gender

It is important to understand gender as different from sexuality. Sexuality concerns physical and biological differences that distinguish males from females. Cultures construct differences in gender. These social constructions attach themselves to behaviors, expectations, roles, representations, and sometimes to values and beliefs that are specific to either men or women. Gendered differences—those that society associates with men and women—have no necessary biological component. Instead of biology, socially agreed upon and constructed conduct, and the meanings cultures assign to that conduct, constitute the area of gendered difference.

Labels of ““essentialism”” can attach themselves to arguments that gender and sex have an inherent relationship. However, a cultural essentialist, who is interested in issues of gender, may argue that a historical relationship exists between gender, a culture's experience, and its public identity and representation that is so pervasive and so intimate that it seems nearly inherent.

The study of gender in African American literature considers the way in which the texts of black writers have distinctive and unique expressions in men and women writers. Critical and theoretical studies may explore the consequences of gendered identity upon the structure, theme, or style of African American texts. The historical development of these textual markers of gender across the tradition of the literature may also be a focus. Cultural essentialism has some place in such studies because African American literature has a racial identity. Discussions of gender and racial identity provoke vigorous argument because socially constructed differences are a matter of debate and discrimination and because essentialism of any design holds a pejorative context among many theorists.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the insistent surge of the civil rights movement and Black Power movement into the political fabric of life in the United States made the issue of race and its political and social stratifications the signal cultural issue for these decades. Dramatic political activity within the women's movement during the same era eventually matched the intensity of the critical attention to race. Contention surrounds the attention garnered by each agenda. Many identify white women as the women's movement's targeted beneficiaries. In an often competitive play for power and visibility, white women arguably shadowed and dominated the movement for racial equity and authority. Notably, contemporary reflections on the civil rights and Black Power movements launch equally critical challenges to the masculinist authority of these organizations.

Among the most significant and prolific in establishing the cultural text of gendered studies has been bell hooks in her penetrating analyses of culture and gender. In Ain’t I a Woman (1981) hooks established the parameters of the debate asserting that conversations about black people “tend to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.” Hooks returned to this forceful declaration of the frames of the eventual debate in Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984), a conversation about radical social and political change that obligated a confrontation with intersecting dynamics of gender constructions and cultural identity. Her work vigorously engages the complicated spheres of power within the domains of race, class, and feminist thought and in many ways is a disciplinary standard and touchstone for contemporary cultural studies.

Given the national political conversations and confrontations of the latter half of the twentieth century, where the rights of those on the margin—women and people of color—have determined a national discourse, it would have been difficult to emerge from this era without the coalescence of these dual issues of race and gender. Consequently, the activity of the women's rights, civil rights, and Black Power movements anticipate the eventual turn to a critical focus on black women.

As social and political scientists looked critically at the activity of the women's rights and Black Power movements, literary critics and theorists turned their attention to the intersection of race and gender in the literary tradition of the United States. Prior to this historical moment, the study of the African American tradition largely concerned the history and development of its cultural presence and identity within the American literary tradition. In other words, ““difference””—as a critical category—focused on the difference of race. Initially, literature's critical studies focused on determining the ways that race and gender revealed significant differences in the writing of African American women.

Even though critical studies did not directly address gender construction in African American literatures prior to the twentieth century, it would be a mistake to assume that these cultural representations were not an expressed concern in the individual works of creative writers and scholars. Frederick Douglass, for example, certainly made it clear that he understood the differences of gender in his narrative and in ““The Heroic Slave”” (1853). Contemporary scholars have noted the rigidity in men's and women's identities in his autobiography and the troubled associations these rigid constructions enured. Similarly, women writers such as Harriet E. Wilson, Julia A. J. Foote, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper made the difficulties of women's gender a focus in their works and underscored how it often constrained their struggles for equity and respect. In other words, although an intertextual collaboration of gender issues was neither the means nor the focus of scholarly critique prior to the mid-twentieth century, individual writers certainly made it clear that gender identities were part and parcel of the struggle for equity in African American cultures.

Issues of ““manhood”” and the challenges that U.S. culture presented to black males are evident in the literature of William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson. Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Claude Brown made men's and boy's lives a thematic focus in their works prior to the theorizing of gender constructions that characterizes the turn of the century and the end of the millennium. Similarly, dilemmas of ““womanhood”” clearly complicate the fiction and prose by Jarena Lee, Harriet A. Jacobs, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Sojourner Truth, as well as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, and Gwendolyn Brooks. All of these writers’ works, and a host of others, create the body of literatures that is the focus of contemporary critical studies of gender.

Although, as noted, these first critical studies focused on black feminism, the end of the millennium finds a parallel interest in representations of a black masculinist presence in the arts, literature, and popular cultures of the United States emerging as a sustained and coherent critical project.

Since the 1970s and through the early 1990s, the popularity of women's writing and issues of feminist theory have been at the fore of gendered studies in literature. However, because feminist politics did not initially demonstrate concern for issues of race and culture, it was necessary for literary study to address this absence as it focused on black women writers.

In the preface to In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) Alice Walker argues for a ““feminist of color””—a ““womanist”” for whom culture and gender are both essential. Although this was likely not her intent, Walker's term ““womanist”” underscores the tension between the feminist agendas of a woman's movement that was initially inattentive to cultural difference and to black women's issues. It has encountered contestation and some debate. In Talking Back (1989), bell hooks argues that “womanism” does not engage the dynamics of radical and transformative political struggle and change. Others argue that its separatist agenda underscores potentially divisive problematics of race in gender studies. In this latter sense, womanism has a clearly historical evolution as it calls for attention to the discrete cultural issues of the tradition that do not only implicate gendered differences. In some ways, it may even be considered as a response to Barbara Smith's 1977 argument in what is widely held to be the generative essay for critical attention to women writers in the African American literary tradition.

In that 1977 essay, ““Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”,” Barbara Smith writes that the “politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers” (emphasis added). Smith's essay provoked great controversy in the emergent studies of black feminism. Her arguments concerning a black woman's language and cultural experience that were evidence of “an identifiable literary tradition” seemed problematically essentialist to many readers. What is a black woman's language? How does language indicate a gender and a culture? Do all black women writers ““inherently”” (i.e., biologically) use this language? These difficult questions raised within the essay's thesis were not, however, its most debatable aspect. More bothersome to some was Smith's insistence on bringing a black female lesbian voice into the discourse of black feminism. Smith's thesis concerned both gender and sex, and for each of these differences the issue of culture was critical. At this point in the developing field of black feminist literary studies, the complications and controversies inherent to the intersecting relationships of culture, sexuality, and gender were riveted to its disciplinary identity. Of these issues, culture and gender have received the most sustained academic study.

A pivotal anthology for the development of and attention to black feminist criticism preceded Smith's essay. Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman (1970) gathered prose and poetry of black women writers of the era and forced a focused consideration of their presence in American arts and letters. Bambara's work lay the ground for the 1982 publication edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith—All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. This text would fix a disciplinary home-place for black women's studies in the academy.

Both the archival projects of critics and theorists’ figurative constructions of a poetics of women's writing find distinctions that are apparent and consistent in the voice, structure, and language of African American women writers’ texts. Issues of language have a discrete configuration in black women writers according to the work of several theorists, including Mae Henderson's “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Women Writer's Literary Tradition” (in Changing Our Own Words, ed. Cheryl Wall, 1989), Houston A.Baker, Jr.'s Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (1991), and Karla Holloway's Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Writing (1992). Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987) reconstructs the cultural history “of the forms in which black women intellectuals made political [and] literary interventions” in their social domains. Roseann Bell, Mari Evans, Gloria Wade-Gayles, Barbara Christian, Joanne Braxton, and Andree McLauglin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cheryl Wall explore generational continuities of thesis, character, and language as well as complex intersections of these issues in the literature of nineteenth-and twentieth-century women writers in rich and provocative critical essays. Finally, the 1988 publication of The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers—a project of massive archival documentation and recovery—places back into print heretofore lost volumes of African American women writers. The Schomburg Library collection stands as testament to the scholarly interest in African American women's writing and to the significant and perceptive initiative of Bambara's The Black Woman.

As in the developmental history of black feminism, the intersection of race and gender in U.S. sociopolitical discourse is also the likely impetus for the late-twentieth-century focus on black male writers. A critically significant moment in this encounter was the 1994 New York City exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art—Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. The Whitney exhibit honed in upon this discourse as it indicated, through its collective and eclectic sweep, the newly pervasive subjectivity of the black male. Black Male, the exhibit catalog, brings together what seem to be disparate aesthetic commentaries regarding black male representations—from visual art, film, music, literature, and popular culture. The collagelike structure of both the exhibit and the catalog make it apparent that the ““invention”” of the black man, in public cultures and in private literary/artistic cultures, is a force that dramatically patterns the history and progress of America's racial and sexual stereotype of black masculinity.

To some degree, the sustained interest in black women's writing has been a provocative agent in the recently focused attention on black male writers. In a gendered critique that represented vigorously negative assessments of their work, some black male writers and critics launched bitterly aimed diatribes against black women writers and the attention, celebrity, and publishing opportunities lavishly available to them. Ishmael Reed, Charles R. Johnson, David Bradley, and Stanley Crouch have been among the most vocal. These writers and critics present what they identify as the selective politics of corporate publishing decisions. Their contentions? First, that black feminist politics have made the contemporary works of black male writers, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, less visible and therefore less important than the work of black women writers; and second, that black women writers’ celebrity is constructed by a parallel denigration of black males within the characterizations of their texts. Much of this debate began with the publication of Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)—a text in which her black male characters were read, by an American public, as being representative of an abusive black masculine ethos.

However, of more significance than the factional and fracturing disputes about publishing and celebrity are the issues that emerge once expressions of black male cultures come under critical and theoretical scrutiny. Critical interest in individual male writers’ characterizations, themes, and issues has not been absent from literary studies of the tradition. Although Edward Margolies's 1968 Native Sons critically studies sixteen twentieth-century ““Negro American Authors”,” all of whom are male, his is not a gendered study. The male collective of Margolies's anthology of essays expresses selective bias rather than critical methodology. There is a similar absence of intertextual gendered study in Charles Johnson's 1988 Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970. Following an impressive and widely ranging discussion on the philosophy of being and its expressive impact on race, fiction, and novelistic form, Being and Race has two sections: ““The Men”” and ““The Women”.” However, despite the promise of these categorical dividers, Johnson's project does not develop an intertextual conversation concerning thematic exchange or stylistic patterns that are consistent in black men's literature nor does it concern the collective effects of gendered issues in black male writing.

A gendered critique of the literary and intellectual history of African American writing would address lingering issues and questions about the male writers of various eras in the tradition and the male-identified gender associations within those literary periods. Hazel Carby's study accomplishes such a perspective for women novelists. However, critical studies have yet to address, in a sustained manner, questions that concern male writers and their works. In what ways does gender identify the earliest writing of enslaved Africans in America? Why is protest literature male identified? What differences and critical perspectives do gendered studies of the Black Arts Movement reveal? Does the writing from the era known as Black Aesthetics contradict the sexism of the Black Power movement or does it reify those stereotypes?

In the 1990s, interest in the study of gendered intertextualities that focus exclusively on representations of males seems to bear some relationship to a contemporary swell in autobiographical writings by contemporary African American men. This literature, creatively expressed in a variety of personal narrative forms (autobiography, biography, memoir, and reflection), forces a sustained attention to the shared experiences of black male bodies in the United States and to the visceral qualities and exchangeable expressions of those experiences in writers from the beginnings of the tradition to the present. Within this frame, early writers such as Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass, turn-of-the-century authors such as Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson, the protest literature of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the public courage and challenge recorded in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) as well as the quietly courageous, yet fiercely intimate passion of John Edgar Wideman' Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (1994) benefit from the discrete attention of a gendered critique. Considering the rich history of critical and theoretical work about gender and women's writing in the tradition, it is probable that the developing scholarly attention to the intersections of culture and masculinity in African American literature will follow a similar trajectory as it defines and theorizes along the lines of gender.

Representing Black Men (eds. Marcellus Blount and George Cunningham, 1995) indicates this developing trajectory. It argues that the social sciences have defined African American men as ““absences”” and therefore chooses to explore “constructions of African American masculinities as presences” in theories of the culture and its literature. Certainly the 1995 publication of Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America (eds. Herb Boyd and Robert Allen), a hefty anthology of black men's writing, echoes back a quarter of a century and recalls Bambara's 1970 publication, The Black Woman. The publication of Brotherman augurs an era when the intellectual history of the literature of African American writers, fully attentive to the cultural critique of gendered representations, comes full circle.

Bibliography

• Roseann P. Bell et al., eds., Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, 1979.
• Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1980.
• Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers, 1950–1980: The Development of a Tradition, 1984.
• Gloria Wade-Gayles, No Crystal Stair, 1984.
• Joann Braxton and Andree McLaughlin, eds., Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, 1989.
• Cheryl Wall, ed., Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, 1989.
• Henry L. Gates, Jr., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist, 1990.
• France Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892, 1993.
• Thelma Golden, ed., Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, 1994

Karla F C Holloway

1. Grammar.
   1. A grammatical category used in the classification of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and, in some languages, verbs that may be arbitrary or based on characteristics such as sex or animacy and that determines agreement with or selection of modifiers, referents, or grammatical forms.
   2. One category of such a set.
   3. The classification of a word or grammatical form in such a category.
   4. The distinguishing form or forms used.
2. Sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture.
3. 1. The condition of being female or male; sex.
   2. Females or males considered as a group: expressions used by one gender.

[Middle English gendre, from Old French, kind, gender, from Latin genus, gener-.]

USAGE NOTE   Traditionally, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter," but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex-based categories, as in phrases such as gender gap and the politics of gender. This usage is supported by the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories. According to this rule, one would say The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient, but In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined. This distinction is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels.

For more information on gender, visit Britannica.com.

Apart from its narrow application in languages that assign masculine/feminine/neuter status to linguistic terms, gender is a category used to differentiate women and men, boys and girls, male and female, masculinity and femininity. Increased attention to gender as a category of analysis, particularly in the social and behavioural sciences, has coincided with the rise of academic feminism. The category itself has undergone many revisions over time, but is typically employed to distinguish sex from gender in the following way: there are clear biological differences (sex differences) between men and women, and those biological differences serve as the basis for the social construction of different roles for men and women (gender differences), though these may vary from one culture to the next. Although biological difference does not necessitate the roles assigned to men and women, it enables differential social relations which are then often (mis) understood to be ‘naturally’ determined by biology. Recently, this formulation of the relation between sex and gender has been challenged as endorsing ‘gender essentialism’ (see below).

Gender as sex

That men and women have different natures is an ancient idea, but in the nineteenth century it gained the epistemological authority of medicine and science as the idea became an object of formal investigation. Victorian science placed particular emphasis on what it identified as the weaker constitution of women, and fluctuated between assigning to them either through-going sexual passivity (attributed to bourgeois women) or rampant promiscuity (attributed to lower-class women and women of colour). However it was characterized in medical or biological terms, and women's nature was said to be decidedly inferior to that of men. The emergence of the science of psychology seemed to confirm women's inferiority by locating female pathology in a psychosomatic nexus. Freud is an exemplar of the view that female ‘hysteria’, characterized by a complex interweaving of physical and mental disorders, results from somatizing unfulfilled sexual fantasies. While Freud was certainly ready to admit that both men and women suffer from mental disorders, his overall approach was that the ‘anatomical differences between the sexes’ determine gender-typed psychopathologies. The rigid adherence to the biological model enforced the belief that homosexuality was pathological, as well. Sexual desire for the ‘opposite’ sex was thought to be a sine qua non of normal gender identification. The ‘mannish woman’ or the ‘effeminate man’ could only be understood as forms of deviance.

In the early twentieth century, Margaret Mead was among the first explicitly to forge a distinction between sex understood as a biological category, and sex or gender roles understood as a social category. Mead's ethnographic study, Sex and Temperament in Three Societies (1935), argued that, ‘many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of head-dress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.’ This prying apart of sex and gender forms the basis for feminist efforts to displace biologically based assumptions about women's inferiority and/or the ‘naturalness’ of the maternal role. For feminism, gender becomes a critical category by means of which women's degraded status can be understood and transcended.

Feminism and gender

Early (1970s) feminist sociology and anthropology sought to identify how those with female bodies are solicited into particular gender roles that are then seen as stereotypical. An explosion of research proposed both that (i) gender stereotyping occurs at all levels of social and cultural organization; and that (ii) the analytical tools by means of which different disciplines organize knowledge are themselves permeated by gender bias. Sherry Ortner (1972), for example, argued that because women's reproductive functions are associated with nature, and because nature is subordinated to culture (which is associated with men), it follows that women are assigned a status subordinate to that of men. Carol Gilligan (1982) argued that cognitive-developmental categories employed by the dominant research on moral development assumed the superiority of categorical over relational thinking. Since men are more likely to reason categorically, and women rationally, it follows that women's moral reasoning will be deemed deficient in relation to that of men. This would explain why moral authority is granted to men in both the public and the private spheres, as both the Judge and the Father. Gilligan attempted to develop an analytical framework that re-evaluated the development of women's moral reasoning in light of the particular contexts of women's experience. Thus, she juxtaposed women's ‘ethic of care’ to men's ‘ethic of justice’, and argued that the former is just as structurally complex as the latter.

Feminists made analogous claims concerning the gendered nature of the subject matters and the methodologies of other fields. Evelyn Fox Keller (1978) argued that the very terms of scientific investigation — objectivity, disinterestedness, rationality — are themselves highly invested in a masculinist regime of domination and control over nature (including women). According to Keller, the relatively small number of women scientists reinforces the genderization of science by excluding women's ways of knowing from its arena. Feminist literary theorists scrutinized the literary canon for its exclusion of women writers, and for its masculine preoccupations (the pursuit of power, women, and whales). By analyzing representations of women in literature, and by unveiling the work of women writers, feminist scholarship revealed both the gendered nature of literature and our gendered ways of reading it. These approaches to the study of gender, sometimes called ‘gender standpoint theory’, assume that women's ‘identity’ can be defined and demarcated, and that the world is constituted in unique ways by women's ‘subjectivity’.

Gender essentialism and beyond

Apart from a general conservative backlash against the disruption to business as usual, feminist critics themselves offered counterexamples to the presuppositions that seem to underlie gender standpoint theory, that is, that women are universally subordinated to men, that men and women are always differentially associated with culture and nature respectively, that nature and culture are universally distinct categories, that male and female are universally distinct categories, and finally, that the category of woman is a stable category in and of itself. Cross-cultural evidence, for example, has been marshalled to show that there are widespread differences in the ways that reproductive labour is apportioned between men and women. Other critics have demonstrated that race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity must be interposed with gender in order to account for the cultural and historical variability of social relations and subjectivities. Given the effects of racism on the distribution of material and symbolic resources, the category of woman cannot be applied univocally to white women and to women of colour. Similarly, ‘queer theory’ has challenged the assumption that gender provides a singular axis of sexual orientation. Along these lines, Monique Wittig (1991) argues that, understood in relation to the categories of sexual difference, lesbians are not women. How many genders might there then be?

