C OMPOSICIÓN DE ÁCIDOS GRASOS EN PLASMA

This chapter shows how our understanding of household activities in other cultures has been shaped by archaeological projections of an élite Victorian gender ideology as the universal gender system from early prehistory through Classical cultures to the nine-teenth century. Archaeologists have created distorted constructions of past cultures by selecting and interpreting evidence to validate an assumed gender dichotomy. Feminist theory and research has questioned assumed stereotypes, revealing previously overlooked evidence of multiple diverse gender ideologies and practices from prehistory to the present. This chapter demonstrates that the élite Victorian gender ideology was not even universal in the nineteenth century.

The first section of this chapter discusses how feminist theoretical critiques have revealed androcentric biases produced by projecting Victorian-derived modern gender stereotypes as universal. Partial understandings of the past have been created by dichotomizing cultural activities into dominant-public-male versus subordinate-domestic-female roles. Feminist theorizing has revealed that belief in the reality of dualistic gender ideology is supported at deeper levels by language and an epist-emological belief in the universality of structuralist binary thinking.¹The next section discusses how nineteenth-century classicists legitimated their élite Victorian gender ideology by claiming it originated in Classical Greece. Feminist research is presented showing that a gender dichotomy was not universally espoused or practiced in Classical Greece. […]

Feminist critiques of male-biased frameworks

Starting in the 1970s third-wave feminist analyses have revealed how a self-reinforcing structure of Victorian-derived androcentrism deeply permeates all aspects of western culture, including anthropology, archaeology, scientific epistemology, language, and values. Multiple levels of male bias support and reinforce each other in a comprehensive 32 Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood

12 See H. G. West, “The House is a Compass”, Landscape I, no. 2, 1951, 24–7. This topic has been studied by J. B. Jackson. He suggested this view to me in personal conversation and also during a seminar at the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, Winter 1967; see also his “The Westward Moving House”, Landscape II, no. 3, 1953, 8–21, on how three attitudes toward life in the United States produced three different types of house.

13 John Steinbeck, “Fact and Fancy”, San Francisco Examiner, March 30, 1967.

14 See Richard D. Cramer, “Images of Home”, AIA Journal XLVI, no. 3, 1960, 41, 44; also

“The Builder’s Architect”, Architectural Forum XCV, no. 6, 1951, 118–25, which discusses public house preferences in the tract house field. It is clear that these preferences are symbolic.

15 Cited in Landscape VII, no. 2, 1957–58, 2.

16 Richard D. Cramer, “Images of Home”, AIA Journal XLVI, no. 3 (Sept. 1960), 42.

androcentric system of thought that is represented as objective in ungendered text and discourse. As a result most of us have at some point unconsciously used widely accepted but androcentric paradigms, methodology, models, assumptions or taxono-mies. Androcentrism can be most simply defined as an ideology of sexist prejudice resulting from a male-centered point of view. Androcentrism constructs gender in a universal structural dichotomy between opposed gender stereotypes. In androcentric ideology men are identified as public, cultural, rational, active, powerful, superior and naturally dominant over women, who are devalued as subordinate, domestic, natural, emotional, powerless, passive and inferior. Women and households have been devalued to the point that they have often been excluded entirely from large-scale constructions of the past in apparently objective ungendered text. Androcentric archaeology and anthro-pology are fundamentally political in supporting the oppression of women in the present by creating partial distorted constructions of cultures that represent male dominance and female subordination as universal, natural, and inevitable.²This section discusses feminist critiques of androcentric biases at a number of levels, from supposedly ungendered text and discourse, through constructions of cultures in gender dichotomies, to the under-lying epistemology of structuralism.

