gender roles history essay

A global story

This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series . In this essay series, Brookings scholars, public officials, and other subject-area experts examine the current state of gender equality 100 years after the 19th Amendment was adopted to the U.S. Constitution and propose recommendations to cull the prevalence of gender-based discrimination in the United States and around the world.

The year 2020 will stand out in the history books. It will always be remembered as the year the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the globe and brought death, illness, isolation, and economic hardship. It will also be noted as the year when the death of George Floyd and the words “I can’t breathe” ignited in the United States and many other parts of the world a period of reckoning with racism, inequality, and the unresolved burdens of history.

The history books will also record that 2020 marked 100 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment in America, intended to guarantee a vote for all women, not denied or abridged on the basis of sex.

This is an important milestone and the continuing movement for gender equality owes much to the history of suffrage and the brave women (and men) who fought for a fairer world. Yet just celebrating what was achieved is not enough when we have so much more to do. Instead, this anniversary should be a galvanizing moment when we better inform ourselves about the past and emerge more determined to achieve a future of gender equality.

Australia’s role in the suffrage movement

In looking back, one thing that should strike us is how international the movement for suffrage was though the era was so much less globalized than our own.

For example, how many Americans know that 25 years before the passing of the 19th Amendment in America, my home of South Australia was one of the first polities in the world to give men and women the same rights to participate in their democracies? South Australia led Australia and became a global leader in legislating universal suffrage and candidate eligibility over 125 years ago.

This extraordinary achievement was not an easy one. There were three unsuccessful attempts to gain equal voting rights for women in South Australia, in the face of relentless opposition. But South Australia’s suffragists—including the Women’s Suffrage League and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, as well as remarkable women like Catherine Helen Spence, Mary Lee, and Elizabeth Webb Nicholls—did not get dispirited but instead continued to campaign, persuade, and cajole. They gathered a petition of 11,600 signatures, stuck it together page by page so that it measured around 400 feet in length, and presented it to Parliament.

The Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Bill was finally introduced on July 4, 1894, leading to heated debate both within the houses of Parliament, and outside in society and the media. Demonstrating that some things in Parliament never change, campaigner Mary Lee observed as the bill proceeded to committee stage “that those who had the least to say took the longest time to say it.” 1

The Bill finally passed on December 18, 1894, by 31 votes to 14 in front of a large crowd of women.

In 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first woman to stand as a political candidate in South Australia.

South Australia’s victory led the way for the rest of the colonies, in the process of coming together to create a federated Australia, to fight for voting rights for women across the entire nation. Women’s suffrage was in effect made a precondition to federation in 1901, with South Australia insisting on retaining the progress that had already been made. 2 South Australian Muriel Matters, and Vida Goldstein—a woman from the Australian state of Victoria—are just two of the many who fought to ensure that when Australia became a nation, the right of women to vote and stand for Parliament was included.

Australia’s remarkable progressiveness was either envied, or feared, by the rest of the world. Sociologists and journalists traveled to Australia to see if the worst fears of the critics of suffrage would be realised.

In 1902, Vida Goldstein was invited to meet President Theodore Roosevelt—the first Australian to ever meet a U.S. president in the White House. With more political rights than any American woman, Goldstein was a fascinating visitor. In fact, President Roosevelt told Goldstein: “I’ve got my eye on you down in Australia.” 3

Goldstein embarked on many other journeys around the world in the name of suffrage, and ran five times for Parliament, emphasising “the necessity of women putting women into Parliament to secure the reforms they required.” 4

Muriel Matters went on to join the suffrage movement in the United Kingdom. In 1908 she became the first woman to speak in the British House of Commons in London—not by invitation, but by chaining herself to the grille that obscured women’s views of proceedings in the Houses of Parliament. After effectively cutting her off the grille, she was dragged out of the gallery by force, still shouting and advocating for votes for women. The U.K. finally adopted women’s suffrage in 1928.

These Australian women, and the many more who tirelessly fought for women’s rights, are still extraordinary by today’s standards, but were all the more remarkable for leading the rest of the world.

A shared history of exclusion

Of course, no history of women’s suffrage is complete without acknowledging those who were excluded. These early movements for gender equality were overwhelmingly the remit of privileged white women. Racially discriminatory exclusivity during the early days of suffrage is a legacy Australia shares with the United States.

South Australian Aboriginal women were given the right to vote under the colonial laws of 1894, but they were often not informed of this right or supported to enroll—and sometimes were actively discouraged from participating.

They were later further discriminated against by direct legal bar by the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act, whereby Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were excluded from voting in federal elections—a right not given until 1962.

Any celebration of women’s suffrage must acknowledge such past injustices front and center. Australia is not alone in the world in grappling with a history of discrimination and exclusion.

The best historical celebrations do not present a triumphalist version of the past or convey a sense that the fight for equality is finished. By reflecting on our full history, these celebrations allow us to come together, find new energy, and be inspired to take the cause forward in a more inclusive way.

The way forward

In the century or more since winning women’s franchise around the world, we have made great strides toward gender equality for women in parliamentary politics. Targets and quotas are working. In Australia, we already have evidence that affirmative action targets change the diversity of governments. Since the Australian Labor Party (ALP) passed its first affirmative action resolution in 1994, the party has seen the number of women in its national parliamentary team skyrocket from around 14% to 50% in recent years.

Instead of trying to “fix” women—whether by training or otherwise—the ALP worked on fixing the structures that prevent women getting preselected, elected, and having fair opportunities to be leaders.

There is also clear evidence of the benefits of having more women in leadership roles. A recent report from Westminster Foundation for Democracy and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) at King’s College London, shows that where women are able to exercise political leadership, it benefits not just women and girls, but the whole of society.

But even though we know how to get more women into parliament and the positive difference they make, progress toward equality is far too slow. The World Economic Forum tells us that if we keep progressing as we are, the global political empowerment gender gap—measuring the presence of women across Parliament, ministries, and heads of states across the world— will only close in another 95 years . This is simply too long to wait and, unfortunately, not all barriers are diminishing. The level of abuse and threatening language leveled at high-profile women in the public domain and on social media is a more recent but now ubiquitous problem, which is both alarming and unacceptable.

Across the world, we must dismantle the continuing legal and social barriers that prevent women fully participating in economic, political, and community life.

Education continues to be one such barrier in many nations. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women. With COVID-19-related school closures happening in developing countries, there is a real risk that progress on girls’ education is lost. When Ebola hit, the evidence shows that the most marginalized girls never made it back to school and rates of child marriage, teen pregnancy. and child labor soared. The Global Partnership for Education, which I chair, is currently hard at work trying to ensure that this history does not repeat.

Ensuring educational equality is a necessary but not sufficient condition for gender equality. In order to change the landscape to remove the barriers that prevent women coming through for leadership—and having their leadership fairly evaluated rather than through the prism of gender—we need a radical shift in structures and away from stereotypes. Good intentions will not be enough to achieve the profound wave of change required. We need hard-headed empirical research about what works. In my life and writings post-politics and through my work at the GIWL, sharing and generating this evidence is front and center of the work I do now.

GIWL work, undertaken in partnership with IPSOS Mori, demonstrates that the public knows more needs to be done. For example, this global polling shows the community thinks it is harder for women to get ahead. Specifically, they say men are less likely than women to need intelligence and hard work to get ahead in their careers.

Other research demonstrates that the myth of the “ideal worker,” one who works excessive hours, is damaging for women’s careers. We also know from research that even in families where each adult works full time, domestic and caring labor is disproportionately done by women. 5

In order to change the landscape to remove the barriers that prevent women coming through for leadership—and having their leadership fairly evaluated rather than through the prism of gender—we need a radical shift in structures and away from stereotypes.

Other more subtle barriers, like unconscious bias and cultural stereotypes, continue to hold women back. We need to start implementing policies that prevent people from being marginalized and stop interpreting overconfidence or charisma as indicative of leadership potential. The evidence shows that it is possible for organizations to adjust their definitions and methods of identifying merit so they can spot, measure, understand, and support different leadership styles.

Taking the lessons learned from our shared history and the lives of the extraordinary women across the world, we know evidence needs to be combined with activism to truly move forward toward a fairer world. We are in a battle for both hearts and minds.

Why this year matters

We are also at an inflection point. Will 2020 will be remembered as the year that a global recession disproportionately destroyed women’s jobs, while women who form the majority of the workforce in health care and social services were at risk of contracting the coronavirus? Will it be remembered as a time of escalating domestic violence and corporations cutting back on their investments in diversity programs?

Or is there a more positive vision of the future that we can seize through concerted advocacy and action? A future where societies re-evaluate which work truly matters and determine to better reward carers. A time when men and women forced into lockdowns re-negotiated how they approach the division of domestic labor. Will the pandemic be viewed as the crisis that, through forcing new ways of virtual working, ultimately led to more balance between employment and family life, and career advancement based on merit and outcomes, not presentism and the old boys’ network?

This history is not yet written. We still have an opportunity to make it happen. Surely the women who led the way 100 years ago can inspire us to seize this moment and create that better, more gender equal future.

• December 7,1894: Welcome home meeting for Catherine Helen Spence at the Café de Paris. [ Register , Dec, 19, 1894 ]
• Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World , (Text Publishing, 2018).
• Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, (Melbourne University Press, 1993)
• Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, (Icon Books, 2010)

This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series.  Learn more about the series and read published work »

About the Author

Julia gillard, distinguished fellow – global economy and development, center for universal education.

Gillard is a distinguished fellow with the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. She is the Inaugural Chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London. Gillard also serves as Chair of the Global Partnership for Education, which is dedicated to expanding access to quality education worldwide and is patron of CAMFED, the Campaign for Female Education.

Read full bio

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World History Project - 1750 to the Present

Course: world history project - 1750 to the present   >   unit 4.

• READ: A World Tour of Women’s Suffrage

READ: Changing Gender Roles

First read: preview and skimming for gist, second read: key ideas and understanding content.

• What were “Victorian” ideals of gender roles, according to the article? How did they spread around the world?
• This period saw the rise of the “new women” in Europe and America. Who were “new women”?
• What kinds of impacts did European imperialism have on women in Asia in this period, according to the author?
• How did women in Nigeria attempt to use their traditional roles as mothers to protest British taxes and colonialism?
• How did the rise of Marxism (socialism) create potential for change in gender roles?
• According to the author, did nationalism create new opportunities for gender equality, or not? Explain your answer.

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

• This article begins with the spread of European-inspired “Victorian” gender roles. How were these ideas expressed in new nation-states being created around the world? What does this tell us about empire as a community?
• This article also looks at the spread of ideas like nationalism and socialism as forces that could challenge Victorian gender roles, but only to a certain degree. What does this tell us about the role of networks in spreading new ideas about gender, and their limitations?

Changing Gender Roles

Introduction, changing gender roles in asia, nationalism, socialism, and resistance.

"The women stole the hats [of the British men ], then they rubbed their naked bottoms over the faces and bodies of the chiefs and their court officers, who had dispatched the census takers. The demonstrators moved on to the towns and attacked British merchants whom they held responsible for the declining price of palm products and the high costs of imported goods. When the Yoruba troops, members of an alien ethnic group, were ordered to attack the women, the women turned their backs and mooned 2 ‍   the soldiers—challenging them to 'shoot your mothers.' The soldiers shot down 18 women in a massacre that alerted the British to anti-imperialist sentiments, which would increasingly intensify" (Kaplan 178).

• “Gender” and “the sexes” are not the same thing. The World Health Organization defines gender as something that “refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men—such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men.” In contrast to this is the traditional biological definition of the sexes as male and female.
• When you “moon” someone, you show them your bare bottom. Aren’t you glad you read footnotes now?

Want to join the conversation?

History Cooperative

World History and the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

In his recent—and excellent—study of the development of world history, Navigating World History, Patrick Manning remarks on the lack of intersection between social history and world history as the two fields have developed over the last several decades.[1]

World history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality have also seen relatively few interchanges, which several women’s historians, including Bonnie Smith, Judith Zinsser, Margaret Strobel, and I, have noted in various venues.[2]

Manning does as well in Navigating World History, writing “World history, especially as a history of great states and long-distance trade, included little recognition of gender and little space for women …it remains striking that studies of women and gender roles in world history have developed so slowly and that their development has been restricted to a small number of themes.”[3]

Why might this be? In his comments about this issue, Manning suggests that the reason for this is the “well established presumption that women’s lives are acted out in the private sphere of the family rather than the public sphere of the economy and politics” and notes that one reason scholarship on colonized societies seems to be leading the way in a gendered approach to world history is that “in colonial situations, the state interferes in the working of families and social values generally.”[4]

This may indeed be a well-established presumption among world historians, whom Manning knows very well. Most historians of women, gender, and sexuality today begin with the exact opposite presumptions, however: that women’s history is not the same as the history of the family, that the state has always interfered in the working of families and social values (and continues to do so), that the boundaries between public and private are contested, variable, and shifting, and perhaps don’t really exist at all.

Manning’s statements and his thorough discussion of the field of world history inadvertently highlight what I would see as the reason for this situation: women’s/gender history and world history have both developed at the same time as, in part, revisionist interpretations arguing that the standard story needs to be made broader and much more complex; both have been viewed by those hostile or uninterested as “having an agenda.” Both have, as Judith Zinsser has commented, “had to write with the stories of men’s lives in the United States and Europe paramount in their readers’ memories.”[5]

Both have concentrated on their own lines of revision and, because there is only so much time in a day and only so many battles one can fight, have not paid enough attention to what is going on in the other. Thus neither has a very good idea of what the other has been doing over the last several decades, and each conceptualizes the other in terms that the other would find old-fashioned: world historians see women’s history as a matter of families and private life; women’s/gender historians see world history as area studies and world-systems theory.

The primary revisionary paths in world history and women’s and gender history have also been in opposite directions. In Patrick Manning’s words, “world history is the story of connections within the global human community. The world historian’s work is to portray the crossing of boundaries and the linking of systems in the human past.”[6] As David Northrup commented recently, world history has been the story of the “great convergence.”[7]

In contrast, after an initial flurry of “sisterhood is global,” women’s and gender history over the last decades have spent much more time on divergence, making categories of difference ever more complex. There was, of course, the Holy Trinity of race, class, and gender, but there was also sexual orientation, age, marital status, geographic location, and able-bodiedness. Women’s historians emphasized that every key aspect of gender relations—the relationship between the family and the state, the relationship between gender and sexuality, and so on—is historically, culturally, and class specific. Everything that looks like a dichotomy—public/private, male/ female,gay/straight, black/white—really isn’t, but should be “queered,” that is, complicated so as to problematize the artificial and constructed nature of the oppositional pair.

These differing revisionary paths have meant that most historians who identify themselves as scholars of women, gender, and sexuality thus do not think of themselves as world historians, and both leading and younger scholars who do identify as world historians do not regularly focus on women or sexuality, or include gender as a primary category of analysis. This lack of intersection is reflected in the fact that at the 2003 World History Association conference, there was only one full panel and two individual papers (out of forty panels) that focused on women, gender, or family; at the 2004 conference there were two panels and two individual papers; and at the 2005 conference two papers and no panels. At none of these conferences was there anything on sexuality. Of the eighty articles in the last five years of the Journal of World History, only three specifically examine women or gender, and none focuses on sexuality. Of the more than thirty books in the Ashgate series “An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History 1450–1800,” not one focuses on women or gender, though there is one on families. This could be because gender is so well integrated as a category of analysis that separate articles or books aren’t necessary (in other words, that the “add women and stir” stage has been vaulted over), but this is not the case.

From the other side, well over half of the paper proposals to the Berkshire Women’s History Conference in the last several years it was held (1996, 1999, 2002, 2005) focused on U.S. history, despite the fact that the 1996 Berks theme was “Complicating Categories,” the 1999 theme was “Breaking Boundaries,” and the 2002 theme was “Local Knowledge and Global Knowledge.” The 2005 Berks theme was even more pointedly global: “Sin Fronteras: Women’s Histories, Global Conversations,” but about half the proposals were still in U.S. history. Yes, the “globalization” of U.S. history has affected women’s history, and many of the papers that focused on U.S. topics considered issues such as migration, American neo-imperialism, various diasporas, ethnic identity, and transnationalism. They were still about the United States, however. Of the eighty-eight articles published in the last five years of the Journal of Women’s History, only eight are what I would term “world history” topics, though two-thirds do deal with topics outside the United States. Of the books submitted to the American Historical Association by publishers for consideration for the Joan Kelly Prize in women’s history for the last two years (about ninety books a year), about 40 percent focus on U.S. history, another 40 percent focus on Europe, and about 20 percent are about the rest of the world. Only a handful take on topics that have been at the center of world history, such as trade, cultural diffusion, or encounters between population groups.

Though some people may interpret all these numbers as intentional exclusion on the part of journal editors and conference organizers, I edit a journal and have run enough conferences to know that it more likely reflects a lack of manuscripts or papers submitted. Because conference paper submissions often come from younger scholars, including those still in graduate school, however, the prospects for the immediate future aren’t great—too much world history does not involve gender, and too much women’s and gender history focuses on the United States.

The lack of interchange between world history and social history, and between world history and women’s history, might seem to be directly related, as most stories of women’s history as a field link it with the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s and also with the rise of the New Social History in the 1960s. That latter connection is one that has not always been comfortable, however. In a recent article in the Journal of Women’s History, Joan Scott comments that “there was nothing inevitable about women’s history arising from social history. Rather, feminists argued, within the terms and against the grain of behaviorism and new left Marxism, that women were a necessary consideration for social historians. If they were omitted, key insights were lost about the ways class was constructed. While male historians celebrated the democratic impulses of the nascent working class, historians of women pointed to its gender hierarchies [and] also offered a critique of the ways in which labor historians reproduced the machismo of trade unionists. This did not always sit well, indeed feminists found themselves (and still find themselves) ghettoized at meetings of labor historians.”[8]

I remember this from a conference years ago sponsored by History Workshop Journal, which had only just changed its subtitle to “a journal of socialist and feminist historians,” but in which the two sides of that linking were still quite separate and definitely not equal.[9] That has changed; the editorial board at History Workshop Journal is now exactly gender balanced, and that of Radical History Review has slightly more women than men. (What’s going on in labor history, at least in terms of journals, has been complicated by the dispute between the editors of Labor History and its publisher, Taylor and Francis, which led to a founding of a new journal in 2004, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, edited by Leon Fink. The editorial board of the new journal is distinctly more gender-balanced than that of Labor History, however, and the phrase “men and women” does appear in its mission statement.)

Despite Scott’s sliding from one to the other, labor history and leftie history are not the same as social history, of course, though both are often seen, like women’s history, as growing out of the New Social History of the 1960s. In the last several decades, however, women’s historians have stressed that what they do is not always social history, to avoid the very presumption about the limitation of women’s lives to the private sphere of the family that Manning talks about. They assert that there is really no historical change that cannot be analyzed from a feminist perspective, and no historical change—or continuity—that did not affect the lives of women in some way. (They also assert that these two things are not the same, that is, that feminist analysis does not have to be about women.) They argue most forcefully in historical fields in which the fit seems less obvious and in which the resistance to women’s history has been greatest—intellectual history, political history, military history. This is in part because who doesn’t love a good fight? But also, I would argue, because it has been more satisfying and comfortable to take on people in such fields than those who are closer politically and intellectually. Generally when women’s historians set what they do up against “traditional” history, that “traditional” history, despite Scott’s comment, is more often the story of states and generals than that of labor unions and socialist parties.

