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What historical factors tend to limit the opportunities available to women, and what eras are notable for expanding these opportunities?
Carol Symes: One of the things I find most challenging myself, as a student of history, and challenging to communicate to my students is why something like the history of women's roles or status in a given society doesn't always track along with other progressive trends in the history of western civilization. We can't draw a straight line demonstrating that women's power is always increasing in some way. Women in ancient Mesopotamia four thousand years ago, for example, could divorce their husbands, own property, and operate businesses. In other words, they had equalities and opportunities that women didn't have until the later 19th century in a lot of modern civilizations. If we look at Ancient Greece, we see the dawn of democracy and the birth of the equality of men with certain property rights, but I can't think of a society that I would less like to live in as a woman than Ancient Athens, because of the ways that women were sequestered and kept separate from any sort of meaningful public activities. And so I find this very difficult to explain to students.
Joshua Cole: I think one way to look at it may be to explore the ways that notions of gender difference, in particular notions of gender difference that define a specific social role for women, are often very important for a given society's conception of order. A moment of progressive change is a moment in which order is being challenged. And it is precisely at those moments that leaders look for ways to anchor and stabilize and comfort people about those changes.
Just to give some classic examples from the French Revolution, the question of women's participation in the new definition of citizenship and of the nation was posed right from the start. There were women, a society of revolutionary republican women who wanted the right to bear arms, to participate in the revolution, who wanted to be citizens and to vote. But the revolutionaries themselves, who had just claimed a universal citizenship, pulled back. There's a famous moment where a member of the Parisian Municipal Council, when faced with this group of women making demands, looked at them in anger and said, "Do I have breasts to feed my children?" And the argument made clear was that politics was for men and that women's role was clear.
Now, you don't want to overdraw this because there were actual, real benefits for women in the French Revolution. Marriage was redefined as a civil contract and women were given the right to divorce. Women now had a legal personality and could sue for paternity and inheritance. But those rights didn't last and ultimately that moment was lost; French women didn't get the right to vote until 1944.
CS: This is so helpful to think about because it helps to explain why women in traditional societies and in tribal societies tend to have much more gender equality, much higher status, and much more opportunity. Precisely, if we use your theory, which is very compelling, because there isn't a lot of rapid change. In times when we are not in crisis and perceiving ourselves to be in a revolutionary situation, the opportunities available to women are very open.
For example, in Scandinavia during the middle ages, it's been argued that there wasn't really even a two-gender model. There was essentially a one-sex model of gender and that ultimately it was about powerlessness versus power. You could basically end up anywhere on that sliding scale, whether you were a man or a woman. Men tended to have certain advantages due to basic physicality or being warriors but women could also be basically gendered as masculine if they behaved in powerful ways. In fact, this one-gender model tends to favor women because women have nowhere to go but up on this scale, whereas men have the capacity to sink. Old age, for example, is gendered in medieval society as essentially an effeminate state. On of the reasons why warrior cultures valorize the death of beautiful young men is because being old is such a terrifying thing - it makes you female.
JC: Maybe by way of conclusion we should point out that it is in particular moments of progressive change, where certain groups are claiming the right to restructure the political order, that gender and, specifically, the obligations that women face, are reinforced. At other moments of crisis that are not necessarily progressive in their origins, like warfare, women in some ways find opportunity to expand the ways in which they participate in society. Again, the classic example in modern European history is the First World War, where women enter the workforce, middle class women become familiar with male bodies in ways that were unavailable to them before the war, and after the war there is a debate about the liberated woman who is smoking, getting all sorts of new haircuts, changing fashions, etc. And this period is seen as one in which women make remarkable progress. It came out of crisis, but it's not a crisis that we would define as a moment of progress in any way.