Historical Accounts Lack Women
Written mostly by men, they introduced women into the standard parade of wars, revolutions, monarchs and parliaments only at moments like their ascension to inherited thrones or religious authority. In the 19th century, most male historians compounded the problem by making women's history sound as though women had only then begun making headway.
Women's history has more to it than that. Women have always questioned their subordination and often found ways around it.
Further, some institutions important in the lives of women that seem timeless, like monogamous marriage, are in fact rooted in the last thousand years; some ostensibly modern movements reach far back in time. Indeed, many turning points on the thousand-year time line of women's history are little known or little understood. The following brief account of that history describes the rest of the story.
Who Says Men Are Closer to God?
Are women and men more alike than they are different? And where they are different, are women inferior or superior? Such questions have been debated since biblical times, and especially in the years after 1000.
Some medieval theologians -- male, that is -- taught that woman was not created in God's image. But that could not be true, abbesses and nuns objected, for they had felt Christ's "imprint of resemblance" on them. Hildegard of Bingen, a nun in the Rhineland in the 12th century, insisted that women's "weakness" did not refer to spiritual capacities. A woman could mortify the flesh and draw close to God as well as any man.
Such women accepted the general view that the universe was organized into realms of higher and lower: angels over humans, humans over animals, nobles over commoners, soul over body. But when it came to men over women, women balked.
Christine de Pizan, poet and moralist at the French court, said in her "Book of the City of Ladies" of 1405 that God had created men and women with equal potential. If men had stronger bodies, women had freer and sharper minds, if they were just educated. Against the old medical idea that women had a hungry womb -- that is, a sexual appetite less controllable than men's -- Christine countered that women were by nature virtuous and modest.
The hottest debates about male-female relations in medieval Europe turned on celibacy. In the 10th and 11th centuries, many priests were married, and their wives had access to the sacred.
In a turning point in women's history, the 11th-century reforms of Pope Gregory VII did away with clerical marriage in the Roman Church. These reforms inaugurated 10 centuries in which sexually active males -- and all women -- were forbidden to perform important liturgical functions.
A spiritual demotion it may have been, but it also confirmed an ideal of the celibate life, leaving nuns like Hildegard of Bingen scope for high ascetic devotions.
The church put all its force behind insisting on monogamous, permanent marriage. An important step was declaring the full doctrine of marriage as a religious sacrament in 1215.
Getting the doctrine accepted by lay people was another matter. Among the landed classes, men lived with concubines instead of, or along with, wives and cast their women aside at will. Only when the great families decided that the church's rule would help keep feudal property together did they go along.
Then in the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation did away with marriage as a religious sacrament and allowed for divorce. Yet it legitimated marriage all the more by allowing clergymen to wed and doing away with celibate nunneries and monasteries.
In Europe, prostitution was made illegal in both Catholic and Protestant cities. It was still practiced, of course, as was concubinage, especially between European settlers in America and their female slaves. But monogamous marriage remained the triumphant cultural ideal.
According to religious teaching and secular law, the wife was "subject" to her husband, and her property was under his control. He was to rule her justly and not be cruel. Moderate beating was permissible, though some Protestant pastors preached against using it at all, and Ashkenazic rabbis disagreed about whether it was grounds for divorce.
Divorce was not an easy out: a single woman with children could scarcely survive. Marriage was a frame that most women accepted, hoping for affectionate unions. What we today would call lesbian couples lived as married partners in the 17th and 18th centuries, one cross-dressing as a man.
Protofeminists chronicled abuses in marriage, but did not reject the notion of "subjection" outright until the 18th century. A 17th-century male feminist said that wives should defer to their husbands not because the men were truly superior, but to keep the peace.
Nine Babies, Three Adults
More worrisome to women than subjection was procreation. For most of the millennium, the pattern was many births, many deaths. Given the poor food and poor health, it was not always easy to get and stay pregnant. Many infants, even among the wealthy, died at birth.