The split between “women’s history” and “gender history” also became mixed up in this distinguishing of women’s history from social history. Afsaneh Najmabadi has recently commented that “social history was most welcoming of the former [that is, women’s history], but anxious about the latter, especially as gender became a troubled category in itself.”[10] The development of gender history occurred at the same time as the “linguistic turn” and “the new cultural history,” and in some people’s minds—both in and out of the fields—the two are related. Many women’s historians responded harshly to the linguistic turn. Wasn’t it ironic, they noted, that just as women were learning they had a history, and asserting they were part of history, “history” became just a text and “women” just a historical construct? In her wonderfully titled 1998 article in Church History, “The Lady Vanishes,” Liz Clark wrote, “Why were we told to abandon subjectivity just at the historical moment that women had begun to claim it?”[11]

In an article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Women’s History that surveys books and dissertations in U.S. women’s history 1998–2000, Gerda Lerner documents and criticizes the trend toward studying representation, culture, and discourse. She comments that “the subject of class is being massively ignored, and interest in the economic realities of women’s lives in the past seems generally to be fading.”[12] She also finds, and criticizes, a “low order of interest aroused by topics such as suffrage, women’s organizations, women’s struggles for equality under the law, and political subjects in general,” and calls for more research that “focuses on the activities, thoughts, and experiences of women,” and that also constructs theory that develops a “new paradigm for an egalitarian history of men and women as agents of history.”[13] In recent speeches, Lerner’s critique of the focus on representation has been even sharper.

The linguistic turn provoked strong reactions and led to splits within many other historical fields as well. Most recently, however, cultural history, or rather the more broadly defined “cultural studies,” has portrayed itself not as a divisive force but as a healer of all wounds, a sort of humanistic unified field theory. “Cultural studies” understands itself—at least in self-descriptions on Web sites and in essay collections—as including everything I’ve been talking about: social history, women’s history, world history, gender history. The word “social” appears in most descriptions of cultural studies programs—social theory, social construction of values, social relations—as do words that suggest (though they rarely use the word) history—contemporary and past cultures, change and continuity, present and past.

Cultural studies does not understand itself as growing out of or even linked to social history, however, and even less to anthropology. Both Colin Sparks (in the reader What Is Cultural Studies?) and Simon During (in The Cultural Studies Reader) locate the origins of cultural studies in two books of literary theory, The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart and Culture and Society by Raymond Williams.[14] Sparks does note that these two represented a “shift from the aesthetic to the anthropological definition of culture,” but it was only when literary criticism shifted that a new field was born. The fact that anthropologists had had an “anthropological definition of culture” for quite some time did not seem to matter. Nor did it seem to occur to the folks at Towson State’s cultural studies program that someone, somewhere might have already been studying “aspects of everyday life in both the present and the past,” a phrase they include in their description of the program’s objects of study.[15] They do world history and women’s history, too, of course, studying “gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnicity, globalization, and national identity.” So apparently we can just stop worrying about finding connections and promoting interchange, because cultural studies has done it for us.

There are some problems with this, however, as you can imagine. Despite the sweeping (and often breathless) self-definitions, programs and readers in cultural studies tend toward the literary and the contemporary, as might be expected from programs that often grew out of the theory wing of English departments. Simon During’s introduction to The Cultural Studies Reader notes first that the field’s focus is culture, but then adds, “more particularly, the study of contemporary culture.”[16] A few historians are included in the general readers, and some course descriptions also include the same language about “contemporary and historical” that the program definitions do. But it is, not surprisingly, primarily in cultural studies materials produced by historians that there is much concern with the deep past, that is, the past before the invention of television. These materials are often specifically framed as “cultural history,” however, a reification that has both benefits and detriments; it highlights the historical nature of some studies of culture, but also implies that there is some history that is not cultural, while the definitions of cultural studies imply no such limits.

I don’t think, therefore—to use a highly gendered metaphor—that cultural studies is quite the white knight and unifier that it represents itself as being. That sentiment is shared by some of the historians and anthropologists who have been most associated with the field, yet who continue to stress its problematic nature. Lynn Hunt, for example, whose The New Cultural History was required reading in the 1990s, has more recently published Beyond the Cultural Turn.[17] The anthropologist Sherry Ortner goes even further, putting culture in quotation marks in her edited volume The Fate of “Culture.”[18] Things in quotation marks —the “Enlightenment,” Athenian or Jacksonian “democracy”—are clearly things that raise questions, not answer them or make them moot.

So if cultural studies can’t provide a unified-field theory, and most world history does not involve gender, and most women’s and gender history focuses on the United States, is there much promise of interchange? I think there is, and I would like to end with several examples of work in which I see this promise becoming reality, work that brings together world history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality. Most of these studies do not explicitly present themselves as world history, but they use concepts or investigate topics that have been extremely influential in world history: encounters, borderlands, frontiers, migration, transnational, national and regional identities, and heterogeneity.

Manning is absolutely right that studies of colonialism and postcolonialism seem to be leading the way—so much so, in fact, that we are already into revision and self-criticism in work on gender and colonialism. The Winter 2003 issue of the Journal of Women’s History was a special issue: “Revising the Experiences of Colonized Women: Beyond Binaries,” with articles on Australia, Indonesia, India, Igboland, Mozambique, and the U.S. Midwest.[19]

That issue also had a separate section on historians, sources, and historiography of women and gender in modern India that emphasized “dissolving” and “rethinking” various boundaries. It is not surprising that this section focused particularly on India, for among colonized areas, South Asia has seen the most research. Feminist historians of India, including Tanika Sarkar, Kamala Visweswaran, and Manu Goswami, have developed insightful analyses of the construction of gender and national identity in India during the colonial era and the continued, often horrific and violent, repercussions of these constructions today.[20]

Sarkar in particular highlights the role of female figures—the expected devoted mother, sometimes conceptualized as Mother India, but also the loving and sacrificing wife—in nationalist iconography. Though the theoretical framework in this scholarship is postcolonial, Sarkar and Visweswaran also take subaltern studies and much of postcolonial scholarship to task for viewing actual women largely as a type of “eternal feminine,” victimized and abject, an essentialism that denies women agency and turns gender into a historical constant, not a dynamic category.

The large number of works on India has led some scholars of colonialism to argue that Indian history has become the master subaltern narrative, and that Indian women have somehow become iconic of “gendered postcolonialism.” I was not surprised to find the cover image on a recent issue of Radical History Review, an issue titled “Two, Three, Many Worlds: Radical Methodologies for Global History,” a photograph of two Indian women, the environmentalists Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla.[21]

This choice of image makes sense given the lead article in the issue, which focuses on the aftermath of Bhopal, and given the powerful role of Indian women in global environmental movements. (Along with these two women, Vandana Shiva has become especially prominent on issues of biodiversity and the globalization of resources.) But it does reinforce the iconography.

Because it would be impossible to do justice to the many studies of South Asia, I would like to mention some excellent recent work on other parts of the world.[22] Gender and nationalism has clearly been a key area of scholarship, with edited collections and monographs.[23]

There are articles on gender and nationalism in many of the new collections on nationalism, and a special issue in 2000 of the new journal Nations and Nationalism titled “The Awkward Relationship: Gender and Nationalism.” Feminist Review, Gender and History, and Women’s Studies International Forum have all had special issues on nationalism, and there are chapters on nationalism in the new collections on global gender history, such as Bonnie Smith’s Women’s History in Global Perspective, and in Teresa Meade and my Companion to Gender History. Thus the interpenetration is going both ways, as it must: gender is making it into considerations of nationalism, and nationalism into considerations of gender.

The construction of nationalism and the imagined nature of national communities are important themes in this work, but women are viewed as important agents in that construction, and actual nations do result. Gender is also beginning to show up as a category of analysis in transnationalism, such as the new collection by Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol, Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation, and the new journal Meridians: Feminism, Race Transnationalism.[24]

The construction of gendered ethnoracial categories has been another strong area of research, including Jane Merritt’s At the Crossroads: Indians & Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 and Nancy Appelbaum’s Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History inColombia, 1846–1948.[25] This is also the focus of Susan Kellogg’s “Depicting Mestizaje: Gendered Images of Race in Colonial Mexican Texts” and Martha Hodes’s “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story.”[26] Some of this work, and much of the scholarship on gender in colonial South Asia, is about discourse and representation—in this Gerda Lerner would not be pleased—but much of it is explicitly political, part of the burgeoning feminist work on gender and the state.

Studies that are clearly in what we usually think of as the realm of social history are fewer, but here I would highlight two articles from last year in the Journal of World History, both about North American women in Japan : Manako Ogawa’s on missionary women’s establishment of a settlement house in Tokyo right after World War I and Karen Garner’s on the World YWCA visitation to occupied Japan right after World War II.[27]

Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery explores the way that work and reproduction both shaped the economic value, gendered identity, and day-to-day lives of African women in West Africa and the New World.[28] The ways gendered patterns of consumption shaped trade and production worldwide over very long periods emerge in Michelle Maskiell’s study of Kashmiri shawls and Maxine Berg’s analysis of European response to Asian luxury goods.[29] Several of the thematic essays in Teresa Meade and my Companion to Gender History address social history topics: labor, the family, popular religion, schooling.[30] M. J. Maynes and Anne Waltner provide suggestions of how to do comparative or global social history in several articles focusing on marriage.[31]

This brief survey is certainly not exhaustive, but even a more complete list would not be as long as it should be, and would also be skewed toward certain issues: race, political rights, slavery, representations of the “Other.” There is far less social and economic history in gendered global history than one would expect. These trends are a reflection of what has happened in history as a whole, of course; one can hardly expect a subfield that has been seen as a “fad” now for thirty years to avoid whatever is the newest trend.

But they are also a reflection, as I argued earlier, of historians of women and gender being more eager to take on what seem to be less likely fits—the Renaissance; the French, American, Haitian, and Scientific Revolutions; the Meiji Restoration—to make sure that the stories of formalized power relationships and of intellectual change do not remain stories of ungendered men. As Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar wrote in the introduction to U.S. History as Women’s History, the most significant task has been “to discover how gender serves to legitimize particular constructions of power and knowledge, to meld these into accepted practice and state policy.”[32]

That point still needs to be made, for gender remains what Randi Warne has called an “expertise of the margins” in global political and intellectual history, where there are huge areas that have not been analyzed at all in terms of either women or gender, to say nothing of sexuality.[33] (There are now nearly thirty books on the history of English masculinity, so won’t someone please, please do the manly Mongols?[34]) But I think that world history might provide historians of women, gender, and sexuality with an opportunity to also work on social history topics without seeming too fuddy-duddy.

Lerner’s survey of recent work in U.S. women’s history finds that books, articles, and dissertations on African American women tend to focus much more on women’s organizations and on class than does the rest of U.S. women’s history, and to be “more interested in the realities of lives of the past than they are in interpretation and representation.”[35] The first of these areas—women’s organizations—has seen many studies from a world-history perspective, as so many of those organizations had a global reach and mission. Gendered class analysis from a global perspective, however, is another matter, and one where the insights gained through investigating the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race, and the role of gender in constructions of the nation and national identity, can be fruitfully applied.

We may now be at a point where the opposite paths of world history and women’s and gender history—one toward convergence, and the other toward divergence—could be coming together. In his discussion of the emphasis on convergence in world history, David Northrup commented that this may have been an overly “cherished framework,” and that divergence now needs more attention from world historians.[36] On the other side, historians of women and gender are clearly more willing to pay particular attention to instances of encounter and convergence, as is clear from the exploding amount of scholarship on gender and empire. Increased interchange between world history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality can help develop what we might choose to call the “new, new social history.”

This would not be the breathlessly totalizing unified field theory that cultural studies presents itself as (what the physicist Michio Katu has called “an equation an inch long that would allow us to read the mind of God”), but one that builds on the strengths of many subfields: the tradition of collaborative and collective work in radical and feminist history; the emphasis on interaction, exchange, and connection from world history; the focus on the agency of everyday people from the “old” new social history; the attention to hegemony, hierarchy, and essentialism from queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory; the stress on difference and on intersections between multiple categories of analysis from women’s history.

These are all lines of interchange that offer much, much promise. “Gender” and “global” are two lenses that have been used, largely separately, to re-vision history in the last several decades. Putting them together allows us to create both telescopes and microscopes, to see further and find new things we’ve never seen before, and to see very familiar things in completely new ways.

I presented this paper in January 2005 and revised it over the following year. As it was going into press, the 2006 World History Association conference was held at California State University at Long Beach. At that conference, there were three entire sessions devoted to issues of gender and/or sexuality, and several additional individual papers; one of the sessions was specifically organized to look at “confluences” of gender and world history.

Papers included analyses of brand-new topics and new approaches to familiar topics, some from areas of concern to social historians, such as the family and work, and others from cultural history, such as gendered constructions of imperial encounters. It is clear that the creative interchange between gender history and world history I call for here has already begun, and to that, I say huzzah! Fabuloso! Wunderbar! Ihmeellinen! Odorokubeki! Csodás! Ajabu!

1 Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

2 Judith P. Zinsser, “And Now for Something Completely Different: Gendering the World History Survey,” in The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, ed. Ross E. Dunn (Boston: Bedford, 1999), pp. 476–478, and “Women’s History, World History, and the Construction of New Narratives,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 3 (2000): 196–206; Bonnie Smith, “Introduction,” in Women’s History in Global Perspective Vol. 1, ed. Bonnie Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 1–8; Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Women’s History and World History Courses,” Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005): 133–150; and Margaret Strobel and Marjorie Bingham, “The Theory and Practice of Women’s History and Gender History in Global Perspective,” in Smith, Women’s History, pp. 9–47.

3 Manning, Navigating World History, pp. 208, 210.

4 Ibid., p. 210.

5 Zinsser, “Women’s History,” p. 197.

6 Manning, Navigating World History, p. 3.

7 David Northrup, “Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term,” Journal of World History 16 (2005): 249–268.

8 Joan Scott, “Feminism’s History,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 2 (2004): 10–29. With responses by Afsaneh Najmabadi, “From Supplementarity to Parasitism,” and Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Power and Politics in Feminism’s History—and Future.”

9 That conference, held in 1983, was titled “Religion and Society” and organized by Raphael Samuel, James Obelkevich, and Lyndal Roper, who subsequently edited a conference volume, Disciplines of Faith: Religion, Patriarchy and Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). The conference ended with a session on “Women and Christianity Today,” which the conference organizers note in the book introduction “released a great deal of anger.” This is a very understated description of a scene I will never forget, with people shouting and standing on chairs, those in the back of the room calling for the heads of those who thought that the topic of the session could be discussed in a dispassionate way, and those in the front just as fervently arguing that it had to be.

10 Najmabadi, “From Supplementarity,” p. 32.

11 Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn,'” Church History 67 (1998): 3. Clark also has a book-length consideration of the linguistic turn, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

12 Gerda Lerner, “U.S. Women’s History: Past, Present and Future,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 4 (2004): 10–27, with responses by Kimberly Springer, Kathi Kern, Jennifer M. Spear, and Leslie Alexander. The quotation is on p. 21.

13 Ibid., pp. 22, 24–25.

14 Colin Sparks, “The Evolution of Cultural Studies,” in What Is Cultural Studies? A Reader, ed. John Storey (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 14–30; Simon During, The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1999); Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991); and Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

15 http://wwwnew.towson.edu/clst/.

16 During, Cultural Studies Reader, p. 1.

17 Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and (with Victoria Bonnell) Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

18 Sherry Ortner, ed., The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

19 Claire C. Robertson and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., “Revising the Experiences of Colonized Women: Beyond Binaries,” special issue, Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 4 (Winter 2003).

20 Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (New Delhi: Permanent Black; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) and “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra,” Economic and Political Weekly, 13 July 2002, pp. 2872–2876; Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Kamela Visweswaran, “Small Speeches, Subaltern Gender: Nationalist Ideology and Its Historiography,” in Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 83–125. For more reading on gender and colonialism, see Temma Kaplan, “Revolution, Nationalism, and Anti-Imperialism,” in A Companion to Gender History, ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (London: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 170–185; and Mrinalini Sinha, “Gender and Nation” in Smith, Women’s History, pp. 229–274.

21 Duane J. Corpis and Ian Christopher Fletcher, eds., “Two, Three, Many Worlds: Radical Methodologies for Global History,” special issue, Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005).

22 For surveys of recent work on South Asia, see Barbara Ramusack, Geraldine Forbes, Sanjam Ahluwalia, and Antoinette Burton, “Women and Gender in Modern India: Historians, Sources, and Historiography,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 4 (2003); Nupur Chaudhuri, “Clash of Cultures: Gender and Colonialism in South and Southeast Asia”; and Barbara Molony, “Frameworks of Gender: Feminism and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Asia,” in Meade and Wiesner-Hanks, Companion, pp. 430–444 and 513–539.

23 See, e.g., Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford International, 2000); Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Social Text Collective (Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat), eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage Publications, 1997); and Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

24 Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol, eds., Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

25 Nancy Appelbaum, Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); and Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians & Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

26 Susan Kellogg, “Depicting Mestizaje: Gendered Images of Race in Colonial Mexican Texts,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 3 (2000): 69–92; and Martha Hodes “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (2003): 84–118.

27 Karen Garner, “Global Feminism and Postwar Reconstruction: The World YWCA Visitation to Occupied Japan, 1947,” Journal of World History 15 (2004): 191–228; and Manako Ogawa, “‘Hull-House’ in Downtown Tokyo: The Transplantation of a Settlement House from the United States into Japan and the North American Missionary Women, 1919–1945,” Journal of World History 15 (2004): 359–388.

28 Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

29 Michelle Maskiell, “Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000,” Journal of World History 13 (2002): 27–66; and Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 182 (2004): 85–142.

30 Meade and Wiesner-Hanks, Companion.

31 Mary Jo Maynes and Anne B. Waltner, “Women’s Life Cycle Transitions in a World-Historical Perspective: Comparing Marriage in China and Europe,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 4 (2001): 11–21, and “Family History as World History,” in Smith, Women’s History, pp. 48–91.

32 Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women’s History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 7.

33 Randi Warne, “Making the Gender-Critical Turn,” in Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives, ed. Tim Jensen and Mikhail Rothstein (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), pp. 249–260.

34 In the oral presentation of this paper, I estimated that there were more than ten such studies, and then I decided to count them, which almost tripled my estimate. Many of these have a world history angle, but their primary focus is on British men. They include J.A.Mangan and James Walvin, Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991); Michael Roper, Masculinity and the British Organization Man Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); David Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1994); Donald Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imaging of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1994); James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1995); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996); Mark Breitenberg and Stephen Orgel, eds., Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996); Jonathan Rutherford, Forever England: Reflections on Race, Masculinity and Empire (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997); Revathi Krishnaswamy, Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen, English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (London: Addison Wesley, 1999); John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Elizabeth Foyster Wiley, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999); Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990 (London: Routledge, 1999); Andrew Bradstock, ed., Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001); Michael Mangan, Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Kelly Boyd, Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History 1855–1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Matthew Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew (London: Ashgate, 2004); Thomas A. King, The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750: The English Phallus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Paul R. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2005). This list is probably not exhaustive, and it does not include studies of masculinity in literature, which would add at least another thirty.