Thus, revisionist accounts of gender attempt to displace ‘gender essentialism’, the view that women's experience and embodiment can be distilled into a unified form of subjectivity. Some theorists replace gender essentialism with the idea that subjectivity is not fixed by intersecting social categories (gender, race, etc.) but is ‘positional’, ‘provisional’, and ‘performative’. According to this view, the initial feminist impulse to distinguish sex and gender must be resisted because, though it attempts to break the ideological tie between the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’, it in fact reproduces the categories of man and woman at the level of the sexed body. Judith Butler (1990) argues that sex construed as a biological category is as heavily socially constructed as gender, and that biological sex itself is a gendered category. According to Butler, while feminist analysis successfully identified the social practices that produce gender as a category of identification, they have failed to see that sex itself is produced as a category that precedes gender. Butler's postmodern conception of gender draws on the assumption that nothing exists prior to systems of representation, thus it is wrong to think that gender identity is inscribed on a pre-existing sexed body. According to this view, the meanings attached to the female body as an object of scientific scrutiny are determined not just by the practices of science, but in conjunction with other cultural and economic formations, for example, global capitalism, the mass media, institutional racism, or homophobia. Gender, as such, is best seen as a heuristic category, a means of investigating the variability and contingency of our understanding of sexual diference.

— Meredith W. Michaels

Bibliography

• Fausto-Sterling, A. (1985). Myths of gender: biological theories about men and women. Basic Books, New York.
• Rosaldo, M. Z. (1980). The use and abuse of anthropology: reflections on feminism and cross-cultural understanding. Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(3)

See also feminism; sex determination; sexual orientation; sexuality.

A social classification of people, attributes, and activities into categories such as male, female, and neuter. Gender is frequently based on anatomical differences between men and women, but does not necessarily coincide with them. Gender is socially and culturally determined; it is not biologically determined.

There is a strong tendency in Western cultures to indulge in gender role stereotyping, labelling certain activities and forms of behaviour as being appropriate to one sex but not the other. This stereotyping is still rife in sport and exercise; some people still regard activities such as rugby and boxing as being unladylike, while others think that activities such as dance and synchronized swimming are unmanly. Gender stereotyping has resulted in a psychological conflict among some males taking part in activities ascribed as feminine, and among females taking part in activities ascribed as masculine. However, the boundaries of cultural acceptance are continually being extended. It is now more commonplace to find female boxers, rugby players, and body-builders, and some professional soccer clubs, such as Birmingham, are employing female managers.

This entry consists of two articles, each of which deals with the issue of gender and the military from a different perspective. The first, Male Identity and the Military, examines the concept of men as warriors and protectors. The second, Female Identity and the Military, emphasizes the relationship that women have had to war and the military. For more detailed related discussions, see Combat Effectiveness, Gays and Lesbians in the Military, Gender and War, Military Ideals, Sex and the Military, Sexual Harassment, Women in the Military.

Male Identity and the Military
Female Identity and the Military

As early as 31 March 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, who was attending the Second Continental Congress, urging him to “remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors” (Butterfield etal., 1975, p. 21). Adams's admonitions to her husband had little impact on either the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution. It was not until 1920 that the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, offering women that most basic element of citizenship—suffrage. And, today, despite long years of a concerted drive by women's rights groups to have an amendment guaranteeing equal rights ratified, the Constitution continues to afford women less protection from discrimination than men.

The Supreme Court often is looked upon as ahead of its time, or at least public opinion, in the expansion of rights to minorities. This has not been the case with the rights of women. Instead, as a general rule, the Court has lagged behind societal mores and realities when it has dealt with issues of concern to women.

From the Colonial Period to the Civil War Amendments

During the colonial period, suffrage was largely determined by local custom and usage. While there are few records of women voting, it is clear that some did, especially large landowners. Once individual states began to draft written constitutions, however, women's suffrage evaporated. Women also were excluded by the gradual shift from gender‐neutral property‐owning requirements to near universal male suffrage. This emphasis on male suffrage also fostered the codification of many of the practices Abigail Adams denounced as contributing to second‐class citizenship for women.

Recognition of their legally inferior status, however, did not come to women overnight. In 1848, in what is widely hailed as the first major step toward female equality under the Constitution, a women's rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Eight years earlier, in 1840, two women active in the American abolitionist movement had traveled to London for the annual meeting of the World Anti‐Slavery Society. After the long and arduous journey, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were denied seating on the floor of the convention solely because they were women. Forced to take places in the balcony, they could not help but begin to see parallels between their status and that of the slaves they were trying to free (see Slavery). They resolved to call a meeting to discuss women's second‐class status, but the antislavery movement and issues in their own lives kept them from sending out a call to Seneca Falls until 1848.

At Seneca Falls, and at a later meeting in Rochester, New York, a series of resolutions and a Declaration of Sentiments were drafted calling for expanded rights for women in all walks of life. Both documents reflected dissatisfaction with contemporary moral codes, divorce and criminal laws, and the limited opportunities for women to obtain an education, participate in the church, and to enter careers in medicine, law, and politics. None of the participants at Seneca Falls or subsequent conventions for women's rights, however, saw the Constitution as a source of potential rights for women. Women's rights activists did, however, eventually see the need to amend the Constitution to achieve the right to vote.

While women continued to press for changes in state laws to ameliorate their inferior legal status, they also continued to be active in the abolitionist movement. During the Civil War, most women's rights activists concentrated on the war effort and abolition. Many who had been present at Seneca Falls or active in subsequent efforts for women's rights joined the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), an association dedicated to abolition and woman suffrage. AERA members saw the issues of slavery and women's rights as inextricably intertwined, believing that woman suffrage would occur when the franchise was extended to newly freed slaves.

Even the AERA, however, soon abandoned the cause of woman suffrage with its support of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. When a majority of its members agreed “Now is the Negro's hour,” key women's rights activists including Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were outraged. They were particularly incensed by the text of the proposed amendment, which introduced the word male into the Constitution for the first time. Although Article II of the Constitution does refer to the president as “he,” the use of the word male to limit suffrage was infuriating to many women. Not only did Stanton and Anthony argue that women should not be left out of any attempt to secure fuller rights for freed slaves, but they were concerned that the text of the proposed amendment would necessitate the passage of an additional amendment to enfranchise women. How right they were. Soon after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution to enfranchise African‐American males previously ineligible to vote. Feverish efforts to have the word sex added to the amendment's list of race, color, or previous condition of servitude as improper limits on voting were unsuccessful. Women once again were told that the rights of African‐American men must come first.

Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, and AERA's support of it, led Anthony and Stanton to found the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869. Its relatively radical demands for the reform of family laws and standards of dress, as well as its support of a well‐known supporter of free love, Victoria Woodhull, led many to deride its more conservative demand for suffrage via a national constitutional amendment.

Litigating for Suffrage

The National Woman Suffrage Association's advocacy of controversial reforms led to a severe image problem for both the association and its goals. In 1869, to lend credibility to its cause as well as to short‐circuit the possibility of a long battle for a women's suffrage amendment, Francis Minor, an attorney and the husband of a prominent NWSA member, set forth his belief that women, as citizens, were entitled to vote under the existing provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. Minor saw NWSA's possible resort to the courts as a means by which to gain favorable publicity for the organization. Victoria Woodhull's presentation to Congress in 1871, urging it to pass enabling legislation to give women the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, provided the impetus for renewed efforts.

Minor, along with Susan B. Anthony, quickly seized the enthusiasm that Woodhull's suggestion created. Minor urged that test cases be brought to determine if the courts would obviate the need for additional legislative action. A number of legal scholars and judges had publicly agreed with Minor's arguments. Moreover, in rejecting Woodhull's request for enabling legislation, the House of Representatives noted that if a right to vote was vested by the Constitution, that right could be established in the courts without further legislation. More important, the newly appointed chief justice, Salmon P. Chase, had suggested that women test the parameters of the Constitution to determine if they were already enfranchised by its provisions.

Despite Chase's encouragement, prior references to women by the Supreme Court had generally accepted a limited role for them. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), for example, Chief Justice Taney noted, “Women and minors, who form a part of the political family, cannot vote …” (p. 422). Ignoring this discouraging language, NWSA initiated several test cases hoping to have at least one heard by the Supreme Court. Somewhat fittingly, the only one to reach the Supreme Court was Minor v. Happersett (1875), which involved both Minors as co‐plaintiffs; married women then had no legal right to sue in their own names.

Unfortunately for NWSA, before Minor was appealed to the Supreme Court, the justices heard another case challenging gender discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment. Bradwell v. Illinois (1873) involved a challenge to the Illinois State Supreme Court's refusal to admit Myra Bradwell to the practice of law because she was a woman. Bradwell's lawyer based her claim on the Fourteenth Amendment's clause concerning privileges and immunities. Because Bradwell's lawyer was cognizant of the suffrage test cases, he rejected the notion that women were enfranchised under the same provisions. He carefully differentiated the practice of a chosen profession from the right to vote, putting the Court on notice that not even all women were in agreement over the scope and reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite the care he took to disassociate his client from NWSA's tactics, the court ruled 8 to 1 against Bradwell's petition.

The majority opinion in Bradwell—the first pronouncement from the Supreme Court on the issue of gender—was based on two grounds. First, because Bradwell was a citizen of Illinois, the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV, section 2 of the Constitution was held inapplicable to her claim and to apply only to matters involving U.S. citizenship. Second, since admission to the bar of a state was not one of privileges and immunities of U.S. citizenship, the Fourteenth Amendment did not secure that right.2

Far more damaging to women's rights, however, was a concurrence written by Justice Joseph P. Bradley, which is often referred to as the promulgation of the “Divine Law of the Creator.” Writing for himself and two other justices, Bradley observed “a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman” and went on to insist that the “natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. … The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator” (p. 141).

Two years later, in Minor v. Happersett, the Court again ruled against the claim of women's rights. The Court rejected the argument that the judiciary was empowered to read into the Fourteenth Amendment the right of suffrage as a natural privilege and immunity of citizenship. Writing for a unanimous Court, the newly appointed Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite argued that the states were not inhibited by the Constitution from committing “that important trust to men alone” (p. 178). Nevertheless, the Court stressed that women were “persons” and might even be “citizens” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.

All of the gender discrimination cases heard by the Supreme Court during this era involved construction of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, and not the Due Process or Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), argued and decided shortly after Bradwell, the Supreme Court meticulously examined the Fourteenth Amendment. In addition to limiting the constitutional significance of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, the Court concluded that the Equal Protection Clause “is so clearly a provision to that race [the Negro] that a strong case would be necessary for its application to any other” (p. 81). Although the Fourteenth Amendment would be revived as a potential tool for women's rights in the early twentieth century, women had yet to win a favorable decision against sex discrimination from the Supreme Court. While women were gaining greater rights within the family through the passage of state‐level married women's property acts, and were beginning to gain entry into institutions of higher education, the Court stuck rigidly to its interpretation that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was intended primarily to protect African‐Americans (i.e., African‐American males) from discrimination, and it held fast to traditional notions concerning women's proper role in society.

Litigating to Protect Women

Although the Slaughterhouse Cases did not provide a useful precedent for women seeking to practice law or to vote, the Court's opinion planted the seeds for judicial adoption of a very broad state police power to enact laws to protect the public health, welfare, safety, and morals. This view was accepted in several subsequent cases. In Mugler v. Kansas (1887), however, in sustaining a law prohibiting the sale of intoxicating beverages, the Court built on the Slaughterhouse dissents of Justice Bradley and Stephen Field, announcing that it was ready to examine the substantive reasonableness of state legislation. According to Justice John Marshall Harlan, when state laws involving “the public morals, the public health, or the public safety” were at issue, the Court would “look to the substance of things” so as not to be “misled by mere pretenses” (p. 661). Ten years later, in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), the Court, for the first time, invalidated a state statue on substantive due process grounds. And, in Lochner v. New York (1905), the Court similarly invalidated a law regulating the work hours of bakers.

Until then, the Court rarely looked to the substance of legislation in addressing its validity. The Court's earlier reading of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (or the Fifth Amendment when federal legislation was involved) only guaranteed that legislation be passed in a fair manner, even though it might have an arbitrary or discriminatory impact (see Due Process, Procedural). According to the Court in Lochner, however, state laws would fail unless the provisions at issue were deemed reasonable under “common knowledge.” Thus, the Court refused to accept New York's claim that a ten‐hour maximum‐hour law for bakers was reasonable to ensure the health of bakers. Instead, the Court found that it unreasonably interfered with the employers' and employees' freedom of contract protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and found no “common knowledge” to justify such actions by New York (see Due Process, Substantive).

The importance of common knowledge cannot be understated in chronicling the Court's treatment of gender. Often, “common knowledge” has been a substitute for the personal views of individual justices. As Bradley's “Divine Law of the Creator” opinion made quite clear, that view could easily lead to restrictions on the rights of women.

In the early 1900s, concern about the health, welfare, and morals of women led activists, particularly those closely allied with the growing woman suffrage movement, to press for state laws to upgrade the status of working women (see Police Power). Large numbers of women had begun to enter the labor force out of necessity. Most were confined to low‐paying jobs in substandard conditions, a circumstance highlighted by the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, in which many young female workers lost their lives. Even before that time, however, efforts had begun to improve the working conditions of women and children. And, whether out of civic concern, moral outrage, or a sense of noblesse oblige, beginning in the 1890s, resolutions were adopted annually at suffrage conventions calling for improved conditions for women workers.

The organization most responsible for change, and for the Court's again addressing issues of gender, was the National Consumers' League (NCL). Through the hard work of its national staff and numerous affiliates, the NCL secured maximum hour or other restrictions on night work for women in eighteen states. Its leaders, therefore, immediately recognized how much they had at stake when the Supreme Court decided to review Muller v. Oregon (1908), a case challenging the constitutionality of an Oregon law that prohibited the employment of women for more than ten hours a day. (Muller, the owner of a small laundry, had been found guilty of violating the statute). When Muller was accepted for review and oral argument, the NCL went to work immediately. Its general secretary quickly asked Louis D. Brandeis, the brother‐in‐law of one of its most active members and already a famous progressive lawyer, to take the case. Brandeis did so under one condition—that he have sole control of the litigation, a condition to which Oregon gladly acceded, thus allowing the NCL to represent it in Court.

Numerous state court decisions involving protective legislation for women, as well as the Supreme Court's recent decision in Lochner, made it clear to Brandeis that a victory could be forthcoming only by presenting information or “common knowledge” that could persuade the Court that the dangers to women working more than ten hours a day made them more deserving of state protection than the bakers in Lochner, and by proving that there was something different about women that justified an exception to the freedom of contract doctrine enunciated in Lochner. Brandeis and the NCL would not challenge the Supreme Court's right, under substantive due process, to make that judgment.

At Brandeis's request, NCL researchers compiled information about the possible detrimental effects of long hours of work on women's health and morals, as well as on the health and welfare of their children, including unborn children. Brandeis stressed women's differences from men and the reasonableness of the state's legislation. In fact, his brief had but three pages of strictly legal argument and 110 pages of sociological data culled largely from European studies of the negative affects of long hours of work on women's health and reproductive capabilities. The information presented by Brandeis was not all that much different (except in quantity) from that presented on behalf of New York in Lochner, yet, the Court was persuaded by the contents of what has come to be called the “Brandeis brief.”

In holding that the Oregon law was permissible, the Court unanimously concluded “[t]hat woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence” (p. 241). Such a condition meant the state had an interest in protecting women's health through appropriate legislation. Muller's impact was immediate. State courts began to hold other forms of protective legislation for women constitutional, whether or not they involved the kind of ten‐hour maximums at issue in Muller. Thus, eight‐hour maximum work laws in a variety of professions, outright bans on night work for women, and minimum wage laws for women routinely were upheld under the Muller rationale.

The NCL's efforts to protect women from unscrupulous employers won the approval of the Supreme Court in several additional cases, but then ran into trouble in the early 1920s. In Stettler v. O'Hara (1917), a lower court decision upholding Oregon's minimum‐wage law for women was appealed to the Supreme Court. Forces opposed to governmental interference in contractual rights feared that a decision supporting additional protective legislation would open floodgates to more governmental regulation. Stettler's lawyers argued that a labor agreement between an employer and an employee could not be disturbed by the government. Because the Fourteenth Amendment forbade the state from denying any individual liberty without due process of law, they argued that freedom of contract was protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court had been amenable to this kind of argument, as attested to by its Lochner decision.

Building on the Court's far‐ranging discussion of women and their physical, social and legal differences from men, Brandeis, again presenting the state's case, structured his arguments similarly to those offered in Muller, stressing the importance of a living wage to the health, welfare, and morals of women. Before the Court could decide the case, however, a vacancy occurred on the Court and Brandeis was appointed to fill it. Stettler was reargued in 1917 with Brandeis not participating. The Court divided 4 to 4, thus sustaining the lower court's decision.

The next NCL‐sponsored case, Bunting v. Oregon (1917), attracted a significant amount of attention. Felix Frankfurter, Brandeis's hand‐picked successor as NCL counsel, used the same kind of arguments Brandeis had used in Muller and Stettler. In a 5‐to‐3 decision (with Brandeis again not participating) the Court extended Muller to uphold an Oregon statute that established maximum hours for all factory and mill workers.

Although the NCL was victorious in these two cases, it had not anticipated the impact that the controversy within the suffrage movement over protective legislation would have on pending litigation. During the early twentieth century, women had come together to lobby for passage and then ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Once it was ratified, attempts were made to secure other rights for women. Women in the more radical branch of the suffrage movement, represented by the National Woman's Party (NWP), proposed the addition of an equal rights amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. Progressives and those in the NCL were horrified because they believed that an equal rights amendment would immediately invalidate the protective legislation they had lobbied so hard to enact.

When Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923) came to the Court, the NWP was ready. Adkins involved the constitutionality of a Washington D.C., minimum‐wage law for women. The NWP filed an amicus curiae brief urging the Court to rule that, in light of the Nineteenth Amendment, women should be viewed on a truly equal footing with men. The division among women concerning equal rights and protective legislation was now exposed to public view. It was a debate that was to be resurrected again and again in the Court and public through the 1990s.

In Adkins, the Court ruled 5 to 4 that minimum‐wage laws for women were unconstitutional thus resurrecting Lochner, which Court commentators thought had been overruled sub‐silentio in Bunting. The Court was unwilling to overrule Muller, and thus simply distinguished it because it involved maximum hours and not wages. Nevertheless, the justices clearly believed that the Nineteenth Amendment conferred more rights upon women than just the right to vote. In noting women's newly emancipated status, the Court undoubtedly was responding at least in part to the pro‐equality arguments offered by the National Woman's Party.

Adkins, unlike Muller, was decided by the narrowest of majorities. But it stood as a good law and as a ringing endorsement of the notion of freedom of contract regarding minimum‐wage laws for women until 1937 (although the Court continued to uphold state maximum‐hour provisions). In West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), the Court finally abandoned its endorsement of substantive due process, explicitly overruled Adkins, and upheld Washington state's minimum‐wage law for women. In hammering in the last nail in the coffin of substantive due process, the Court also appeared to be escaping from the constitutional need to establish a difference between men and women.

While the Court was enunciating a view that men and women were equal as the permissible objects of regulation, clearly they were not. Most states continued to bar or limit night work for women. And while a separate minimum wage for women could no longer be valid, employer practices of clustering women into certain positions at far lower wages than those paid to men continued to exist.

No new cases came to the Court involving women's rights until 1948. The NCL had obtained what it wanted, and the coalition of women's groups that had pressed for suffrage had largely disintegrated. Women were urged to support the war effort and, after the war ended, to return to their homes to their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Thus, few groups were left to press for women's rights in the legislatures or through the courts. The National Woman's Party continued to press for equal rights, and in fact, was able to see a proposed equal rights amendment introduced into every session of Congress after 1923. But it chose to stay out of litigation until the 1970s.