In 17th-century France, a long-lived peasant mother might bring nine children to term; half might survive till age 5, and she could rejoice if two or three reached adulthood. Under these circumstances, the local midwife was consulted much more often for medicines to conceive than for those to abort. Only in the late 17th century, when a better food supply in Western Europe allowed more children to survive, did couples start to limit the number of their children.
The model of man over woman had some effect in every sphere, forcing women to find means to cope or resist. Female wage earners were paid less than men; the women improvised new ways to stitch, smuggle, peddle or beg. Male surgeons began to deliver babies in the wealthy families in the 17th century; midwives defended their female turf in the village, claiming their dexterous hands would do better than the surgeon's forceps.
Does 'Man' Include Woman?
Since the days of Hildegard of Bingen, women had tried for a larger role in religion. The witchcraft prosecutions that swept Europe and then New England in the 15th through 17th centuries threatened that initiative: among the many thousands executed, women outnumbered men everywhere, at least 4 to 1. To rulers and churchmen seeking control, the sorceress with her pact with the devil was the symbol of secret revolt. Out of jealousy, infertile village women even accused other women.
Meanwhile, during the Counter Reformation, energetic women founded teaching orders that brought instruction to many girls other than nuns; contemplative orders were reformed by leaders like Teresa of Avila. Her autobiography, a profound account of a woman's interior and mystical life, was read as eagerly as Augustine's "Confessions."
Jewish women followed their own leader in the women's gallery of the synagogue; one Yiddish prayer visualized women studying Torah in Paradise. Protestant women expanded their Bible reading, but it was especially radical sects like the Quakers who challenged the limits on women. Margaret Fell wrote her 1666 tract, "Women's Speaking Justified," against Paul's admonition that women should keep silent in church. Women "led by the Spirit of God" could preach. "Christ in the Male and Female is one."
For centuries, women had been queens, some of whom, like Elizabeth I of England, sustained authority by combining "masculine" and "feminine" styles of rulership. But no woman served in the law courts or chancelleries of late medieval and early modern monarchies.
If a woman wanted to fight in the royal army, she had to do so disguised as a man. Joan of Arc, openly leading soldiers into battle to save France, was an exception in her day -- and she ended up burned at the stake.
Most political action of women was taken informally through conversations and coquetry at court and as sponsors of the salons that arose in many cities in the 17th century. More open influence came about through increased literacy and printing. By the 18th century, women of diverse views were contributing to the abundant pamphlet literature on public affairs.
The English historian Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay published tracts defending authors' copyright, frequently elected parliaments and the rights of the American colonies. As for the illiterate women of the lower classes in England, France and the Netherlands, their only lever of protest was joining in street riots.
All these forms of political action came together in the French Revolution, and some new ones were added as women made public political speeches and joined the army openly. The new philosophy of rational natural rights placed all men on an equal footing in regard to citizenship and the law.
But did "men" include women?
The French playwright Olympe de Gouges insisted that it did in her "Declaration of the Rights of Woman," in 1791, as did Mary Wollstonecraft the following year in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Others did not want women to have so much of a share in political life.
Men of the revolution said that women should stay home and rear their sons to be good citizens. Even evangelical women encouraged their sisters to seek reform through religion and leave matters of state to men.
It would be the new American republic where the issues of women's status would play out most vigorously over the next century.
'The Slavery of Marriage'
When enlightenment ideas came to America, the debate about women's rights found a new context, since the most powerful form of social hierarchy there was not gender but race.
And the American Constitution, by dispensing with hereditary rank and monarchical institutions, immediately granted women a new role: teaching republican values to young Americans. The new republic opened many avenues to women: social, economic, political, educational and religious. Evangelical Christianity made the home, not the church, the site of religious instruction.
As women increasingly assumed this responsibility, they also began teaching outside the home and stressed the need for women's schools. In the first half of the 19th century, Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary and Catharine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary became thriving institutions, followed by Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.