The disappearance of women and households in androcentric ungendered discourse

The political standpoint of an individual or group is revealed by the questions that are not asked as much as the questions that are asked. Traditionally most archaeological research has not explicitly considered gender, although it is a foundational cultural construct that structures all social life. Supposedly objective ungendered text, discourse, constructions of cultures and evolution reveal unquestioned sexist assumptions about gender. Prior to feminist archaeology gender was not researched as a cultural construct because it was unproblematically reduced to biologically determined models of sex in which weak domestic women were dependent on strong public men.³According to this ideology, because men are dominant their viewpoints and behavior are of primary importance, while domestic women are subordinate and unimportant. Therefore, supposedly ungendered constructions of other cultures usually represent men’s behaviors and view-points as those of the whole society, often masked as cultural norms.⁴The primacy and dominance of men over women is reinforced at the deepest cultural level by the linguistic convention of always putting men before women. Further, women disappear and are excluded from the past by the linguistic convention of using male nouns and pronouns to represent androcentric text and discourse as ungendered and universal.⁵Women and chil-dren often disappear from the past in ungendered text that purports to represent them but is actually exclusively about men.

The tradition of subsuming women and children within male-biased language extends as well to male-defined categories. For instance, in historical archaeology households usually have been identified only by the male head.⁶This continues the historic western cultural practice in which each man legally controlled and represented “his” household of women and children in the public community of men.⁷Women and children have disap-peared, not only in male-defined households but also in classes defined according to men’s occupations by economists, historians and archaeologists.⁸ At the larger scale cultures are often defined according to male-controlled social, political and economic structures. Households and women disappear as they are subsumed in classes. For The world their household 33

instance, Henretta’s⁹androcentric research on the social structure of colonial Boston only discussed men, their sons, and their occupations, as if households, women and girls didn’t exist. Henretta ignored female-domestic households and families as unimportant to men’s public history. Yet colonial women in households produced significant quanti-ties of goods for public sale, including textiles, butter, eggs and chickens. Further, many houses included rooms where public sales occurred, whether stores, craft shops, or print shops such as Ben Franklin’s in Philadelphia. Often women worked in household stores, in craft shops, and in the industrial system of “putting out” to households the production of goods such as shoes and straw hats. Widows usually became proprietors of household businesses after their husbands died.¹⁰ Androcentric bias in ungendered text and discourse is often apparent from the fact that only men are mentioned, excluding women’s contributions to history.

Henretta exemplifies the fundamental assumption among androcentric historians and anthropologists: what men did was always more important and powerful than what women did. Some early feminist anthropologists analyzed how androcentric anthropologists produced male-biased ethnographies by accepting the viewpoints of male informants as the monolithic truth for a culture.¹¹Men have been viewed by many anthropologists and historians as the only important social agents, the makers of male-defined large-scale political history. This definition of what is important in the past limits research questions to men’s public actions and excludes women and households from the past because they are assumed to be only domestic and therefore irrelevant to history by definition. Thus women and households have disappeared in androcentric constructions of the past as sequences of men’s public events, including wars, conquests, and kings.

In processual archaeology those questions considered most important and accorded the highest status have been male-defined and limited to the identification of un-gendered large-scale public external variables considered to determine small-scale internal socio-cultural variables such as ethnicity, class, and gender.¹²Many large-scale external causal variables are androcentrically assumed to be controlled by men, such as exploration, wars, trade, and governmental or religious cultural contacts. The systems theory model of culture has focused research on large-scale processes in functional perspective, making small-group actions, roles and choices invisible as sources of cultural change.¹³Large-scale public constructions of the past subsume and therefore exclude from consideration the essential contributions of households to economies, social and political systems. Prior to feminist critique and research household archaeology was considered a less important … topic due to its association with women. Households were not often explicitly related to larger scale descriptions of cultural systems. […] The large-scale focus is on men’s public activities, whether hunting, agriculture, production of goods for trade or political leadership. The household is subsumed under these un-gendered but male-represented categories and is seldom mentioned at the large scale.

