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Gender has become more complicated in recent years, as Caitlyn Jenner has just proven. In the old days, there were two genders defined since the ancient Greeks as opposite, immutable, and two sexual orientations. Neat. A 2x2 table. Now everything has changed, even, or especially, the ranking.
In the old days, Plato was relatively gender egalitarian, recommending that both women and men might be rulers (or philosopher-kings) depending on merit (Republic 5); and he recognised that they love each other (Symposium 190-1). His former student, Aristotle, flatly disagreed about gender equality and argued forcefully for the superiority of men over women due, he thought, to their greater rationality (Politics, Economics 1, Generation of Animals 728-75). Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle. These ideas may have influenced the witch hunts across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and Salem in 1692.
This two thousand year consensus on human inequality (by merit or gender) ended rather abruptly with the Enlightenment, and a fresh paradigm of the equality of humanity: a massive value shift that conveniently happened to coincide with the anti-imperial values of the American Revolution and the anti-monarchist values of the French Revolution. This new insight was reflected in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Neither revolution drastically shifted the gender balance of power nor increased gender equality; but the French Revolution, with its slogans of “Liberty. Equality. Fraternity” did inspire Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792), which is still in print.
Simone de Beauvoir named the first four feminists as Sappho, Christine de Pisan, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-92) and Olympe de Gouges (1989:128). Wollstonecraft’s book was a passionate, eloquent and forceful demand for the emancipation of women. But, oddly, she was no great fan of women, whom she described as historically “either a slave or a despot” (144), “only taught to please” (146), and: “Confined, then, in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch” (146). Unlike men, “they are all rivals” (310). They do have power over men: “They will smile – yes, they will smile…” (146). But the cost is high. Woman, she insisted, was not created to be “the toy” or “rattle” of men, for his amusement (118). She blames women for being complicit with their cages, but she blames men much more stating that men have made women “slaves of power” (282) and “slaves of injustice” (313), which has resulted in “the state of warfare which subsists between the sexes” (285, cf. 233).
So here begins the second paradigm shift: the re-thinking of men from the chivalrous, rational protector of “the weaker sex” to the tyrant and the slave owner, oppressive of women: from the positive to the negative. And also the re-thinking of women from the fragile, protected, domestic sex to the innocent and powerless victim: a slave, in fact, at war.
So she capsized, or tried to, the later complementary gender definition of Tennyson (1809-92), who died exactly 100 years after Wollstonecraft and penned the classic description of role separation in his poem “The Princess”:
Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.
Wollstonecraft added: ”I love man as my fellow; but his sceptre, real or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then, the submission is to reason, and not to man” (121). In the dedication of her work on the rights of women to Talleyrand, she “loudly demands JUSTICE for one-half of the human race” (89. Her emphasis). Her point was that women did not need chivalry, which simply weakened women. They wanted justice, liberty and their rights.
This process of re-thinking men and women accelerated with the Seneca Falls Conference Declaration of Sentiments of 1848, which deliberately echoed the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal…The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of absolute tyranny over her.
Again, the re-definition of men as tyrants and women as victims and society as unjust. And ironically, this was written in the same year and in similar terms to The Communist Manifesto, which begins: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Interesting if the proponents of these two different perspectives on inequality and power, one on gender the other on class, could have joined forces, but they didn’t.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Suffragette Movement for the enfranchisement of women was gaining strength, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K. Even Queen Victoria did not have a vote. And the longer the delays, the more militant and violent the protests became.
Meanwhile, the loss of HMS Birkenhead (1852) off the coast of South Africa and RMS Titanic (1912) off the coast of Newfoundland exemplified British chivalry, with the orders of “Women and children first!” My students are still vexed by this. One woman, who was not, said: ”Well, if you insist!” Similarly, military chivalry—the code of honour from the French chevalier, (a knight on horseback)—died at the Somme.
Now chivalry is reversing. I was leaving the university the other day, and the exit has two doors. I opened mine, and saw a young women entering and opening her door simultaneously. So I gestured to her to enter and stepped back. She grinned and stepped back further and gestured me to come through first. I realised that I was not going to win this, and as I passed her and said “Thank you,” she smiled and said “It’s a whole new world!” Mary would have been amused.
The extension of the franchise, gradually, around most of the world, and the election of female legislators did not dramatically alter the gender status quo, i.e. did not immediately bring economic equality. The franchise was extended at various dates from 1893 in New Zealand and 1907 in Norway, to between 1917 and 1928 in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, and only 1971 in Switzerland, but not in Saudi Arabia.
World War 2 also impacted gender relations, especially in the U.K. where women took over most of the jobs that had previously been restricted to men: farming, munitions, everything but underground mining; including serving in the armed forces, though usually not in combat, except for Special Forces. After the war many returned to civilian life and the “baby boom” followed, which in turn was soon followed by the “baby bust.”
The next turning-point was the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948: “All human beings are born free and equal,” and it listed a series of rights. Clearly this was a statement of moral principle, not of empirical fact; but as a statement of principle it was immensely important and influential, universalizing the Enlightenment.
In the following year Simone de Beauvoir published “The Second Sex” (1953 in English), a brilliant and exhaustive treatise on the biology, psychology, economics and politics of being a woman. Her take was both similar and different to Wollstonecraft, as we shall see. But the first problem is biology. She started with her body (contrast Descartes who started with his mind). The female body is problematic. “It is during her periods that she feels her body most painfully as an obscure, alien thing…Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself” (29). “It has been said that women “have infirmity in the abdomen”; and it is true that they have within them a hostile element…” (30). After menopause: “Woman is now delivered from the servitude imposed by her female nature” (31). She insists that biology is not destiny, and does not bother to refute Freud. The point is that the female body is obscure, alien, hostile, and women are in servitude to it.
The other problem is men. She is blunt: “Now, woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two have never shared the world in equality” (xxvi). Again: “The female is the victim of the species” (20). Again: “All oppression creates a state of war” (717).The oppression consists largely in persuading women of the bliss of the home and motherhood and beauty; and de Beauvoir says that many women are complicit in this. But in the end she is optimistic that “The free woman is just being born” (715) and she indicates how this freedom can be facilitated.
Such a one was Rosa Parks, who refused to sit in the back of the bus in 1953, and her action initiated the Civil Rights movement in the States. She was fighting for the rights of Blacks in the U.S., not women; as were so many others including King, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, as well as Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. Race was being re-thought and re-defined and, if race, then also gender and sexual orientation. The struggle was successful in terms of legislation and the election of President Obama in 2008 and 2012 (and almost Hillary Clinton), but not in terms of the elimination of racism, as the killing of so many black men by the police in 2015, the high incarceration rates of blacks, the massive income differentials between Blacks and whites, and the mass murders allegedly committed by Dylann Roof (June 2015) indicated.
The re-definitions of gender and race and sexual orientation continue apace.
To be continued...