By midcentury, it was clear that tax revenues should be spent to educate girls as well as boys, at least in New York and New England. By the 1870's, many public universities admitted women, and elite women's colleges like Smith and Wellesley were established. In 1894, feminist donors to Johns Hopkins Medical School used their gifts to compel the admission of women.
Still, far into the first half of the 20th century, many professional schools continued to bar women, and when they were admitted, discrimination drove them to lower-status professional fields. Female doctors were steered toward public health, lawyers to social work, language scholars to library cataloguing, scientists to high-school teaching.
Within the white middle-class family, education and religious responsibility for children improved women's status through the 19th century. By the 1830's, magazines analyzing life from a woman's point of view began to flourish in North America.
In Europe, female writers of philosophical insight, from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf in the early 20th century and on up to Simone de Beauvoir, steadily clarified women's issues. But mostly, wives were still considered their husbands' subordinates.
American feminists wishing to convey their critique of marriage often did so through the lens of slavery, the most volatile public issue of the mid- and late 19th century.
"The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own," wrote Angelina Grimk, a Southern abolitionist. "I have found the Anti-Slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land.. . . Now if rights are founded in the nature of our moral being, then the mere circumstance of sex does not give to man higher rights and responsibilities than to woman."
Though they didn't participate in elections, American women believed that they had access to the political system through the right to petition Congress. But as the conflict over abolition escalated, it became clear that women's petitions were not being heard. The right to vote was moved to the top of the list.
Female reformers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anna Howard Shaw combined spellbinding oratory with noisy street politics. Stanton was well known, for instance, for her lecture The Slavery of Marriage.o The argument for suffrage then became more expedient: white women's votes would balance those of newly enfranchised black males and immigrants. The majority that ratified the 19th Amendment in 1920 was built on these racist grounds.
New Experts in Mothering: Men
Meanwhile, biological science was replacing theology as the language for discussing the differences between women and men. The popularity of Darwinian thought and the discovery of the endocrine system anchored the discussion firmly in science. Nor were such discussions purely theoretical, for by the 1920's women and men began to inhabit the same workplace. Even so, the young women taking clerical jobs in corporate offices were considered little threat, for it was thought that their hormones would drive them to maternity and service rather than wealth and power.
The new economic forces at work in America radically altered the role of women as workers, mothers and wives. Industrialization had created jobs for women in factories and textile mills in the mid-1800's.
At the same time, the fruits of industrialization -- mass-produced clothing and foods -- gave middle-class mothers a new role: manager of household consumption. But many female responsibilities were subject to male guidance at the turn of the century. In the new field of child studies, male experts like G. Stanley Hall even tried to make mothering a science. Isolation made mothers willing recipients of such expertise.
The middle class had begun its flight from the city in the mid-19th century, and by its close servants were being replaced by new labor-saving household equipment. So suburban women were alone with their children.
Whereas in the 18th century the family was a partnership for spouses and children, the 20th-century family became based on intimacy. Greater life expectancy meant that marriages lasted longer, well past a woman's childbearing years.
As infant mortality declined, the family became more child-centered, and private insurance and pensions, as well as governmental assistance, made older parents less dependent on working children. The emotional tone of marriages also changed with the rise of the corporation and the profession.
Increasingly, the vocations of middle-class men excluded their families. This prompted a movement for more accessible divorce, along with longer marriages, increased mobility and the growing ideal of emotional and sexual fulfillment between spouses.
Not-So-Equal Rights
Sigmund Freud and other pioneers of psychology profoundly affected the status of women by arguing that an acceptance of gender difference was a prerequisite for mental health.
From the 1920's through the 1970's, women with political, scientific or intellectual interests were stigmatized as neurotic, while men involved in the more feminineo realms like the arts were considered less than fully male.
The family dynamic laid out by Freud, based on latent erotic attachments, encouraged sons to overcome their mother complexes by becoming strong and independent. Daughters, meanwhile, were encouraged to replace their love for their fathers by finding a male romantic partner rather than by developing an independent self.
