Gender is an organising principle for social life in all known traditional societies. Work tasks, rights and duties are distributed according to gender. Social anthropologists have shown that although there is an extraordinary diversity in what different cultures and different times have
considered as belonging to men and belonging to women, the cultural systems always give authority and value to the roles and activities of men. This does not mean that women cannot hold power within specific areas (most frequently the household and child rearing, but also certain work tasks). However, in all these cultures, there is always some area of activity that is seen as exclusively or predominantly male, and therefore overwhelmingly and morally
important. Thus, men are the locus of cultural value and the gender order is openly
hierarchical.54 This was also the case in premodern Europe. Men held power and authority as the heads of households, and had different work tasks, rights and duties to women. Women were not seen as weak and passive, however, but rather as dangerously competent, sexually active and immoral creatures (cf. the burning of witches) who needed to be kept in place by male authority. Men and women were judged according to the same scale of values, but men’s abilities (spiritual and intellectual values) came out on top and women’s (earthbound, body knowledge, sexuality) on the bottom.55
What is unique concerning gender in the modern societies that first developed in Europe from the 1600s and 1700s is the rise of two completely new ideas, which, at first, seem to be rather self-contradictory. The first is the idea of freedom and equal civil rights for all human beings, whatever their personal situation and their cultural, political and religious affiliations. The other is the idea that men and women are fundamentally different and form a harmonious gender complementarity. How could two so distinctly different ideas arise at the same time? The notion of human rights is connected to the irreducible value of every individual, and to ideas of rationality, justice, democracy, and free and equal participation that arose in the age of the Enlightenment. However, these rights were first restricted not only to men, but to those men who owned a certain amount of property. Men of the working classes obtained the right to vote only at the end of the 1800s and women even later. Thus, the new universal human subject was in fact a white, bourgeois man. But the principal legitimacy for others to claim freedom and equal civil rights was laid. Since the 1700s, European women have been able to raise the question of equal rights as a political issue, and not as one confined to the church and theological arguments. Thus, feminism is a true child of modern society, and the first feminists raised their voices precisely during this period in which the idea of human rights was born.56 However, a puzzling fact is that it is precisely when the notion of universal human rights and freedom and the idea of gender equality were conceived for the first time in history that a much more polarised gender system came into being. Femaleness and maleness were now not only a matter of external arrangements such as work tasks, duties and obligations, but understood as fundamental, innate, characteristics. In the new medical science of this period it was argued that women’s biology and their destiny as mothers prevented the development of their full humanity. Thus, men had the potential to become fully modern individuals, while women were restricted by their biological sex. They were now defined only through motherhood, and lost their active sexuality.
Symbolic and structural gender interacted here, as they always do: when work was separated from the household as part of the process of the new industrialism, bourgeois men and women increasingly came to live in separate spheres. The tasks of the bourgeois man were connected to public life – work, politics, science; while the life of the bourgeois woman was tied to the family, to love and care for others. The public sphere was constructed as a male domain and was populated by men, while women and children disappeared from it.57 While being called a
54 Rosaldo, M. Z. and L. Lamphere (1974). Woman, Culture, and Society. Standford, Standford University Press. p.20-21. 55 Wiestad, E. (2001). Gender Models in Europe in the 18th Century. Gender and Religion/Genre et Religion. European Studies. K. E. Børresen, S. Sabibbo and E. Specht. Roma, Carocci.
56 For instance, the French woman Olympe de Gouges who wrote a ‘Declaration of rights for women’ in 1791, because the ‘Declaration of human rights’ in the new French constitution was for men only. (She was decapitated for this in 1793.) In 1792 came the English author Mary Woolstonecraft’s famous ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’.
57 ‘Public man and private woman’ was the predominant model first and foremost in the bourgeoisie. In other social classes the public/private spheres had less significance: the poor women had to take up paid work, and the poor men did not play any role in the political public sphere. In peasant families the premodern gender order of male authority and gender- dependent work tasks prevailed almost into our times. There are also many examples of how bourgeois women managed to gain access to the public sphere, for instance, as authors or through charity work. The main point here, however, is to understand how this era of European history created a fundamental divide between public and private that symbolically (and to a wide extent also structurally) constituted a gender dualism.
‘public man’ was an honour for a 19th century bourgeois man, the notion of a ‘public woman’ meant a prostitute. A woman belonged to the home, and her contributions should not be desecrated by instrumental considerations, but be a pure expression of love. Thus, the split between public vs. private space gave rise to splits that still govern our thinking today: rationality vs. emotionality, principles vs. empathy, money vs. love, freedom vs. care.