New Attempts to Expand Rights

In Goesaert v. Cleary (1948) and Hoyt v. Florida (1961), the Court again made it clear that women were not guaranteed additional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment or elsewhere in the Constitution. Although the Fourteenth Amendment is a pledge of protection against state discrimination, over the years the Court generally has applied a two‐tiered level of analysis to claims advanced under its provisions. Classifications based on race or national origin are considered *suspect classifications and are entitled to be judged by a severe test of strict scrutiny. As such, they are presumed invalid unless the government can show that they are “necessary to a compelling state interest” and that there are no less‐restrictive alternative ways to achieve those goals. In contrast, when the Court applies the less stringent level of ordinary scrutiny, which until 1976 included all other legislative classifications, a state need show only a conceivable or reasonable rationale for its action.

Until 1971, the Court routinely applied this minimal rationality test to claims involving discrimination against women. In Goesaert, for example, it sustained a statute that prohibited a woman from dispensing drinks from behind a bar unless she was the wife or daughter of the bar owner. Thus, forty years after Muller, the Court continued to justify differential treatment of women by deferring to a state's special interest in her social and “moral” problems. Under the reasonableness test, some rational basis for the law was all that needed to be shown.

In Hoyt, the Supreme Court accepted sex‐role stereotypes as a sufficient reason to uphold a state statute that required men to serve on juries while women could merely volunteer for jury service (see Trial by Jury). When Hoyt was convicted by an all‐male jury of second‐degree murder for killing her husband with a baseball bat, she argued that her conviction violated her rights to equal protection of the laws and her Sixth Amendment right to be judged by a jury of her peers. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that the Florida statute was not an arbitrary and systematic exclusion of women. Justice John M. Harlan concluded that “Despite the enlightened emancipation of women from the restrictions and protections of bygone years, and their entry into many parts of community life formerly considered to be reserved to men, woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life.” (pp. 61–62)

It was not until the dawn of the most recent women's movement that judicial perspectives on what was reasonable discrimination against women began to change. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded. Soon after, a plethora of other women's rights groups were created. Most of these groups renewed the call for passage of an equal rights amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. While significant lobbying was carried out on that front, some groups, cognizant of the successes that the NAACP had in securing additional rights for African‐Americans through the courts, began to explore the feasibility of a litigation strategy designed to seek a more expansive interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although prior forays into the courts had ended unfavorably, some woman lawyers, in particular, believed that the times had changed enough for the justices (or some of the justices) to recognize that sex‐based differential treatment of women was unconstitutional. Many believed that the status of women and the climate for change was sufficiently positive to convince even a conservative Court that some change was necessary.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), long a key player in the expansion of constitutional rights and liberties, led the planning for a comprehensive strategy to elevate sex to suspect classification status, and thus to be entitled to strict scrutiny. Its first case was Reed v. Reed (1971). Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a member of the ACLU Board, argued the case before the Supreme Court. Her enthusiasm and interest in the expansion of women's rights via constitutional interpretation led the ACLU to found the Women's Rights Project (WRP).

At issue in Reed was the constitutionality of an Idaho statute that required males be preferred to otherwise equally qualified females as administrators of estates for those who die intestate. NOW, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women, and the Women's Equity Action League all filed amicus curiae briefs urging the Court to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit discrimination against women on account of sex. Democratic Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, a major sponsor of the ERA, wrote one of the briefs in which he attempted to apprise the Court of the glaring legal inequities faced by women and to link those inequities, at least in part, to the Court's own persistent refusal to expand the reach of the Equal Protection Clause to gender discrimination. Judicial decisions such as Goesaert and Hoyt, which allowed states to discriminate against women on only minimally rational grounds, made it clear to women's rights activists that a constitutional amendment was necessary if women were ever to enjoy full citizenship rights under the Constitution. But Reed was just a critical first step.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for a unanimous Court in Reed, held that the Idaho statute, which provided “different treatment … to the applicants on the basis of their sex … establishes a classification subject to scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause” (p. 75). With these simple words, the Supreme Court for the first time concluded that sex‐based differentials were entitled to some sort of scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment. But what type of scrutiny? According to Burger, who quoted Royster Guano v. Virginia (1920), the test was whether the differential treatment was “reasonable, not arbitrary,” and rested “upon some ground of difference having a fair and substantial relation to the object of the legislation, so that all persons similarly circumstances will be treated alike” (p. 76). The Court then found that the state's objective of reducing the workload of probate judges was insufficient justification to warrant this kind of sex‐based statute. In fact, according to the Court, this was “the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause” (p. 76). Although the Court did not articulate a new standard specifically, most commentators agreed that sex‐based classification were not to be treated with more than ordinary scrutiny.

This major breakthrough heartened women's rights activists. It also encouraged the WRP to launch a full‐blown test case strategy akin to the one pursued by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund that culminated successfully in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). WRP attorneys jumped at the opportunity to assist the Southern Poverty Law Center of Alabama with the next major sex‐discrimination case to come before the Supreme Court, Frontiero v. Richardson (1973). At issue in Frontiero was the constitutionality of a federal statute that, for the purpose of computing allowances and fringe benefits, required female members of the armed forces to prove that they contributed more than 50 percent of their dependent husbands' support. Men were not required to make a similar showing about their wives.

By an 8‐to‐1 vote, the Court struck down the statute, which gave male members of the armed forces potentially greater benefits than females. More important, though, four justices voted to make sex a suspect classification entitled to the strict scrutiny standard of review. While four other justices agreed that the statute violated the Equal Protection Clause, they did not agree that sex should be made a suspect classification. In fact, three justices specifically noted the pending ratification of the ERA as a reason to wait to allow the political process to guide judicial interpretation.

Three years later, in Craig v. Boren (1976), Justice William J. Brennan, author of the plurality opinion in Frontiero, formulated a different test, known as “intermediate” or “heightened scrutiny” test to apply in sex discrimination cases. Craig involved a challenge to an Oklahoma statute that prohibited the sale of 3.2 percent beer to males under the age of twenty‐one but to females only under the age of eighteen. In determining whether this kind of gender‐based differential violated the Equal Protection Clause, Brennan wrote that “classifications by gender must serve important governmental objectives and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives” (p. 197). He also specifically identified two governmental interests that would not justify sex discrimination: neither administrative convenience nor “fostering ‘old’ notions of role typing” (p. 198) would be considered constitutionally adequate rationalizations of sex classifications. Shedding many of the stereotypes that had been at the core of Muller, Hoyt, and Goesaert, the Court specifically noted there was no further place for “increasingly outdated misconceptions concerning the role of females in the home rather than in the ‘marketplace and world of ideas’” (pp. 198–199). Continuing in this vein, in Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney (1979), the Court even went on to clarify this new standard, noting that any state statute that was “overtly or covertly designed to discriminate against women would require an exceedingly persuasive justification” (p. 273). In Feeney, however, the Court concluded that a veteran's preference law was intended to discriminate against non‐veterans—not women.

This new intermediate standard of review subsequently was used to invalidate a wide range of discriminatory practices including some Social Security, welfare and workmen's compensation programs, alimony laws, age of majority statutes and jury service exemptions. This is not to say that the Court no longer continued to be swayed by sex‐role stereotypes. In Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), for example, the Court considered congressional combat restrictions sufficient to rationalize the exclusion of women from the new draft registration requirements of the Military Selective Service Act (see Conscription). A majority of the Court accepted the government's position that the statutory exclusion of women from combat positions combined with the need for combat‐ready troops was a sufficiently important justification to meet the burden of the intermediate standard of review. And, in Michael M. v. Superior Court of Sonoma County (1981), the Court held that a California rape law, which applied only to males, did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. Justice William H. Rehnquist noted that the state's concern about teenage pregnancy was a sufficiently strong state interest to justify the statute. Rehnquist's opinion pointedly did not apply intermediate scrutiny.

In late 1981, the Court was joined by its first female member, Sandra Day O'Connor. It was not long before she and the other justices were faced with another sex‐based claim made under the Fourteenth Amendment. Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan (1982) involved a state policy that restricted enrollment in one state supported nursing school to females. Writing for the five‐member majority, O'Connor noted that when the purpose of a statute was to “exclude or ‘protect’ members of one gender because they are presumed to suffer from an inherent handicap or to be innately inferior, the objective itself is illegitimate” (p. 725). As one commentator noted, “she out‐Brennaned Justice Brennan” (Williams, p. 112). For example, not only did she go further than Justice Brennan had in recent opinions by suggesting in a footnote that sex might best be treated by the Court as a suspect classification, she also went on to resurrect the Feeney language saying that the state fell short of “establishing the exceedingly persuasive justification needed to sustain the classification” (p. 724).

Justice O'Connor's strong opinion in Hogan again brought to four the number of justices on the Court who apparently favored some sort of strict standard of review for sex‐based classifications that need “exceedingly persuasive justification” to withstand challenge. The elevation of William H. Rehnquist to chief justice and the appointments of Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter by Republican presidents, however, were taken by supporters of expanded women's rights as a signal that the courts were no longer a viable strategy to see strict scrutiny applied to sex‐based classifications. Thus, supporters of women's rights were heartened by the appointments of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Court by Democratic president Bill Clinton.

In 1994, shortly after Justice Ginsburg's appointment to the Court, J.E.B. v. Alabama was decided. J.E.B. sought review of a lower court decision that had denied his claim that the use of peremptory challenges to exclude men from a jury deliberating a paternity claim against him violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the Court, concluded that the state was unable to provide the exceedingly persuasive justification needed to justify these gender‐based peremptory challenges. The use of gender‐based stereotypes to select a jury pool, said the Court, is prohibited.

By the late 1990s, it had become clear that a narrow majority of the Court had reformulated the intermediate standard of review announced in Craig, replacing a state's need to show that a gender‐based classification “serve important governmental objectives” with the need for a state to show an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for the practice or law. In United States v. Virginia (1996), a challenge to Virginia's maintenance of the male‐only Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Justice Ginsburg, writing for a five‐person majority, used the exceedingly persuasive justification test in a manner “all but indistinguishable from strict scrutiny” (Brake, 1997, p. 35) to find the state support of VMI unconstitutional. Chief Justice Rehnquist's concurring opinion echoed this assessment of the standard used by the majority. At the very least, it appears that gender‐based classification will now be examined more skeptically than under the Craig standard. This “skeptical scrutiny” test recognizes the long history of gender discrimination and seeks to give substance to a standard used by the Court.

Still, under this standard, the Court has upheld challenged practices as constitutional. In Nguyen v. INS (2001), for example, five members of the Court concluded that a federal law that imposed different requirements for a child's acquisition of citizenship depending upon whether the citizen parent was male or female, did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. Writing in sharp dissent, however, were Justices O'Connor, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, who concluded that the INS had failed to show an exceedingly persuasive justification for the sex‐based classification.

Recognizing the fragile nature of even the heightened middle tier standard of review and the Court's uneven application of its standards, women's rights groups continue to seek the addition of an equal rights amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, an effort that failed earlier. In 1972 Congress passed and sent to the states, a proposed ERA. By 1982, however, its supporters had failed to win ratification of the amendment in the requisite three‐quarters of the states. Most see an ERA as the only way to guarantee that women ever will be recognized as fully equal under the Constitution, but they are not particularly optimistic about its chances of success, although members of Congress continue to introduce it in each session of the Congress.

The Court has never been at the fore in the development of full equality for women. Yet, its decisions clearly add to a climate that frowns on blatant discrimination. Given the increasingly conservative nature of the Court, however, and the increasingly complex patterns of discrimination that are being presented to it, it is unlikely that the scope of constitutional protections for women will grow unless other societal changes take place. Women's active combat roles in the war in Iraq, for example, could possibly foreshadow a Court that would uphold a challenge to the discriminatory provisions of the Military and Selective Service Act.

Moreover, it is important to note that fewer and fewer cases involving constitutional issues of sex discrimination come before the Court each year, perhaps because women's rights groups are using their time and money to fend off challenges to Roe v. Wade (1973) and to keep abortion legal. Moreover, most of the “easy” cases have been decided, and there is fairly uniform application of at least the intermediate standard of review in lower courts. Thus, most cases involving sex discrimination that the Court chooses to hear now involve employment or educational discrimination litigated under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972. In Johnson Controls, Inc. v. International Union, UAW (1990), for example, which involved a company fetal‐protection policy that required women in certain hazardous positions to be sterilized as a condition of their continued employment, the Court ruled unanimously that the company's policies were not valid bona fide occupational qualifications permitted by Title VII. Likewise, in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), the Court found that a school board was responsible for sexual harassment and thus violating Title IX when the school board acted with deliberate indifference.

Bibliography

• Deborah Brake, Reflections on the VMI Decision, American University Journal of Gender and the Law (1997), pp. 35‐42.
• L.H. Butterfield etal., eds., The Book of Abigail and John (1975).
• Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America 1848–1869 (1978).
• Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (1989).
• Susan M. Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics Since 1960 (1989).
• Herma Hill Kay and Martha S. West, Sex Based Discrimination: Text, Cases, and Materials, 4th ed. (1996).
• Naomi B. Lynn, ed., Women, Politics and the Constitution (1990).
• Karen O'Connor, Women's Organizations' Use of the Courts (1980).
• Wendy Williams, Sex Discrimination: Closing the Law's Gender Gap, in The Burger Years, edited by Herman Schwartz (1987), pp. 109–124

— Karen O'Connor

While it is generally accepted that sex is biologically determined, societies construct appropriate behaviour for each gender, thus producing local gender cultures. Gendered divisions of labour and gendered divisions of spheres exist throughout the UK, although differentiation and separation seem to be more marked in northern regions, and both enact and reproduce gender inequalities.

There are signs of a transformation in gendered power relations: employment rates and life cycle patterns of participation in work now differ little between men and women, girls outstrip boys' performance up to and including first-degree level, and pay differentials between men and women have fallen; in 1985 men earned 1.55 times more than women, but 1.42 times more in 1995 (some of this is due to an increase in low-paid male jobs and some to the minimum wage). However, although women in the UK as a whole have fewer full-time jobs, and less job security, differentials between women—in wages, opportunities for full-time work, and job security—are astonishingly class-dependent.

The ordering of space is strongly gendered, and may also reinforce gender stereotypes; when space is constructed so as to make women feel unsafe (secluded woodlands, dark alleyways, ill-lit multi-storey car parks), they are much more aware of their vulnerability and lack of physical strength, and this will further constrain their movements, so fulfilling the stereotype that women are less adventurous than men.

Gender may be seen as arising from the norms of (hetero)sex, and its production, reproduction, and transformations take place in different ways, at different times, and in different places. As such, gender is of interest to the geographer, and the innovative views of the body as ‘a surface to be mapped…a boundary between the individual subject and that which is Other…but also as a permeable boundary which leaks and bleeds and is penetrable’ (L. McDowell and M. Sharpe (eds.) 1997) have thrown new light on gender and geography.

The distinction between sex and gender is attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead (Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, 1935). Sex is the biological category, whereas gender is the culturally shaped expression of sexual difference: the masculine way in which men should behave and the feminine way in which women should behave. It is emphasized by de Beauvoir that in this system woman is the Other: the kind of person whose characteristics are described by contrast with the male norm. It is a central aim of much feminist thought to uncover concealed asymmetries of power in differences of gender, and to work for a society in which the polarization of gender is abolished.

In sociology, the social and cultural differences between men and women based on, but not necessarily coincident with, anatomical differences. Gender refers to socially and culturally determined attributes categorized as masculine and feminine. Compare sex.

This entry consists of the following articles:

• Gender: Gender and the Economy
• Gender: Gender and Education
• Gender: Gender and Law
• Gender: Gender and Politics
• Gender: Study of

Until the 1980s, "gender" was a word used primarily in the realm of linguistics. The women's movement changed that, as it changed so much else. Advocates of women's rights in the present looked at what they had been taught about the past and realized that it described only the male experience, though often portraying this as universal. This realization, combined with increasing numbers of women going into the field of history, led to investigation of the lives of women in the past. Women were first fitted into existing conceptual categories—nations, historical periods, social classes, religious allegiances—but focusing on women often disrupted these classifications, forcing a rethinking of the way history was organized and structured.

This disruption of well-known categories and paradigms ultimately included the topic that had long been considered the proper focus of all history—man. Viewing the male experience as universal had not only hidden women's history, it had also prevented the analysis of men's experiences as those of men. Historians familiar with studying women increasingly began to discuss the ways in which systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men, and by the early 1980s they began to use the word "gender" to describe these systems. They differentiated primarily between "sex," by which they meant physical, morphological, and anatomical differences (what are often called "biological differences") and "gender," by which they meant a culturally constructed, historically changing, and often unstable system of differences. Historians interested in this new perspective asserted that gender was an appropriate category of analysis when looking at all historical developments, not simply those involving women or the family. Every political, intellectual, religious, economic, social, and even military change had an impact on the actions and roles of men and women, and, conversely, a culture's gender structures influenced every other structure or development.

Historians of the early modern period figured prominently in the development of both women's and gender history and continue to be important voices in their subsequent growth and that of related areas of study such as the history of sexuality. Though summarizing their conclusions in a brief article goes against the central premise of the field—that gender issues should be a part of every historical analysis—three main areas can serve as examples of the way in which thinking about gender challenges understandings of the early modern era: gender and periodization, gender and political power, gender and the social order.

Gender and Periodization

One of the most important insights in women's and then gender history began with a simple question—Did women have a Renaissance?—first posed by the historian Joan Kelly in 1977. Her answer, "No, at least not during the Renaissance," led to intensive historical and literary research as people attempted to confirm, refute, modify, or nuance her answer. This question also contributed to the broader questioning of the whole notion of historical periodization. If a particular development had little, or indeed a negative, effect on women, could it still be called a "golden age," a "Renaissance," or an "Enlightenment"? Can the seventeenth century, during which hundreds or perhaps thousands of women were burned as witches on the European continent, still be described as a period of "the spread of rational thought"?

Kelly's questioning of the term "Renaissance" has been joined more recently by a questioning of the term "early modern." Both historians and literary scholars note that there are problems with this term, as it assumes that there is something that can unambiguously be called "modernity," which is usually set against "traditional" and linked with contemporary Western society. The break between "medieval" and "early modern" is generally set at 1500, roughly the time of the voyages of Columbus and of the Protestant Reformation, but recently many historians argue that there are more continuities across this line than changes. Some have moved the decisive break earlier—to the Black Death in 1347 or even to the twelfth century—or have rejected the notion of periodization altogether. Gender historians, most prominently Judith Bennett, have been among those questioning the validity of the medieval/modern divide, challenging, in Bennett's words, "the assumption of a dramatic change in women's lives between 1300 and 1700" and asserting that historians must pay more attention to continuities along with changes.

Gender and Political Power

During the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries male and female writers in many countries of Europe wrote both learned and popular works debating the nature of women. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this debate also became one about female rulers, sparked primarily by dynastic accidents in many countries that led to women serving as advisers to child kings or ruling in their own right. The questions vigorously and at times viciously disputed directly concerned the social construction of gender: could a woman's being born into a royal family and educated to rule allow her to overcome the limitations of her sex? Should it? Or stated another way: which was (or should be) the stronger determinant of character and social role, gender or rank?