35 Lerner, “U.S. Women’s History,” p. 19.

36 Northrup, “Globalization.”

Gender: An Historical Perspective

Social attitudes toward women vary significantly across societies. This chapter reviews recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies, and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children and therefore persist until today. We review work on the historical origin of differences in female labor-force participation, fertility, education, marriage arrangements, competitive attitudes, domestic violence, and other forms of difference in gender norms. Most of the research illustrates that differences in cultural norms regarding gender roles emerge in response to specific historical situations, but tend to persist even after the historical conditions have changed. We also discuss the conditions under which gender norms either tend to be stable or change more quickly.

I thank Susan Averett and Saul Hoffman for comments that substantially improved the chapter. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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Introduction Women, Gender, and American History

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor is associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (2009) and coauthor of Global Americans (2017). Her current project, America under the Hammer, investigates gender and capitalism within a history of auctioning and market culture in early America.

Lisa G. Materson is associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (2009). She is currently completing a political biography of Ruth Reynolds, a leading activist in the movement for Puerto Rico’s independence from the United States.

• Published: 10 September 2018
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This chapter analyzes the methods, sources, and relationship between women’s and gender history, arguing American women’s and gender history is its own interpretation of American history, focused on how ideas about women and gender shaped people’s lives as they participated in the processes of migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, community-building, and political mobilization. It explores the field as an integrated one that embraces tensions between women’s history and gender history, as well as intersectional analysis and new understandings of sexuality, to consider who counts as a “woman” and for what purpose. The field challenges the conventional chronology of the United States and the primacy of the nation as a unit of history. The field’s archive innovation excavates histories hidden in plain sight and scrutinizes silences in the historical record, challenging the nature of historical evidence and remapping what counts in historical interpretation of the past.

Half of the people who have lived in North America and the United States have been women. Like the pictured seamstress stitching dolls in 1947 Puerto Rico, they lived, worked, and died at the center of families and communities. Like her, many dwelled in cities. Others populated isolated outposts and small villages. Their stories—of work and recreation, political struggle and religious inspiration, mobility and stasis—are at the center of the history of North America. Yet, as with Puerto Rican seamstresses laboring under a US-backed investment program called Operation Bootstrap, uncovering and interpreting those stories has required a long evolution in historians’ methods and a revolution in the politics of scholarship.

Generations of women’s and gender historians built the field presented in the Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History. Remembering her early efforts, the scholar Gerda Lerner recalled, “The contempt in which work on women in history was held in the 1960s not only represented career obstacles for the few of us who ventured into that field, but also limited our training and our command of methodology.” Lerner was part of a generation of women historians who confronted profound structural obstacles to placing women at the center of understanding the American past, as well as outright hostility from colleagues for their efforts to bring women’s history into the academy. As pioneers of a new field, this generation trained themselves and each other within university departments that were teaching history as defined and dominated by men. They encountered archives designed to record men’s experiences. Initially equipped with what Lerner called “the tools developed for doing the history of men,” they pioneered alternative methodologies and perspectives. 1

This book continues their innovations, by presenting new chronologies, transnational themes, and the integration of histories about diverse women’s lives with the history of ideas about gender and their consequences. Individuals who lived as women are the focus and anchor of the chapters in this Handbook . At the same time, contributors explore how one of the key struggles these individuals contended with was their gender—who counted as a woman, and for whose sake? Such an understanding reframes the North American past, down to its basic contours and root sources, in ways that at times intersect with and at other times diverge from an American history long oriented around the nation-state and punctuated by turning points of wars and elections. American women’s and gender history is not a subfield of American history that enlivens the larger truth, but rather its own interpretation, focused on how ideas about women and gender shaped people’s lives as they participated in the processes of migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community-building.

Women’s and gender history challenges the conventional chronology of US history because focusing on women’s lives challenges the primacy of the nation as the unit of history. For example, white women’s increasing participation in the paid labor force in the twentieth century, a hallmark of the modern United States, rested on the work of other women, often migrant women of color, to clean their clothes, cook their food, nurse their parents, and nurture their children. The availability of such intimate services depended on the migration of women from Latin America, Africa, and Asia to the United States. A transnational approach, then, best comprehends the lives of women and the operation of ideas about gender and caring work that undergird the modern US labor system. 2

Focusing on gender and women likewise excavates a host of new sources and archives to illuminate the past, often through the lens of sexuality. 3 For example, European men who traded and traveled in seventeenth-century North America depended on personal and sexual relationships with Indian women for their businesses and their very lives. Where once historians scrutinized imperial regulations to understand the fur trade economy, now they must also understand the coerced and consensual sexual relationships that facilitated trade, recorded fleetingly in passed-down oral accounts, priests’ correspondence, material culture, and birth records. 4

The chapters in the Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History incorporate the voices of multiple generations of scholars and the wide variety of approaches they use to understand women and gender in the past, many of which come from other fields in the social sciences and humanities. Perhaps as a result, the essays do not map onto familiar assertions that the continent’s history flowed from enslavement to freedom, from constraint to liberty, from discrimination to rights. Some scholars view the history of women and gender in pessimistic terms, identifying a “patriarchal equilibrium” that has reasserted male power over female lives time and again. 5 Contributors to this Handbook see a more varied story, shaped by differences within and across communities and often surprising patterns of change and continuity in women’s and men’s lives.

Methods, Sources, Perspectives

Writers and readers have long been interested in women who came before, and they have enlisted their imaginations to understand saints, queens, and great-great-grandmothers. For scholars, too, connections between past and present have motivated historical inquiry. In the case of women’s history, feminist commitment to understanding the origins of female subordination, as well as a dedication to celebrating those who rose above their female condition, provided an engine for scholarship, as Lerner’s classic title The Majority Finds Its Past suggests. With their own connections to feminism, early academic historians of women were interested in female social activists of the past, such as abolitionists and suffragists. 6 As part of historians’ turn to social history and histories from the “bottom up,” they also focused attention on the private aspects of women’s daily lives perceived as ahistorical, from reproduction, to childrearing, to domestic labor, to friendship and love. 7 Method and theory merged, as an essential part of their mission was to challenge value-laden divisions between scholars and activists, within professional ranks, and in regard to what kinds of sources “counted.”

One early insight was deceptively simple: that scholarly history was specifically male, rather than universally human. Not only were women’s lives in the past different from men’s, but also the research questions raised by women’s experiences diverged from those previously deemed the proper focus of history. In Regency England, Jane Austen had famously skewered the masculine bias of what counted as history as “quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.” 8 But a new generation pressed further, noting that kings and wars depended on women’s work. George Washington’s rebel troops needed female labor, even if he wanted those women marching out of sight, with the baggage and in the alleys. Furthermore, women’s historians pointed out, military campaigns and politicians depended on ideas about the supposed “natural” relationships between men and women to achieve their power. Washington’s reputation as “father of his country” was designed to make the brand-new office of president seem natural and familial, though he physically produced no children of his own.

Another key insight was that “women” were not and are not all the same. Women scholars of color especially called attention to white colleagues’ own blind spots and assumptions about universality. “With a few noteworthy exceptions,” recalled the pioneering historian of African American women’s history Darlene Clark Hine, “it was only Black women scholars who insisted that Black women’s experiences, precisely because of their race, gender, and class, were often different and distinct in fundamental ways from those of Black men and white women.” 9 Pronouncements about “the status of women” were meaningless given the influence of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identification, religion, and able-bodiedness/disability on women’s lives. Their experiences and identities required intersectional analysis, meaning the acknowledgment of differences within groups and the understanding that overlapping social hierarchies shaped those differences. 10 Think of jazz music, created by artists improvising individually but also performing in relation to each other, said the historian Elsa Barkley Brown, to understand that “white women live the lives they do in large part because women of color live the ones they do.” 11

Women’s historians theorized about gender, but gender history as a distinct field gained prominence in the 1980s, when Joan W. Scott’s highly influential 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” spearheaded a dynamic and sometimes contentious debate over the relationship between gender and women’s history. Scott defined gender as a language of power linked to perceived differences between men and women. 12 This language of power, she observed, was used not only to discriminate against women, but also to support a variety of structures that were not overtly about relationships between men and women. Proponents of Manifest Destiny used female pronouns and feminine imagery to discuss potential territories not because Native people were all women, but rather because casting them as feminine made their supposed inferiority and ability to be physically overpowered by a masculine conqueror seem natural and inevitable. 13 In time, other historians identified variant power relationships and societies that practiced gender distinctions differently than Scott’s oppositional male–female binary. 14 The close but sometimes divergent development of women’s and gender history was evident in 1989 with the establishment of the Journal of Women’s History and Gender & History , leading journals with titles that each signaled a specific intellectual orientation.

Many women’s historians worried that gender history would supplant women’s history. They cautioned against a gender history that, in making women’s history a subcategory alongside the history of men, might once again make men’s historical experiences ascendant. As Alice Kessler-Harris warned, a gender history that did not challenge “the normative view of the world through the eyes of men” risked ignoring the political power of legitimizing women as thinkers—both as historical actors and modern historians—and ultimately killing off the energy and urgency that had created the field to begin with. 15 Concern over losing that political edge affected the reception of gender history, or as Laura Lee Downs asked, “If ‘Woman’ is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night?” 16

Scholars addressed these concerns by thinking about the relationship between women’s and gender history in different ways. Some proposed gender as one of several categories within women’s history, rather than the other way around. 17 Others insisted that focusing on gender brought more women into history as important actors. It was not a coincidence that some of the leading scholars on the history of marriage, international adoption, or sex-reassignment wrote their first books on women’s history topics. 18 Their professional trajectories reflected enduring links between scholarly interest in women’s lives and scholarly interest in gendered power in the United States and beyond.

Gender history did not replace women’s history. Instead what emerged from the tensions between women’s and gender history was a “big tent” of practitioners and areas of inquiry. 19 By the twenty-first century, American women’s history courses across the United States began to include “gender” in their titles or course descriptions. History departments sought applicants specializing in “women’s and gender history,” looking for scholars who were able to teach a range of overlapping women’s, gender, and sexuality courses. The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History , likewise, employs a “big tent” recognition that “women’s and gender history” operates as an integrated field that is fueled by the confluences and tensions of these related categories. The authors employ the category of woman to examine the gendered history of North America and the United States, even while probing the boundaries of the category “woman.” They uncover the structures of law, governance, and knowledge that underpinned gender patterns. Sometimes, such patterns transgressed the female-male binary based on sexual difference; at other times, they shored it up. As a result, “doing gender” does not mean giving “men” and “women” equal time and equal analytical weight. Instead, it means examining the history of masculinity within the framework of women’s and gender history and considering the experiences of those outside a two-sex model. A volume organized exclusively under the rubric of either women’s history or gender history would undoubtedly look different.

No rethinking of categories would be possible without a revolution in research itself, and women’s and gender historians are archive innovators. Faced with a familiar claim that “the sources aren’t there,” they have found traces of women’s actions and decisions in court cases, government hearings, and runaway slave notices. Often, they work with sources created about idealized women who never existed in the flesh. Legal opinions invoked the “natural destiny” of “women”; poems waxed nostalgic about “mothers”; satires lampooned lusty “female” sexuality; in each case, authors perpetuated fictional tropes. Part of the craft, therefore, has been to pierce the impression that such sources describe “truth” while looking for the ways that those same sources created real-life consequences. The other part of the craft has been to look for new kinds of sources, including family papers, oral histories, and material culture.

Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, scholars have challenged the nature of historical evidence and called for rigorous attention to its absences. If histories fail to hinge on women’s lives, they suggest, the archive is the problem, because its silences are deliberate, the result of men and institutions using their records to consolidate their power. Alternatively, others insist, the archive can be a solution. Instead of writing an intellectual history of equality from the essays of white male Enlightenment authors, craft it from the sermons of black women preachers, or the international translations of the female-created health manual Our Bodies, Ourselves . 20 Archival innovation delivers a good shake to prevailing ideas about what “counts” as intellectual history, or for that matter, the history of technology or the environment.

Scholarly research on American women’s and gender history resists a single narrative. The field’s explorations of empire and boundary crossing, workers and households, sexualities and the body, culture and commerce, and activism all challenge any singular subject or cause of historical change. Even that most classic topic of historical inquiry, war, with women and gender at the center, reveals both enduring links between frontline and homefront struggles and the vivid truth that conflicts began long before and continued long after the fighting. American women’s and gender history does not throw out chronology; it reframes events to reveal deeper patterns of change and continuity.

Empire, Boundary Crossing, and the Borders of Belonging

Take, for example, events in the seventeenth-century Southwest. In 1673, seven-year-old Juana was a vulnerable child, kidnapped by Navajos from her Pueblo Indian mother and Spanish father. By the time she died at age eighty, however, her extensive social and kin ties had earned her an estate of two ranches, dozens of animals, and substantial personal property. Her surprising economic transformation pointed to the ways that colonial (and US) imperial encounters in North America pivoted around ideas about how women and men should behave and interact. Imperial travelers, national policymakers, and Native peoples often wielded ideas about what was natural and what was cultural as tools to conquer or contain others. Social and sexual relationships were the proving ground of political power. Emerging in an ad hoc fashion in the earliest encounters, rules about proper relations of men and women were institutionalized by the federal state. At the same time, communities and families used their own gender ideas to decide who moved and who stayed, who accommodated and who resisted. Many times, these two arenas—the formal state on the one hand and families and communities on the other—intersected as women and men mobilized gender ideologies to seize power within institutions as diverse as the military, political parties, or churches.

The law served many of these interests. Formal codification of slavery depended on making the maternal line the most legally significant. Laws about who could marry whom marked the boundaries of national citizenship and the physical borders of the United States itself. Laws about military service, and the financial and political rewards of risking one’s life, opened opportunities to specific groups of men and the women legally attached to them. In this regard, the history of nation-building and expansion was connected to shifting ideas about manhood and masculinity and the authority that some men wielded over women and other men.

But culture and fantasy also worked to encourage some alliances and forbid others, to shore up some men’s power and subordinate the desires of others. Rigid ideas about race emerged within cultural contact zones in which men and women interacted over decades. All along the way, women’s lives as border-dwellers and border-crossers shaped communities and politics. Female captives and refugees, from Native Americans to Spanish colonial girls to enslaved Africans, all experienced lives shaped by movement across boundaries of state and empire as much as constriction within them.

Workers, Families, and Households

Sarah Bagley knew exactly why she and other young white women left New Hampshire farms to work in Massachusetts factories in the 1830s: “We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother’s ambition to be aided.” 21 For everyone in North America, the fluctuating border between “home” and “work” sat at the core of economic life. Indeed, the English term “economy” comes from Greek words for “household” and “management,” suggesting the historical centrality of women’s labor, even as American capitalism has often obscured its value. From the earliest colonial encounters to the rapidly developing “gig” economies of the twenty-first century, the relationship between so-called productive and reproductive labor determined the development of labor flows, economies, and ideas about trade. Colonial economies and indigenous families owed their existence to determining whose labor could be counted on, whose labor coerced, and whose labor rewarded. Over time, evolving ideas about men and women established the terms of economic calculations, often through expanding or restricting membership in a family, household, or other collective.

In the case of unfree women, reproductive labor was part of violent coercion, and their bodies were employed both in field work and as vehicles for commodified investment and future slaves. The diverse slave trades of North America—across the Atlantic, around the coast, or deep in Indian Country—always involved the sexual traffic in women. For the women trapped by that trade, intimate family connection was a source of strength that was always vulnerable to the financial calculations of owners.

Those same owners simultaneously claimed that within their own families, the work of cooking, cleaning, and bearing and caring for children, was not work at all, but rather an expression of care. By the middle of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of people worked independently for pay rather than within a shared household enterprise. Market exchanges upended older ideas about work’s value, and an influential ideology of “domesticity” connected middle-class women to homes that were supposed to represent the opposite of the values of the economy.

The tension between unpaid reproductive labor and paid work continued to mold women’s struggles for rights and protections at work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Employers, masters, and male-dominated labor unions defined the work that women did as unskilled—an extension of their “natural” duties within families—either to justify lower wages for women (in the case of employers) or to shore up jobs and higher salaries for men (in the case of many labor unions). In a cycle that repeated over generations, the labor force was divided by gender and race as government policies and private companies channeled women into jobs deemed culturally appropriate for their status. In response, some women fought to enter new sectors of paid employment, while others—especially women of color—insisted on their right to work within their families, rather than for pay. The developing global economy, in turn, benefited from the expectation that families could tap into networks of women to wash, cook, and care for children, the sick, and the elderly, without pay and with fewer supports than in other wealthy countries. The household—in all of its new forms—still bears the burden of invisible manager of the economy.

Sexualities, Identities, and the Body

“Ex-GI Becomes Blond Beauty” read the 1952 front-page headline of the New York Times article on the American Christine Jorgensen’s gender reassignment treatment, or sex-change operation, in Denmark. Jorgensen funneled her celebrity toward a career as an entertainer, and sought to become a wife. When she applied for a marriage license, however, the city clerk of New York rejected the application because Jorgensen’s birth certificate identified her as male, even though her passport identified her as a woman and her physician provided a letter confirming her sex as a woman. 22 Her legal dilemma raised the key historical question: What did it mean to have a body classified as female or male, and were there other options?

In North America, gender expression and identity have, in different circumstances, conformed to or challenged two “norms” that many claimed to be universal and fundamental: a two-sex model of humans as either male or female, and heterosexuality. Some American Indian groups have long accepted “third” and “fourth” gender expressions, and the historical record is interspersed with accounts of intersex individuals and gender crossing. Erotic affection and intimacy between people of the same gender likewise existed from the continent’s earliest encounters. Yet for much of North American history, those who challenged gender conventions associated with a two-sex model, including sexual expression, faced stigma and punishment.

In these and a host of other ways, political power worked through intimate relationships and childbirth, bringing the force of governments, courts, and churches into women’s daily experience of their bodies. Sexual violence, laws prohibiting interracial and same-sex relationships, and controls on women’s reproduction helped establish and maintain white male supremacy and class hierarchy in North America. Each served as scaffolding to slavery, Native American removal, Jim Crow, and immigration restrictions.

Americans struggled to gain control of their own sexuality and gender identity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, various women recalibrated ideas about male and female sexuality in the expanding print culture world of books, pamphlets, and periodicals. Female-bodied people lived as husbands and fathers, and male-bodied people presented themselves as women, in order to legitimize same-sex intimacies and/or to express gender variant identities. By the twentieth century, some Americans also sought medical procedures to affirm their gender identity. They challenged opposition to interracial and same-sex marriage and family formation in the courts and the realm of popular opinion. Many women and girls wrestled with reporting sexual violence when popular beliefs and legal practice questioned their credibility and morality. Others pursued reproductive justice that encompassed a wide range of claims to personal autonomy. For women of color pushing back against state-sponsored sterilization, this meant rights to have as many or as few children as a woman wanted. For married women facing laws prohibiting contraception or husbands reluctant to limit pregnancies, it meant legal and affordable birth control and abortion.