Compared to the premodern period, femininity was now viewed more positively: in contrast to the image of woman as a sexually greedy and immoral creature, the 19th century redefined woman as ‘the angel of the house’, asexual, pure, innocent, fragile and blissfully ignorant. A woman was understood more in the image of a child than of an adult, a fragile and helpless being in need of a man’s protection. Competence in relationships, love, care and beauty became distinctly female areas; while independence, rationality, activity, sexuality, and aggressive competition were connected to masculinity. Thus, the single scale of human values of premodern times was replaced by gender-specific ones. Positive male and female qualities became distinctly different and incompatible.58
The change from a stable feudal economy to a liberal market economy demanded autonomous people who were willing to pursue their economic life and happiness in competition with others. To prepare men for this merciless competition and to keep its aggressive form within limits, the state became the political regulator, and women the emotional regulator. While motherhood and care for children had always been part of a woman’s work, her productive work functions were dismissed in the bourgeois family and her caring functions extended to men.59 Thus, women came to represent ‘the haven in a heartless world’ for the new, independent, rational, competing, male individual. Or, to put it another way: woman’s private role became a presupposition for man’s public role. In Rousseau’s ‘Emile’ from 1762, we see the idea
expressed (for the first time) that boys and girls should receive distinctly different educations in order to internalise the demands they would meet as men and women. While Emile is brought up to become the new autonomous subject, independent of others’ opinions and in control of his own life; his imagined spouse-to-be, Sophie, should be trained in interpreting Emile’s wishes and opinions, fulfilling them and making them her own. She must learn to read subtle signals to understand his physical and emotional needs better than himself. This gives her a special kind of power, which is indirect, seductive or motherly:
Within this framework the woman may use and cultivate talents for craftiness, coquetry, intuition, and a set of submissive female virtues that may neutralize male aggressiveness. Rousseau both tolerates and recommends woman’s use of such informal power tactics (...) She should cultivate talents for trickery and manipulation together with feminine traits of patience, docility, dependence and flexibility.60
At the same time, however, this kind of female power was deemed illegitimate in the new public sphere in which only steady and rational arguments should count. Thus, female power was a problematic category and, anyway, restricted to the private sphere. Her relationship to sexuality became ambiguous. The Victorian woman was desexualised but, at the same time, completely defined by her sexuality. A single woman was scorned and literally understood as sexless in these times.61 A woman was a passive prey, not a sexual subject. As her whole existence was defined by her relationship to others, as a mother or a wife, her only private commodity to sell on the market was her sexuality, whether it was her virginity or as a prostitute. Her worth and virtue were connected more to her sexual purity and morality than to her competence and achievements. Thus, the pure and innocent maid and the sex object were two sides of the same coin.
This gender system infused femininity with an ambivalence that can be traced all the way through to the present culture. On the one hand, women, care and emotionality represent a lost childhood paradise for the modern man; on the other hand, they also represent a threat to the modern project through their passivity, dependency and illegitimate form of power. On the one hand, women are idealised and sentimentalised as pure and caring figures, (the mother, the sister, the Virgin Mary); on the other, they are feared or scorned as weak and incompetent
58 Wiestad, E. (2001). Gender Models in Europe in the 18th Century. Gender and Religion/Genre et Religion. European Studies. K. E. Børresen, S. Sabibbo and E. Specht. Roma, Carocci.
59 Ibid. 60 Ibid.:313.
61Hellesund, T. (2001). Lesbisk, skeiv eller bare kjedelig? Den norske peppermø 1870-1940. Norsk homoforskning. T. Eikvam. Oslo.
creatures. It is not only as receivers of physical and emotional care, but also through the projection of their own fears and weaknesses onto women that the modern European man can maintain the image of himself as an autonomous, strong and rational human being. From this perspective, the gender polarisation is not contradictory to the ideas of the free human being, but is the hidden premise for them.
As we shall see in Chapter 9, this gender order was an important part of the cultural context of the Scout Movement when it began in the early 20th century. It is also the historical context for some of the present day dilemmas of gender equality and gender complementarity: we have learned to think that one is either an autonomous, rational, active, and aggressive human being, or a dependent, passive, emotional and moral woman. Our European heritage has made us believe that women must choose between becoming a man, or remaining imprisoned and defined by their biological sex.