The most extreme opponents of female rule were Protestants who went into exile on the Continent during the reign of Mary Tudor (ruled 1553–1558), most prominently John Knox, who argued that female rule was unnatural, unlawful, and contrary to Scripture. Being female was a condition that could never be overcome, and subjects of female rulers needed no other justification for rebelling than their monarch's sex. Their writings were answered by defenses of female rule which argued that a woman's sex did not automatically exclude her from rule, just as a boy king's age or a handicapped king's infirmity did not exclude him. Some theorists asserted that even a married queen could rule legitimately, for she could be subject to her husband in her private life, yet monarch to him and all other men in her public life. As Constance Jordan has pointed out, defenders of female rule were thus clearly separating sex from gender and even approaching an idea of androgyny as a desirable state for the public persona of female monarchs.

Jean Bodin (1530–1596), the French jurist and political theorist, stressed what would become in the seventeenth century the most frequently cited reason to oppose female rule: that the state was like a household, and just as in a household the husband/father has authority and power over all others, so in the state a male monarch should always rule. Male monarchs used husbandly and paternal imagery to justify their assertion of power over their subjects, though criticism of monarchs was also couched in paternal language; pamphlets directed against the crown during the revolt known as the Fronde in seventeenth-century France, for example, justified their opposition by asserting that the king was not properly fulfilling his fatherly duties.

This link between royal and paternal authority could also work in the opposite direction to enhance the power of male heads of household. Just as subjects were deemed to have no or only a very limited right of rebellion against their ruler, so women and children were not to dispute the authority of the husband/father, because both kings and fathers were held to have received their authority from God; the household was not viewed as private, but as the smallest political unit and so part of the public realm.

Many analysts see the Protestant Reformation and, in England, Puritanism as further strengthening this paternal authority by granting male heads of household a much larger religious and supervisory role than they had under Catholicism. The fact that Protestant clergy were themselves generally married heads of household also meant that ideas about clerical authority reinforced notions of paternal and husbandly authority; priests were now husbands, and husbands priests. After the Reformation, the male citizens of many cities and villages increasingly added an oath to uphold the city's religion to the oaths they took to defend it and support it economically. For men, faith became a ritualized civic matter, while for women it was not. Thus both the public political community and the public religious community—which were often regarded as the same in early modern Europe—were for men only, a situation reinforced in the highly gendered language of the reformers, who extolled "brotherly love" and the religious virtues of the "common man."

Religious divisions were not the only development that enhanced the authority of many men. Rulers intent on increasing and centralizing their own authority supported legal and institutional changes that enhanced the power of men over the women and children in their own families. In France, for example, a series of laws were enacted between 1556 and 1789 that increased both paternal and state control of marriage. Young people who defied their parents were sometimes imprisoned by what were termed lettres de cachet, documents that families obtained from royal officials authorizing the imprisonment without trial of a family member who was seen as a source of dishonor. Men occasionally used lettres de cachet as a means of solving marital disputes, convincing authorities that family honor demanded the imprisonment of their wives, while in Italy and Spain a "disobedient" wife could be sent to a convent or house of refuge for repentant prostitutes. Courts generally held that a husband had the right to beat his wife in order to correct her behavior as long as this was not extreme, with a common standard being that he not draw blood, or that the diameter of the stick he used not exceed that of his thumb.

Access to political power for men as well as women was shaped by ideas about gender in early modern Europe. The dominant notion of the "true" man was that of the married head of household, so that men whose class and age would have normally conferred political power but who remained unmarried did not participate to the same level as their married brothers; in Protestant areas, this link between marriage and authority even included the clergy.

Notions of masculinity were important symbols in early modern political discussions. Both male and female rulers emphasized qualities regarded as masculine—physical bravery, stamina, wisdom, duty—whenever they chose to appear or speak in public. A concern with masculinity pervades the political writings of Machiavelli, who used "effeminate" to describe the worst kind of ruler. (Effeminate in the early modern period carried slightly different connotations than it does today, however, for strong heterosexual passion was not a sign of manliness, but could make one "effeminate," that is, dominated by as well as similar to a woman.) The English Civil War (1642–1649) presented two conflicting notions of masculinity: Royalist cavaliers in their long hair and fancy silk knee-breeches, and Puritan parliamentarians with their short hair and somber clothing. Parliamentary criticism of the court was often expressed in gendered and sexualized terminology, with frequent veiled or open references to aristocratic weakness and inability to control the passions.

Gender and the Social Order

The maintenance of proper power relationships between men and women served as a basis for and a symbol of the functioning of society as a whole. Women or men who stepped outside their prescribed roles in other than extraordinary circumstances, and particularly those who made a point of emphasizing that they were doing this, were seen as threatening not only relations between the sexes, but the operation of the entire social order. They were "disorderly," a word that had much stronger negative connotations in the early modern period than it does today, as well as two somewhat distinct meanings—outside of the social structure and unruly or unreasonable.

Women were outside the social order because they were not as clearly demarcated into social groups as men. Unless they were members of a religious order or guild, women had no corporate identity at a time when society was conceived of as a hierarchy of groups rather than a collection of individuals. One can see women's separation from such groups in the way that parades and processions were arranged in early modern Europe; if women were included, they came at the end as an undifferentiated group, following men who marched together on the basis of political position or occupation. Women were also more "disorderly" than men because they were unreasonable, ruled by their physical bodies rather than their rational capacities, their lower parts rather than their upper parts. This was one of the reasons they were more often suspected of witchcraft; it was also why they were thought to have nondiabolical magical powers in the realms of love and sexual attraction.

Disorder in the proper gender hierarchy was linked with other types of social upheaval and viewed as the most threatening way in which the world could be turned upside down. Carnival plays, woodcuts, and stories frequently portrayed domineering wives in pants and henpecked husbands washing diapers alongside professors in dunce caps and peasants riding princes. Men and women involved in relationships in which the women were thought to have power—an older woman who married a younger man, or a woman who scolded her husband—were often subjected to public ridicule, with bands of neighbors shouting insults and banging sticks and pans in their disapproval. Adult male journeymen refused to work for widows although this decreased their opportunities for employment. Fathers disinherited disobedient daughters more often than sons. The derivative nature of an adult woman's authority—the fact that it came from her status as wife or widow of the male household head—was emphasized by referring to her as "wife" rather than "mother" even in legal documents describing her relations with her children. Of all the ways in which society was hierarchically arranged—class, age, rank, race, occupation—gender was regarded as the most "natural" and therefore the most important to defend.

Bibliography

Amussen, Susan Dwyer. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. London, 1988.

Bennett, Judith. "Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide." In Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, edited by David Aers, pp. 147–175. London, 1992.

Breitenberg, Mark. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.

Hanley, Sarah. "The Monarchic State in Early Modern France: Marital Regime, Government and Male Right." In Politics, Ideology, and the Law in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of J. H. M. Salmon, edited by Adrianna Bakos, pp. 27–52. Rochester, 1994.

Hardwick, Julie. The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France. University Park, Pa., 1998.

Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y., 1990.

Kelly, Joan. "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" In Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, pp. 138–164. Boston, 1977.

Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, 1988.

Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton, 1990.

Pitkin, Hannah Fenichel. Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. Berkeley, 1984.

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Gender in History. London, 2001.

—MERRY WIESNER-HANKS

Although historians have been studying gender for several decades, the study of gender in American foreign policy is a relatively new phenomenon. Indeed, the proliferation of scholarship on this topic in the 1990s suggests that gender has become a permanent and theoretically significant category of analysis for the historian of American foreign relations. It is important to note, however, that this approach has generated lively debate among many historians. In journals and on-line forums and at conferences, scholars at the beginning of the twenty-first century continued to argue about the degree to which gender has affected the creation, conduct, and outcomes of international diplomacy.

Women and Gender: Different Approaches

Many people understandably but mistakenly equate the study of gender with the study of women when, in fact, these are fairly different enterprises. Historians who study women (many but not all of them women) look at women's activities and contributions in various economic, political, cultural, and spatial contexts. Practitioners of women's history see all women as historical actors: they look at an individual woman or women together in social movements, at notable and elite women or anonymous, "ordinary" women, at women in the kitchen or women in the streets. Since the 1970s (and even earlier), women's historians have argued that historical narratives have largely ignored women's experiences, yielding an incomplete, or even misleading, portrait of the American past. Through critical analysis of traditional primary sources—and by uncovering sources that historians previously did not think worthy of study—women's history seeks to expand and complicate our histories of industrialization, electoral politics, and warfare, to name only a few topics. Historians of women insist that their scholarship should not merely add a new set of female characters to the plot line of American history, but rather that the whole story needs to be tested, reconsidered, and revised.

The study of gender is an outgrowth of women's history, which is why people tend to view the study of gender and women as the same thing. The scholarly interest in gender emerged as practitioners of women's history, informed by scholarship in anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism, began to ask critical questions of their own methodologies. Shifting the focus from women to gender, historians of gender explore how males and females (sex) become men and women (gender). That is, to study gender is to examine how a society assigns social meanings to the different biological characteristics of males and females. Historians who study gender see it as a cultural construct—something that human beings create and that changes over time. The differences between men and women, they argue, are rooted in society, not in nature, and as such can be historicized. Moreover, gender scholars point out, if women's lives have been shaped profoundly by gender prescriptions, then so, too, have men's. Cultural ideals and practices of masculinity and femininity have been created together, often in opposition to one another; therefore, both men and women have gender histories that must be analyzed in tandem. Indeed, gender studies is relational in that research into the history of gender ideals and practices is always linked to investigations about the operation of the economy, the construction of racial ideologies, the development of political institutions, and other phenomena typically studied by historians.

So what does it mean to do women's history in comparison to gender history? Actually, most historians in this field do a little bit of both. Still, whereas a women's historian would focus on, for example, women's labor force participation during World War II, a gender historian would examine how gender ideologies shaped the organization of labor on the battlefield and the home front, and how the war remapped the meanings of masculinity, femininity, and labor. Put another way, women's historians foreground women as historical actors, while gender historians foreground ideological systems as agents of history. Certainly, those who do women's history engage the question of how gender norms shape women's experiences and struggles, but they tend to focus on women, as such, more than they examine historical ideological shifts in the meanings of masculine and feminine. At the same time, gender historians do not ignore women altogether; rather they interrogate the very meaning of the term "woman," highlighting historical changes in the construction of masculinity and femininity, manhood and womanhood. Again, many historians do some combination of both, combing the documents for clues about how men and women have both shaped and been shaped by gendered beliefs, practices, and institutions.

The theories and methodologies of gender history have been adapted to many fields, but the integration of gender into the study of American foreign relations has been slow and uneven. Part of the reason for this is that the "high" politics of diplomacy seem far removed from the politics of everyday life that have long been the concern of gender and women's history. Until the late twentieth century, both diplomatic and women's historians were themselves inattentive to the connections between their fields and thus very few conversations took place across the disciplinary divide. Scholarly work in various disciplines since the 1980s, however, has revealed important links between American diplomacy and American culture, and the most recent scholarship reflects a more self-conscious attempt by historians to identify a dynamic interrelationship between the creation of foreign policy and the construction of gender.

Finding Women in Foreign Policy

The integration of these two seemingly disparate literatures—gender studies and diplomatic history—is ongoing, and it is important to note that this subfield is still "under construction." Nevertheless, it is possible to describe and analyze the myriad approaches historians have used thus far. One of the first ways historians have made gender visible in foreign policy is by spotlighting the presence and contributions of the anomalous women who have shaped American foreign policy. This approach reveals how women like Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Eleanor Dulles (the younger sister of John Foster and Allen), and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt have influenced foreign policy in a variety of roles—as elected officials, lobbyists, mid-level bureaucrats, and even first ladies. More recently, women such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, and Condoleeza Rice have risen to the highest levels of statecraft. President Ronald Reagan appointed Kirkpatrick in 1980 to be the U.S. representative to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick's staunch anticommunism and advocacy of a reinvigorated national defense fit comfortably in the Reagan administration, and she became a widely known spokesperson for Reagan's foreign policy positions. President Bill Clinton, too, selected a woman to represent U.S. interests at the UN. Albright served several years at the UN until Clinton appointed her secretary of state in 1996. Secretary Albright was the first woman to serve in that role, and in 2001, President George W. Bush made Rice the first woman assistant to the president for national security affairs.

Tracking these "firsts" and the careers of other notable but lesser known women in the diplomatic corps marks an important contribution to the literature simply because it makes women visible. Biographical information on how these women worked their way through institutions controlled by men can yield important insights about the role of feminism in paving the way for their entry, and about the challenges involved in managing a career in a field still populated with very few women. This approach also encourages scholars to not simply acknowledge women such as Kirkpatrick or Albright but to evaluate their contributions and legacies. Many critical questions have emerged from this literature about the weight of women's influence in foreign policymaking (Albright, for example, enjoyed much more access to policy inner circles than did Kirkpatrick), about whether female policymakers' contributions reflect "a woman's view," and whether American women can effect more change if they operate inside or outside of policy circles.

Still, this quasi-biographical approach to gender and foreign policy has some significant limitations. It tends to focus on elite women, so it is narrow by definition. As a result, we lose something of the story of how the nonelite majority of American women have shaped foreign policy through different means. Further, its "notable women" orientation just adds women to the story, leaving untapped the methods, questions, and theories that define diplomacy and the discipline of diplomatic history itself. Finally, this approach also supports (probably unintentionally) the misguided notion that truly exceptional women, with enough resources and pluck, can enter the inner circle of statesmen, and that the vast majority of women cannot, because of either native inability or subjugation by a male power structure. Neither of these notions can be supported historically, nor are they the intended arguments of writers, but the impressions remain. Many more important biographies and studies of such women need to be done, but they can contribute only modestly to the knowledge about gender and American foreign relations.

Beyond this approach lies another, broader in scope, more inclusive of nonelite women, and more sensitive to the array of historical forces that have shaped women's inclusion or exclusion from foreign affairs. In this approach, women are written into the history of foreign relations as missionaries—emissaries of Americanism. These more prosperous white women (teachers, reformers, and members of faith communities) become part of the larger narrative about the energetic expansion of the United States in the late nineteenth century, and here they can be cast as both villains and victims. Historians have documented the ways in which women missionaries exported "civilization" to nonwhite populations through "uplift" programs that valorized whiteness, Christianity, and conventional gender and family ideologies. Some newer work has complicated this story further, suggesting that women such as turn-of-the century female travelers abroad and the women photojournalists who documented the violence of the Spanish American War participated in missionary types of civilizing projects, even if not formally engaged in missionary work themselves. At the same time, however, all of these works acknowledge that nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century gender systems prevented women's participation in diplomacy (and domestic electoral politics), relegating women to a separate sphere of foreign affairs. Excluded from formal policymaking, these women were still political actors; they promoted the tenets of American foreign policy through the means available to women of their status. Like their sister reformers who worked in immigrant communities in American cities, female missionaries practiced their "social housekeeping" on a global stage. In this approach, then, women become visible in the dramas of foreign policymaking as collaborators in exile, historical actors who support the worldviews and expansionist agendas of male foreign policymakers but only from a position of exclusion.

Like women missionaries, women in peace movements tried to participate in foreign policy-making from the outskirts. Historians have found in peace histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a meaningful paper trail of women's participation in important national and international debates about U.S. foreign policy. In examining the theories, strategies, and tactics of organized women's peace movements, it becomes difficult to capture the whole of their contributions to policymaking. Historians hold different views about the degree to which peace movements generally have influenced decision makers' choices about interventions and arms buildups. Moreover, historians of women's pacifism have tended to focus less on the policy impact side of the story and more on the social movement story—that is, how it was that women in different eras were able to muster the ideological and material resources to create and sustain movements that addressed foreign policy issues long considered to be "men's business."

It is difficult to generalize about the politics of women's peace movements, because female pacifism has both enshrined conventional gender roles and advanced the ideas of feminism. One safe generalization might be that women in peace movements have capitalized on their outsider perspective; their very exclusion from the "man's world" of diplomacy enabled them to criticize—more perceptively, they argued—the overseas adventurism of the United States. Many female peace activists, whether mothers or not, claimed a maternal identity as the basis of this outsider critique of American diplomacy. Although there was no national, independent women's peace movement before 1914, there were individual women and small peace groups that lobbied in various locales. In these activities we can see a nascent feminist peace consciousness developing over the course of the nineteenth century, and much of this activism sprung from female reformers' maternalist sensibilities. These women, largely middle class, white, and Protestant, argued that U.S. expansion overseas should not extend what they charged were male values of conquest and acquisition, but rather should reflect women's purity, virtue, and maternal morality. By the late nineteenth century, many nationally organized women's groups, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), had fully incorporated a peace plank into their reform agendas. In fact, the WCTU created a Department of Peace and Arbitration in 1887, which enabled them to link more systematically their crusade against alcohol (a critique of male violence in the family) with a campaign for peace (a critique of male violence overseas).

Over the course of the twentieth century, through both world wars and after, female pacifists continued to claim the mantle of motherhood as an entry into foreign policy politics. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, these later activists nurtured the notion of a maternalist citizenship, a concept that included not only the demand for the vote, but a full voice in governmental affairs, electoral politics, and any other arena in which foreign policy was made. During the years of World War I, for example, we see the emergence of what Harriet Hyman Alonso calls the "suffrage-pacifists," women who saw peace issues as inextricably linked with women's suffrage. The formation of the Woman's Peace Party in 1915 reflected this fusion of peace and women's rights; its platform called for arms limitation, international jurisprudence and peacekeeping, an end to the war in Europe, and the right to vote for women. Representation from numerous women's clubs at the founding meeting, including the WCTU, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Women's Trade Union League, and the Women's National Committee of the Socialist Party, reveals the breadth of interest in suffrage-peace politics. Social reformer and Woman's Peace Party leader Jane Addams encouraged women already active in local matters to pay attention to international affairs—to link local with global. Addams and others noted that peace activism was a natural extension of women's nurturance of family and community, and the Peace Party's appeal to "the mother half of humanity" reflected their maternalist orientation.

Years later, well after women won the right to vote, motherhood continued to be an important identity and organizing base for women's peace groups. In 1961, Women Strike for Peace, an organization of "concerned housewives," called on President John F. Kennedy to "end the arms race—not the human race." They, too, claimed the experiences and insights of motherhood as a foundation for activism. As caretakers of the nation's children, they argued, all women had a responsibility to lobby for peace. Taking a multitude of positions on issues from the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963 to U.S. intervention in Vietnam, members of Women Strike for Peace went further than mere criticism of U.S. policies: they argued passionately that the moral, maternal citizenship they embodied promised a new path to more harmonious local, national, and international relationships.

This ideological fusion of motherhood with peace made women's entrance into national debates about global affairs more hospitable than it might have been had they argued for participation based on more feminist principles of justice and equality. But as historians have aptly pointed out, women's pacifism was a politics of feminism as well as maternalism. Indeed, women active in peace movements saw a connection between militarist diplomacy and male supremacy, and they infused their critique of American foreign policy with a critique of male domination. Maternalist peace activism enabled women to understand not only their exclusion from the military state, but also their cultural and economic disenfranchisement in American society as women and mothers. They identified a link between military violence abroad and domestic violence at home. They argued that the violence of war devalued and destroyed women's values and women's work, since it was women—as mothers—who created and sustained life. The war machine was male owned and operated, they claimed, and an American foreign policy based on military intervention was the logical culmination of men's domination in the workplace, politics, and the family. In this sense, many women activists (especially those in the second wave of the feminist movement) went further than mere condemnation of their exclusion from policymaking bureaucracies—they denounced the whole system itself. These ideological currents could be seen in both nineteenth-and twentieth-century peace movements, and it is significant that women's participation in peace movements often grew out of and coexisted with activism in abolitionist, suffrage, and other feminist causes.

