patriarchal and misogynist movement, seeking to overcome racial divisions by strengthening sexist ones
• Readily latched onto idea of emasculating Black matriarch
• Feminist movement - largely white middle and upper class - did not articulate needs of poor and non-white women, thus reinforcing sexism, racism, and classism
• Doesn’t provide a bibliography for any of her work, doesn’t use footnotes, difficult to find citations listed under notes
• In later work she explains her lack of conventional academic practice is motivated by a desire to be inclusive and reach as many readers in as many diff locations as possible

Question 15

Angela Davis (1981) Women, Race, and Class - CONTENT

Answer 15

• Similar to hooks looking at women, race, and class throughout American history
• Intersectional approach - highlight the issue with universal categories of womanhood and how lived experiences differed
• Looks both at masculinity and femininity as social constructs within black community and role of whites but also the layers of class dimensions too

Question 16

Joan Scott (1986) ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’ - HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HER THEORY/WORK (5)

Answer 16

• Inaugurated shift away from women’s history to gender history - which used gender as a lens through which to view history
• Gender as a cultural rather than biological category, product of discourse rather than experience - i.e. a social construct
• Abandons biological determinism → discarding of search for a single universal account of women’s oppression
• History now tasked with understanding meanings that femininity/masculinity carried in the past and what it meant for wider social experience
• Relational dynamic of this femininity and masculinity constituted the fundamental self/other power paradigm - acted as a framework for explaining historical change and phenomena

Question 17

Judith Butler (1989) Gender and the Subversion of Identity - KEY ARGUMENTS/THEORY (11)

Answer 17

• Concept of a female in our culture is unstable and relational
• Gender as a category is the creation of institution, practices and discourses
• Feminist aim should not be to construct a correct notion of identity based on gender, but move from critique already well underway in feminist theory
• Sets out to speculate on the possibility of a feminist politics which might be without a subject in the category of women
• Reconsiders the status of women as the subject of feminism and the sex/gender distinction
• Compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism are understood as regimes of power/discourse within language
• Selective reading of structuralism, phychoanalytic and feminist accounts of the incest taboo as the mechanism that tries to enforce discrete and internally coherent gender identities
• Subverisve bodily acts - critical consideration of constructing the maternal body
• Shows implicit norms that govern cultural intelligibility of sex and sexuality in Kristeva’s work
• Performative subversions consider surface bodies are politically constructed
• AMONGST OTHERS, LOOKS AT Q POSED BY DE BEUAVOIR

Question 18

Kimberlee Crenshaw coins term intersectionality for first time

Answer 18

1989

Question 19

1990S HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Answer 19

• Shift occurred and the new study of gender history begun to gain traction and arguably overtook women’s history
• Attempted to embody a wider perspective beyond the woman, examining gender relations, including homosocial ones, rather than just the history of women

Question 20

Evelyn Higginbotham (1994) Righteous Discontent

Answer 20

Seminal text in AA history and history of race relations/long civil rights era
Recognises role of women in public arm of church and in making it the most powerful institution of racial self-help and collective character of Church

Question 21

Evelyn Higginbotham (1994) Righteous Discontent - argues women developed a unique discourse of resistance:

Answer 21

Not content with operating within boundaries of individual churches/male-led state conventions
1880s → own course
Women’s movement
Part of AA community and evangelical sisterhood across racial lines
Forged own sphere of influence at state level
Challenged silent helpmate image
Loyal dissent - used Bible to fight for their rights and struggle for equality

Question 22

Higginbotham Politics of respectability

Answer 22

Respectability assumed a political dimension
Emphasis on reform of individual behaviour as goal/strategy for reform of structural system of AA race relations
Class and status
Agency and will to define themselves outside of prevailing racist discourses
Exposed Race relations as socially constructed

Question 23

What does Penny Summerfield’s 1998 Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives study and how? (3)

Answer 23

• Studies the effects of WW2 on women’s experience and sense of selves through 42 oral interviews
• Explores women’s wartime lives and cultural representations of men and women by analysing the connection between popular/collective discourse and personal memory in women’s accounts
• She explored how women remembered themselves as participants in war, their relationships with other women and men, how they responded to demobilisation and employment post-war, and how they felt their lives had changed

Question 24

What does Summerfield argue?

Answer 24

Uses this exploration to argue that accepted historiographical view that war reinforced gender distinctions was over-simplified

Question 25

What does Summerfield note a contrast between?