Culture, Commerce, and Religion

As Shirley Owens stood with the three other young African American singers who made up the Shirelles and asked a lover “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” in 1960, her performance expressed personal emotion and social anxieties about female sexuality. The four women’s sleek hair, neat attire, and measured movements challenged centuries of white sexualization of African American women; simultaneously this sexualization made them acceptable cultural messengers of these anxieties to whites. 23 If the body inhabited one expression of gender, culture—in all its forms—expressed others. For herself and for the teenaged audience who purchased her records, Owens captured the great ambivalence surrounding women as producers and consumers of culture.

From early on, the politics of consumption were frequently tangled in misunderstandings over ideas about gender, as when Indian women insisted on playing a central part in trade diplomacy, to the confusion of European men who considered diplomacy men’s domain. Legal structures governing commercial exchanges also rested on ideas about men, women, and the relationships between them. Early British-American law deemed married women “covered” by their husbands, and therefore ineligible to sign contracts. French, Dutch, and Spanish legal systems, in contrast, recognized married partners as independent financial actors, and business culture developed different patterns in regions influenced by them. From the nineteenth century onward, new commercial industries—from credit agencies to insurance companies to grocery stores—institutionalized specific gender ideals, often creating female dependence. The market, like all products of culture, has never been gender-neutral.

Yet within widely variable cultural expressions, women found purpose, community, and power that often eluded them in the structures of the state, the professions, or the corporation. Deprived of economic clout as producers, women seized public power as consumers, organizing boycotts and flexing the power of the purse. Denied the sense of service and purpose of fighting in the military, they found leadership and mission within religious communities, traveling far from the confines of home in the interest of spreading the word of God. Although from one angle, evangelical religion, commercial entertainment, and corporate advertising are highly patriarchal and were frequently deployed to silence and manipulate women, from the perspective of women themselves, these forms were flexible and rich in potential meaning.

Culture also offered collective experience for women, and in collective action, they articulated ideas about fairness and women’s proper influence. From churches, black women pressed for economic justice and physical security in a climate of Jim Crow at the opening of the twentieth century. Within twenty-first century public high schools, Muslim girls donned headscarves to assert that Islam and modest dress were just as “All-American” as was sexually explicit, and often misogynistic, popular music.

In 1972, the US Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink helped to author and pass Title IX, the groundbreaking legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions. Mink’s advocacy of Title IX and other legislative efforts were shaped by her overlapping encounters with sexism, racism, and classism in the United States as a Japanese American lawyer from Hawai‘i. For her legislation, as for earlier generations’ activism, the meaning of “woman” was a social identity around which individuals mobilized to achieve liberal, radical, and conservative agendas. Neither that identity nor the linked activism has been uniform.

The revolutionary moment that swept across Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century set the stage for a revolution in public engagement and new ideas about individuals’ and groups’ “rights” relative to one another. One strand of this activism pursued fuller protection for the rights of a citizen. Another strand sought redefinition of family law, from one that secured a white man’s power over his wife, children, and slaves to one that recognized white women’s and people of color’s claims to their own bodies and children.

For many, women’s political activism falls under a broad understanding of feminism, a movement taking multiple forms that at its core challenges gender hierarchies. Some feminist activists concentrated on sexual relationships, challenging the idea that a heterosexual couple, under the dominance of a man, deserved preeminent cultural approval and legal support. For others, economic inequality, stemming from practices that lowered women’s wages relative to men’s and policies that denied women of color financial safety nets for their children, was the most pernicious. Conservative women, by contrast, tied the endurance of such hierarchies to their feminine identity.

Women’s activism repeatedly demonstrated power hierarchies and differences among them. Women’s multiracial antislavery activism did not eliminate white women reformers’ racial prejudices toward black colleagues. Late-nineteenth-century organizations leading the fight for woman suffrage largely excluded black members and, as an argument for the vote, characterized white women as “civilizers” of colonized peoples. Some strands of feminism have vocally rejected trans-women as women. White feminist campaigns for full citizenship rights have ignored the exclusion of immigrant women and sexual minorities from US citizenship, and have at times failed to acknowledge African American women’s disfranchisement and Puerto Rican and indigenous women’s efforts to obtain national independence.

Activists have employed diverse strategies to challenge power structures, but also to uphold them. Some women reformers invoked beliefs about women’s “natural” role as mothers and moral superiority to soften opposition to their public activism, but so too did conservative women to oppose woman suffrage, deny other women government and reproductive health services, and fuel nativism, white supremacy, anticommunism, and isolationism. Activists strategically turned to the global stage to connect local efforts to transnational networks and movements: black and white antislavery and woman suffrage advocates crossed the Atlantic to find common cause with British counterparts; Latinas recalibrated women’s rights as human rights in Pan-American organizations; and low-paid immigrant women advanced economic justice through alliance with women laborers in other nations. Even if they did not use the language of “intersectionality,” those facing intersecting sexual, race, and class hierarchies employed distinct strategies to demand gender and racial justice. Sexual minorities used the language of civil rights at home and human rights abroad to press for greater sexual expression and protections. Low-income women of color framed their resistance against employment discrimination and exclusionary social welfare provisions as a struggle for not only economic but also racial justice.

War and Transformation

During the military struggle of the American Revolution, Konwatsi’tsiaienni, known also as Molly Brant, helped secure the Iroquois League’s allegiance to the British, thereby supporting a long-standing alliance. When the victorious United States claimed Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) homelands as part of its spoils of war, Brant’s alliance offered her people a physical place of refuge, but only if they moved to a new entity forming north of the US border in Canada. Brant’s story of prewar alliance-making and postwar compromises offers a new narrative of wartime experience. More broadly, the histories of women draw attention to the fact that wars often punctuated long-standing transformations, exposing political and cultural borders that had already shifted the terrain on which women lived. As turning points, they were rooted in events that began long before official violence commenced and reverberated for decades of consequences.

The chaos and upheaval of war demanded that women take up new duties, but also opened possibilities for women to seize new chances, with lasting consequences. During the Civil War, enslaved women fled their owners in unprecedented numbers, forcing the Union army to create a refugee program and bringing the question of emancipation directly to the federal government. At the same time, individuals who were raised female traded one set of clothing, relationships, and expectations for others, not only “passing” as men to fight but also embarking on new lives and identities after the war in western territories conquered by US soldiers in the late nineteenth century.

All wars, like most political conflicts in American history, drew on gendered images to support their ideologies. During World War II, the Office of War Information encouraged women to work in munitions factories with posters that suggested both their can-do capability and Hollywood-inspired glamour. At the height of the Cold War, women in sexual relationships with other women were condemned for making the United States vulnerable to communist infiltration. The upheavals of war, and the overt challenges they posed to gender norms, also revealed how fragile and changeable those norms were. During the Civil War, the loss of so many southern men to Confederate battlefields put pressure on free women at home to adopt “masculine” roles. At the same time, the physical destruction of families and economies exposed how much effort had previously gone into maintaining those roles—effort that was no longer available. On other fronts and in every war, women and men found themselves unable to act according to their own ideas about proper gender ideals. 24

Women and Gender at the Margins and Intersections

The Puerto Rican seamstress at the opening of this chapter entered the historical archive as a subject for the camera of Louise Rosskam, a middle-class Jewish photographer from the US mainland. Rosskam was one of a cadre of white women, including Dorothea Lange, who worked for the federal government as documentary photographers during the 1930s and 1940s. While Lange’s famous dustbowl images documented poverty among southern migrants, Rosskam’s photojournalism juxtaposed images of poverty with ones of industrial development. Her body of work advances a challenge to the analytical tools of women’s and gender historians: What can we see, what do we think we can see, and what silences are woven into available archives? Rosskam’s photograph highlights the repetitive, mechanized nature of the Puerto Rican needlework industry at the center of the United States’ expanding export economy, but its orderly, clean image masks the reality of harsh working conditions, dangerous chemicals, low wages, and conflicts with husbands and fathers over finances. Rosskam approached the camera as a tool for social justice, but her framing bolstered the United States’ claim to be a benevolent modernizing force. 25 After several generations of scholarship, the problem of silences in the archive remains one of the central themes guiding women’s and gender history.

A second main theme—how intersectional identities shaped individual and collective experience—is advanced by the racial politics of twentieth-century North America that caught up Puerto Rican women such as the one in Rosskam’s image. For seamstresses in a US colony, and for the many who journeyed to the US mainland at midcentury, racial and gender landscapes shifted with migration. They left behind a society that used an array of color categories ( mulata/o, morena/o, café con leche, blanca/o , negra/o colorao ) linked to a tacit hierarchy, and entered a rigid biracial system that treated most as racial inferiors. 26 Transnational histories of women, therefore, open a new angle on the linked scholarship of race and gender by emphasizing that markers of privilege or subordination were situational, not universal, in a single person’s life.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History ’s integration of women’s and gender history showcases the range and sweep of topics that generations of scholars have crafted through pathbreaking methods, sources, and perspectives. Its analyses compel historians to ask: What gets defined as the center of historical inquiry, and who is left to the margins? Its stories of real women’s lives demand recognition that who counts as a “woman,” and for what purpose, itself has a long and thorny history that has shaped relations among women as much as those between women and men. Finally, its sources demonstrate how deeply women’s and gender history is about rethinking the archive. While some may worry that “the cost of mainstreaming women’s history may well be to diminish the power of gender as an analytic category,” we believe the field’s crosscutting effects rather open up the study of North America. 27

1. Gerda Lerner , The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3 .

2. Studies examining these transnational labor flows include Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo , Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) ; Rhacel Salazar Parreñas , Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) ; Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild , Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002) ; Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein , Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) .

3. In 1988, John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman published the highly influential synthetic Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row) . For an examination of transnational approaches, see Joanne Meyerowitz , “Transnational Sex and U.S. History,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (December 2009): 1273–86 .

4. Susan Sleeper-Smith , Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounters in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) ; Sylvia Van Kirk , “ ‘The Custom of the Country’: An Examination of Fur Trade Marriage Practices,” in Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World , ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 481–511 ; Sophie White,   Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) .

5. Judith M. Bennett , History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) .

6. Classic examples of this scholarship include Gerda Lerner’s   The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967) ; Anne Firor Scott , The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) ; Kathryn Kish Sklar , Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973) ; Anne Firor Scott and Andrew M. Scott , One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975) ; Ellen Carol DuBois , Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978) .

7. Ellen Carol DuBois , “The Last Suffragist: An Intellectual and Political Autobiography,” in Woman Suffrage and Woman’s Rights , ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 2–3 ; Linda Gordon, “U.S. Women’s History,” in The New American History , ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 262–64; Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74 ; Caroll Smith-Rosenberg , “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 1–29 ; Linda Gordon,   Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976) ; Nancy F. Cott,   The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977) ; Nancy F. Cott , “Passionless: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs 4, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 219–36 .

8. Jane Austen , Northanger Abbey (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 104 .

9. Darlene Clark Hine , Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (LM: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), xxvi .

10. Kimberlé Crenshaw , “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99 ; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham , “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 251–74 . See also articles by Robin D. G. Kelley, Tamar W. Carroll, Dayo F. Gore, Marlon M. Bailey, L. H. Stallings, and Sherie Randolph, as a well Higginbotham’s response, in the spring 2017 Signs special edition examining the legacy of Higginbotham’s influential article on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication.

11. Elsa Barkeley Brown , “ ‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 297–98 . Foundational monographs on the history of women of color that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s include Paula Giddings , When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984) ; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985) ; Vicki L. Ruiz , Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987) ; Darlene Clark Hine , Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) ; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham , Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) ; Valerie Matsumoto,   Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993) ; Judy Yung,   Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) ; Huping Ling,   Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) ; Vicki L. Ruiz , From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) ; Deborah Gray White , Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) ; Theda Perdue,   Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998) .

12. Joan W. Scott , “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1067 .

13. Scott, “Gender,” 1069–70, 1073; Joanne Meyerowitz, “A History of ‘Gender,’ ” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2008): 1347 . For Manifest Destiny, see Amy S. Greenberg , Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) . Key early cultural histories on women and gender include Kathleen M. Brown , Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ; Susan M. Juster , Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) ; Gail Bederman,   Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) ; Kristin L. Hoganson , Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) ; Mary A. Renda , Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) .

14. Jeanne Boydston , “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis,” Gender & History 20, no. 3 (November 2008): 558–83 .

15. Alice Kessler-Harris , “Do We Still Need Women’s History?,” Chronicle of Higher Education 54, no. 15 (December 7, 2007): B6 .

16. Laura Lee Downs , “If ‘Woman’ Is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night?: Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 2 (April 1993): 414–37 .

17. Gerda Lerner and Kathryn Kish Sklar , Graduate Training in U.S. Women’s History: A Conference Report (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1989), 14 ; Kessler-Harris, “Do We Still Need Women’s History?”

18. For example, both Laura Briggs and Catherine Ceniza Choy, whose first books examine women, gender, and US empire, wrote second books on international adoption. Joanne Meyerowitz followed her first book on working-class women in Chicago with a history of transsexuality. Nancy Cott, an author of several women’s history books, prepared a book on the history of marriage in the United States. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 ; Nancy F. Cott , The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987) ; Joanne J. Meyerowitz , Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) ; Nancy F. Cott , Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) ; Laura Briggs,   Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) ; Catherine Ceniza Choy , Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) ; Joanne Meyerowitz,   How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) ; Laura Briggs,   Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012) ; Catherine Ceniza Choy , Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (New York: NYU Press, 2013) .

19. Cornelia H. Dayton and Lisa Levenstein , “The Big Tent of U.S. Women’s and Gender History: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 99, no. 3 (2012): 793–817 .

20. Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway , eds., Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2007) ; Mia E. Bay , Farah J. Griffin , Martha S. Jones , and Barbara D. Savage , eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015) ; Brittney C. Cooper , Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017) ; Kathy Davis,   The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) .

21. Sarah Bagley , “Voluntary?” Voice of Industry , September 18, 1845 .

Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed , 51, 58–62, 73–76, 79.

23. Susan J. Douglas , Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994), 84–85 , 95–96.

24. On the problem of masculinity “crises,” see Mary Louise Roberts , “Beyond ‘Crisis’ in Understanding Gender Transformation,” Gender & History 28, no. 2 (August 2016): 358–66 .

25. Linda Gordon , Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 207 ; Laura Katzman and Beverly W. Brannan , Re-viewing Documentary: The Photographic Life of Louise Rosskam (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011), 24–25 , 105; Eileen J. Suárez Findlay , We Are Left without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 87 ; Hilda Lloréns,   Imagining the Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race, and Gender during the American Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 32 , 39, 79.

26. Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva , Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3 , 5, 8, 224; Jorge Duany,   The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 236–39 , 244, 252–54; Eileen J. Suárez Findlay , Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) . For a discussion of shifting color codes and consciousness in Chicana history, see Vicki L. Ruiz , “Morena/o, Blanca/o, y Café con Leche: Racial Constructions in Chicana/o Historiography,” in The Practice of U.S. Women’s History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues , ed. S. Jay Kleinberg , Eileen Boris , and Vicki L. Ruiz (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 221–37 .

Kessler-Harris, “Do We Still Need Women’s History?”

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

• It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
• One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
• AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
• AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
• AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
• AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.

S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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Beauvoir, Simone de | feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | homosexuality | identity politics | speech acts

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Tuukka Asplund, Jenny Saul, Alison Stone and Nancy Tuana for their extremely helpful and detailed comments when writing this entry.

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4.3 Gender History

4.3.1 History and the Challenge of Gender History (1997; 1999), Pdf6 This essay, first published in 1997, provides a critical assessment of debates within and about gender history. The initial hype that claimed that women’s history would subvert the entire discipline of history and introduce a new ‘herstory’ was wildly overdone. At the same time, however, women’s history has indeed enriched the subject and has, importantly, mutated into a broader gender history, which offers scope for the history of men/masculinity as well as of women/femininity. It is an inclusive development which is fostering a holistic history. And these innovations can be warmly welcomed, without entailing an intellectual appeal to a supposedly warm and sensitive ‘female’ intuition, or depending upon a postmodernist onslaught upon an allegedly harsh and dying ‘male’ rationality. The text includes PJC’s response to a subsequent critique, which argued that abandoning women’s history for the delusive cause of gender history was a retrogressive move from the point of view of women. PJC replied that gender history, far from being a cuckoo in the nest of women’s history, was a logical development. It means that ‘Man’ is no longer deemed an ahistorical construct that is beyond analysis; but is being put into the full historical context of emerging and contested gender roles – the pioneering research often being undertaken by experts in women’s history. The diversification of women’s history into gender history, which allows practitioners to choose which themes they prefer to study, is not ‘anti-woman’ but a strong signal of research vitality. Both the original essay and the subsequent debate have also been reprinted in S. Morgan (ed.), The Feminist History Reader (2006), pp. 116-29. 4.3.2 Women and Public Speaking – and Why It has Taken so Long to Get There (BLOG/ 47, Nov. 2014) Conventional prohibitions in Britain upon women speaking in public have proved long-lasting, because the ban managed not only to deter women but also to embolden male audiences to jeer and heckle. This short essay assesses how and why things began to change.

4.3.3 Why is it Taking So Long to Normalise the Role of Women at the Top in Politics? (BLOG/ 64, April 2016) This short essay is a pair to 4.3.2 , on the power of conventional barriers to women’s public participation in politics, as opposed to their behind-the-scenes wielding of influence.

4.3.4 How did Women First Manage to Break the Grip of Traditional Patriarchy? (BLOG/ 65, May 2016) To be read in conjunction with 4.3.2 and 4.3.3 , this essay explores the steps by which women in Britain managed to take plausible steps to achieve full public and political participation. 4.3.5 Why is the remarkable Charlotte Despard not Better Known? (BLOG/ 97, Jan. 2019) Charlotte Despard (1844-1939) was a remarkable figure. She was so controversial in her own day that her pioneering commitment as a feminist, vegetarian, socialist, Irish nationalist and (latterly) communist supporter fell reputationally between all stools. But her passion and civic commitment deserve proper historical recognition.

4.3.6 Is it Time to Look beyond Separate Identities to Find Personhood? (BLOG/ 104, August 2019) Identity politics are powerful. And, up to a point, valuable and enlightening. But this essay (which can be read in conjunction with 4.3.7 ) argues that valuing separate identities should not detract from a proper civic recognition of all people’s shared personhood.

4.3.7 Enlightenment Gender, Womanhood, Manhood, Sexualities & Personhood: Thematic Overview Pdf55 This thematic overview analyses the main trends and conceptual debates which have informed research into eighteenth-century gender and sexualities. It celebrates the quality of much new work, which has dramatically expanded historical knowledge on significant and multi-faceted aspects of human experience, which were once shrouded in coyness and/or silence. At the same time, the essay also notes that women and men have some common human interests, above and beyond their gender roles; and it predicts a new and complementary interest in historical ‘personhood’.

4.3.8 GINA LURIA WALER ‘Women’s History: Galvanizing Marginality’ Web-published here by permission of author © Gina Luria Walker, this essay is a companion piece to Essay 4.3.7 by PJC. It provides a critical survey of the evolution of women’s history as a research theme, complete with ebbs and flows of changing approaches and interpretations. Overall, Walker shows how women’s history has brought the lives of past women back into view, to salutary effect. And she concludes that the knowledge gained must not be marginalised or trivalised; but built into a better, deeper understanding.