Although the focus on women missionaries and pacifists has been instrumental in writing women into the history of American foreign policy, this approach, too, has its problems. It can often assume an essentialized femininity (the idea that women are all the same) across all racial, class, and regional boundaries. At the same time, it can posit a theory of female difference—that women are a special class of human being, uniquely nurturant, maternal, and peaceful. As historians have suggested, this seemingly powerful vision of women can lead to their exclusion from politics and policymaking, based on the assumption that women would be unfit or somehow corrupted by the rough and tumble world of diplomacy.

More importantly, ideas about women's inherent pacifism are not true. As many studies have demonstrated, women have been an integral part of military engagements as auxiliary military forces, production workers, and home front volunteers. In fact, women themselves have invoked a maternalist ideology to endorse as well as oppose military preparedness and war. And, of course, American foreign policymakers have often depended on the rhetoric of maternalism and family to whip up popular support for their decisions. At different historical moments, American women have strenuously affirmed and participated in a whole range of military mobilizations.

Taken together, these histories reveal women's varied levels of engagement with American diplomacy. They underscore the fact that "women were there" in the making of foreign policy: there were a few in policymaking circles, more in missionary work, and even more in peace movements. Yet finding them has not made it easy to generalize about the meanings of their presence, for women were positioned differently in relation to the state that made foreign policy decisions, and they viewed and acted on those decisions in different ways. Perhaps the most important outcome of writing these women into diplomatic history is that now scholars must widen their lens as they seek to understand how foreign policy has been made and implemented by varieties of historical actors in varied political contexts.

Seeing Gender in Foreign Policy

If finding women in foreign policy has broadened the study of American foreign relations, then locating gender has stretched the discipline even further. In the most basic sense, applying a gender analysis to the study of American foreign policy is an attempt to see things differently, or to see new things entirely. Like other tools of analysis, gender offers another angle, another peek into the complicated world of policymaking. Diplomatic historians who use gender analysis are no different than their colleagues in the field; they, too, seek answers to longstanding questions about the emergence of colonialism, the development of tariff and trade policies, the rise of anti-imperialist movements, the origins of the Cold War, and the like. The use of a gender analysis does not preclude the use of any of the customary methodologies of the historian; gender merely adds to the historian's toolbox.

As explained earlier, the emergence of gender studies has made it possible for historians not only to find women but to see both women and men as gendered actors. Indeed, the research on women and femininity as historical subjects has inspired new investigation into the histories of men and masculinity. This has opened a rich vein of scholarship that does not take men's participation in foreign affairs for granted; rather, it interrogates how masculine values and worldviews have shaped diplomacy, enabling students of foreign policy to see anew how normative ideas about manhood inform policymakers' decision making in both domestic and international contexts.

But a gender analysis shows us more than masculinity in action; it offers a critical tool for understanding power in all of its guises. Seeing gender enables historians to scrutinize the organization of power in any arena, from the most public to the most intimate. Gender ideologies can represent relationships of power as innate, fixed, or biologically rooted, but gender history can make transparent the human agency behind those "natural" relationships. Gender analysis can also reveal how ideologies of masculinity and femininity are embedded in language and social structures; the language of warfare, for example, depends on gendered ideas of strength and weakness, protector and protected, which, in turn, shape how an institution like the military utilizes men and women to carry out American foreign policy. A gender analysis can be powerful precisely because it interrogates power itself; it raises fundamental questions about how particular groups have achieved dominance by naturalizing power relations that are, in fact, humanly constituted.

Cold War history offers an illustrative, although by no means exclusive, case of how gender analysis can affect the study of American foreign policy. It was in this field where scholars first began to commingle the study of politics, culture, and gender to expand traditional narratives of diplomatic history. The Cold War's rich imagery of nuclear apocalypse and hyperbolic talk of patriotism and subversion first caught the attention of historians of culture and social history, who sought to explain the relationship between the social-cultural politics of the postwar home front and the diplomatic politics of the Cold War. This work tended to locate gender and national security themes in popular culture (film, mass-circulation magazines) and in the burgeoning social scientific "expert" literature translated for public consumption. Scholars have traced how messages about muscular masculinity and dangerously aggressive femininity made their way into the films, novels, advice columns, and even comic book literature of the era. According to this research, new opportunities for women's independence unleashed by World War II (as witnessed by women's rising participation in the postwar wage labor force) generated new fears about the stability of gender roles and family practices. Female independence, often portrayed in popular culture in highly sexualized ways, was likened to the lethal potency of a mushroom cloud. Social science experts and popular advice literature advocated family stability—and female domesticity, in particular—as antidotes to the past disruptions of World War II and the future uncertainties of the nuclear age. This scholarship revealed intriguing symbolic linkages between the generalized anxiety about atomic energy and the popular apprehension about the slow but steady transformations in gender roles and family life.

In a similar vein, historians have pondered how containment doctrine, a policy hatched in high-level diplomatic circles, became a language and practice in the popular realm. Historians of the family and sexuality, for example, have explored how anticommunism and national security policies became manifest in everyday life. The ambient fear of nuclear annihilation, paired with concerns about the resilience of the nuclear family, spurred campaigns to "contain" the social forces that might prove disruptive to gender and family traditionalism. In fact, scholars have argued, postwar America's red scare was as much an attempt to root out nontraditional gender roles and sexual practices as it was an effort to secure America's foreign policy dominance. The preoccupation with national security abroad was bolstered by a security effort at home that enshrined "family values." According to popular cold warriors, with Joseph McCarthy being merely one of a chorus of voices, only heterosexual nuclear families with breadwinner fathers, stay-at-home mothers, and children could anchor a patriotic domestic security endeavor. Anything outside of that configuration was suspect, probably subversive, a potential menace to national security.

This gender conservatism underpinning the red scare was more than simply a cultural mood. Historians have shown it had concrete policy manifestations as well. Despite the changing gender and sexual practices of the wartime and postwar years, McCarthy-era intolerance led to the criminalization of homosexuality, resulting in the federal government's purge of gays and lesbians in government service. Advocates of the purge argued that homosexuals were "sex perverts" whose tastes and habits imperiled national security. Like communists, gays and lesbians could avoid detection and spread their propaganda under the radar screen. Homosexuals were dangerous as well because they were gender outlaws: mannish women who could not be domesticated and weak-willed, "sissified" men who could not stand firm and tall against communist aggression, at home and abroad. The theme of the "homosexual menace" pervaded postwar political culture, reaching from the very top echelons of the federal government to the most local bureaucracies and organizations. Using the screening and firing mechanisms of President Harry Truman's loyalty-security program, anticommunist officials were able to either screen out or discharge thousands of gay and lesbian citizens from government service. This episode illustrates how policymakers, opinion leaders, and ordinary folk imagined gender and sexual dangers as foreign policy or national security dangers. Without a gender analysis, these symbolic and material linkages would be difficult to see.

This early scholarship on the gendered meanings of Cold War culture and the national security state was highly suggestive, urging historians to think about connections not yet made and pointing out directions for future study. This work took the traditional approach of historians—document analysis—and pushed it into new directions, borrowing from postmodern approaches that take discourse (written and spoken language, images, and symbols) analysis seriously. Historians saw in this Cold War discourse rich and varied gender meanings that could broaden our understanding of how language constructed the national security environment in which policymakers formulated their momentous decisions. In the broadest sense, the work on gender, culture, and foreign policy provocatively suggests that the relationship between text and context is more than incidental—that text actually constructs the historical context, it does not merely reflect it. This work has also performed an invaluable service to both diplomatic and social history, because it has successfully linked these heretofore separate historical literatures. The fusion of this previously bifurcated historiography of the postwar era has yielded a more complex understanding of the Cold War as a creature with both domestic and diplomatic dimensions.

Still, the first historians to do this work tended to look for a gender–foreign policy connection primarily in popular culture, leaving unanalyzed the gender content of the more traditional documents (letters, memos, telegrams, agency reports, treaties) found in presidential and security agency archives. In fact, there was arguably a kind of gendering of the sources themselves, whereby scholars who wanted to find gender in diplomacy tended to look at popular discourses (gendered feminine) rather than at the records of diplomacy (gendered masculine). This left the impression, as Amy Kaplan (1994) has argued, that gender "enters diplomatic history only through the aegis of culture." More recent scholarship on gender and Cold War foreign policy has built on these earlier approaches, and historians continue to fine-tune and adapt the methodologies of literary and cultural studies to traditional historical analysis of diplomacy. Much of the newer work on gender and foreign policy now analyzes gender in sources that few postwar Americans would have laid eyes on. Cold War historians excavate the classified archival materials of presidents, defense bureaucracies, military leaders, intelligence agencies, and nongovernmental actors engaged in diplomacy at various levels. Their analysis of these institutional documents produced in relatively remote political environments is no different than the cultural historian's analysis of documents produced for mass consumption. Like Cold War films or science fiction literature, traditional diplomatic documents are cultural artifacts that can reveal something about the operation of gender in the Cold War era.

An examination of particular moments in Cold War history from the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations may help readers see how this work is done. Diplomatic historians have long debated questions about the emergence of chilly relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II. Volumes have been written about how the two superpowers sought military, economic, and territorial advantages as they tried to construct a postwar world hospitable to their own interests. Many scholars have focused on the development of the doctrine of containment, foreshadowed by the 1947 Truman Doctrine (which pledged the United States to fight communism in Greece and Turkey), and then articulated more thoroughly by George Kennan, the State Department analyst who penned the now famous "long telegram" in early 1946, followed by the "Sources of Soviet Conduct" article in July 1947. Historians have scrutinized Kennan's policy recommendations and rhetorical flourishes for decades, but until the late 1990s, no historian had done a close textual analysis that incorporated gender analysis. In fact, the question of how gender has shaped the political assumptions, worldviews, and policies of cold warriors has yet to be asked in a systematic way for the whole of the Cold War. Nevertheless, new studies have yielded some compelling findings on particular episodes in Cold War history.

Using the insights of gender studies, historian Frank Costigliola found that George Kennan's writings were rife with gendered metaphors that represented the Cold War as an emotional, sexually charged struggle between a man and woman. Kennan's favorite analogies to describe the changing postwar relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union depended heavily on gender, family, and sexual ideologies and imagery. For example, Kennan likened the relationship between Soviet citizens and their government to a wife who becomes gradually disillusioned with her husband and seeks a divorce from him. Russian people, in general, were gendered feminine, Kennan's way of conveying his firm view that the Soviet citizenry was beholden to their cruel and despotic government, gendered as a hypermasculine authority figure. In his telegram, Kennan went so far as to portray the Soviet government as a rapist who tried to exert "unceasing pressure" with "penetration" into Western society. These gendered metaphors and tropes are not just casual talk; they are the stuff of politics, according to Costigliola and others. Kennan's writings shaped the political environment in which policymakers thought about and negotiated with the Soviets; the invocation of highly gendered and sexualized motifs, Costigliola notes in "'Unceasing Pressure for Penetration'" (1997), "created an emotionalized context" that made the exaggerations of a Soviet threat seem "rational and credible," thus closing off deeper deliberation about the reality and dimensions of that threat. Other scholars, too, have delved into diplomatic sources to see how policymakers relied on gender to understand diplomatic relations between states. Historian Michelle Mart examined the gendered discourses of U.S. relations with Israel in the Truman and Eisenhower years. In this case, gender helps explain how Israeli Jews became worthy of a close relationship with the United States from 1948 through the 1950s, that is, only after they had proclaimed statehood and strenuously resisted subsequent Arab attacks. An analysis of the diplomatic exchanges between the United States and Israel reveals that the manly pursuits of statehood and warfare transformed Israeli Jews, in the eyes of the U.S. policymakers, from marginal global players to muscular fighters, sex symbols, and triumphant underdogs. Jewish "tough guys" had proven their mettle in the battle for statehood, and the reward for their virile and vigorous struggle was a dependable, long-term alliance with the United States. Gender defined the parameters of that alliance, for a toughminded masculine orientation was considered by U.S. policymakers an important indicator of a country's fitness for a close political and military alliance with a global superpower.

A study of U.S. relations with India in the same time period reveals how the very gendered perceptions that enabled diplomatic partnership with the Israelis disqualified India as a serious player in Cold War politics. According to a study by Andrew Rotter, America's postwar relationship with India was structured, in part, by the gendered perception that India's desire to remain a neutral player in the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union was a signal of its passivity and cowardice. American policymakers, frustrated with India's desire for neutrality, portrayed India itself and Indian diplomats as feminine, meaning in this case, weak-willed, irrational, naive about world affairs, and ultimately undependable. Cold War gender ideologies that valorized masculine rationality and decisiveness as a counterpoint to feminine emotionality and passivity thus shaped policymakers' views that India was acting like a frightened woman who could not be relied upon to sustain a long-term diplomatic alliance in Asia.

Moving forward from the Cold War diplomacy of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations into the early 1960s, scholarly work has uncovered the centrality of gender to the policy assumptions and decision making of the Kennedy administration. John F. Kennedy's cultivation of youth, energetic patriotism, and moral courage has been discussed widely. As historian Robert D. Dean argues, scholars and media observers of the Kennedy presidency have often cited President Kennedy's preoccupation with "toughness" as an issue of personal style or habit, not a matter of gender politics. In fact, Kennedy's foreign policy interests and energies were a reflection of his views that American manhood was threatened by indulgent consumption at home and communist insurgency abroad, both of which required the diplomatic muscle flexing of tough-minded cold warriors. Kennedy's physical fitness programs would strengthen youth at home, while his new Peace Corps would dispatch an energetic corps of youth to all ends of the globe to fight the Cold War with American ideology and first-world technology. Meanwhile, his counterinsurgency measures, embodied by the elite Green Berets, would counter Soviet aggression by discouraging any potential—and quashing any real—Soviet-sponsored indigenous uprisings. In essence, Dean claims, Kennedy's policies were a projection of his perception that American men had grown soft and idle in the postwar period, and that the antidote to this crisis of masculinity was an infusion of bellicose and brawny political leadership at home and abroad.

We can reach further back in time, to the nineteenth century, to apprehend gender meanings in American foreign policy. Kristin L. Hoganson's 1998 study about the operation of gender in the Spanish-American War, for example, nudges historians to confront difficult questions about the causal role of gender in American foreign policy decisions. Like the scholarship on gender and the Cold War, her study is premised on the notion "that the conduct of foreign policy does not occur in a vacuum, that political decision makers are shaped by their surrounding cultures," and that "inherited ideas about gender" are a part of that culture and thus shape profoundly the views of foreign policymakers. In the case of the Spanish-American War, Hoganson states that gender ideals "played an exceptionally powerful and traceable role" in the decision to go to war. Advocates of intervention in Cuba and the Philippines believed that international aggression would fortify American nationalism and manhood at the same time. They drew on nineteenth-century ideas about "manly" character and citizenship, arguing that a war for territorial and economic expansion would energize and rehabilitate American manhood, which, they claimed, had grown soft without the challenges of frontier expansion, agricultural production, and warrior experience. Layered upon these concerns was another: women's growing political activism and their insistence on the right to vote. An imperial war, according to interventionists, would certify gender traditionalism (man as protector, women as the protected) and restore the manly (and womanly) virtues and character that were the basis of American democracy.

Interestingly, we see a striking repetition of gender themes between the foreign policy environments of the late nineteenth century and the Cold War era: a perceived crisis of masculinity (notably, associated with consumption in both centuries), an emergent anxiety about women's independence, and a confidence that a virile and robust American diplomatic posture abroad could go far to solve the twin problems of gender disorder at home and global threats abroad. In both periods of expansionist impulse, concerns about masculinity and femininity merged with concerns about affairs of state. Whatever the century or whatever the case study, then, late-twentieth-century scholarship made big and insistent claims that gender ideologies were a fundamental part of foreign policy formulation. In all of the examples cited, it appears that gender shaped the identities of foreign policymakers themselves before they arrived in Washington, and that it continued to shape their assumptions, anxieties, aspirations, and actions once they were fully ensconced in diplomatic circles.

Gender and the Historiography of American Foreign Policy

Historians who study gender will find all of the above themes familiar, but scholars who have not yet tangled with gender analysis in their studies of foreign policy might find the approaches dubious and the conclusions unconvincing. Indeed, since gender topics first appeared in the pages of diplomatic history journals, historians have debated the merits of gender analysis at conferences, in on-line forums, in journals, and in their own monographs. One of the reasons for this debate is that some of the gender-themed studies of American foreign relations gained momentum in fields outside of diplomatic history and, indeed, outside of the history discipline itself, in the more literary-focused arena of cultural studies. Skeptics of the gender approach have wondered aloud what diplomatic historians can learn from stories about sexual metaphors, "tough Jews," feminized Indians, and the gender tropes of imperial expansion and war. They have accused gender historians of paying too much attention to issues of representation at the cost of asking hard questions about causation. Some have argued that gender scholars have borrowed too heavily from other disciplines and have introduced questionable theories, methodologies, and insights into the field.

These criticisms are important and worth some elaboration. In fact, a great deal of the work on gender is indebted to postmodernist and cultural studies approaches, which cross disciplinary boundaries, take language seriously, and insist that historians interrogate not only the construction of reality in primary documents but the social construction of their own historical narratives. Cultural studies approaches differ, of course, but all involve close scrutiny of the unarticulated assumptions that underlay the legitimation, expression, and resistance of power. As Costigliola observes in "The Nuclear Family" (1997), "gender norms acted as silent organizers" of power in the diplomatic and political realms. Perhaps, then, what has made gender analysis controversial in diplomatic history is the fact that those who recognized these silences in their documents have also exposed some of the methodological silences of their discipline as well. Turning their critical eye from primary to secondary sources, gender scholars have provocatively suggested that gender norms might have also tacitly shaped the historiography of American foreign relations, thus calling into question some of the disciplinary "truths" of diplomatic history. Drawing on the insights of postmodernism, these scholars have argued that the historiography itself is a social construction, and that narratives about foreign policy (or any historical phenomena) are human creations, subject to the inherited biases and assumptions of time and place.

Such challenges to the discipline and its historiography have evoked spirited criticism of postmodernism, gender analysis, and critical theory in general. Some historians claim that post-modernist gender approaches are jargon-filled intellectual exercises that have done little to enlighten the key debates in the field. More than a few have said that investigations of language and representation have taken diplomatic history too far afield from its traditional units of study (the nation-state, for example) and its tried and true methodology of document analysis and synthesis. In particular, critics have challenged the post-modernist claim that historical evidence does not benignly reveal a "real" world or a central "truth," and that the evidence itself is a selective representation that can suppress multiple truths and heterogeneous realities. They maintain that such critical approaches, of which gender analysis is an elemental part, have spilled too much ink probing language and ideology rather than apprehending the real reasons for foreign policy decisions and outcomes.

