A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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political worldview that depends upon a certain familial model will replicate those differing effects for individuals according to gender. Thus, a social order based on patriarchy, in which the law of the father over his wife and children prevails, underpins a political ordering in which authority rests with men, producing laws and relations of authority in which women and underage males suffer disabilities. Attempts to ameliorate such political and legal disabilities necessarily have to challenge the legitimating theories or cosmologies that inform them. This situation helps to explain why eighteenth‐century French revolutionaries turned to an idiom of brotherhood or fraternity to justify and narrate the toppling of their absolute monarch; and why feminists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, looking to implement a social and political order that would recognize and value women as full citizens, sought out historical or anthropological examples of matriarchy through which they could demonstrate that a previous “natural” order of beneficent and egalitarian women‐controlled and women‐dominated societies had been overthrown by authoritarian, inegalitarian patriarchal orders. In both instances, they sought to establish their own mythologies of law and politics that legitimated their contemporary political aims.
Ancient Patriarchy
Patriarchy has an ancient pedigree, arising, it appears, at about the same time that ownership of property by individual households became predominant in the societies of the Near and Middle East around 3000 BCE and later in India, Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean. The heads of households, or patriarchs (the word deriving from the Latin for father, pater), in the earliest societies for which we have written records, may have sought to maintain their control over property by controlling the actions of the members of their households, especially the women, ensuring that their legitimate offspring, and not some spurious claimant, inherited their wealth. The earliest forms of political units derived from family and kin groups in which fatherhood actually and/or figuratively served as the model for the exercise of power in larger clan, tribal, village, or state structures. The making of law and the exercise of power have thus always been gendered, and as far as the historical record can tell us, patriarchal in nature, though the actual playing out of day‐to‐day political operations might vary considerably, as we shall see below. In the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and in other, more modern states like medieval China or post‐revolutionary France seeking to impose or maintain patriarchal regimes, rulers implemented laws that regulated women’s marital, sexual, and reproductive practices, making them subjects of their husbands and fathers as well as of their kings. In sixth‐century BCE Greece, for example, Solon the “lawgiver” and so‐called second founder of Athens, reorganized the matrimonial system in the process of creating a new political community, the famous Athenian “democracy.” In the aftermath of civil war in which poor householders had arrayed themselves against rich ones, he instituted a political system in which landless as well as landowning men become citizens. He did so by equalizing the marriage portions, the dowries, that brides might bring to their marriages, making women a kind of placating circulating commodity. Because rich fathers could not endow their daughters with greater dowries than poor ones, rich and poor households could exchange women in an effort to ameliorate tensions based on wealth, reduce the risk of civil war, and establish a peaceful polity (Leduc, 1992).
In the developing states of the ancient world, claims to rule and to make law often rested upon references to male divinity: Egyptian pharaohs, Mesopotamian princes, and Chinese, Japanese, or Mayan emperors recited narratives that linked their families to a single masculine deity who was credited with having created life, thus providing sacred legitimation for what was no more than the bald exercise of power by one family over all others. Within the dynasties constituted as divine, female relatives might and did stand in as rulers when male heirs failed to materialize in order to preserve the dynastic line, their claim to rule deriving from their familial relationship to the deceased king or missing successor, not to any right they enjoyed themselves as women. In Egypt, for example, queens like Nefertiti and Hatshepsut ruled in place of male pharaohs. Hatshepsut, significantly, appears bearded in all pictorial or plastic depictions of her, the beard being the emblem of Egyptian royalty, a reminder that rulership was a masculine prerogative. Wu Zhao, a Tang empress who usurped the authority of the male line and ruled in her own right from 690 to 705 CE as the only female emperor in Chinese history, had to construct a kind of cosmology that legitimated her unprecedented and shocking action. She created a Chinese character for the concept of human being that foregrounded the process of birth as flowing from one woman, a function usually presented as the result of the masculine, dominant, creative yin drawing forth power from the feminine, properly inferior, receptive yang. She also fashioned a character for her first name that showed the sun and the moon moving over heaven, a depiction that suggested not simply that Wu was the Daughter of Heaven, as emperors were Sons of Heaven, but might in fact be heaven itself (Tung, 2000).
Biological women might rule as pharaohs or emperors, but the gender of rule was masculine, a trait that did not always correspond to a male person. Under the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), court ministers sometimes represented their relationship to the emperor through the hierarchical masculine and feminine principles of yin and yang, in which the male creative force of the emperor activates the receptive female power of his imperial servants. Courtiers further articulated their servile status vis‐à‐vis the emperor by styling themselves minister‐concubines, a clear reference to the masculinity of the ruler and the femininity of those he ruled. One of the most effective monarchs of England, indeed, all of Europe, Elizabeth I, recognized the long‐standing gender principle of rule when she reassured her subjects in the late sixteenth‐century, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” She referred to herself as a “Prince” and claimed for herself the qualities of masculinity that legitimated her royal power. In more modern times, English and American reformers from the eighteenth century onward based their claims for political participation on their “manliness,” a set of conditions that not every male person possessed, and without which they should be excluded from political life. Aristocrats and working‐class men, for instance, in the eyes of bourgeois English “radicals” and American patriots, lacked the requisite manliness to govern either themselves or their respective nations; the former because they seemed in thrall to women and to “effeminate” French fashions, the latter because they lacked the financial means that gave them independence. In both cases, their masculinity, though not their maleness, was in question (Colley, 1992; Clark, 1997; Kann, 1998).
Even states that eschewed monarchical rule for that of citizens, like republican Rome or “democratic” Athens, drew upon familial patriarchal models to organize political life. Romans understood their society to be a family and arranged their political and legal offices according to the principles of patria potestas, fatherly authority, so that magistrates, always male, behaved like paterfamilias and ruled in consultation with a council of other paterfamilias; and citizens, always male, recognized themselves as unequal to one another, just as they would be within families depending upon their age or birth order and whether their father still lived. Women enjoyed no rights to citizenship and could not hold office, just as they lacked any legal authority over their children within families, even after their husbands had died (Lacey, 1986; Thomas, 1992). Women, Romans believed, did not possess the moral or mental capacity that would enable them to enjoy legal capacity, to look after the interests of anyone but themselves.
Women had no rights to citizenship in Athens, either, a situation explained and justified by Aristotle in terms that reverberated across the centuries right down to our own time. Aristotle’s political theory, the stories he told to legitimate the legal and political regime of his time, explicitly constructed the realm of politics as masculine (Brown, 1988). Politics, according to Aristotle, provided men – and it was only men and men of independent wealth, at that – the sole means by which they could achieve their full human potential; the polis, he insisted, was the “higher thing,” and the place where man, “by nature,” was “intended to live.” The “self‐sufficiency” demonstrated by men who headed households based on land, or oikos, enabled them to subordinate their private interests to the public good, to demonstrate the virtue required to act politically.
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