4.3.9 Being Assessed as a Whole Person – A Critique of Identity Politics Pdf58 ( BLOG/121, January 2021 ) The title of this text is self-evident. It is a further development and personal affirmation of arguments first addressed in 4.3.6 and 4.3.7 .

4.3.10 Battersea’s Female Pioneers (BLOG/124, January 2021) To celebrate International Women’s Day in Battersea on 8 March 2021, a public meeting was offered a presentation of five pioneering women, with strong Battersea connections. Here are very short pinpoint summaries of their lives. And, at the end, mottoes from each one (improvised on the basis of their lives and recorded words) are offered for all women today.

4.3.11 What Does It Mean to be a Whole Person? Why We Should all be Arty-Smarty. Pdf60 ( BLOG/125, May 2021 ) This commentary picks up the theme of 4.3.9 to explore further what is meant by the concept of being a ‘whole person’. It calls for all individuals to get a rounded education to develop all their talents. Such an approach is sometimes dismissed as too ‘arty-farty’. But that’s wrong. It’s actually arty-smarty, for individuals and for humanity as a whole.

4.3.12 Does classifying people in terms of their ‘Identity’ have parallels with racist thought? Answer: No; Yes; and ultimately, No. Pdf61 This commentary follows responses to 4.3.9 (Pdf58) Being Assessed as a Whole Person; and 4.3.11 Pdf60 What Does it Mean to be a Whole Person? See also 4.4.1 (BLOG/36) . It asks whether classifying people in terms of ‘Identity’ has parallels with racist thought? And it answers: No, yes (in some circumstances); but ultimately NO.

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Penelope J. Corfield

Penelope J. Corfield is a historian, lecturer and education consultant. She currently serves as the President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS).

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113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for gender roles essay topics? This field is hot, controversial, and really worth exploring!

• 🔝 Top 10 Gender Topics
• 📝 Gender Essay: Writing Tips
• 🏆 Gender Essay Examples & Topic Ideas

✍️ Gender Argumentative Essay Topics

❓ research questions about gender roles.

In your gender role essay, you might want to focus on the issues of gender equality in the workplace. Another exciting option is to write about gender stereotypes in education. Finally, you can elaborate on how traditional gender roles are changing.

In this article, you’ll find a list of gender argumentative essay topics, ideas for papers on gender and society, as well as top gender roles essay examples.

🔝 Top 10 Gender Roles Topics

• Gender stereotypes and the way they affect people
• Fighting gender stereotypes and sexism
• Gender equality in the workplace
• Gender stereotypes in education
• Gender schema theory
• Is gender socially constructed?
• Social learning theory and gender
• Gender roles and sexual orientation
• Body image and gender
• Social gender construction in the media

📝 Gender Roles Essay: Writing Tips

Essays on gender roles present students’ understanding of the similarities, differences, and aspects of gender roles in society.

Writing gender roles essays helps learners to understand the significance of topics related to gender roles and the changes in societal norms. Students should be highly aware of the problems associated with traditional gender roles. For example, there are many periods in world history, in which people did not have equal rights.

Moreover, some aspects of gender roles may be associated with discrimination. To make an essay on this problem outstanding, you should discuss the problem in detail and present your points clearly. A useful tip is to develop a good structure for your paper.

Before starting to work on the paper, you should select the problem that is most interesting or relevant to you.

Gender roles essay topics and titles may include:

• The history of gender roles and their shifts throughout the time
• Male and female roles in society
• Gender roles in literature and media
• How a man and a woman is perceived in current society
• The causes and outcomes of gender discrimination
• The problem of ‘glass ceiling’
• The problem of social stratification and its outcomes
• The revolution in the concept of gender

After selecting the issue for discussion, you can start working on the essay’s structure. Here are some useful tips on how to structure your paper:

• Select the topic you want to discuss (you can choose one from the list above). Remember to pay attention to the type of essay you should write. If it is an argumentative essay, reflect on what problem you would want to analyze from opposing perspectives.
• Gender roles essay titles are important because they can help you to get the reader’s attention. Think of something simple but self-explanatory.
• An introductory paragraph is necessary, as it will present the questions you want to discuss in the paper. Remember to state the thesis of your essay in this section.
• Think of your gender roles essay prompts. Which aspects of the selected problem do you want to focus on? Dedicate a separate section for each of the problems.
• Remember to include a refutation section if you are writing an argumentative essay. In this section, you should discuss an alternative perspective on the topic in 1-2 paragraphs. Do not forget to outline why your opinion is more credible than the alternative one.
• Avoid making the paragraphs and sentences too long. You can stick to a 190 words maximum limit for one paragraph. At the same time, make sure that the paragraphs are longer than 65 words. Try to make all sections of the body paragraphs of similar length.
• Check out examples online to see how you can structure your paper and organize the information. Pay attention to the number of paragraphs other students include.
• Remember to include a gender roles essay conclusion. In this paragraph, you will discuss the most important claims of your paper.
• Do not forget to add a reference page in which you will include the sources used in the paper. Ask your professor in advance about the types of literature you can utilize for the essay.

Do not forget that there are free samples on our website that can help you to get the best ideas for your essay!

🏆 Gender Roles Essay Examples & Topic Ideas

• Gender Roles in Antigone Essay This will be seen through an analysis of the other characters in the play and the values of ancient Greeks. Indeed this central character appears to be at odds with the inclinations of the other […]
• Conflict of Gender Roles in Munro’s “Boys and Girls” Munro’s “Boys and Girls” is a story about a puzzled girl who struggles to find the balance between the battles of her inner female-housewife side, like her mother, and a boyish character who likes to […]
• Gender Roles in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams In the play The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams has written the story of the Wingfield family that lived in St Louis during the 1940s.
• Gender Roles in “Bridge to Terabithia” by Paterson The theme of gender roles is consistently present in the novel, starting with character origins and becoming the central concept as they mature to defy archetypal perceptions of feminine and masculine expectations in order to […]
• Gender Roles in Society One might think that a child is born with the idea of how to behave in relation to gender while in the real sense; it is the cultivation of the society that moulds people to […]
• Gender Roles in The Yellow Wallpaper & Trifles The two texts; the short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins and the play ‘Trifles’ by Susan Glaspell strategically illustrate this claim since they both aim at attracting the reader’s attention to the poor […]
• Gender Roles: Changes From the Late 1800’s to Today The definition of who is a male or a female depends on the types of gender roles one was exposed to during the early ages. In today’s society, we have a greater number of women […]
• Gender Roles Set in Stone: Prehistoric and Ancient Work of Arts In the prehistoric and ancient works of art, the representation of women and men reveals a massive imbalance in gender equity that favors men over women.
• Changing Gender Roles in Families Over Time The division of labor and traditional gender roles in the family usually consists of men doing the work while women take care of the children, other relatives, and housekeeping.
• Gender Roles and Stereotyping in Education Teachers should be trained to give clear and useful instruction to students on the issue of gender roles in modern society.
• Cohabitation and Division of Gender Roles in a Couple Cohabitation is perceived in the society as the form of relationships which is an effective alternative to the traditional marriage because of focusing on the principles of flexibility, freedom, and equality, but few couples can […]
• Gender Roles Inversion: The Madonna Phenomenon At the same time partial narrowing of the gender gap in the context of economic participation did not lead to the equality of men and women in the field of their occupations.
• Athena and Gender Roles in Greek Mythology According to Eicher and Roach-Higgins, the elements of her dress were important because they immediately communicated specific ideas about her character that was as contradictory as the physical gender of the birthing parent.”In appropriating the […]
• Gender Roles in South Korean Laws and Society At the same time, all custody is traditionally granted to husbands and fathers in a case of a divorce” though the anxiety about the high divorce rate and the nasty endings of relationships is more […]
• Gender Roles by Margaret Mead Once the a rift defining men and women develops this way, it goes further and defines the positions, which men and women occupy in the society, basing on these physical and biological differences, which form […]
• Gender Roles in the 19th Century Society: Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper However, the narrator’s developing madness can also act as the symbolical depiction of the effects of the men’s dominance on women and the female suppression in the 19th-century society.”The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in […]
• Gender Roles in Brady’s “Why I Want a Wife” and Sacks’ “Stay-at-Home Dads” Yet, there are some distinctions Judy Brady believes that women are often viewed as unpaid house servants who have to take care of husbands’ needs, whereas Glenn Sacks argues that gender roles begin to transform […]
• Gender roles in the Wind in the Willows For instance, in the case where both the mole and the rat make comments to the toad that are full of women critics.
• The Concepts of Gender Roles and Sexuality by John Money and Judith Butler These categories of feminists are united in the belief of existence of many children and little sex. This paper explains the concepts and ideologies relating to gender roles and sexuality.as advocated by John Money and […]
• Gender Roles in ‘Mr. Green’ by Robert Olen Butler Green Butler uses the character of the grandfather to develop the theme of gender roles within the culture. The character of the grandfather is extremely sound for the cultural beliefs the author conveyed through all […]
• Analysis of the Peculiarities of Gender Roles Within Education, Families and Student Communities Peculiarities of gender aspect within the education system and labour market Attitude for marriage of men and women as one of the major aspects within the analysis of gender roles Family relations as a significant […]
• Gender Roles in Brady’s and Theroux’s Works In the satire “Being a Man” by Paul Theroux, the author demonstrates to readers the essence of how a particular manifestation of masculinity is extolled in American society.
• Evaluating Gender Roles in Nursing The purpose of this study was to explore perspectives on the experience and gender roles of male and female students, as well as how they think about their future professional roles.
• Women’s Gender Roles in American Literature The stories written by Constance Woolson Fenimore, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Jaqueline Bishop highlight the harmful gender roles and discrimination that still remains a major topic for disputes and illustrate the fate of oppressed women.
• Aspects of Gender Roles and Identity The breadth of her practice in transgender issues suggests that every choice Bowers makes is ethical, requiring her to be respectful and highly responsible.
• Gender Roles, Expectations, and Discrimination Despite Isaac being the calmest boy in the school, he had a crush on Grace, a beautiful girl in the school who was from a wealthy family.
• Gender Roles in Social Constructionism The reality, in the view of sociologists, is a social attitude in connection with which a personality is formed that adapts to the requirements of the world.
• Gender Roles and Stereotypes in Straightlaced Film One might conclude that gender neutrality and abstraction in offices are only a cover to maintain the basis of gender injustice.
• Gender Roles and Body Images The media has one of the most widespread and significant effects on how we perceive men and women. It is incorrectly assumed that men are the cultural norm, while women stay invisible and underrepresented by […]
• Biology and Gender Roles in Society Thus, it may be more convenient for society to justify the imposition of certain gender roles on men and women using biology-related arguments, which, in reality, are more related to culture and social development.
• Children’s Views of Gender Roles Today, both parents and teachers see the positive impact of the attempts to integrate anti-biased gender-related education on young children as they get more freedom to express themselves and grow up less aggressive.
• The Construction of Gender Roles However, it is wrong to consider women exposed to the domestic work powerless, as they have the opportunity to informally or implicitly influence men and the decisions they make.
• Sociology of the Family: Gender Roles Thus, the societal predisposition and notion that women are lesser in the community should be abandoned, and greater emphasis should be placed on the critical functions they perform in the household. These assertions, equivocations, and […]
• Femininity and Masculinity: Understanding Gender Roles The understanding of how gender roles are portrayed in the media and the general perception of the expected behavior for men and women communicated non-verbally in the society is the basis on which children build […]
• Injustice Within Strict Gender Roles There is still no clear answer to how a person can find his or her destiny and place in the world, and understand the opportunities and prospects, considering the opinion of the dominant number of […]
• Gender Roles and Body Image in Disney Movies In this research, attention will be paid to gender roles and body images of Disney princesses to understand the popularity of the franchise and its impact on child development.
• Gender Roles and How People Perceive Them However, all of the survey participants indicated that their families would be inclined to differentiate between the toys for a child based on the latter’s sex and the corresponding perceived gender role.
• Early Gender Roles, Modern Interpretations, and the Origin of Stereotypes Since each gender was assigned a particular role in the past due to the differences in the biological makeup between a man and a woman in the prehistoric era, the modern process of communication between […]
• Gender Roles in TV Commercials and Values in the Society Each of them will watch, code, and analyze the TV commercials separately; at the end of the procedure, their results will be compared in order to ensure the inter-observer reliability of the chosen research method.
• Toxic Masculinity and Gender Roles: New Aspects in Discussions Between Men and Women It is believed that men have to be silent and invincible warriors who exercise power due to their status of a man.
• Gender Roles in Contemporary Society The conditions of life are tough and it is presumed that only men are able to carry out such hardships and limitations of a soldier life.
• Culture and History: Gender Roles Over the Past 50 or So Years It is not that there were no women in the workforce; it was just that she had to choose one over the other, juggling the two was quite rare and unheard of.
• Gender Roles and Sexuality in Media: Cosmopolitan & Maxim The woman portrayed in these sites is supposed to look ‘hot’ and sexy in order to be attractive to a man.
• The Problem of Gender Roles in Society Based on Plays by Glaspell and Ibsen The men in the play are constantly showing their self-importance, they are trying to act like real detectives, and they do not even realize that Mrs. But, all of a sudden, the moment of repaying […]
• Social Element in Gender Roles I learned of the origins of gay and lesbian studies, as well that of the confining of such studies in earlier times to specific institutions.
• Equality: The Use of TV to Develop Our Gender Roles In this sense, when it is the men who predominantly work outside of the home, they will usually see the home as a place of leisure and so use the TV as a source of […]
• Gender Roles and Family Systems in Hispanic Culture In the Hispanic culture, amarianismo’ and amachismo’ are the terms used to determine the various behavioral expectations among the family members.
• Family Unit and Gender Roles in Society and Market The role of molding the infant into an adult belonged to the family in the ancient society. In the past, the father was expected to be the breadwinner of the family.
• Gender Roles and Social Classes in Wartime The message is as simple as “The women of Britain say ‘Go.’” It points to the role of both men and women in wartime.
• The Necessity for Gender Roles The potential change from the elimination of the differences in gender may affect every perceived part of one’s life. Such factors as one’s occupation, status, and appearance may also contribute to the creation of stereotypes.
• China’s Gender Roles in Mo Yan’s and Shen Fu’s Works Six Records of a Floating Life is a multi-faceted chronicle which helps to comprehend the difficulties and the features of Shen Fu’s life and the romance between him and his beloved Chen Yun.
• Changing Gender Roles Between Boys and Girls In the twenty-first Century, girls have greatly stepped up and assumed some of the roles that were considered to be boy’s while boys have done the same leading to an interchange of roles.
• Nomadic Society’s Gender Roles and Warrior Culture On the one hand, it was clear that the 1100s and the 1200s included the period of male power. It was wrong to assume that all women were similar and treat them in the same […]
• “Beside Oneself” by Judith Butler: Gender Roles Following the views of the author, who states that choice in the formation of gender and sexuality is not transparent, and a key role is still played by others in the form of expectations and […]
• Gender Roles in Couples and Sex Stereotypes Altogether, the last reconsiderations of the nature of relations promoted the appearance of numerous debates related to the role of partners and their right to be the leader.
• Understanding the Social Element in Gender Roles When saying that gender is a binary construction, one implies that there are two genders, namely, the masculine and the feminine one, and two corresponding types of social behaviour, which are predetermined by the existing […]
• Gender Roles in Tango: Cultural Aspects However, one should not assume that the role of women in tango is inferior because they create the most aesthetic aspects of this dance.
• Gender Roles in Toy Stores According to Fisher-Thompson et al, two of the major differentiating factors in toys for girls and boys are color and nature.
• Discussing Gender Roles in the Interaction Perspective It is the purpose of this issue to discuss the concept of gender roles using the sociological perspective of symbolic interaction.
• Women in Hip-Hop Music: A Provocative and Objectified Gender Roles It is one thing that men want women to be in music videos and play a particular role, but women are willing to participate in the videos.
• Content Analysis of Gender Roles in Media In the critical analysis of the article, the point of disagreement is that of under-representation of women in the media. How do the media subordinate and relegate roles of women in society?
• Effects of Media Messages about Gender Roles Media articles, such as the Maxim Magazine and the Cosmopolitan Magazine, socialize individuals to believe that women are very different from men as regards to dressing, behaving, and eating.
• The Change of Gender Roles This similarity is one of the most important to focus on the structure of the narrative. In both plays, the main actions of the characters are not directly described by the authors.
• Gender Equality: Male Dominance The simple reason is that gender inequality exists in affluent societies wherein women are free to do what they want, have access to education, and have the capacity to create wealth.
• “The Odd Women” and “Women in Love”: Evolving Views of Gender Roles An effort is also made to track the changes of the roles of women in the social fabric in the Victorian era by considering The Odd Women by George Gissing written in 1893.
• Gender Roles: Constructing Gender Identity In the course of the twentieth century and at the threshold of the twenty-first century, the images and roles of gender have constantly been changing.
• Ideology of Gender Roles In the world of literature, ideology has played a vital role in depicting the condition of the society. In this scenario, Kingston reveals that the men out-live their roles in the society, and they are […]
• Concepts of Gender Roles As a result of these, the war on gender inequality and sexism has failed, because of the failure of these agents of change to promote gender equality and eliminate discriminative notions held by the society.
• Gender Roles in the United States Over the Last Century The men’s perception towards this idea was negative, and this consequently resulted to a conflict with the men claiming that the roles of the women were in the kitchen.
• Fashions, gender roles and social views of the 1950s and 1960s Fashion was highly valued and this can be seen in the way the clothes worn by the wives of the presidential candidates in America hit the headlines. In the 1950s, the role of housekeeping and […]
• Cheating, Gender Roles, and the Nineteenth-Century Croquet Craze The author’s main thesis is, “Yet was this, in fact, how the game was played on the croquet lawns of the nineteenth century?” Whereas authors of croquet manuals and magazines emphasize so much on the […]
• Gender Roles in Cartoons Though the males are portrayed to be logical, but it is shown that the females are more successful because of simple blunders or miscalculations which males fail to understand, females are able to beat males […]
• The Industrial Revolution Impact on the Gender Roles The population growth combined with the increased productivity of small parts of the country and the migration of the now landless people in search of work opportunities led to the phenomena of urbanization.
• How Does Aristophanes Represent Gender Roles in Lysistrata?
• Are Gender Roles and Relationships More Equal in Modern Family Life?
• How Do Children Develop Gender Roles?
• Does Men’s Fashion Reflect Changes in Male Gender Roles?
• How Did Colonialism Resonate With Gender Roles and Oppression?
• Are Gender Roles Damaging Society?
• How Did Revolutions Affect Gender Roles?
• Are Gender Roles Defined by Society or by Genetics?
• How Have Family Structure and Gender Roles Changed?
• Are Gender Roles Fluid When Dealing With Death and Tragedy?
• How Do Gender Roles Affect Communication?
• Are Gender Roles Natural?
• How Do Gender Roles Affect Immigrants?
• Are Gender Stereotyped Roles Correct?
• How Do Gender Roles Affect the Physical and Emotional Health?
• Have Gender Roles Played a Big Part in the History?
• How Do Gender Roles and Extroversion Effects How Much People Talk?
• What Are Gender Roles? How Are They Defined?
• How Are Gender Roles Predetermined by the Environment?
• What Drives the Gender Wage Gap?
• How Has Gender Roles Changed Over the Last Centuries?
• What Factors Influence Gender Roles?
• How Have Gender Roles in Japanese Theatre Influenced and Affected Societal View on Homosexuality and Masculinity?
• What Society Norms for Gender Roles Should Be Conceived?
• How Have Traditional Gender Roles Been Stressful?
• What Was Distinctive About Gender Roles in the Nineteenth Century?
• How Has Hegemonic Masculinity Set Ideas of Gender Roles?
• How Do Media and Politics Influence Gender Roles?
• Where Does the Truth on Gender Roles Lie in Nahua and Mayan Civilizations?
• How Radical Are the Changes to the Gender Roles in Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Gender Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts

Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies. This non-exhaustive list introduces readers to scholarship in the field.