Answer 25

Contrast between women who remembered their war work as ‘heroic’ and the experience as emancipatory, who drew on narratives within popular memory and wartime propaganda/recruitment campaigns, and ‘stoic’ women who saw work as a necessity and remembered more traditional discourses of femininity

Question 26

What is the name of Joan Scott’s 2001 revisitation of gender?

Answer 26

Millenial Fantasies: The Future of Gender

Question 27

What does Joan Scott argue in (2001) ‘Millennial Fantasies: The Future of Gender’?

Answer 27

Appalled by the ‘biological determinism’ of earlier eras where it was assumed that women were weaker, more fragile, and compelled by their biological role to stay at home and raise children

Question 28

What does Stephen Brooke’s (2001) Gender and Working-Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s argue? (4)

Answer 28

• Concludes discourse of transformation in working class life in Britain in 1950s/60s often bound up in the perception of changes in gender roles
• Emphasises the persistent interweaving of gender and class identity in mid-twentieth century Britain
• Emphasises importance of gender to development of class consciousness and that class identity distinctively gendered
• Acknowledges that progress and prosperity may have worn away the singularity and coherence of working class identity

Question 29

What source Material does Brooke’s (2001) Gender and Working-Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s use?

Answer 29

Studies of popular subculture, sociologists accounts

Question 30

What is historical context within which Brooke was writing?

Answer 30

• Time when gender history very popular, recognition of need to incorporate multianalaytical frameworks
• Also time when Labour Party has moved more to the centre and is in power - perhaps looking at how we have got to this point

Question 31

Why is Andrea Peso’s (2003) ‘Memory and the Narrative of Rape in Budapest and Vienna’ significant? (4)

Answer 31

• Utilised work of Austrian historians on Red Army rapes to ask similar questions in her interviews in Budapest to produce comparative data
• Noticed how Iron Curtain meant historical and political discourse on WWII focused on differences while ignoring similarities - Soviet troops stationed in Vienna until 1955
• Concludes conspiracy of silence in immediate post-war - women blamed for rape, women trying to pretend didn’t happen, women unsupported
• Perhaps we should read their speaking about rapes not in political context of then but of 2000s - rise of women’s history, women more able to speak up - tension between Mark’s analysis

Question 32

Why is Kate Fisher’s (2006) Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 significant? (4)

Answer 32

Studies attitudes towards birth control through oral narratives
Historians have assumed that 20th century women cared more about contraception than their male counterparts
Uses oral studies to demonstrate the opposite to be true
Suggests men’s knowledge of birth control was far more extensive than women’s, with women seeing it as important to claim ignorance with regards to matters of contraception

Question 33

Nathalie Thomlinson (2012) ‘The Colour of Feminism’ (6)

Answer 33

• Looks at WLM in 1970s and 1980s and how they have since been accused of being racist and blind to ethnic minority women’s needs
• Interesting because it is again looking at the revisionist takes of it being liberatory
• But also argues relationships white feminists in UK had with race, Balck women and Black nationalism was more complex than accusation of racism suggests
• With anti-imperialism and black liberation white feminist periodical Shrew hints that the women supported the liberation movement of the oppressed group and analogised their oppression as women and of people oppressed as nations but not the women themselves
• Janet Hadley said she came to understanding women’s oppression by analogising it to the experience of Black people - experience of Black Power inspired WLM
• Difficulty for Jewish women, women not from London, non-white women, w-c women

Question 34

G Stevenson (2016) ‘The Women’s Movement and Class Struggle” (5)

Answer 34

• Discusses how women workers’ industrial disputes were of fundamental importance to the WLM in late 60s-70s
• Shows how women strikers’ particular experiences of trade unionism, class politics and feminism resulted in gendered BUT still fundamentally class-based identities
• Notes how Black feminists have critiqued the WLM’s essentialism and how it was liberationary only for those within its primary demographic - white middle-class women who dominated it
• Looks at three different strikes and how the women strikers’ political identities were linked to class and gender at Dagenham, Trico, and at Grunwick race intertwined
• Essentially incorporating not just gender as a category of analysis but the need for multi axis frameworks

Question 35

Helen Mills (2016) ‘Using the Personal to Critique the Popular’ (6)

Answer 35

• Uses women’s memories of 1960s youth to critique popular idea of the “swinging sixties”
• Demonstrates that impression of period as promiscuous and permissive is based on the experiences of young men not subject to same restrictions as young women
• Highlights that the collective memory is based off of the culture of a very narrow metropolitan middle-class elite
• Female subjects critique the popular memory of the 1960s which did not fit with their experiences
• But popular memory was significant in their framing of their concept and experience of the 1960s
• Suggest popular memory based on a myth propagated at the time by media representations, such as the films: A Taste of Honey, Up the Junction, and Ready, Steady, Go!