While critics have argued that the new work on gender has better explained the connections between gender, culture, and diplomacy, rather than causation, those whose scholarship has been integral to this historiographical turn maintain that clear causation is hard to identify for any scholar, working on any problem, in any era. In fact, most gender scholars would agree that gender analysis does not explain reductively a single cause for a particular action, and that sometimes, gender meanings are not the most salient or significant aspects of a historical puzzle. Rather, they would argue, gender analysis abets the historian's effort to get closer to a reasonable and reliable set of explanations about a particular historical problem. Historians who seriously engage gender do not shy away from questions about causation, but they tend to approach overarching causal explanations with caution. The precise effect of George Kennan's "long telegram" on policymaking, for example, is impossible to discern, but it seems clear that his writings simplified what should have been a complex debate about Soviet intentions, and that his highly gendered, emotional musings naturalized—and thus rationalized—a set of diplomatic maneuvers that positioned the Soviets as unreliable allies and credible threats. In the case of the Spanish-American War, the societal panic about masculinity in decline reveals how gender "pushed" and "provoked" warfare as an antidote to the changes in nineteenth-century family and gender relations. And in the case of President Kennedy's foreign policy programs, the gender experiences of Kennedy and his elite policy cohort, along with the gender ideologies and anxieties of the postwar era, motivated the president to respond to his Cold War environment as an Ivy League tough guy who could martial the resources to assure American hegemony.

These debates about gender and causation will, no doubt, continue, but in some ways they may miss the point. No historian has endowed gender with monocausal superpowers; in fact, many scholars of gender point out that the causal relationship between gender and foreign policy needs to be teased out even further. And although asking the "how" and "why" questions continues to be a staple of the discipline, perhaps historians need to reexamine this preoccupation with causation. The studies of Kennan and Kennedy are instructive here. As Costigliola's "'Unceasing Pressure for Penetration'" has made clear, the questions about gender's causal effects in foreign policy formulation "arise from the premise that there must be single, clear, unequivocal causes for policies and actions," a premise that historians have repeatedly tested and found wanting. Even vocal critics of the gender approach have acknowledged that no single theory or explanatory framework can possibly explain the complexities of American foreign policymaking. As Dean has aptly stated, "gender must be understood not as an independent cause of policy decisions, but as part of the very fabric of reasoning employed by officeholders." And so, too, it should be for historians—that gender become one part of the fabric of our historical analysis, not a separate, unrelated path of inquiry.

Together, women's history and gender studies have enabled historians to conceive of foreign policy more broadly, inviting more actors, methods, and theories into the endeavor. A gender analysis offers one way to recast and expand the debates about the history of diplomacy. Its newness, relative to other approaches, has generated both excitement and skepticism, and as new work is published, historians will have new opportunities to debates its impact and merits.

Bibliography

Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women's Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights. Syracuse, N.Y., 1993.

Cohn, Carol. "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." Signs 12 (winter 1987): 687–718. A gender analysis of nuclear strategy debates.

Cooke, Miriam, and Angela Woollacott, eds. Gendering War Talk. Princeton, N.J., 1993. An interdisciplinary collection on gender and war.

Costigliola, Frank. "'Unceasing Pressure for Penetration': Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation of the Cold War." Journal of American History 83 (March 1997): 1309–1339.

——. "The Nuclear Family: Tropes of Gender and Pathology in the Western Alliance." Diplomatic History 21 (spring 1997): 163–183.

Crapol, Edward P. Women and American Foreign Policy: Lobbyists, Critics, and Insiders. Wilmington, Del., 1992.

"Culture, Gender, and Foreign Policy: A Symposium." Diplomatic History 18 (winter 1994): 47–70. A collection of articles and commentaries on the application of gender analysis to diplomatic history.

Dean, Robert D. "Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy." Diplomatic History 22 (winter 1998): 29–62.

D'Emilio, John. "Bonds of Oppression: Gay Life in the 1950s." In his Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. Chicago, 1983. Discusses links between anticommunism and containment of sexuality.

Enloe, Cynthia. Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women's Lives. London, 1983. One of the earliest works to theorize about women, war, and international relations.

——. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley, Calif., 1989. A useful primer on gender and foreign relations.

Goedde, Petra. "From Villains to Victims: Fraternization and the Feminization of Germany, 1945–1947." Diplomatic History 23 (winter 1999): 1–20.

Harris, Adrienne, and Ynestra King, eds. Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics. Boulder, Colo., 1989. An introduction to issues of women, gender, and peace activism.

Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz. Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. New Haven, Conn., 1987.

Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven, Conn., 1998.

Hunter, Jane. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China. New Haven, Conn., 1984.

Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington, Ind., 1989.

Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917–1994. New Brunswick, N.J., 1995.

Kaplan, Amy. "Domesticating Foreign Policy." Diplomatic History 18 (winter 1994): 97–105.

Mart, Michelle. "Tough Guys and American Cold War Policy: Images of Israel, 1948–1960." Diplomatic History 20 (summer 1996): 357–380.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York, 1988. An analysis of gender, family, and Cold War culture.

McEnaney, Laura. Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties. Princeton, N.J., 2000. Includes lengthy analysis of women, gender, nuclear preparedness, and the national security state.

Meyer, Leisa. Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women's Army Corps During World War II. New York, 1996. A discussion of gender, sexuality, and military mobilization.

Papachristou, Judith. "American Women and Foreign Policy, 1898–1905: Exploring Gender in Diplomatic History." Diplomatic History 14 (fall 1990): 493–509.

Rosenberg, Emily S. "Gender." Journal of American History 77 (June 1990): 116–124. An overview of historiographical approaches on women, gender, and foreign policy.

——. "Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy: Narratives of Money and Manliness." Diplomatic History 22 (spring 1998): 155–176. A useful discussion of gender, critical theory, and diplomatic history.

——. "Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the 'American Century.'" Diplomatic History 23 (summer 1999): 479–497.

Rotter, Andrew J. "Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947–1964." Journal of American History 81 (September 1994): 518–542.

Smith, Geoffrey S. "National Security and Personal Isolation: Sex, Gender, and Disease in the Cold-War United States." International History Review 14 (May 1992): 307–337.

Swerdlow, Amy. Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s. Chicago, 1993.

Tickner, J. Ann. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. New York, 1992.

Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000. A study of female photojournalists and the gendered representations of war and foreign relations.

— Laura McEnaney

A grammatical category indicating the sex, or lack of sex, of nouns and pronouns. The three genders are masculine, feminine, and neuter. He is a masculine pronoun; she is a feminine pronoun; it is a neuter pronoun. Nouns are classified by gender according to the gender of the pronoun that can substitute for them. In English, gender is directly indicated only by pronouns.

Sex; the category to which an individual is assigned on the basis of sex.

Quotes:

"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above." - Virginia Woolf

"It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself superior." - Virginia Woolf

"Except for their genitals, I don't know what immutable differences exist between men and women. Perhaps there are some other unchangeable differences; probably there are a number of irrelevant differences. But it is clear that until social expectations for men and women are equal, until we provide equal respect for both sexes, answers to this question will simply reflect our prejudices." - Naomi Weisstein

"It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes." - Arianna Stassinopoulos

"To be sure he's a Man, the male must see to it that the female be clearly a Woman, the opposite of a Man, that is, the female must act like a faggot." - Valerie Solanis

"In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity." - Camille Paglia

See more famous quotes about Gender

For other uses, see Gender (disambiguation).

Three gender symbols: intersex or transgender (top), female (middle), male (bottom). From symbols for Mercury, Venus and Mars

Gender is the wide set of characteristics that are seen to distinguish between male and female entities, extending from ideas of biological sex to, in humans, one's social role or gender identity. As a word, it has more than one valid definition. In linguistics, it refers to characteristics of words. In ordinary speech, it is used interchangeably with "sex" to denote the condition of being male or female. In the social sciences, however, it refers specifically to socially constructed and institutionalized differences such as gender roles.^[1] The World Health Organization (WHO), for example, uses "gender" to refer to "the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women".^[2] People whose gender identity feels incongruent with maleness or femaleness sometimes refer to themselves as "intergender." Not all cultures adhere to a binary gender system. Some cultures have separate sets of gender-related social roles (distinct from those for men and women) for certain types of intergendered people, such as those covering the hijra of India and Pakistan.

Many languages have a system of grammatical gender, a type of noun class system—nouns may be classified as masculine or feminine (for example Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and French) and may also have a neuter grammatical gender (for example Sanskrit, German, Polish, and the Scandinavian languages). In such languages, this is essentially a convention, which may have little or no connection to the meaning of the words. Likewise, a wide variety of phenomena have characteristics termed gender, by analogy with male and female bodies (such as the gender of connectors and fasteners) or due to societal norms.

While the social sciences analyze gender as a social construct, especially gender studies, in the physical sciences, research links biological and behavioral differences in males and females as determining factors for gender (here meaning "the state of being male or female") in humans and other species; this is assisted by debate regarding the extent to which the various biological differences necessitate differences in gender identity, which has been defined as "an individual's self-conception as being male or female, as distinguished from actual biological sex".^[3] Some scholars reject the framework of biological versus social determinism and advocate a deeper analysis of how interactions between the biological being and the social environment influence individuals' capacities.^[4]

Contents 1 Etymology and usage 1.1 The word gender in English 1.1.1 As kind 1.1.2 As masculinity or femininity 1.1.3 As a grammatical term 1.1.4 As a sexual stereotype 1.2 Concept in other languages 2 Sociological gender 2.1 Social assignment and idea of fluidity 2.2 Social categories 2.3 Feminism and gender studies 3 Biological gender 4 Gender taxonomy 5 Sexual reproduction and differentiation 5.1 Sexual reproduction 5.2 Sexual differentiation 6 General studies 6.1 Genes 6.2 Brains 6.3 Society and behaviors 7 Legal status 7.1 Gender and development 7.2 Gender and poverty 8 Spirituality 9 Other uses 9.1 Linguistics 9.2 Connectors, pipe fittings, and fasteners 9.3 Music 10 See also 11 References 12 Further reading 13 External links

Etymology and usage

The historical meaning of gender is "things we treat differently because of their inherent differences".^[5] It has three common applications in contemporary English. Most commonly, it is applied to the general differences between male and female entities, without any overt assumptions regarding biology or sociology. Sometimes, however, the usage is technical or overtly assumes a particular theory of human nature, which is usually made clear by the context. Finally, the same word, gender, is also commonly applied to the independent concept of distinctive word categories in certain languages. Grammatical gender has little or nothing to do with differences between men and women.

The word gender in English

As kind

The word gender comes from the Middle English gendre, a loanword from Norman-conquest-era Old French. This, in turn, came from Latin genus. Both words mean 'kind', 'type', or 'sort'. They derive ultimately from a widely attested Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root g^en-,^[6][7] which is also the source of kin, kind, king, and many other English words.^[8] It appears in Modern French in the word genre (type, kind, also genre sexuel) and is related to the Greek root gen- (to produce), appearing in gene, genesis, and oxygen. As a verb, it means breed in the King James Bible:

• 1616: Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind — Leviticus 19:19.

Most uses of the root g^en- in Indo-European languages refer either directly to what pertains to birth (for example pre-gn-ant) or, by extension, to natural, innate qualities and their consequent social distinctions (for example gentry, generation, gentile, genocide and eugenics). The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED1, Volume 4, 1900) notes the original meaning of gender as 'kind' had already become obsolete.

Gender (dʒe'ndəɹ), sb. Also 4 gendre. [a. OF. gen(d)re (F. genre) = Sp. género, Pg. gênero, It. genere, ad. L. gener- stem form of genus race, kind = Gr. γένος, Skr. jánas:— OAryan *genes-, f. root γεν- to produce; cf. KIN.]

†1. Kind, sort, class; also, genus as opposed to species. The general gender: the common sort (of people). Obs.

13.. E.E.Allit. P. P. 434 Alle gendrez so ioyst wern ioyned wyth-inne. c 1384 CHAUSER H. Fame* 1. 18 To knowe of hir signifiaunce The gendres. 1398 TREVISA Barth. De P. K. VIII. xxix. (1495) 34^I Byshynynge and lyghte ben dyuers as species and gendre, for suery shinyng is lyght, but not ayenwarde. 1602 SHAKES. Ham. IV. vii. 18 The great loue the generall gender beare him. 1604 — Oth. I. iii. 326 Supplie it with one gender of Hearbes, or distract it with many. 1643 and so on.

As masculinity or femininity

The use of gender to refer to masculinity and femininity as types is attested throughout the history of Modern English (from about the 14th century).

• 1387-8: No mo genders been there but masculine, and femynyne, all the remnaunte been no genders but of grace, in facultie of grammar — Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love II iii (Walter William Skeat) 13.
• c. 1460: Has thou oght written there of the femynyn gendere? — Towneley Mystery Plays xxx 161 Act One.
• 1632: Here's a woman! The soul of Hercules has got into her. She has a spirit, is more masculine Than the first gender — Shackerley Marmion, Holland's Leaguer III iv.
• 1658: The Psyche, or soul, of Tiresias is of the masculine gender — Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia.
• 1709: Of the fair sex ... my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them — Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters to Mrs Wortley lxvi 108.
• 1768: I may add the gender too of the person I am to govern — Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
• 1859: Black divinities of the feminine gender — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
• 1874: It is exactly as if there were a sex in mountains, and their contours and curves and complexions were here all of the feminine gender — Henry James, 'A Chain of Italian Cities', The Atlantic Monthly 33 (February, p. 162.)
• 1892: She was uncertain as to his gender — Robert Grant, 'Reflections of a Married Man', Scribner's Magazine 11 (March, p. 376.)
• 1896: As to one's success in the work one does, surely that is not a question of gender either — Daily News 17 July.
• c. 1900: Our most lively impression is that the sun is there assumed to be of the feminine gender — Henry James, Essays on Literature.

As a grammatical term

Aristotle

According to Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Protagoras used the terms "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter" to classify nouns, introducing the concept of grammatical gender.

τὰ γένη τῶν ὀνομάτων ἄρρενα καὶ θήλεα καὶ σκεύη

The classes (genē) of the nouns are males, females and things.^[9]

— Aristotle, The Technique of Rhetoric III v

The words for this concept are not related to g^en- in all Indo-European languages (for example, rod in Slavic languages).

The usage of gender in the context of grammatical distinctions is a specific and technical usage. However, in English, the word became attested more widely in the context of grammar, than in making sexual distinctions.

This was noted in OED1, prompting Henry Watson Fowler to recommend this usage as the primary and preferable meaning of gender in English. "Gender...is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons...of the masculine or feminine g[ender], meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder."^[10]

The sense of this can be felt by analogy with a modern expression like "persons of the female persuasion." It should be noted, however, that this was a recommendation, neither the Daily News nor Henry James citations (above) are "jocular" nor "blunders." Additionally, patterns of usage of gender have substantially changed since Fowler's day (noun class above, and sexual stereotype below).

As a sexual stereotype

The word sex is sometimes used in the context of social roles of men and women — for example, the British Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 that ended exclusion of women from various official positions. Such usage was more common before the 1970s, over the course of which the feminist movement took the word gender into their own usage to describe their theory of human nature. Early in that decade, gender was used in ways consistent with both the history of English and the history of attestation of the root. However, by the end of the decade consensus was achieved among feminists regarding this theory and its terminology. The theory was that human nature is essentially epicene and social distinctions based on sex are arbitrarily constructed. Matters pertaining to this theoretical process of social construction were labelled matters of gender.

• 1998: Today a return to separate single-sex schools may hasten the revival of separate gender roles. — Wendy Kaminer, 'The Trouble with Single-Sex Schools', The Atlantic Monthly (April).

The American Heritage Dictionary uses the following two sentences to illustrate the difference, noting that the distinction "is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels."^[11]

• 2000: The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient.
• 2000: In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, the use of gender in academia increased greatly, outnumbering uses of sex in the social sciences.^[12] Frequently, but not exclusively, this indicates acceptance of the feminist theory of human nature. However, in many instances, the term gender still refers to sexual distinction generally without such an assumption.

• 2004: Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation — David Haig, The Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex.

In fact, the ideological distinction between sex and gender is only fitfully observed.^[12]

Concept in other languages

Urdu recognizes hijra as a third gender in India and Pakistan since the mid to late 2000s.^[13][14]

Greek (distinguishes biological from sociological in adjectives)

In Greek, male biology and masculine grammatical inflection are denoted by arsenikos (αρσενικός), in distinction to sociological masculinity, which is denoted by andrikos (ανδρικός). Likewise, female biology and feminine grammatical inflection are denoted by thēlukos (θηλυκός); and sociological femininity is denoted by gunaikeios (γυναικείος, compare English gynaecology). This distinction is at least as old as Aristotle (see above). It is a different distinction to English, where 'male' and 'female' refer to animals as well as humans, but not to grammatical categories; whereas, 'masculine' and 'feminine' refer to grammatical categories as well as humans, but not properly to animals, except as anthropomorphism.

German and Dutch (no distinction in nouns — Geschlecht and geslacht)

In English, both 'sex' and 'gender' can be used in contexts where they could not be substituted — 'sexual intercourse', 'safe sex', 'sex worker', or on the other hand, 'grammatical gender'. Other languages, like German or Dutch, use the same word, de:Geschlecht or nl:geslacht, to refer not only to biological sex, but social differences as well, making a distinction between biological 'sex' and 'gender' identity difficult. In some contexts, German has adopted the English loanword Gender to achieve this distinction. Sometimes Geschlechtsidentität is used for 'gender' (although it literally means 'gender identity') and Geschlecht for 'sex'.^[15] More common is the use of modifiers: biologisches Geschlecht for 'biological sex', Geschlechtsidentität for 'gender identity' and Geschlechtsrolle for 'gender role', and so on. Both German and Dutch use a separate word, de:Genus, for grammatical gender.

Swedish (clear distinction in nouns — genus and kön)

In Swedish, 'gender' is translated with the linguistically cognate sv:genus, including sociological contexts, thus: Genusstudier (gender studies) and Genusvetenskap (gender science). 'Sex' in Swedish, however, only signifies sexual relations, and not the proposed English dichotomy, a concept for which sv:kön (also from PIE g^en-) is used. A common distinction is then made between kön (sex) and genus (gender), where the former refers only to biological sex. There are different opinions whether genus should involve biology but within the genusvetenskap which is strongly influenced by feminism it usually does not.^[16] Sweden uses the words sv:könsroll and sv:könsidentitet (literally 'sex role' and 'sex-identity') for the English terms 'gender role' and 'gender identity'.

French (no distinction in noun sexe, distinction supplied by neologistic coinage genre)

In French, the word sexe is most widely used for both "sex" and "gender" in everyday contexts. However, the word genre is increasingly used to refer to gender in queer or academic contexts, such as the word transgenre (transgender) or the translation of Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble, Trouble dans le genre. The term identité sexuelle was proposed for "gender" or "gender identity," although it can be confused with "sexual identity" (one's identity as it relates to one's sexual life).