Gender studies asks what it means to make gender salient, bringing a critical eye to everything from labor conditions to healthcare access to popular culture. Gender is never isolated from other factors that determine someone’s position in the world, such as sexuality, race, class, ability, religion, region of origin, citizenship status, life experiences, and access to resources. Beyond studying gender as an identity category, the field is invested in illuminating the structures that naturalize, normalize, and discipline gender across historical and cultural contexts.

At a college or university, you’d be hard pressed to find a department that brands itself as simply Gender Studies. You’d be more likely to find different arrangements of the letters G, W, S, and perhaps Q and F, signifying gender, women, sexuality, queer, and feminist studies. These various letter configurations aren’t just semantic idiosyncrasies. They illustrate the ways the field has grown and expanded since its institutionalization in the 1970s.

This non-exhaustive list aims to introduce readers to gender studies in a broad sense. It shows how the field has developed over the last several decades, as well as how its interdisciplinary nature offers a range of tools for understanding and critiquing our world.

Catharine R. Stimpson, Joan N. Burstyn, Domna C. Stanton, and Sandra M. Whisler, “Editorial.” Signs , 1975; “Editorial,” off our backs , 1970

The editorial from the inaugural issue of Signs , founded in 1975 by Catharine Stimpson, explains that the founders hoped that the journal’s title captured what women’s studies is capable of doing: to “represent or point to something.” Women’s studies was conceptualized as an interdisciplinary field that could represent issues of gender and sexuality in new ways, with the possibility of shaping “scholarship, thought, and policy.”

The editorial in the first issue of off our backs , a feminist periodical founded in 1970, explains how their collective wanted to explore the “dual nature of the women’s movement:” that “women need to be free of men’s domination” and “must strive to get off our backs.” The content that follows includes reports on the Equal Rights Amendment, protests, birth control, and International Women’s Day.

Robyn Wiegman, “Academic Feminism against Itself.” NWSA Journal , 2002

Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies, which consolidated as an academic field of inquiry in the 1970s. Wiegman tracks some of the anxieties that emerged with the shift from women’s to gender studies, such as concerns it would decenter women and erase the feminist activism that gave rise to the field. She considers these anxieties as part of a larger concern over the future of the field, as well as fear that academic work on gender and sexuality has become too divorced from its activist roots.

Jack Halberstam, “Gender.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition (2014)

Halberstam’s entry in this volume provides a useful overview for debates and concepts that have dominated the field of gender studies: Is gender purely a social construct? What is the relationship between sex and gender? How does the gendering of bodies shift across disciplinary and cultural contexts? How did the theorizing of gender performativity in the 1990s by Judith Butler open up intellectual trajectories for queer and transgender studies? What is the future of gender as an organizing rubric for social life and as a mode of intellectual inquiry? Halberstam’s synthesis of the field makes a compelling case for why the study of gender persists and remains relevant for humanists, social scientists, and scientists alike.

Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, “Defeating Bigenderism: Changing Gender Assumptions in the Twenty-First Century.” Hypatia , 2009

Scholar and transgender activist Miqqi Alicia Gilbert considers the production and maintenance of the gender binary—that is, the idea that there are only two genders and that gender is a natural fact that remains stable across the course of one’s life. Gilbert’s view extends across institutional, legal, and cultural contexts, imagining what a frameworks that gets one out of the gender binary and gender valuation would have to look like to eliminate sexism, transphobia, and discrimination.

Judith Lorber, “Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories.” Social Problems , 2006

Judith Lorber identifies the key paradigm shifts in sociology around the question of gender: 1) acknowledging gender as an “organizing principle of the overall social order in modern societies;” 2) stipulating that gender is socially constructed, meaning that while gender is assigned at birth based on visible genitalia, it isn’t a natural, immutable category but one that is socially determined; 3) analyzing power in modern western societies reveals the dominance of men and promotion of a limited version of heterosexual masculinity; 4) emerging methods in sociology are helping disrupt the production of ostensibly universal knowledge from a narrow perspective of privileged subjects. Lorber concludes that feminist sociologists’ work on gender has provided the tools for sociology to reconsider how it analyzes structures of power and produces knowledge.

bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women.” Feminist Review , 1986

bell hooks argues that the feminist movement has privileged the voices, experiences, and concerns of white women at the expense of women of color. Instead of acknowledging who the movement has centered, white women have continually invoked the “common oppression” of all women, a move they think demonstrates solidarity but actually erases and marginalizes women who fall outside of the categories of white, straight, educated, and middle-class. Instead of appealing to “common oppression,” meaningful solidarity requires that women acknowledge their differences, committing to a feminism that “aims to end sexist oppression.” For hooks, this necessitates a feminism that is anti-racist. Solidarity doesn’t have to mean sameness; collective action can emerge from difference.

Jennifer C. Nash, “re-thinking intersectionality.” Feminist Review , 2008

Chances are you’ve come across the phrase “intersectional feminism.” For many, this term is redundant: If feminism isn’t attentive to issues impacting a range of women, then it’s not actually feminism. While the term “intersectional” now circulates colloquially to signify a feminism that is inclusive, its usage has become divorced from its academic origins. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw created the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s based on Black women’s experiences with the law in cases of discrimination and violence. Intersectionality is not an adjective or a way to describe identity, but a tool for analyzing structures of power. It aims to disrupt universal categories of and claims about identity. Jennifer Nash provides an overview of intersectionality’s power, including guidance on how to deploy it in the service of coalition-building and collective action.

Treva B. Lindsey, “Post-Ferguson: A ‘Herstorical’ Approach to Black Violability.” Feminist Studies , 2015

Treva Lindsey considers the erasure of Black women’s labor in anti-racist activism , as well as the erasure of their experiences with violence and harm. From the Civil Rights Movement to #BlackLivesMatter, Black women’s contributions and leadership have not been acknowledged to the same extent as their male counterparts. Furthermore, their experiences with state-sanctioned racial violence don’t garner as much attention. Lindsey argues that we must make visible the experiences and labor of Black women and queer persons of color in activist settings in order to strengthen activist struggles for racial justice.

Renya Ramirez, “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging.” Meridians , 2007

Renya Ramirez (Winnebago) argues that indigenous activist struggles for sovereignty, liberation, and survival must account for gender. A range of issues impact Native American women, such as domestic abuse, forced sterilization , and sexual violence. Furthermore, the settler state has been invested in disciplining indigenous concepts and practices of gender, sexuality, and kinship, reorienting them to fit into white settler understandings of property and inheritance. A Native American feminist consciousness centers gender and envisions decolonization without sexism.

Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization.” Science & Society , 2005

Hester Eisenstein argues that some of contemporary U.S. feminism’s work in a global context has been informed by and strengthened capitalism in a way that ultimately increases harms against marginalized women. For example, some have suggested offering poor rural women in non-U.S. contexts microcredit as a path to economic liberation. In reality, these debt transactions hinder economic development and “continue the policies that have created the poverty in the first place.” Eisenstein acknowledges that feminism has the power to challenge capitalist interests in a global context, but she cautions us to consider how aspects of the feminist movement have been coopted by corporations.

Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran.” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008

Afsaneh Najmabadi remarks on the existence of sex-reassignment surgeries in Iran since the 1970s and the increase in these surgeries in the twenty-first century. She explains that these surgeries are a response to perceived sexual deviance; they’re offered to cure persons who express same-sex desire. Sex-reassignment surgeries ostensibly “heteronormaliz[e]” people who are pressured to pursue this medical intervention for legal and religious reasons. While a repressive practice, Najmabadi also argues that this practice has paradoxically provided “ relatively safer semipublic gay and lesbian social space” in Iran. Najmabadi’s scholarship illustrates how gender and sexual categories, practices, and understandings are influenced by geographical and cultural contexts.

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore’s “Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore map the ways that transgender studies can expand feminist and gender studies. “Transgender” does not need to exclusively signify individuals and communities, but can provide a lens for interrogating all bodies’ relationships to gendered spaces, disrupting the bounds of seemingly strict identity categories, and redefining gender. The “trans-” in transgender is a conceptual tool for interrogating the relationship between bodies and the institutions that discipline them.

David A. Rubin, “‘An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name’: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender.” Signs , 2012

David Rubin considers the fact that intersex persons have been subject to medicalization, pathologization, and “regulation of embodied difference through biopolitical discourses, practices, and technologies” that rely on normative cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Rubin considers the impact intersexuality had on conceptualizations of gender in mid-twentieth century sexology studies, and how the very concept of gender that emerged in that moment has been used to regulate the lives of intersex individuals.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs , 2005

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson provides a thorough overview of the field of feminist disability studies. Both feminist and disability studies contend that those things which seem most natural to bodies are actually produced by a range of political, legal, medical, and social institutions. Gendered and disabled bodies are marked by these institutions. Feminist disability studies asks: How are meaning and value assigned to disabled bodies? How is this meaning and value determined by other social markers, such as gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, national origin, and citizenship status?

The field asks under what conditions disabled bodies are denied or granted sexual, reproductive, and bodily autonomy and how disability impacts the exploration of gender and sexual expression in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood historical and contemporary pathologization of genders and sexualities. It explores how disabled activists, artists, and writers respond to social, cultural, medical, and political forces that deny them access, equity, and representation

Karin A. Martin, “William Wants a Doll. Can He Have One? Feminists, Child Care Advisors, and Gender-Neutral Child Rearing.” Gender and Society , 2005

Karin Martin examines the gender socialization of children through an analysis of a range of parenting materials. Materials that claim to be (or have been claimed as) gender-neutral actually have a deep investment in training children in gender and sexual norms. Martin invites us to think about how adult reactions to children’s gender nonconformity pivots on a fear that gender expression in childhood is indicative of present or future non-normative sexuality. In other words, U.S. culture is unable to separate gender from sexuality. We imagine gender identity and expression maps predictably onto sexual desire. When children’s gender identity and expression exceeds culturally-determined permissible bounds in a family or community, adults project onto the child and discipline accordingly.

Sarah Pemberton, “Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes.” Signs , 2013

Sarah Pemberton’s considers how sex-segregated prisons in the U.S. and England discipline their populations differently according to gender and sexual norms. This contributes to the policing, punishment, and vulnerability of incarcerated gender-nonconforming, transgender, and intersex persons. Issues ranging from healthcare access to increased rates of violence and harassment suggest that policies impacting incarcerated persons should center gender.

Dean Spade, “Some Very Basic Tips for Making High Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk about Gendered Bodies.” The Radical Teacher , 2011

Lawyer and trans activist Dean Spade offers a pedagogical perspective on how to make classrooms accessible and inclusive for students. Spade also offers guidance on how to have classroom conversations about gender and bodies that don’t reassert a biological understanding of gender or equate certain body parts and functions with particular genders. While the discourse around these issues is constantly shifting, Spade provides useful ways to think about small changes in language that can have a powerful impact on students.

Sarah S. Richardson, “Feminist Philosophy of Science: History, Contributions, and Challenges.” Synthese , 2010

Feminist philosophy of science is a field comprised of scholars studying gender and science that has its origins in the work of feminist scientists in the 1960s. Richardson considers the contributions made by these scholars, such as increased opportunities for and representation of women in STEM fields , pointing out biases in seemingly neutral fields of scientific inquiry. Richardson also considers the role of gender in knowledge production, looking at the difficulties women have faced in institutional and professional contexts. The field of feminist philosophy of science and its practitioners are marginalized and delegitimized because of the ways they challenge dominant modes of knowledge production and disciplinary inquiry.

Bryce Traister’s “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies.” American Quarterly , 2000

Bryce Traister considers the emergence of masculinity studies out of gender studies and its development in American cultural studies. He argues that the field has remained largely invested in centering heterosexuality, asserting the centrality and dominance of men in critical thought. He offers ways for thinking about how to study masculinity without reinstituting gendered hierarchies or erasing the contributions of feminist and queer scholarship.

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Gender Development Research in Sex Roles : Historical Trends and Future Directions

Kristina m. zosuls.

School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 873701, Tempe, AZ 85287-3701, USA

Cindy Faith Miller

School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

Diane N. Ruble

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA

Carol Lynn Martin

Richard a. fabes.

The late 1960s through the 1970s marked an important turning point in the field of gender research, including theory and research in gender development. The establishment of Sex Roles in 1975 as a forum for this research represented an important milestone in the field. In this article, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of Sex Roles and, in particular, its contributions to the field of research on children’s and adolescents’ gender development. We examine the trends in research on gender development published in Sex Roles since its inception and use this analysis as a vehicle for exploring how the field has grown and evolved over the past few decades. We begin with a brief review of the history of this field of research since 1975. Then, we present a descriptive assessment of articles published on gender development in Sex Roles over time, and link this assessment to general trends that have occurred in the study of gender development over the past 35 years. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for the field of gender development. In particular, we highlight areas in which the journal could play a role in promoting more diversity in topics, methods, and ages employed in gender development research.

Introduction

Even before a child is born, processes of gender socialization begin as parents prepare for their child’s arrival: do the parents allow the ultrasound technologist to tell them the sex of their baby? Does knowing this information make a difference in how parents think about their unborn child? Once a child is born, parents remark, react to, and question the origins of their child’s behaviors—are they related to how they treat their child, or might they be related to their genes or personality? Developmental scientists are concerned with how and why behaviors emerge and change over time, and gender developmental scientists narrow their focus to the study of the origins of gendered behavior and gendered thinking. Gender development researchers, similar to other developmental researchers, focus on questions of change over time ( Ruble and Martin 1998 ). How early do children learn to identify themselves and others as males or females, and what are the consequences of learning to discriminate and label gender? At what point in development do girls and boys begin to diverge in their behaviors and interests, and why do these gender differences emerge? When do children develop a sense of male privileged status and when do they form negative attitudes about the other sex? These questions all concern basic processes underlying the origins and transmission of gender-role attitudes and structures, and are important to understanding broader issues related to the role of gender in shaping individuals, relationships, and social institutions.

These questions have also found their way into the journal Sex Roles. Since its first issue, the journal Sex Roles has published studies focused on children and adolescents. The presence of such articles in a journal more broadly devoted to the study of gender indicates a longstanding recognition of the importance of understanding the emergence and development of gender across development. Without having an understanding of developmental changes and of the patterns of change over time, scholars may only have a limited perspective on human behavior. Gender development researchers strive to fill these gaps in understanding.

In this article, we review both the broader history of research on gender development over the past few decades and more specifically address how this research has been represented in Sex Roles . In doing so, we celebrate the 35th anniversary of Sex Roles and, in particular, its contributions to the field of research on children’s and adolescents’ gender development. We believe that the 35th anniversary of Sex Roles provides a unique occasion to expand the mission and scope of the journal to more thoroughly incorporate ideas and research about gender development.

We examine the trends in research on gender development published in Sex Roles since 1975 and use this as a vehicle for exploring how the field has grown and evolved, and to highlight gaps in knowledge and research. We first provide a brief review of the history of this field of research since the journal’s inception. Then, we present a descriptive assessment of articles published on gender development in Sex Roles over time, and link this assessment to general trends that have occurred in the study of gender development over the past 35 years. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for the field of gender development and hope to influence what we see in the next 35 years (or more) of research in Sex Roles .

Milestones in the Study of Gender Development

The late 1960s through the 1970s marked an important turning point in the field of gender research. For example, in 1978, the current editor of this journal and her co-authors published one of the first textbooks on the psychology of women and gender roles ( Frieze et al. 1978 ). At that time, these areas were just emerging and the textbook represented an early and important effort to survey and integrate the existing literature. A recurring theme throughout the text was the white male bias that characterized the existing research and its interpretation. Furthermore, it provided a thorough discussion of the complexities surrounding the relative contributions of biological and social factors in understanding the psychology of women. Since that time, the field of gender studies has evolved and research on the development of gender-related behaviors and processes has grown considerably. In this section, we briefly review the developments in this field over the past few decades, with a particular focus on innovations in theory and research on gender development. In this section, we provide some perspective on the broader context of research and theory in the field that coincided with the establishment of Sex Roles as a forum for gender research.

A pivotal moment in the field of the psychology of gender occurred with the publication of Maccoby’s (1966) edited book, The Development of Sex Differences . The book focused on theories of gender development and contained several chapters that remain to this day the foundations of research and theory on children’s gender development (chapters by Hamburg and Lunde on hormonal influences on gender differences in behavior, Mischel’s chapter on social learning theory of gender development, and Kohlberg’s chapter proposing his cognitive developmental theory of gender development). These theoretical contributions gave direction to the study of gender in children.

In 1972, Money and Ehrhardt’s book, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl , advanced a provocative theory about gender identity and gender differentiation that continues to spark debate. Based on research with intersex patients, this book advanced the idea that social factors were more important than biological factors in gender identity and gender roles and brought nature-nurture issues to the forefront. The authors also promoted the notion of “gender role” as a term referring to the socially defined, outward manifestations of gender, and “gender identity” as one’s personal experienced sense of gender.

Chronologically, another important contribution was Maccoby and Jacklin’s (1974) book, The Psychology of Sex Differences. This book presented an unparalleled synthesis of research findings on gender differences in development. It was especially innovative because it challenged the idea that there were numerous differences between the genders; instead, it argued for only a few well-established differences. This book was also important for highlighting that within-gender differences are often larger than those between the genders (a point still lost in many of the popularized beliefs held today; for example, see Sax 2006 ). Maccoby and Jacklin’s conclusions stimulated further investigations on gender differences and similarities. Furthermore, the authors challenged the notion that parents are the primary agents of children’s gender socialization. Instead, they promoted the idea that children play an important and proactive role in the adoption of gender-stereotyped behaviors, and introduced the term “self-socialization” to describe these child-directed processes. The idea that children’s choices of whom to imitate plays a key role in their gender development sparked a new generation of research and debate on social and cognitive processes involved in children’s gender socialization. Their ideas also added a new dimension to research in the field by turning attention to group-level peer processes.

The 1970s marked a turning point in terms of how scholars thought about the concepts of sex and gender. Unger’s (1979) influential paper, Toward a Redefinition of Sex and Gender , asserted that the use of the term gender “serves to reduce assumed parallels between biological and psychological sex or at least to make explicit any assumptions of such parallels” (p. 1,086). Her ideas led scholars to become more selective in their use of the terms sex and gender and to avoid framing research in ways that might hint at biological determinism ( Poulin 2007 ). Terminology issues have continued to be raised in the field: some researchers proposed other usages because of concern that separating “sex” and “gender” may presuppose knowledge of the origins of behaviors (e.g., Deaux 1993 ).