Projecting the ideology of dichotomies as the universal reality

Large-scale cultural processes, cross-cultural generalizations, theories, methods and questions are considered most important in the search for scientific laws of culture change. At a deeper epistemological level the positivistic paradigm of science used in the “new” archaeology is based on a historically situated gender ideology. In the eigh-teenth century Descartes drew from the gender ideology opposing rational man versus 34 Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood

emotional woman to create the ideology that objectivity is opposed to subjectivity.¹⁴ Yet the subjective elements in the objective scientific method include the selection of research question[s], data, and methods of analysis that together determine research results.¹⁵Claims that the scientific method is absolutely objective have been bolstered by the use of omniscient language that removes the subjective observer, making it diffi-cult to reveal assumptions masked in passive voice statements that “The data show this to be true”.¹⁶However, the interpretation of meanings of data is shaped by theory and method. Androcentric frameworks, assumptions and methods that classify data as either domestic or public can create the finding of a sexual division of labor as the result of circular reasoning.¹⁷

Starting in the 1970s some feminist anthropologists and archaeologists began to critique androcentric biases involved in the explicit construction of gender as a universal structural dichotomy, in which public active men dominated women who were devalued as domestic, passive, and subordinate.¹⁸ This practice of reproducing androcentric models and assumptions by explicitly constructing gender in sexist dichotomies has been called the “add women and stir” approach.¹⁹[…]

The construction of cultures, evolution, and science in simplistic dichotomies is supported at an epistemological level by structuralism, which considers dualistic either/

or thinking to be the universally natural pattern of thought. The widespread acceptance of structuralism has resulted in monolithic constructions of cultures as sets of dichoto-mies,²⁰even in post-processualism, although it was strongly influenced at the theoretical level by feminist critiques of dichotomies and concerns for individual social agency.²¹ Structuralist thinking classifies the diversity of human cultural behavior into either one or the other of only two categories that are constructed as polar opposites. Unfortunately, some early attempts to engender other cultures used a structuralist methodology that resulted in monolithic categorizations of women as domestic and subordinate to domi-nant public men. In Rosaldo and Lamphere’s 1974 edited volume they and other authors such as Ortner uncritically used an over-generalizing cross-cultural methodology to find universal dominance by public men and subordination and devaluation of domestic women.²²This exemplifies how some early feminists reinforced gender stereotypes by uncritically accepting male-biased frameworks, methods, ethnographies and data. The ranking inherent in the creation of dualistic oppositions in binary structuralist thinking results in the high status accorded large-scale male-public constructions of the past and the low status accorded small-scale female-domestic pasts.

Dichotomized constructions of household roles and spaces

Gender dichotomies, structuralist thinking and methods can produce distorted construc-tions of households in a number of ways. First, the dichotomizing of gender into male-public and female-domestic spheres results in the a priori categorization of all household tasks as domestic, although many public tasks and events can occur in house-holds, such as production of goods for public sale, public waged labor (as in taking in laundry and the putting-out system), production of public labor, and public entertain-ments from political receptions to parties, dinners and teas.²³Second, dualistic gender ideology is often simplistically projected as actual practice so that household tasks and roles are unproblematically assigned to women. Even when it is acknowledged that both genders had household roles, they are commonly constructed as structurally opposed in a static normative sexual division of labor. Documented dualistic gender ideology is The world their household 35

uncritically accepted as historic reality and is projected onto archaeological data.²⁴Within the structuralist framework of gender dichotomy household spaces, features and artifacts are assigned fixed mutually exclusive identities as either male or female.²⁵The subjectivity of structuralist constructions of gender and households is usually masked in apparently objective text using the passive voice of omniscient authority to claim that artifacts, features and spaces associated with men were, by definition, public, while those associ-ated with women were domestic. In sum, concepts of gender and the household are not problematized except by feminists.²⁶

In historical archaeology Yentsch²⁷similarly projected this idealistic gender dichotomy onto American colonial households, monolithically categorizing the front parlor, dining room, white ceramics and other tableware as male, public and cultural versus women’s domestic kitchen space … This could have been a useful critique of the categorization of households as solely domestic, but instead the mutual exclusivity of the male-public versus female-domestic dichotomy was just imposed on household material culture. The problem with this framework is that women as well as men displayed their status to “public”

outsiders in the parlor and hosted “public” dinners in the dining room. Household spaces were used for public activities at least as much by women as by men. Women often hosted

“public” teas where they displayed their social status to women and sometimes men from other households. Women’s and men’s public activities in the home often overlapped in the same spaces. In addition, by the nineteenth-century upper- and middle-class homes often included separate men’s parlors and women’s parlors where each gender could publicly display their social status and wealth to people outside the household. Yet in the distorted double standard of dualistic gender ideology men’s parlors are labeled public while women’s parlors are labeled domestic. Finally, men were also not always excluded from household kitchens and pantries, since high status was expressed by having male black servants to serve public meals (e.g. the [male] butler’s pantry).