In time, however, feminist interpretations of difference developed. In the 1970's, Nancy Chodorow reworked Freud's Oedipal system to point out that the strongest erotic gratification a female infant receives comes from a same-sex relationship with her mother, raising questions about the inevitability of female dependence on males.
In the political sphere, meanwhile, female voting didn't change party power structures, and women began developing parallel institutions like the National Woman's Party, in 1916. Its 1923 drive for an equal rights amendment failed, just as its successor failed in the 1970's, partly because Americans, including women, remained resistant to the idea of a woman as President. Once again, feminists created parallel structures to support female candidates, like Emily's List (Early Money Is Like Yeast).
Where once the rare women elected to public office were typically the widows of male officeholders, the election of women became unremarkable, though even now they comprise only a fraction of Congress and high state officials. In the 1960's, feminists began to focus on changing the composition of high-status professions.
Once access to graduate education was won, feminist scholars pushed to change patterns of research and teaching so that women were no longer regarded as a failed model of the male norm, but as a norm themselves.
In so doing, they helped ignite the culture wars of the 1980's and 90's. And by the end of the 90's, women constituted 60 percent of college graduates. Even so, on leaving school they still face the continuing reality of the glass ceiling. Inflation, rising economic expectations and women's quest for professional equality after World War II produced the reinvention of the nanny -- a movement promptly challenged by the argument that only birth mothers could care effectively for their children.
A successful dual-track life as mother and professional, therefore, required heroic energy or a flouting of this conventional wisdom. Two careers within one family often meant a commuter marriage, which may have seemed new but which echoed the old aristocratic pattern: spouses parted by attendance at court and by journeys to distant estates or remote colonies. But now there is a big difference: a woman's property and income do not necessarily belong to her husband.
While feminist interpretations of gender difference gained favor in the 1970's, and while lesbian feminists argued in the 1980's for difference with a difference, claiming the superiority of same-sex relationships, a strong backlash arose in conservative quarters.
This was marked not only by a denigration of feminism but also by an elevation of macho versions of male power and fresh assertions of difference. Such arguments were once again located in theology by Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists.
Meanwhile, new debates about gender difference emerged in brain research. While female and male synapses might fire the same way, doubters insisted that there must surely be a difference in the circuitry. Questions about differences in wiring are a new form of debate that goes back to the medieval question about whether women have souls.
The New Terrain
So what has happened to women over the past thousand years? Western women and their children have made astonishing gains in health and life expectancy, though most of their non-Western sisters have not yet shared those benefits. The scope of women's work has expanded vastly, much of it paying well enough so that women with children can survive. Women in the West have secured access to education beyond the wildest dreams of their medieval counterparts. Women's athletic prowess has captured public imagination, and a female general is no longer a novelty.
But what of the mixed outcomes? Feminist spirituality today provides a powerful leaven within some Christian, Jewish and Islamic communities, but others still forbid female participation, and the loss of the institutional structure once provided by female religious orders has shrunk the territory controlled by women. The reduced number of women's colleges has had a similar effect.
Women's reproductive lives, though, are now managed by technologies subject to male control. The ability to detect the sex of a fetus can result in higher abortion rates for female infants, whereas in medieval society the girl babies at least had a chance to be born. Sexual freedoms have enlarged the sphere of pleasure, but with them have come unresolved problems about sexual behavior.
What will be the new terrain for addressing the issues of likeness and difference? What new strategies will women develop to dismantle exclusively male hierarchies? The cognitive sciences will most likely inherit the role of theology in arguing about differences between male and female. Still, the global rise of religious fundamentalism will counter women's efforts to secure equal footing. And among women worldwide there will remain stark differences about how to achieve a better life.
But argument -- and laughter -- about the relationship between women and men will never end. Our physical bodies are cultural texts that are constantly revised, and no single formulation of the relationship between the sexes can last.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