Sociological gender

Gender identity is the gender a person self-identifies as. The concept of being a woman is considered to have more challenges, due to society not only viewing women as a social category but also as a felt sense of self, a culturally conditioned or constructed subjective identity.^[17] The term "woman" has chronically been used as a reference to and for the female body; this usage has been viewed as controversial by feminists, in the definement of "woman". There are qualitative analyses that explore and present the representations of gender; feminists challenge the dominant ideologies concerning gender roles and sex. Social identity refers to the common identification with a collectivity or social category which creates a common culture among participants concerned.^[18] According to social identity theory,^[19] an important component of the self-concept is derived from memberships in social groups and categories; this is demonstrated by group processes and how inter-group relationships impact significantly on individuals' self perception and behaviors. The groups to which people belong will therefore provide their members with the definition of who they are and how they should behave in the social sphere.^[20]

Categorizing males and females into social roles creates binaries, in which individuals feel they have to be at one end of a linear spectrum and must identify themselves as man or woman. Globally, communities interpret biological differences between men and women to create a set of social expectations that define the behaviors that are "appropriate" for men and women and determine women’s and men’s different access to rights, resources, and power in society. Although the specific nature and degree of these differences vary from one society to the next, they typically favor men, creating an imbalance in power and gender inequalities in all countries.^[21]

Western philosopher Michel Foucault claimed that as sexual subjects, humans are the object of power, which is not a institution or structure, rather it is signifier or name attributed to "complex strategical situation".^[22] Because of this, "power" is what determines individual attributes, behaviors, etc. and people are a part of an ontologically and epistemologically constructed set of names and labels. Such as, being female characterizes one as a woman, and being a woman signifies one as weak, emotional, and irrational, and is incapable of actions attributed to a "man". Judith Butler said gender and sex are more like verbs than nouns. She reasoned that her actions are limited. "I am not permitted to construct my gender and sex willy-nilly," she said. "[This] is so because gender is politically and therefore socially controlled. Rather than 'woman' being something one is, it is something one does."^[23] There are more recent criticisms of Judith Butler's theories which critique her writing for reinforcing the very conventional dichotomies of gender.^[24]

Social assignment and idea of fluidity

There are two contrasting ideas regarding the definition of gender, and the intersection of both of them is definable as below:

Gender is the result of socially constructed ideas about the behavior, actions, and roles a particular sex performs. The beliefs, values and attitude taken up and exhibited by them is as per the agreeable norms of the society and the personal opinions of the person is not taken into the primary consideration of assignment of gender and imposition of gender roles as per the assigned gender. Intersections and crossing of the prescribed boundaries have no place in the arena of the social construct of the term "gender".

The assignment of gender involves taking into account the physiological and biological attributes assigned by nature followed by the imposition of the socially constructed conduct. The social label of being classified into one or the other sex is obligatory to the medical stamp on the birth certificate. The cultural traits typically coupled to a particular sex finalize the assignment of gender and the biological differences which play a role in classifying either sex is interchangeable with the definition of gender within the social context.

“

Gender can have ambiguity and fluidity.[25]

”

In this context, the socially constructed rules are at a cross road with the assignment of a particular gender to a person. Gender ambiguity deals with having the freedom to choose,manipulate and create a personal niche within any defined socially constructed code of conduct while gender fluidity is outlawing all the rules of cultural gender assignment. It does not accept the prevalence of two rigidly defined genders "Male and Female" and believes in freedom to choose any kind of gender with no rules, no defined boundaries and no fulfilling of expectations associated with any particular gender.

Both these definitions are facing opposite directionalities with their own defined set of rules and criteria on which the said systems are based.

Social categories

Mary Frith ("Moll Cutpurse") scandalised 17th Century society by wearing male clothing, smoking in public, and otherwise defying gender roles.

Sexologist John Money coined the term gender role in 1955. "The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism."^[26] Elements of such a role include clothing, speech patterns, movement, occupations, and other factors not limited to biological sex. Because social aspects of gender can normally be presumed to be the ones of interest in sociology and closely related disciplines, gender role is often abbreviated to gender in their literature.

"Rosie the Riveter" was an iconic symbol of the American homefront in WWII and a departure from gender roles due to wartime necessity.

Most societies have only two distinct, broad classes of gender roles—masculine and feminine—and these correspond with biological sexes male and female. However, some societies explicitly incorporate people who adopt the gender role opposite to their biological sex, for example the Two-Spirit people of some indigenous American peoples. Other societies include well-developed roles that are explicitly considered more or less distinct from archetypal male and female roles in those societies. In the language of the sociology of gender they comprise a third gender,^[27] more or less distinct from biological sex (sometimes the basis for the role does include intersexuality or incorporates eunuchs).^[28] One such gender role is that adopted by the hijras of India and Pakistan.^[29][30] Another example may be the Muxe (pronounced [ˈmuʃe] "moo-shay"), found in the state of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, "beyond gay and straight."^[31]

The Bugis people of Sulawesi, Indonesia have a tradition incorporating all of the features above.^[32] Joan Roughgarden argues that in some non-human animal species, there can also be said to be more than two genders, in that there might be multiple templates for behavior available to individual organisms with a given biological sex.^[33]

Feminism and gender studies

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (September 2009)

The philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir applied existentialism to women's experience of life: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one."^[34] In context, this is a philosophical statement. However, it may be analyzed in terms of biology — a girl must pass puberty to become a woman — and sociology, as a great deal of mature relating in social contexts is learned rather than instinctive.^{[citation needed]}

Within feminist theory, terminology for gender issues developed over the 1970s. In the 1974 edition of Masculine/Feminine or Human, the author uses "innate gender" and "learned sex roles",^[35] but in the 1978 edition, the use of sex and gender is reversed.^[36] By 1980, most feminist writings had agreed on using gender only for socioculturally adapted traits.

In gender studies the term gender is used to refer to proposed social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities. In this context, gender explicitly excludes reference to biological differences, to focus on cultural differences.^[37] This emerged from a number of different areas: in sociology during the 1950s; from the theories of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; and in the work of French psychoanalysts like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and American feminists such as Judith Butler. Those who followed Butler came to regard gender roles as a practice, sometimes referred to as "performative".^[38]

Hurst states that some people think sex will “automatically determine one’s gender demeanor and role (social) as well as one’s sexual orientation (sexual attractions and behavior).”^[39] Gender sociologists believe that people have cultural origins and habits for dealing with gender. For example, Michael Schwalbe believes that humans must be taught how to act appropriately in their designated gender in order to properly fill the role and that the way people behave as masculine or feminine interacts with social expectations. Schwalbe comments that humans "are the results of many people embracing and acting on similar ideas".^[40] People do this through everything from clothing and hairstyle to relationship and employment choices. Schwalbe believes that these distinctions are important, because society wants to identify and categorize people as soon as we see them. They need to place people into distinct categories in order to know how we should feel about them.

Hurst comments that in a society where we present our genders so distinctly, there can often be severe consequences for breaking these cultural norms. Many of these consequences are rooted in discrimination based on sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians are often discriminated against in our legal system due to societal prejudices.^{[citation needed]} Hurst describes how this discrimination works against people for breaking gender norms, no matter what their sexual orientation is. He says that "courts often confuse sex, gender, and sexual orientation, and confuse them in a way that results in denying the rights not only of gays and lesbians, but also of those who do not present themselves or act in a manner traditionally expected of their sex".^[39] This prejudice plays out in our legal system when a man or woman is judged differently because he or she does not present the "correct" gender. How people present and display their gender has consequences in everyday life, but also in institutionalized aspects of our society.

Recent critiques of feminist theory by Warren Farrell^[41][42] have given broader consideration to findings from a ten-year study of courtship by Buss.^[43] Both perspectives on gendering are integrated in Attraction Theory, a theoretical framework developed by Dr Rory Ridley-Duff illustrating how courtship and parenting obligations (rather than male dominance) act as a generative mechanism that produces and reproduces a range of gender identities.^[44][45]

Biological gender

Main article: Biology of gender

See also Sexual differentiation

The biology of gender became the subject of an expanding number of studies over the course of the late 20th century. One of the earliest areas of interest was what is now called gender identity disorder (GID). Studies in this, and related areas, inform the following summary of the subject by John Money, a pioneer and controversial sex and gender researcher.

The term "gender role" appeared in print first in 1955. The term "gender identity" was used in a press release, November 21, 1966, to announce the new clinic for transsexuals at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was disseminated in the media worldwide, and soon entered the vernacular. The definitions of gender and gender identity vary on a doctrinal basis. In popularized and scientifically debased usage, sex is what you are biologically; gender is what you become socially; gender identity is your own sense or conviction of maleness or femaleness; and gender role is the cultural stereotype of what is masculine and feminine. Causality with respect to gender identity disorder is subdivisible into genetic, prenatal hormonal, postnatal social, and postpubertal hormonal determinants, but there is, as yet, no comprehensive and detailed theory of causality. Gender coding in the brain is bipolar. In gender identity disorder, there is discordancy between the natal sex of one's external genitalia and the brain coding of one's gender as masculine or feminine.^[46]

Money refers to attempts to distinguish a difference between biological sex and social gender as "scientifically debased", because of our increased knowledge of a continuum of dimorphic features (Money's word is "dipolar") that link biological and behavioral differences. These extend from the exclusively biological "genetic" and "prenatal hormonal" differences between men and women, to "postnatal" features, some of which are social, but others have been shown to result from "postpubertal hormonal" effects^{[citation needed]}

Prior to recent technology that made study of brain differences possible, observable differences in behaviour between men and women could not be adequately explained solely on the basis of the limited observable physical differences between them. Hence the then-plausible theory that these differences might be explained by arbitrary cultural assignments of roles. However, Money notes concisely that masculine or feminine self-identity is now seen as essentially an expression of dimorphic brain structure^{[citation needed]} (Money's word is "coding"). The new discoveries have an additional advantage over the theory of cultural arbitrariness of gender roles, as they help explain the similarities between these roles in widely divergent cultures (see Steven Pinker on Donald Brown's Human Universals, including romantic love,^[47] sexual jealousy,^[48][49][50] and patriarchy).^[51]

Although causation from the biological — genetic and hormonal — to the behavioural has been broadly demonstrated and accepted^{[citation needed]}, Money is careful to also note that understanding of the causal chains from biology to behaviour in sex and gender issues is very far from complete. For example, the existence of a "gay gene" has not been proven, but such a gene remains an acknowledged possibility.^[52]

Gender taxonomy

The following systematic list (gender taxonomy) illustrates the kinds of diversity that have been studied and reported in medical literature. It is placed in roughly chronological order of biological and social development in the human life cycle. The earlier stages are more purely biological and the latter are more dominantly social. Causation is known to operate from chromosome to gonads, and from gonads to hormones. It is also significant from brain structure to gender identity (see Money quote above). Brain structure and processing (biological) that may explain erotic preference (social), however, is an area of ongoing research. Terminology in some areas changes quite rapidly to accommodate the constantly growing knowledge base. An interactive, animated display of early development is available online.

• chromosomes: 46xx, 46xy, 47xxy (Klinefelter's syndrome), 45xo (Turner's syndrome), 47xyy, 47xxx, 48xxyy, 46xx/xy mosaic, other mosaic, and others
• gonads: testicles, ovaries, one of each (hermaphrodites), ovotestes, or other gonadal dysgenesis
• hormones: androgens including testosterone; estrogens — including estradiol, estriol, estrone; antiandrogens and others
• genitals: primary sexual characteristics, see diagram for the "six class system"
• secondary sexual characteristics: dimorphic physical characteristics, other than primary characteristics (most prominently breasts or their absence)
• brain structure: special kinds of secondary characteristics, due to their influence on psychology and behaviour
• gender identity: psychological identification with either of the two main sexes
• gender role: social conformity with expectations for either of the two main sexes
• erotic preference: gynophilia, androphilia, bisexuality, asexuality and various paraphilias.

Sexual reproduction and differentiation

Sexual reproduction

• Sexual differentiation demands the fusion of gametes which are morphologically different. — Cyril Dean Darlington, Recent Advances in Cytology, 1937.

Hoverflies mating

Sexual reproduction is a common method of producing a new individual within various species. In sexually reproducing species, individuals produce special kinds of cells (called gametes) whose function is specifically to fuse with one unlike gamete and thereby to form a new individual. This fusion of two unlike gametes is called fertilization. By convention, where one type of gamete cell is physically larger than the other, it is associated with female sex. Thus an individual that produces exclusively large gametes (ova in humans) is said to be female, and one that produces exclusively small gametes (spermatozoa in humans) is said to be male.

An individual that produces both types of gametes is called hermaphrodite (a name applicable also to people with one testis and one ovary). In some species hermaphrodites can self-fertilize (see Selfing), in others they can achieve fertilization with females, males or both. Some species, like the Japanese Ash, Fraxinus lanuginosa, only have males and hermaphrodites, a rare reproductive system called androdioecy. Gynodioecy is also found in several species. Human hermaphrodites are typically, but not always, infertile.

What is considered defining of sexual reproduction is the difference between the gametes and the binary nature of fertilization. Multiplicity of gamete types within a species would still be considered a form of sexual reproduction. However, of more than 1.5 million living species,^[53] recorded up to about the year 2000, "no third sex cell — and so no third sex — has appeared in multicellular animals."^[54][55][56] Why sexual reproduction has an exclusively binary gamete system is not yet known. A few rare species that push the boundaries of the definitions are the subject of active research for light they may shed on the mechanisms of the evolution of sex. For example, the most toxic insect,^[57] the harvester ant Pogonomyrmex, has two kinds of female and two kinds of male. One hypothesis is that the species is a hybrid, evolved from two closely related preceding species.

Fossil records indicate that sexual reproduction has been occurring for at least one billion years.^[58] However, the reason for the initial evolution of sex, and the reason it has survived to the present are still matters of debate, there are many plausible theories. It appears that the ability to reproduce sexually has evolved independently in various species on many occasions. There are cases where it has also been lost, notably among the Fungi Imperfecti.^[59] The blacktip shark (Carcharhinus limbatus), flatworm (Dugesia tigrina) and some other species can reproduce either sexually or asexually depending on various conditions.^[60]

Sexual differentiation

Sexual differentiation in peafowl

Although sexual reproduction is defined at the cellular level, key features of sexual reproduction operate within the structures of the gamete cells themselves. Notably, gametes carry very long molecules called DNA that the biological processes of reproduction can "read" like a book of instructions. In fact, there are typically many of these "books", called chromosomes. Human gametes usually have 23 chromosomes, 22 of which are common to both sexes. The final chromosomes in the two human gametes are called sex chromosomes because of their role in sex determination. Ova always have the same sex chromosome, labelled X. About half of spermatozoa also have this same X chromosome, the rest have a Y chromosome. At fertilization the gametes fuse to form a cell, usually with 46 chromosomes, and either XX female or XY male, depending on whether the sperm carried an X or a Y chromosome. Some of the other possibilities are listed above.

In humans, the "default" processes of reproduction result in an individual with female characteristics. An intact Y chromosome contains what is needed to "reprogram" the processes sufficiently to produce male characteristics, leading to sexual differentiation (see also Sexual dimorphism). Part of the Y chromosome, the Sex-determining Region Y (SRY), causes what would normally become ovaries to become testes. These, in turn, produce male hormones called androgens. However, several points in the processes have been identified where variations can result in people with atypical characteristics, including atypical sexual characteristics. Terminology for atypical sexual characteristics has not stabilized. Disorder of sexual development (DSD) is used by some in preference to intersex, which is used by others in preference to pseudohermaphroditism.

Androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) is an example of a DSD that also illustrates that female development is the default for humans. Although having one X and one Y chromosome, some people are biologically insensitive to the androgens produced by their testes. As a result they follow the normal human processes which result in a person of female sex. Women who are XY report identifying as a woman — feeling and thinking like a woman — and, where their biology is completely insensitive to masculinizing factors, externally they look identical to other women. Unlike other women, however, they cannot produce ova, because they do not have ovaries.

The human XY system is not the only sex determination system. Birds typically have a reverse, ZW system — males are ZZ and females ZW.^{[citation needed]} Whether male or female birds influence the sex of offspring is not known for all species. Several species of butterfly are known to have female parent sex determination.^[61] The platypus has a complex hybrid system, the male has ten sex chromosomes, half X and half Y.^[62]

General studies

Genes

Chimpanzee

Chromosomes were likened to books (above), also like books they have been studied at more detailed levels. They contain "sentences" called genes. In fact, many of these sentences are common to multiple species. Sometimes they are organized in the same order, other times they have been "edited" — deleted, copied, changed, moved, even relocated to another "book", as species evolve. Genes are a particularly important part of understanding biological processes because they are directly associated with observable objects, outside chromosomes, called proteins, whose influence on cell chemistry can be measured. In some cases genes can also be directly associated with differences clear to the naked eye, like eye-color itself. Some of these differences are sex specific, like hairy ears. The "hairy ear" gene might be found on the Y chromosome^[63], which explains why only men tend to have hairy ears. However, sex-limited genes on any chromosome can be expressed and "say", for example, "if you are in a male body do X, otherwise do not." The same principle explains why chimpanzees and humans are distinct, despite sharing nearly all their genes.

The study of genetics is particularly inter-disciplinary. It is relevant to almost every biological science. It is investigated in detail by molecular level sciences, and itself contributes details to high level abstractions like evolutionary theory.

Brains

Human brain

"It is well established that men have a larger cerebrum than women by about 8–10% (Filipek et al., 1994; Nopoulos et al., 2000; Passe et al., 1997a,b; Rabinowicz et al., 1999; Witelson et al., 1995)."^[64][65] However, what is functionally relevant are differences in composition and "wiring", some of these differences are very pronounced. Richard J. Haier and colleagues at the universities of New Mexico and California (Irvine) found, using brain mapping, that men have more than six times the amount of grey matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly ten times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men.^[66]

Gray matter is used for information processing, while white matter consists of the connections between processing centers. Other differences are measurable but less pronounced.^[67] Most of these differences are known to be produced by the activity of hormones, hence ultimately derived from the Y chromosome and sexual differentiation. However, differences arising from the activity of genes directly have also been observed.

“

A sexual dimorphism in levels of expression in brain tissue was observed by quantitative real-time PCR, with females presenting an up to 2-fold excess in the abundance of PCDH11X transcripts. We relate these findings to sexually dimorphic traits in the human brain. Interestingly, PCDH11X/Y gene pair is unique to Homo sapiens, since the X-linked gene was transposed to the Y chromosome after the human–chimpanzee lineages split.[68]

”

Language areas of the brain      Angular Gyrus      Supramarginal Gyrus      Broca's Area      Wernicke's Area      Primary Auditory Cortex

It has also been demonstrated that brain processing responds to the external environment. Learning, both of ideas and behaviors, appears to be coded in brain processes. It also appears that in several simplified cases this coding operates differently, but in some ways equivalently, in the brains of men and women.^[69] For example, both men and women learn and use language; however, bio-chemically, they appear to process it differently. Differences in male and female use of language are likely reflections both of biological preferences and aptitudes, and of learned patterns.

Two of the main fields that study brain structure, biological (and other) causes and behavioral (and other) results are brain neurology and biological psychology. Cognitive science is another important discipline in the field of brain research.

Society and behaviors

Many of the more complicated human behaviors are influenced by both innate factors and by environmental ones, which include everything from genes, gene expression, and body chemistry, through diet and social pressures. A large area of research in behavioral psychology collates evidence in an effort to discover correlations between behavior and various possible antecedents such as genetics, gene regulation, access to food and vitamins, culture, gender, hormones, physical and social development, and physical and social environments.

A core research area within sociology is the way human behavior operates on itself, in other words, how the behavior of one group or individual influences the behavior of other groups or individuals. Starting in the late 20th century, the feminist movement has contributed extensive study of gender and theories about it, notably within sociology but not restricted to it.

Spain's desperate situation when invaded by Napoleon enabled Agustina de Aragón to break into a closely-guarded male preserve and become the only female professional officer in the Spanish Army of her time (and long afterwards).