Inclusive feminist frameworks

Many feminists have thrown off the bonds of structuralist thinking that dichotomizes cultures into mutually exclusive either male-public or female-domestic activities, roles, artifacts, and spaces. The actual complexity and diversity in real gender systems can seldom be accurately represented by simplistic dichotomies. Instead, I have suggested a more open-minded inclusive both/and contextually situated epistemology that more objectively analyzes all the evidence to determine whether it supports a whole range of gender behaviors. I’ve proposed modeling diversity in any dimension as a continuum that includes all the shades of gray between the two ends of the range of variation, whether two supposed opposites or the beginning and end of a historical developmental continuum.²⁸ For instance, the social dimension of degree of gender segregation in household behaviors, spaces or artifacts can each be modeled as a continuum from complete spatial separation of women’s and men’s activities, artifacts or spaces at one end, to complete flexibility in gender roles and multiple uses of artifacts and spaces at the other end. Between these two poles the continuum includes the whole range of variation possible in combining gender-segregated and shared household spaces and artifacts.

Tasks and artifacts that were not gender segregated can overlap in household spaces that also include gender-segregated tasks and artifacts. […]

Feminists have critiqued gender stereotypes basically in two ways: evidence has been found that women as well as men were important powerful cultural agents both (1) in the 36 Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood

domestic sphere and (2) in the public sphere, even in male-dominated cultures. Most feminists, while not denying evidence of male domination and oppression of women in many situations, have also sought and found evidence of women’s many sources of social and cultural power. Feminists have argued that women’s public positions cannot be dismissed as exceptions, but instead invalidate the identification of women as only domestic. However, fewer feminists have challenged the solely male-public definition of importance by showing that women’s domestic roles were important by themselves and not just for what they contributed to public history.²⁹

Differentiating gender ideologies from practices

The universality of gender stereotypes can be further critiqued by differentiating gender ideology from reality. Gender ideals constructed in stereotypes and dichotomies do not represent the full diversity, complexity and flexibility in actually practiced gender roles and behaviors.³⁰The linguistic root of the confusion of ideals with practice is the defini-tion of a role as “the characteristic and expected social behavior of an individual” which represents ideals and normative practice as monolithic synonyms, ignoring variation in individual behavior that is the basis for processes of culture change. Since the culturally constructed categories of women and men both included important domestic as well as public actors, the idealistic gender dichotomy did not exist as a monolithic reality.³¹

The gender dichotomy between public men versus domestic women can also be critiqued as only one gender ideology, albeit a dominant one, among many gender ideologies. Many people today have other gender ideologies that support women in working outside the home and support male contributions to housework. Not only are there many alternative ideologies today, there were also a number of alternative ideolo-gies in the past. Feminists have shown that the meaning of the female-domestic versus male-public dichotomy changed through time and was only one among a variety of gender ideologies.

The legitimation of élite Victorian ideology by classical archaeology

This section discusses feminist critiques of the use of Classical scholarship to materially legitimate modern and Victorian gender stereotypes as universal. In 1980 Rosaldo critiqued the universalization of modern gender stereotypes by revealing their roots in the élite Victorian gender ideology of separate spheres for dominant public men versus subordinate domestic women. Subsequently feminist historians have shown that this dominant gender ideology was only one of many nineteenth-century gender ideologies…

The Victorian separate spheres gender ideology was dominant because it was espoused by most people in the upper and middle classes.³²Most nineteenth-century scholars were

The Victorian separate spheres gender ideology was dominant because it was espoused by most people in the upper and middle classes.³²Most nineteenth-century scholars were