Also during the 1970s, scholars started to move away from unidimensional and relatively simplistic models about the origins and meaning of gender differences and began to challenge conceptualizations of masculinity and femininity as representing bi-polar opposites. Most notably, in a conceptual breakthrough with both theoretical and methodological ramifications, Constantinople (1973) and Bem (1974) argued that males and females possess both masculine and feminine qualities. This idea revolutionized the measurement of these characteristics. Bem (1974) also argued that having both masculine and feminine qualities—that is, being psychological androgynous—was optimal for psychological adjustment. Her research laid the groundwork for subsequent research on gender identity and framed much research over the following years ( Marecek et al. 2003 ).

These ideas about multidimensionality were further emphasized in Huston’s (1983) chapter in the Handbook of Child Psychology . Huston encouraged researchers to conduct empirical investigations of links between domains of gender typing rather than to infer their existence, as researchers had been doing (e.g., make assumptions about a child’s gender identity based on toy preferences). To provide a framework for organizing existing theoretical constructs and describing different content areas, Huston presented a matrix of gender typing. This matrix helped focus theoretical debates and organize literature in the field. The matrix also has provided directions for new research.

Another important advancement in gender research has been the development and incorporation of meta-analytic methods. Meta-analysis allows for the systematic quantitative assessment of patterns across the findings of multiple studies and has had considerable impact on the study and understanding of many aspects of the psychology of gender ( Hyde and Linn 1986 ). Although not an experimental method, the application of meta-analysis to the study of gender differences has once again highlighted the limited nature of differences between the genders and has illuminated the conditions under which gender differences are more or less likely to appear (e.g., Else-Quest et al. 2006 ; Hyde et al. 1990 ). Meta-analyses are themselves not without limitations; they are non-experimental and thus limited in ability to draw cause-effect conclusions and tend to focus on mean differences rather than distributions (see Knight et al. 1996 ). Nonetheless, they provide important insights into gender development and gender differences.

Current Theoretical Trends and Debates

The field of gender development has been dominated by a few prevailing theoretical perspectives that have driven progress and debate in the field. Some of these competing perspectives have given rise to concepts (and related terms), methods, and research studies that have shaped the literature, including the research found in the pages of Sex Roles . In this section, we describe these contrasting perspectives and debates; however, we refer the reader to other sources for detailed discussions of the individual theories that are beyond the scope of what we can do in this article (e.g., Ruble et al. 2006 ).

Because developmental researchers are interested in the origins of behaviors, it is not surprising, that issues of nature and nurture are theoretically important and that great attention and fervor surround biological versus socialization approaches to understanding gender development ( Ruble et al. 2006 ). Biological arguments have long been advanced to justify gender inequality ( Shields 1975 ) and are often interpreted as deterministic. As such, there is much at stake when biological theories are proposed and research findings are interpreted. Nonetheless, with advancements in research methods and theories addressing biological mechanisms, this field of inquiry has gained acceptance and visibility ( Ruble et al. 2006 ). Current biological approaches do not imply determinism and instead emphasize the ways in which biological and social factors interact to produce behavior. Some of the most active research in this area has been on girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disease in which the fetus is exposed to elevated levels of androgens. Researchers have found that girls with CAH tend to be masculinized in some aspects of their preferences and behaviors (e.g., Berenbaum and Snyder 1995 ). Studies of prenatal exposure to normal variations in hormones such as testosterone ( Cohen-Bendahan et al. 2005 ), and cross-species comparisons ( Alexander and Hines 2002 ; Wallen 1996 ) have also become increasingly sophisticated and common.

Another debate that has received considerable attention in the field has concerned socialization and cognitive approaches to gender development. Although this debate can be traced back to Kohlberg’s and Mischel’s chapters in Maccoby’s 1966 book, more recent reviews of empirical evidence has re-stimulated this discussion (e.g., Bandura and Bussey 2004 ; Bussey and Bandura 1999 ; Martin et al. 2002 , 2004 ). Both approaches emphasize socialization versus biological processes and highlight the shaping of children’s behavior to match cultural gender role norms. However, the socialization and cognitive perspectives differ in the degree to which they emphasize the role of the social environment, especially reinforcement and modeling of adults and peers, relative to cognitive developmental processes, such as the emergence of children’s gender identity and knowledge of gender stereotypes. Despite the disagreements over relative contributions of socialization and cognitive processes, there are a number of similarities in these approaches, and both groups of theorists have conducted studies of cognitive and socialization factors. For instance, Bussey and Bandura (1999) describe some cognitive information-processing mechanisms, such as selective attention, forming cognitive representations, and forming plans of action, that mediate observational learning. Cognitive theorists describe the ways in which children interpret and respond to messages provided by socialization agents, such as peers ( Ruble et al. 2006 ).

These controversies have been important for driving new research. For example, researchers have increased efforts to understand early origins of gender differences and have done so by focusing research on younger ages, when gendered cognitions and behaviors first emerge (e.g., Zosuls et al. 2009 ). More research has also turned to focusing on links among various cognitive and socialization processes, thus leading to more complex models and studies of gender development (for example, see Tobin et al. 2010 ).

Gender Development Research in Sex Roles

There is no doubt that the historic changes described above have influenced the research that appears in our scholarly journals. To explore these trends, we turn our attention to the patterns of publication on gender development within Sex Roles since 1975. Our aim is to provide a descriptive medium for presenting trends in the field (and this journal, in particular) rather than to present an empirical piece with analyses that are an end in themselves. In taking this approach, we intend to characterize the issues, methods, and age groups that have received attention in the published research, and identify areas that need additional emphasis. Furthermore, we discuss why conducting developmental investigations is enriching to the field of gender studies, both theoretically and methodologically.

Identifying Patterns in Sex Roles Articles

To accomplish our goals, we reviewed all articles published in Sex Roles since 1975 (through 2009) and identified 660 abstracts of Sex Roles articles that specifically focused on children and child development (for further inclusion criteria, see Appendix A ). We then categorized these articles based on the age of the participants in the study (see Fig. 1 ), the principal type of methodology used in the study (see Fig. 2 ), and the content. Given the large number of articles we compiled and the descriptive purpose of our categorizations, our classifications were based on text provided in the abstracts. Because articles often investigated more than one content area or topic, categorizations were not mutually exclusive.

Percentage of articles by decade including each age grouping

Percentage of articles by decade using each type of methodology

Issues of Terminology

One of the most challenging aspects of classifying the articles was deciphering the meaning of some terms. In fact, this exercise served to highlight conceptual developments in the field and we felt a discussion of terminology was in itself a revealing way to illustrate important conceptual issues. As the area of gender development has evolved and expanded, the terminology used has similarly expanded and sometimes the meaning terms have changed over time. For example, although the terms “sex-typing,” “gender-typing,” or “gender stereotyping,” and “gender identity” have been the most frequently used terms in the field, the definitions and operationalizations of these terms have changed over time. To address this definitional issue, we briefly review these terms, how they have been used, and how we decided to code them in our analyses.

A recent model of children’s gender self-socialization, the Gender Self-Socialization Model (GSSM; Tobin et al. 2010 ) provides a useful framework for distinguishing among the various constructs studied by gender researchers. Tobin et al. point out that “sex-typing” and “gender-typing” are used in many different ways. They may refer to (a) the demonstration of knowledge or beliefs about attributes associated with gender categories (i.e., gender stereotyping), (b) thoughts and feelings about oneself in relation to being a girl or boy (i.e., gender identity), and (c) the enactment of gendered behavior. In accordance with Tobin et al. (2010) , when classifying articles, we took into account what measures authors used and classified studies as investigating Stereotyping, Gender Identity, or Gender Differences.

Studies investigating masculinity and femininity as proposed by Bem (1981) were classified under Gender Identity because this classification is consistent with the intent of the authors of these studies. However, a problem with Bem’s measurement and conceptualization of gender identity is that it is not assessed in terms of subjective thoughts, feelings, and knowledge about oneself as a member of a gender category, but rather is inferred from self-reports of the degree to which one possesses certain gender stereotyped attributes ( Tobin et al. 2010 ). Thus, we attempted to be sensitive to the multiple types of assessment methods used to investigate gender identity, such as those defined by Perry and his colleagues (e.g., Egan and Perry 2001 ) and adopted by other researchers over the past decade or so (e.g., Smith and Leaper 2006 ).

We also found that the term “gender stereotyping” was used without indication of whether gender stereotypes were assessed in terms of personal stereotype beliefs, knowledge of cultural stereotypes, stereotyped judgments, or the enactment of stereotype-consistent behaviors. Such distinctions are important. For example, a child’s personal beliefs related to gender stereotypes (e.g., believing that girls are good at math) might not always be consistent with her knowledge of cultural gender stereotypes (e.g., knowing the cultural stereotype that girls are not good at math; Signorella et al. 1993 ). Judgments, perceptions, and attributions might be closely linked with stereotype knowledge and beliefs, but are nonetheless distinct from them. Behaviors, such as engaging in stereotyped activities or demonstrating stereotyped interactions styles, might also be linked with more cognitive variables, such as stereotype knowledge, but are also distinct from them. As such, applying the general term “gender stereotyping” without explicit indication of whether gender stereotyped beliefs, knowledge, or behaviors are being measured can cause confusion and more importantly, conflate conceptually distinct constructs. In our classification, we included knowledge and beliefs in the category of stereotyping but included behaviors under Gender Differences.

Content of Gender Development Research in Sex Roles

In this section, we examine the content of articles in Sex Roles and how it relates to the field more broadly. We focus on the content both in terms of the methods used and the topics covered in the articles.

How Much Attention Has Sex Roles Paid to Gender Development Issues?

Since its inception, Sex Roles has published a substantial number of articles focused on child and adolescent participants, although such articles made up on average only about 20% of the journal’s total publications. The child-focused articles were least represented in the 2000s, comprising only 15% of the publications in Sex Roles , compared to between 20% and 23% in other decades. The changes over time are somewhat surprising when compared to the field (see Ruble and Martin 1998 ). This decline seen in Sex Roles might possibly be due to an increase in the number of developmental journals since the 1990s and greater receptiveness of other journals to articles focusing on gender development.

The publications in Sex Roles represented a wide range of developmental stages from infancy to adolescence. On average, Adolescence was clearly the most studied age group, followed by Middle Childhood (43% and 31% on average, respectively), and the least frequently studied stage was Infants/Toddlers, especially in the 2000s (see Fig. 1 ). The paucity of research in Infants/Toddlers in Sex Roles likely does not reflect a general trend in the field as sophisticated infant paradigm procedures have been recently developed, allowing researchers to gain better sense of infants’ and toddlers’ understanding of gender (e.g., Serbin et al. 2001 , 2002 ). In contrast to Infant/Toddler studies, there was a steady increase across decades in articles focusing on Adolescence (see Fig. 1 ). This change may be due to increased interest in adolescents’ gender development in general but it may also be that some of the specific topics, such as body image, have garnered more attention in recent years because of societal focus on health and problems with obesity.

What Have Been the Dominant Methods to Study Gender Development in Sex Roles ?

Although the studies in Sex Roles have used a wide range of methods, across all years the most frequently used method of study represented in Sex Roles was Survey methodology (66% on average). A number of articles also used Experimental (14% on average) and Observational (14% on average) methods; however, over time these methods were less represented (see Fig. 2 ). In addition, few articles used longitudinal or cross-sectional designs to make age comparisons and test developmental hypotheses. On average, 24% of studies involved cross-sectional or longitudinal designs, and these appeared to decrease across decades, with the 1970s and 1980s having the largest percentage and the 1990s and 2000s having a lower proportion of studies using such designs. Overall, the heavy reliance on non-experimental survey and interview methods and the lack of studies using longitudinal and cross-sectional designs may be problematic in that this tendency limits the goals and questions that can be the focus of study. For instance, debates surrounding the relative influence of biological, socialization, and cognitive factors in the emergence of gender stereotyped preferences and behaviors need to be addressed using methods that can test causal directions, including experimental methods and longitudinal designs. Furthermore, many topics that are important to theoretical development require the use of methods that may be time consuming, expensive, and complex, such as observation methods. The gender development field will need to focus more on these complicated methodologies to make further progress in answering these types of questions. Certainly, Sex Roles can be a leader in emphasizing these methods and in creating calls for special issues that focus on these methods.

Which Particular Issues of Gender Development Have Been Focused on in Sex Roles ?

In the following section, we use the latest version of the multidimensional matrix from the Handbook of Child Psychology ( Ruble et al. 2006 ) to organize the publication topics represented by gender development researchers in Sex Roles. We also use this endeavor to illustrate areas that have not been explored in any depth. This matrix addresses normative aspects of gender development and is organized around four gender-related constructs (e.g., concepts or beliefs) and six content areas (e.g., activities and interests) to create cells (identified with unique number and letter combinations) that contains specific research topics (e.g., gender constancy). Because this matrix has served as a precedent for organizing the literature and has also been modified and discussed over time in successive Handbook chapters ( Huston 1983 ; Ruble and Martin 1998 ; Ruble et al. 2006 ), it serves as a heuristic for describing trends. In Table 1 , we present a breakdown of the content areas and constructs, showing how many articles (and what percentage of the total number) fell into each cell of the matrix.

Classification of articles in the matrix of gender-typing ( Ruble et al. 2006 ): total number of articles (percentage of total articles)

Content areas and Constructs were from the latest version of the multidimensional matrix from the Handbook of Child Psychology ( Ruble et al. 2006 )

The articles in Sex Roles covered a wide range of broad content categories and constructs, although certain topics and constructs were consistently more dominant (see Table 1 ). Starting with content areas (the rows), by far more articles were written on two of the six content areas of the matrix—Activities and Interests (toys, occupations, etc.) and Personal-Social Attributes (roles, abilities, etc.)—than the other areas. Compared to the general patterns reported in the state-of-the-science review chapters on gender typing in the Handbook of Child Psychology , these two areas also received much attention from gender developmental scientists. However, there were notable differences between some of the less frequently appearing categories and trends in the broader field: Sex Roles published fewer studies on Gender-Based Social Relationships and on Biological/Categorical Sex when compared to the field in general. Given the strong socialization perspective of many readers of Sex Roles , it may not be that surprising that Sex Roles published few articles on Biological/Categorical Sex, but this topic has been very popular in the gender development literature because of its theoretical implications. Both Kohlberg’s cognitive developmental theory and gender schema approaches are based on ideas that understanding of basic gender knowledge facilitates and motivates learning about other aspects of gender (e.g., stereotypes) and engaging in gender-typed behaviors. Thus, three gender category topics that would fall under Biological/Categorical Sex (cell 1A) have received heavy research attention in developmental journals: understanding of gender identity, gender constancy (children’s understanding that gender is constant across time and situations), and infants’ abilities to discriminate gender (ability to distinguish males from females). On the other hand, research on Values Regarding Gender (attitudes, bias, discrimination, etc.) associated with gender has not been the focus of research attention by gender developmentalists, and this lack of attention has also been evident in Sex Roles . Given the feminist perspective on the importance of considering power and status, it may be somewhat surprising that so few child-focused articles appearing in Sex Roles have explored issues of gendered values.

An examination of constructs from the matrix (columns) shows that two of the four constructs—Identity/Self-Perception and Behavioral Enactment—were represented more often than others but the differences were relatively small. Concepts and Beliefs were well represented, but Preferences showed the lowest frequency of publication. These patterns are consistent with the amount of space devoted to these constructs in the Handbook of Child Psychology chapters, suggesting that the constructs of interest to gender developmental scientists have been mirrored in Sex Roles .

Also of interest are cells that were empty (e.g., concepts/belief about values; Cell 6A) or showed very low numbers of publications (concepts/beliefs about relationships; Cell 4A). When comparisons were made between the patterns of publication of gender development topics in Handbook of Child Psychology , the articles appearing in Sex Roles appeared to mirror the trends shown in the field more broadly with one major exception. Specifically, Sex Roles differed in the lack of publication of articles on topics related to identity/self perception associated with gender categories (Cell 1B). As described above, researchers have attended to this cell because of the implications for gender development more broadly, but this trend has not been demonstrated in Sex Roles .

Which Gender Development Topics Have Received Consistent Research Interest and Which Have Changed over Time?

In this section, we describe the findings using a more general classification strategy. That is, we classified articles based on major topic areas addressed in the literature on gender development. We identified topic areas using a bottom-up analysis of the articles in Sex Roles. Our topic areas are also consistent with the way in which topic areas are frequently grouped at conferences that cover gender development research, and thus reflects general research activity in the field. This approach allowed us to explore more fully and descriptively the interests of authors and editors of Sex Roles , which may diverge from the focus on topics represented in the developmental handbooks. We developed nine broad topic categories (see Table 2 ). The categories are discussed in terms of whether they have maintained consistent interest over time or have shown a change in research interest over time. We follow this review of the more prominent categories with a discussion of topics that have been relatively neglected across time and more specific content areas that deserve greater attention.

Topic categories by decade: total number of articles (percentage of articles)

Percentages calculated as a proportion of the total number of child-focused articles in individual decades. The 1970s included the years 1975–1979 and the 2000s included the years 2000–2009

Topics that have Maintained Consistent Interest Over Time

A number of topic areas received consistent research attention across time. Here we describe them in order of their prominence.

Gender Differences

The most frequent category appearing across all years was Gender Differences (an article was coded into the Gender Differences category when the abstract mentioned a comparison between girls and boys in a specific area). On average, slightly over half of the articles published in Sex Roles examined differences between the genders, and this trend mirrored research in the field more broadly. It is noteworthy that there was a decrease in the number of these studies in Sex Roles from the 1990s to the 2000s (see Table 2 ), potentially showing a declining interest in this area of research. It is possible that Maccoby and Jacklin’s 1974 book on the psychology of gender differences initially spurred increased interest in this area that peaked in the 1990s, but that increasing criticisms pertaining to the methodology and conclusions drawn from gender differences research resulted in a decrease in studies focusing on such differences by the 2000s. Most notably, Hyde (2005) proposed the gender similarities hypothesis to counter the differences model that has been popular in science and the popular media. The gender similarities hypothesis proposes that males and females are similar on most psychological variables and that most differences are in the close to zero range when examining effect sizes. Further, Hyde (2007) has argued that more theoretical and research attention needs to focus on gender as a stimulus variable that influences how other people behave toward a person rather than as an individual difference variable. Thus, in recent years, researchers have been challenged to formulate more complex research goals and studies that directly address popular assumptions about the existence, origins, and stability (or malleability) of gender differences. It will be interesting to see if such challenges are addressed in future articles in Sex Roles .

Socialization

Over time, an average of about one-third of the articles in Sex Roles were focused on gender socialization (see Table 2 ), and almost half of these articles focused on socialization by parents. Socialization continues to be a popular topic of study in gender development ( Ruble et al. 2006 ). A range of parent factors were represented in these Sex Roles publications, from parents’ attitudes, expectations, and perceptions, to parents’ behaviors with their children, and how parental characteristics (e.g., maternal employment, gay/lesbian parents) affected children’s gender development. A fair number of studies also investigated adults more generally (e.g., adult networks in children’s lives, adults’ perceptions of children) and teachers as socialization agents, although these categories were more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. The emphasis on gender socialization by parents and other adults is consistent with the popularity of socialization theories that emerged in the late 1960s ( Mischel 1966 , 1970 ) and revised in the 1970s and 1980s ( Bandura 1977 , 1986 ; Mischel 1979 ).