Social theorists have sought to determine the specific nature of gender in relation to biological sex and sexuality,^{[citation needed]} with the result being that culturally established gender and sex have become interchangeable identifications which signify the allocation of a specific 'biological' sex within a categorical gender.^{[citation needed]} The second wave feminist view that gender is socially constructed and hegemonic in all societies, remains current in some literary theoretical circles, Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz publishing new perspectives as recently as 2008.^[70]

Contemporary socialisation theory proposes the notion that when a child is first born it has a biological sex but no social gender.^{[citation needed]} As the child grows, "society provides a string of prescriptions, templates, or models of behaviors appropriate to the one sex or the other"^[71] which socialises the child into belonging to a culturally specific gender.^{[citation needed]} There is huge incentive for a child to concede to their socialisation^{[citation needed]} with gender shaping the individual’s opportunities for education, work, family, sexuality, reproduction, authority,^{[citation needed]} and to make an impact on the production of culture and knowledge.^[72] Adults who do not perform these ascribed roles are perceived from this perspective as deviant and improperly socialised.^[73]

Some believe society is constructed in a way in which gender is split into a dichotomy by social organisations which constantly invent and reproduce cultural images of gender. Joan Ackner (The Gendered Society Reader) believes gendering occurs in at least five different interacting social processes:^[74]

1. The construction of divisions along the lines of gender, such as those which are produced by labor, power, family, the state, even allowed behaviors and locations in physical space
2. The construction of symbols and images such as language, ideology, dress and the media, that explain, express and reinforce, or sometimes oppose, those divisions
3. Interactions between men and women, women and women and men and men which involve any form of dominance and submission. Conversational theorists, for example, have studied the way in which interruptions, turn taking and the setting of topics re-create gender inequality in the flow of ordinary talk
4. The way in which the preceding three processes help to produce gendered components of individual identity. i.e. the way in which they create and maintain an image of a gendered self
5. Gender is implicated in the fundamental, ongoing processes of creating and conceptualising social structures.

Looking at gender through a Foucauldian lens, gender is transfigured into a vehicle for the social division of power.^{[citation needed]} Gender difference is merely a construct of society used to enforce the distinctions made between that which is assumed to be male and female,^{[citation needed]} and allow for the domination of masculinity over femininity through the attribution of specific gender-related characteristics.^{[citation needed]} "The idea that men and women are more different from one another than either is from anything else, must come from something other than nature… far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities."^[75]

Gender conventions play a large role in attributing masculine and feminine characteristics to a fundamental biological sex.^{[citation needed]} Socio-cultural codes and conventions, the rules by which society functions, and which are both a creation of society as well as a constituting element of it, determine the allocation of these specific traits to the sexes. These traits provide the foundations for the creation of hegemonic gender difference. It follows then, that gender can be assumed as the acquisition and internalisation of social norms. Individuals are therefore socialised through their receipt of society’s expectations of ‘acceptable’ gender attributes which are flaunted within institutions such as the family, the state and the media. Such a notion of ‘gender’ then becomes naturalised into a person’s sense of self or identity, effectively imposing a gendered social category upon a sexed body.^[76]

The conception that people are gendered rather than sexed also coincides with Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity. Butler argues that gender is not an expression of what one is, but rather something that one does.^[77] It follows then, that if gender is acted out in a repetitive manner it is in fact re-creating and effectively embedding itself within the social consciousness. Contemporary sociological reference to male and female gender roles typically uses masculinities and femininities in the plural rather than singular, suggesting diversity both within cultures as well as across them.

From the 'evidence', it can only be concluded that gender is socially constructed and each individual is unique in their gender characteristics, regardless of which biological sex they are as every child is socialised to behave a certain way and have the ‘proper’ gender attributes. If individuals in society do not conform to this pressure, they are destined to be treated as abnormal; therefore it is personally greatly beneficial for them to cooperate in the determined ‘correct’ ordering of the world. In fact, the very construct of society is a product of and produces gender norms. There is bias in applying the word ‘gender’ to anyone in a finite way; rather each person is endowed with certain gender characteristics. The world cannot be egalitarian while there are ‘assigned’ genders and individuals are not given the right to express any gender characteristic they desire.

The difference between the sociological and popular definitions of gender involve a different dichotomy and focus. For example the sociological approach to "gender" (social roles: male versus female) will focus on the difference in (economic/ power) position between a male CEO (disregarding the fact that he is heterosexual or homosexual) to female workers in his employ (disregarding whether they are straight or gay). However the popular sexual self-conception approach (self-conception: gay versus straight) will focus on the different self-conceptions and social conceptions of those who are gay/straight, in comparison with those who are straight (disregarding what might be vastly differing economic and power positions between male and female groups in each category). There is then, in relation to definition of and approaches to "gender", a tension between historic feminist sociology and contemporary homosexual sociology.^[78]

Legal status

A person's sex as male or female has legal significance — sex is indicated on government documents, and laws provide differently for men and women. Many pension systems have different retirement ages for men or women. Marriage is usually only available to opposite-sex couples.

The question then arises as to what legally determines whether someone is male or female. In most cases this can appear obvious, but the matter is complicated for intersexual or transgender people. Different jurisdictions have adopted different answers to this question. Almost all countries permit changes of legal gender status in cases of intersexualism, when the gender assignment made at birth is determined upon further investigation to be biologically inaccurate — technically, however, this is not a change of status per se. Rather, it is recognition of a status which was deemed to exist, but unknown, from birth. Increasingly, jurisdictions also provide a procedure for changes of legal gender for transgendered people.

Gender assignment, when there are indications that genital sex might not be decisive in a particular case, is normally not defined by a single definition, but by a combination of conditions, including chromosomes and gonads. Thus, for example, in many jurisdictions a person with XY chromosomes but female gonads could be recognized as female at birth.

The ability to change legal gender for transgender people in particular has given rise to the phenomena in some jurisdictions of the same person having different genders for the purposes of different areas of the law. For example, in Australia prior to the Re Kevin decisions, transsexual people could be recognized as having the genders they identified with under many areas of the law, including social security law, but not for the law of marriage. Thus, for a period, it was possible for the same person to have two different genders under Australian law.

It is also possible in federal systems for the same person to have one gender under state law and a different gender under federal law.

Gender and development

Gender, and particularly the role of women is widely recognized as vitally important to international development issues.^{[citation needed]} This often means a focus on gender-equality, ensuring participation, but includes an understanding of the different roles and expectation of the genders within the community.^{[citation needed]}

The Overseas Development Institute has highlighted that policy dialogue on the Millennium Development Goals needs to recognise that the gender dynamics of power, poverty, vulnerability and care link all the goals.^[79]

As well as directly addressing inequality, attention to gender issues is regarded as important to the success of development programs, for all participants.^{[citation needed]} For example, in microfinance it is common to target women, as besides the fact that women tend to be over-represented in the poorest segments of the population, they are also regarded as more reliable at repaying the loans.^{[citation needed]}

Some organizations working in developing countries and in the development field have incorporated advocacy and empowerment for women into their work. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization adopted in November 2009 a 10-year strategic framework that includes the strategic objective of gender equity in access to resources, goods, services and decision-making in rural areas, and mainstreams gender equity in all FAO's programmes for agriculture and rural development.^[80]

The Gender-related Development Index (GDI), developed by the United Nations (UN), aims to show the inequalities between men and women in the following areas: long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living.

Gender and poverty

Gender inequality has a great impact especially on women and poverty. In poverty stricken countries it is more likely that men have more opportunities to have an income, have more political and social rights than women. Women experience more poverty than men do due to gender discrimination.

Gender and Development (GAD) is a holistic approach to give aid to countries where gender inequality has a great effect of not improving the scoial and economic development. It is to empower women and decrease the level of inquality between men and women.^[81]

Spirituality

Further information: Gender and religion

yin and yang

In Taoism, yin and yang are considered feminine and masculine, respectively.

In Judaism, God is traditionally described in the masculine, but in the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, the Shekhinah represents the feminine aspect of God's essence. However, Judaism traditionally holds that God is completely non-corporeal, and thus neither male nor female. Conceptions of the gender of God notwithstanding, traditional Judaism places a strong emphasis on individuals following traditional gender roles, though many modern denominations of Judaism strive for greater egalitarianism.

In Christianity, God is described in masculine terms and the Church has historically been described in feminine terms. On the other hand, Christian theology in many churches distinguishes between the masculine images used of God (Father, King, God the Son) and the reality they signify, which transcends gender, embodies all the virtues of both genders perfectly, and is the creator of both human sexes. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is treated with the neuter pronoun. Hebrew speaking Christians like the Ebionites used the female gender for the Holy Spirit.

In Hinduism,

One of the several forms of the Hindu God Shiva, is Ardhanarishwar (literally half-female God). Here Shiva manifests himself so that the left half is Female and the right half is Male. The left represents Shakti (energy, power) in the form of Goddess Parvati (otherwise his consort) and the right half Shiva. Whereas Parvati is the cause of arousal of Kama (desires), Shiva is the killer. Shiva is pervaded by the power of Parvati and Parvati is pervaded by the power of Shiva.

While the stone images may seem to represent a half-male and half-female God, the true symbolic representation is of a being the whole of which is Shiva and the whole of which is Shakti at the same time. It is a 3-D representation of only shakti from one angle and only Shiva from the other. Shiva and Shakti are hence the same being representing a collective of Jnana (knowledge) and Kriya (activity). Adi Shankaracharya, the founder of non-dualistic philosophy (Advaita–"not two") in Hindu thought says in his "Saundaryalahari"—Shivah Shaktayaa yukto yadi bhavati shaktah prabhavitum na che devum devona khalu kushalah spanditam api " i.e., It is only when Shiva is united with Shakti that He acquires the capability of becoming the Lord of the Universe. In the absence of Shakti, He is not even able to stir. In fact, the term "Shiva" originated from "Shva," which implies a dead body. It is only through his inherent shakti that Shiva realizes his true nature.

This mythology projects the inherent view in ancient Hinduism, that each human carries within himself both male and female components, which are forces rather than sexes, and it is the harmony between the creative and the annihilative, the strong and the soft, the proactive and the passive, that makes a true person. Such thought, leave alone entail gender equality, in fact obliterates any material distinction between the male and female altogether. This may explain why in ancient India we find evidence of homosexuality, bisexuality, androgyny, multiple sex partners and open representation of sexual pleasures in artworks like the Khajuraho temples, being accepted within prevalent social frameworks.^[82]

Other uses

The word gender is used in several contexts to describe binary differences, more or less loosely associated by analogy with various actual or perceived differences between men and women.

Linguistics

Main article: Grammatical gender

Natural languages often make gender distinctions. These may be of various kinds.

• Grammatical gender is a property of some languages in which every noun is assigned a gender, often with no direct relation to its meaning. For example, the word for "girl" is es:muchacha (grammatically feminine) in Spanish, de:Mädchen (grammatically neuter) in German, and ga:cailín (grammatically masculine) in Irish.
• The term “grammatical gender” is often applied to more complex noun class systems. This is especially true when a noun class system includes masculine and feminine as well as some other non-gender features like animate, edible, manufactured, and so forth. An example of the latter is found in the Dyirbal language. A system traditionally called “gender” is found in the Ojibwe language which distinguishes between animate and inanimate, but since this does not exhibit a masculine/feminine distinction it might be better described by “noun class”. Likewise, Sumerian distinguishes between personal (human and divine) and impersonal (all other) noun classes, but these classes have traditionally been known as genders.
• Several languages attest the use of different vocabulary by men and women, to differing degrees. See, for instance, Gender differences in spoken Japanese. The oldest documented language, Sumerian, records a distinctive sub-language only used by female speakers. Conversely, many Indigenous Australian languages have distinctive registers with limited lexis used by men in the presence of their mothers-in-law (see Avoidance speech).
• Most languages include terms that are used asymmetrically in reference to men and women. Concern that current language may be biased in favor of men has led some authors in recent times to argue for the use of a more Gender-neutral vocabulary in English and other languages.

Connectors, pipe fittings, and fasteners

Further information: Gender of connectors and fasteners

In electrical and mechanical trades and manufacturing, and in electronics, each of a pair of mating connectors or fasteners (such as nuts and bolts) is conventionally assigned the designation male or female. The assignment is by direct analogy with mammalian genitalia; the part bearing one or more protrusions, or which is inserted into the other, is designated male and the part containing the corresponding indentations or fitting over or outside the other is female.

This kind of male-female distinction is known as gender (not sex) of connectors and fastners. It provides an example of a technical use of the term gender that evokes association with the physiology, rather than sociology, of male-female differences. Extension of the analogy results in the verb to mate being used to describe connecting two ends together.

Although the gender of tubing and plumbing fittings is usually obvious, this is not true of electrical connectors because of their more complex and varying constructions. Instead, connector gender is conventionalized and thus can be somewhat obscure to the uninitiated. For example, the female D-subminiature connector extends outward from the body, and this protrusion could be erroneously construed as male. Instead, the masculinity of the D-subminiature connectors is defined by specific presence of pins, rather than by the protrusion of the connector, which is also true for many other pin-based connectors like XLR. The male/female distinction is more obvious with ring connectors which are placed around a post, but again with spade or split ring connectors the end alone is not obviously female. Finally, some connectors are hermaphroditic and include both male and female elements in a single unit, such as the IBM token ring connector and the SAE connector; hermaphroditic connections also exist in some specialized tubing fittings.

Devices used for mating two connectors of the same gender have a wide variety of terms, including for example: "gender changer", "gender mender", "gender bender", "gender blender", "sex changer", and the somewhat officious sounding "homosexual adapter".^[83] A specific gender changer can be referred to by either the gender of its connectors, or the gender for which it is designed to connect to. Thus a "male gender changer" might have female connectors to mate two male ends, or male connectors to mate two female ends.

The standard letters "M" and "F" are commonly used in part numbers to designate gender. For example, in Switchcraft XLR microphone or hydrophone connectors, the part numbers are denoted as follows:

• A3F = Audio 3-pin Female connector;
• A3M = Audio 3-pin Male connector.

A cable that has A3F on both ends or A3M on both ends is sometimes referred to as a "gay cable" or "gay cord". The term "homosexual" is also sometimes encountered, generally with humorous intent.

In plumbing fittings, the "M" or "F" usually comes at the beginning rather than the end. For example:

• MIP denotes Male International Pipe thread;
• FIP denotes Female International Pipe thread.

A "gay" male pipe (for example, a short length of pipe having an MIP at both ends) is sometimes called a "nipple".^[84]

• MIP sometimes stands for Male Iron Pipe- it is tapered pipe thread with open end narrow, back end bigger.
• FIP sometimes stands for female Iron Pipe fitting, that goes into MIP. It is not as tapered as MIP. As FIP fitting is inserted into MIP fitting, as the nut is turned, the FIP will pinch into MIP at closed end, making a tight seal. This sometimes is contrast to Compression fitting. The difference is in the tapering of the thread.

A compression fitting has a normal thread (like a screw) and relies on an olive style ferret (soft copper which compresses) or more commonly a tap washer (fibre or rubber) to provide a watertight seal. So for attaching to most taps (plastic or steel) you'd use this, and remember to put a washer on! Normally the male threaded member has a blund end that the washer sits against. Or if it's to fit to a copper pipe, you stick on an olive, which then squashes against two bevelled edges and holds the pipe watertight.

A female iron connection has a tapered thread - which thins out to the end of the pipe. As you tighten against it, the ever-decreasing thread depth means that the connection becomes watertight. You'd not use an olive or washer here - instead you use a bit of ptfe tape Telfon tape wrapped around the thread. So for attaching to radiator bodies you normally have this sort of joint, where you have a hard (non-malleable) material to join to.

Music

In western music theory, keys, chords, and scales are often described as having major or minor tonality, sometimes related to masculine and feminine.^{[citation needed]} By analogy, the major scales are masculine (clear, open, extroverted), while the minor scales are given feminine qualities (dark, soft, introverted). German uses the word Tongeschlecht ("Tone gender") for tonality, and the words Dur (from Latin durus, hard) for major and moll (from Latin mollis, soft) for minor. See Major and minor.

See also

Look up gender in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

General

• Androcentrism
• Androgyny
• Biological determinism
• Epicene
• Femininity
• Gender bender
• Gender differences
• Gender equality
• Gender inequality
• Gender role
• Gynocentrism
• Masculinity
• Misandry
• Misogyny
• Postgenderism
• Sexism
• Sexual identity
• Transgender

Books

• Brain Sex, Anne Moir and David Jessel, 1989.
• The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine, 2006.

Other

• List of animal names — Animal: male, female; horse: stallion, mare; human: man, woman; etc..

References

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73. ^ Wearing, B 1996, Gender: The Pain and Pleasure of Difference, Longman, Melbourne.
74. ^ Acker, J 2000, ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations’, in M Kimmel with A Aronson (eds), The Gendered Society Reader, Oxford University Press, New York.
75. ^ Glover & Kaplan, 2000, p. xxi.
76. ^ Glover, D & Kaplan, C 2000, Genders, Routledge, New York.
77. ^ Lloyd, M 1999, ‘Performativity, Parody, Politics’ in CULT 19016 Contemporary Modes of Culture Resource Materials, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton.
78. ^ See for example http://www.jstor.org/pss/201865
79. ^ "Gender and the MDGS". Overseas Development Institute. September 2008. http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/odi-publications/briefing-papers/42-gender-mdgs-poverty.pdf. 
80. ^ "Gender equity". Food and Agriculture Organization. November 2009. http://www.fao.org/gender/gender-home/gender-programme/gender-equity/en/. 
81. ^ Chant. S. 2008. The ‘feminisation of poverty’ and the ‘feminisation’ of anti-poverty programmes: Room for revision? Journal of development studies 44(2):165-197.
82. ^ "The Male-Female Hologram," Ashok Vohra, Times of India, March 8, 2005, Page 9
83. ^ Jargon File: gender mender
84. ^ Chrome Fittings & Nipples

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Thinking Gender. New York & London: Routledge, 1990.

Further reading

• Chafetz, JS. Masculine/Feminine or Human? An Overview of the Sociology of Sex Roles. Itasca, Illinois: F. E. Peacock, 1974 (1st ed.), 1978 (2nd ed.). ISBN 0875812317. OCLC 4348310. 
• Lepowsky, Maria. Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. ISBN 0231081200. OCLC 28183522. 
• Lerro, Bruce "Power in Eden: The Emergence of Gender Hierarchies in the Ancient World", 2005, Trafford Publishing . ISBN 1412021413. 

External links

• Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook
• Children's Gender Beliefs
• WikEd—Gender Differences
• WikEd—Gender Inequities in the Classroom
• Gender Museum
• Gender in agriculture and rural development

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - køn, genus
v. tr. - skabe

Nederlands (Dutch)
geslacht, woordgeslacht, (gedrags)kenmerken van een geslacht, veroorzaken

Français (French)
n. - (Ling) genre, sexe
v. tr. - engendrer, donner naissance (arch), (Ling) s'accorder en genre

Deutsch (German)
n. - Geschlecht, Genus
v. - erzeugen, entstehen

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - γένος, (γραμμ.) γένος, φύλο

Italiano (Italian)
genere, sesso

Português (Portuguese)
n. - gênero (m) (Gram.), sexo (m) (coloq.)

Русский (Russian)
грамматический род, пол, относящийся к грамматическому роду, относящийся к полу

Español (Spanish)
n. - sexo, género
v. tr. - engendrar, criar, producir

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - genus, kön

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
性, 生

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 性
v. tr. - 生

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 성[별]
v. tr. - 발생하게 하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 性

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الجنس‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מין (בדקדוק), סוג, מין (מדוברת), כל אחד מהמינים הדקדוקיים נקבה, זכר וסתמי‬
v. tr. - ‮הוליד (מיושן)‬

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