Question 36

Jason Crouthamel (2018) ‘Homosexuality and Comradeship: Destabilising the Hegemonic Masclune Ideal in Nazi Germany’ (5)

Answer 36

• Homosexual WWI vets/active soldiers in Third Reich deployed hegemonic masculinity as a resource that allowed for agency and defence
• Most homosexual men could only escape persecution by hiding/supressing identity
• WWI vets/active servicemen contested emphasis on heterosexuality as being crucial to hegemonic masculinity by proving homosexuality didn’t undermine martial masculinity
• Rohm and Brand claimed homosexual soldiers had proven their combat value/embodied ideal warrior - model for this argument
• H/E 1934 violent purges/1935 extended criminalisation of homosexuality meant resorted to less self-confident tactic: acknowledging their homsexuality as deviant/executing it w reference to deprivation/traumatic experiences of WWI
• Only possible bc Nazis viewed homosexuality as a curable/suppressable disease - unlike racial inferiorit

Question 37

Michael J Geheran (2018) ‘Remasculinisng the Shirker’ (3)

Answer 37

• Deployed “complicit” form of masculinity by standing up vs Nazi thugs publicly in front of other men and women
• Displayed core features of martial masculinity - in the process retaining their masculine honour/regaining their self-esteem
• In utilising hegemonic martial masculinity to secure their own status/agency/identity they distanced themselves from/put themselves above non-military i.e. “unmanly” Jews, unwittingly thereby confirming Nazi sterotypes about Jewish men’s alleged effeminacy

Question 38

2020S (4)

Answer 38

• Recent historical works - sense of a recall to early years - some would view as progressive others as regressive
• Esp those questioning the wholly socially constructed notion of gender and suggesting the existence of a more essentialist biological element within gendered experiences
• Modern emphasis on importance of biological sex reacting against some of the more deconstructionist tendencies of gender history which posits gender is entirely a social construct
• Many historians feel this ignored lived experience of women in the past for whom bodily realities, most particularly those relating to procreation, had a huge impact on their life choices and patterns

Question 39

What are John Tosh’s main arguments in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England? (1999)

Answer 39

1) notion of domesticity as “women’s sphere” for Victorians was “a convenient shorthand, not a claim of domesticity”
2) modern scholars have asserted the doctrine of “separate spheres” more dogmatically than Victorians did themselves
3) the phrase separate spheres obscures the distinctly masculine prerogative of enjoying ready access to both spheres and thus glosses over the struggles men encountered in moving between the two

Question 40

Why are John Tosh’s main arguments in A Man’s Place not novel in 1999?

Answer 40

• Because of his own earlier work in 1994 and developments in the field since then

Question 41

What historical source evidence does Tosh use in A Man’s Place (1999)?

Answer 41

• Synthesis of scholarship on Victorian gender and domesticity
• His own archival research focused on the private correspondence of seven families

Question 42

What is the central claim of Tosh?

Answer 42

The Victorian ideal of domesticity was in all respects the creation of men as much as women

Question 43

What does Tosh argue about traditional tensions between manliness and domestic life in Victorian Britain?

Answer 43

• Were exacerbated by the rise of evangelicalism
• Helped to shape domesticity and made it “A defining attribute of manliness”
• happening at the same time home and child-rearing were increasingly thought of as the special province of women

Question 44

What is the argument that Victorian masculinity was in crisis?

Answer 44

• displacement of masculine authority by feminine “influence” was compounded by increasing questioning of patriarchal authority
• both in legal reforms
• also in the unprecedented critique of male sexuality in the great public debates of the 80s and 90s
• meant pressures on masculinity were bound up with an erosion of the domestic ideal itself
• increasingly experienced as confine to both men and women

Question 45

Why does Tosh argue that it would be a “wild exaggeration” to suggest that late-Victorian domestic patriarchy was in “crisis” though he acknowledges “both symbolically and practically the father’s headship of the household was under threat”?

Answer 45

• argues that while the legitimate scope of patriarchy was a subject of increasing public debate,
• patriarchy as such was only questioned by a small minority of feminists
• using family letters argues shifting understandings are registered less in explicit questioning than in a “perceptible change of atmosphere” associated with domestic life

Question 46

What is an important theoretical contribution of Tosh we can see in other masculinities works?

Answer 46

• Can study masculinity through home, work, and all male associations
• talks about hegemonic masculinity and economic and role and legal control involved in setting up a household in Victorian status