Studies focused on peer socialization were also prevalent in the journal, representing on average almost 20% of the socialization articles across the decades. Somewhat more articles on peer socialization were published in the 1970s and the 2000s, perhaps a result of Maccoby’s work in the 1970s on peer socialization and later, from renewed focus and theorizing about the role of peers, such as Judith Harris’ (1995) group socialization theory, and Maccoby’s later work on the consequences of gender segregation ( 1998 ). The peer socialization category also included studies that related to peer bullying and aggression, and there appeared to be more articles on this topic in the 2000s in Sex Roles and in the field more broadly, coinciding with the popularity of new theories concerning gender differences in styles of aggression (e.g., relational aggression vs. physical aggression, Crick and Grotpeter 1995 ).

Two other socialization topics were relatively frequent in the 2000s. First, several articles examined the role of social contexts, such as the family or school environment or specific factors in the broader sociocultural context. This apparent trend toward emphasizing context is consistent with the growth of contextual theories and cultural perspectives over time (for example, see Bronfenbrenner and Morris 2006 ; Magnusson and Stattin 2006 ). Second, some studies investigated the ways in which properties of objects could lead children to develop distinct styles of play (e.g., Karpoe and Olney 1983 ; Serbin et al. 1990 ). This type of research reveals how adults’ choices of children’s toys and children’s own choices can indirectly affect girls’ and boys’ development of different interaction styles and skills and more research identifying these features and their affects could and should be published in Sex Roles.

Stereotyping

The next largest category represented in Sex Roles was Stereotyping, with approximately 25% of the studies across decades addressing some aspect of children’s stereotyping (see Table 2 ). It should be noted that studies that only concerned adult stereotyping (e.g., parents’ stereotyped beliefs) were classified under Socialization rather than Stereotyping. As a result, this category was restricted to children’s stereotype-related cognitions and behaviors. Not surprisingly, most of these studies concerned the domains of activities/interests and personal-social attributes, similar to our findings reported above for gender differences. Studies commonly investigated the links between stereotype knowledge/beliefs and children’s interests/behaviors. Such studies are necessary for resolving theoretical controversies regarding the importance of cognitions in the development of early gendered behaviors, and these types of studies have been popular in the broader field of gender development as well as being represented in Sex Roles . For example, Bradbard and Endsley (1983) found that when novel objects were labeled as being for the other gender (i. e., stereotype knowledge), preschoolers explored the objects less frequently, asked fewer questions, and were more likely to forget object names than when the objects were labeled for their own gender or both genders. Although there were a number of experimental gender-labeling studies like this conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, there have been no recent studies published in this area in Sex Roles. Such studies continue to be published in other child development journals ( Martin et al. 1995 ). This decline in Sex Roles is unfortunate as there are still a number of unanswered questions regarding mediating mechanisms, age trends, and individual differences that are essential for theoretical development and intervention efforts ( Miller et al. 2006 ).

Children’s attitudes regarding egalitarian gender roles were also included within the Stereotyping category, and a considerable number of studies were published in this area, which were coded within the matrix cell for gender attitudes. These studies represent the longstanding interest and established measures concerning attitudes about egalitarian gender roles both within Sex Roles and the broader field of gender development. Moreover, these attitudes were often studied in relation to parent socialization (i.e., how parents’ gender role attitudes relate to children’s gender role attitudes) and as factors influencing gender differences (i.e., how children’s gender role attitudes relate to their behaviors and interests).

This category also encompassed a number of articles that focused on how children process and respond to gendered information in the environment. Many of these studies were designed to investigate the effects of stereotypes on children’s perceptions, including their memory/recall of stereotype consistent and inconsistent information, social judgments, and expectancies. These studies were therefore focused on exploring the cognitive processes underlying gender development.

Gender Identity

Gender Identity was also a consistently appearing topic category across the decades. The largest number of articles on this topic concerned self-perceptions of traits and abilities. Those studies typically involved children’s self-ratings of masculinity/femininity using scales such as Bem’s Sex Role Inventory ( Bem 1974 ) and Spence’s Personal Attributes Questionnaire ( Spence et al. 1975 ). As mentioned previously, however, the studies using these measures did not specifically assess children’s own thoughts, feelings, and knowledge regarding their membership in a gender category ( Tobin et al. 2010 ). Rather, children were asked to indicate the extent to which they believe that certain gender-typed attributes characterize them and the researcher uses this information to classify children along masculine/feminine dimensions. Historically, this has been the methodology used in the adult literature and, until recently, researchers interested in children have also used this approach. Currently, however, child researchers have tended to assess gender identity by directly asking children about their personal feelings regarding being male or female such as asking children the degree to which they feel that they are typical members of their gender group and the extent to which they are content with being a member of their gender group (e.g., Egan and Perry 2001 ). However, there may be developmental constraints in collecting such data as younger children may not be able to reflect upon their personal feelings regarding being male or female.

Another central focus of research and debate on gender identity development has been Kohlberg’s concept of gender constancy and gender schema views on the importance of basic gender understanding ( Martin and Halverson 1981 ; Martin et al. 2002 ). Indeed, the second largest number of articles on Gender Identity concerned gender awareness, labeling, and constancy. These aspects of early gender identity have received less research attention in Sex Roles than in the field more broadly (as described above). Only a small handful of studies addressed children’s affective sense of themselves as male or female or the wish to be male or female. Articles published in the 2000s were more likely than earlier studies to investigate multiple dimensions of identity (e.g., Carver et al. 2003 ), thus representing current thinking about gender identity as a complex, multifaceted construct.

Aside from studies growing out of classic theories of gender identity development, another somewhat frequent sub-category concerned body image. This topic became especially noticeable in the publications in the 1990s and 2000s, likely coinciding with increased attention to and alarm in the popular media surrounding the issue of eating disorders and obesity. Indeed, during the same two decades, eating disorder symptomology also appeared as a topic in Sex Roles .

Topics that Showed Changes Over Time

Although we did not observe any dramatic changes in coverage of the various topics across decades, some did evidence an increase in research attention over time. Here we discuss them in order of their general prominence in the journal.

Increased Cross-cultural Research

One of the more noticeable changes across decades was an increase in publications in Sex Roles categorized as Cross-Cultural in the 2000s (see Table 2 ). This pattern is not surprising given that the recent editorial policy of Sex Roles emphasizes internationalization and the importance of understanding cultural context ( Frieze and Dittrich 2008 ). This increase in cultural articles is also consistent with the increasing attention to cultural differences and representation in the psychological and developmental literatures more generally. Theories about cultural differences have been adapted to provide a framework for describing gender differences ( Cross and Madson 1997 ) and researchers have increasingly called for the need to extend the study of gender differences and gender development. Prior to 2000, most of the studies categorized as cross-cultural concerned racial/ethnic group differences or differences across countries. More recently, however, the bulk of studies in this category have focused on gender in one specific (typically non-white) cultural group. This change is consistent with trends in child development more broadly in investigating within-culture variability. Some studies also investigated differences related to socioeconomic status (SES) and demographic differences related to geography (typically urban versus rural populations).

We also noted that across time, abstracts were more likely to include information on the demographic characteristics of their samples, thus implicitly acknowledging potential limits to the generalizability of their findings and highlighting studies that were not conducted on the predominant US and/or white, middle-class samples. These studies that simply mentioned the demographic characteristics of their sample in the abstract (e.g., African American sample, middle- class sample) were not coded as cross-cultural unless they specifically focused on cultural issues such as similarities or differences between cultures. Thus our figures might somewhat underestimate the presence of culture as a theme in Sex Roles articles.

Increased Attention to Media

Articles in the Media category involved a number of types of media (i.e., books, TV programs/cartoons, commercials, films/video, computer/internet, music, etc.). Published articles concerning media or books were consistently present in the journal and appeared to increase in number in the 1990s and 2000s (see Table 2 ). The form of media most frequently represented involved books, and these most often dealt with the portrayals of females and males. However, in the last two decades, articles appeared that explored new media including the content of computer applications, the internet, and video games. A few other articles examined diverse content, including consumer product packaging (e.g., cereal boxes) and personalities in the media (e.g., celebrities).

On the whole, research in this category confirmed the idea that the books and media that children are exposed to present highly stereotyped portrayals of men and women, and women are often under-represented in stereotypically male roles (e.g., Purcell and Stewart 1990 ). Most studies in this category were content analyses and did not directly test implications, such as effects on various aspects of children’s gender identity (although body image was examined in a few studies) and stereotyping.

Increased Attention to Individual Differences and Adjustment

This broad and diverse category captured a somewhat surprisingly large percentage of articles, especially in the 2000s (See Table 2 ). The size of this category was partly due to the number of studies investigating topics related to psychological adjustment, including general measures of adjustment, such as self-esteem, as well as symptoms of psychopathology. These topics are of obvious relevance to gender development, but have been less frequently studied than core aspects of gender identity and gender-related beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors. Nonetheless, implications related to adjustment have been a driving force of research in gender development and have been important to theories of gender development. Indeed, a central concern of researchers dating back to Kagan (1964) and Bem (1974 , 1981) has been the implications of gender-typing and cross-gender-typing on adjustment. More recently, researchers have investigated adjustment outcomes in relation to multiple dimensions of gender identity (for a review, see Lurye et al. 2008 ). For instance, research by Perry and his colleagues has found that felt pressure to adhere to gender norms is associated with lower self-worth ( Egan and Perry 2001 ). Thus, current research on adjustment appears to be a focus on aspects of gender that lead to good or poor adjustment outcomes. This is an especially fruitful and important direction for future research, as it directly addresses the implications of various aspects of gender for children’s more general functioning.

Several other topics included in this category because of their relevance to adjustment were Gender Identity Disorder and eating disorders and body issues. The number of articles addressing Gender Identity Disorder was extremely small and only appeared in the 2000s. Given the controversies about the causes and consequences of extreme gender non-normative behavior (e.g., Hegarty 2009 ; Zucker et al. 2009 ), and its obvious relevance to theories of gender identity development, more research on this topic is certainly warranted. The studies in this category also reflect topics related to eating disorders, body satisfaction, and body size or Body Mass Index (BMI). These topics have received much attention in the public media and are of clear relevance to gender development.

Publications that focused on various dimensions of personality and individual differences were also coded into this category. One of the individual difference constructs that stood out was the measurement of “fear of success” in the 1970s and 1980s. This was perhaps the most dated concept we came across and its disappearance after the 1980s is indicative of social changes. Although there is little, if any, recent research on girls’ motivations to avoid success as an individual difference, girls might nonetheless avoid participation in certain male-dominated fields due to real and perceived obstacles to success in those fields. For example, the concept of stereotype threat has been frequently used to discuss barriers to girls’ success in fields such as math (e.g., Spencer et al. 1999 ). Thus, in a general sense, the “fear of success” topic is still with us, but its framing has changed to reflect the role of context and the more nuanced nature of barriers to girls’ participation and success in male stereotyped fields.

A number of articles included in this category also addressed topics more closely related to sexuality, sexual maturation, and male-female relationships, including sexual behaviors, dating, menarche, sexual orientation, and sexual harassment. These topics have not been very well integrated into the gender development literature and sexual identity in particular tends to be very specialized and focused on sexual minorities ( Diamond 2003 ). Furthermore, although sexual identity is later developing and obviously related to older age groups, awareness of sexual attraction and relationships emerge earlier, and is clearly relevant to children’s conceptions of gender roles. Thus, greater consideration of issues of sexual identity and sexual and romantic relationships would provide a more complete understanding of gender development.

Neglected Topics and Gaps in the Literature

Thus far, we have primarily focused on the topics and theories that have dominated the literature and been most visible in this journal. However, gaps in the literature were found and are important to consider as they help identify future directions for researchers.

There were gaps in the ages of children studied. Few studies in our content analysis of articles published in Sex Roles involved research on infants and toddlers. The lack of infant and toddler research may be due to in part to challenges associated with testing very young children. However, researchers now have access to a variety of methods available to them for observing and analyzing behavioral data, thus freeing researchers from having to rely on self-report and parent reported data on children, and expanding options for studying children who are too young to follow complex procedures or report on their own thoughts and behaviors. Given that children demonstrate a range of gender-typed behaviors, preferences, and knowledge by 2–3 years of age, if not earlier, it behooves investigators to expand efforts to better understand the earliest stages of gender development.

Gaps were also noted in the types of methods utilized in studies. Self-report measures were the most frequently used method of data collection. This reliance on self-report measures is likely because many of the issues and questions addressed in the articles could be assessed most easily and directly via these methods (and may explain the relative lack of focus on young children and infants/toddlers). These qualities are certainly strengths of direct self-reports. However, weaknesses and limitations also exist (as is the case with any method) and differences in methods may contribute to lack of coherence in findings. For example, Eisenberg and colleagues ( Eisenberg and Lennon 1983 ; Fabes and Eisenberg 1996 ) found that gender differences in empathy and sympathy varied with the method used to assess empathy-related responding. Specifically, their meta-analyses found large differences favoring girls for self-report measures of empathy/sympathy, especially questionnaire indices. No gender differences were found when the measure of empathy was either physiological or unobtrusive observations of nonverbal behavior. Eisenberg and Lennon (1983) suggested that the general pattern of results was due to differences among measures in the degree to which the intent of the measure was obvious and people could control their responses. Gender differences were greatest when demand characteristics were high (i.e., it was clear what was being assessed) and individuals had conscious control over their responses (i.e., self-report indices were used). In contrast, gender differences were virtually nonexistent when demand characteristics were subtle and study participants were unlikely to exercise much conscious control over their responding (i.e., physiological indices). Thus, when gender-related stereotypes are activated and people can easily control their responses, they may try to project a socially desirable image to others or to themselves. Such findings call for the greater use of multiple methods in research published in Sex Roles (and elsewhere) to ascertain whether this pattern exists in our research and certainly argues for less sole reliance on self-report methods.

There is some evidence that such a change is beginning to happen. For example, our analysis revealed a slight increase in studies employing time and labor intensive methods that allow for the discovery and analysis of the more subtle and complex aspects of behavior, such as the coding of transcriptions and videotaped and real-time observation, and qualitative methods. Such methods allow for a more micro-analytic examination of the dynamics of behavioral interactions but also take considerable time and effort to code, manage, and analyze. The investigation of changing patterns of behaviors in large-scale observational or longitudinal studies may require dynamical analyses that may be unfamiliar to many gender researchers ( Martin and Ruble 2010 ). Moreover, a fair amount of debate has surrounded the value and limitations of qualitative methods, though there is now growing consensus that empirical and qualitative methods each have advantages and disadvantages and can be used to complement each other (e.g., Oakley 1999 ).

There were also a number of gaps in the content of the articles. Overall, it seems that the emphasis in the gender development publications in Sex Roles has been on the development of different gender-linked abilities and traits, often in the areas of academic and career-related choices and skills. These aspects of gender development make up only a small portion of the Matrix of Gender-Typing ( Ruble et al. 2006 ) and this emphasis on a limited set of gender-related attributes suggests that many aspects of children’s gender-typing remain to be explored. Some of these aspects might be less salient or more difficult to measure (e.g., gestures, speech patterns), but nonetheless are integral aspects of gender identity. Further research is also needed to better understand the relations among the various cells in the matrix and how such relations might change across development.

Despite the prevalence of articles addressing socialization, our analysis of this category indicated that research in this area has been heavily slated toward investigating the role of parents. Less attention was focused on peers in the articles we reviewed in Sex Roles . Nonetheless, there has been greater focus on peers in the more recent literature. This research activity may have been facilitated by the recognition of peer influences earlier in development (e.g., Fabes et al. 2003b ), as well as by methodological advances that have allowed for the exploration of peer processes in greater depth and complexity ( Martin et al. 2005 ; Martin and Ruble 2010 ).

Despite the recent interest in this topic, the fact that little attention has been paid to peer relationships in children younger than adolescents may reflect a failure to recognize the importance of early peer relationships to young children’s gender development and adjustment. Given that much of young children’s peer-related interactions are highly structured by gender and that these gender segregated peer groups have important influences on short- and long-term adjustment ( Fabes et al. 2003a ; Martin and Fabes 2001 ), researchers who publish in Sex Roles (and elsewhere) need to be more attentive to the role that peers play in early gender development.

Furthermore, relatively little research has focused on the ways in which gender affects relationships and communication with peers and might impact same- and other-gender relationships across time into adulthood. In our analysis, studies that did involve relationship processes tended to focus on adolescents and addressed specific relationship contexts and issues, such as dating and sexual harassment. Few studies focused on assessing cognitions or beliefs about relationships. There is a need for theory to better understand the dynamics and development of male-female (and same-gender) relationships over time ( Zosuls et al. 2011 ). Such knowledge would help us to better understand children’s interpersonal dynamics in friendship, school, and home contexts and how to promote more positive relationships into adulthood.

Children’s social cognition, including their intergroup attitudes, plays an important role in peer relationships. Intergroup attitudes and behaviors have been of longstanding interest to gender researchers coming from a social psychological perspective (e.g., Bigler 1995 ; Powlishta 1995a , b ) and have been prominent in gender schema views ( Martin and Halverson 1981 ; Liben and Signorella 1980 ). However, with the exception of the measurement of children’s gender role attitudes, few studies investigated intergroup processes and gender differences in values regarding gender. The limited research on intergroup processes is surprising given that the study of children’s intergroup gender attitudes should have obvious connections to theories related to children’s behaviors, including gender segregation. One reason for the dearth of research directly measuring children’s intergroup gender attitudes might be that such bias is inferred from children’s greater liking for peers of their own gender. Whereas such evidence certainly indicates more positive attitudes about one’s own group, it does not constitute a direct measure of attitudes and is a poor gauge of the exact nature of children’s feelings about their own and the other gender group ( Martin and Ruble 2010 ; Zosuls et al. 2011 ). Once again, however, it could be the case that studies focused on Intergroup Processes appear in journals that more specifically address these topics (e.g., social psychology journals).

Although gender discrimination is a common topic of study in the adult psychological literature, research on children’s same-gender peer preferences, evaluations, and interactions are rarely framed in terms of discrimination. Furthermore, relatively little is known about how children may or may not perceive gender discrimination directed at others or themselves (for an exception, see Brown and Bigler 2004 , 2005 ). More studies investigating gender discrimination within and between gender groups would be valuable for better understanding the dynamics of girls’ and boys’ relationships and for designing strategies to prevent acts of gender-based discrimination among children.

Our analysis also suggested that even less is known about the impact on gender development of socialization messages children receive from features of the larger socio-cultural context, such as the media. Given how much media children are exposed to and the debates often surrounding children’s media content, more studies that directly test the effects of media on gender-related self-concepts, behaviors, and perceptions would be a valuable direction for future research. Furthermore, although a number of studies investigated features of media that children are exposed to, few examined whether children perceive media messages in the ways that they are presented and assumed to be processed by adults. In the majority of studies of socialization, investigators have often worked under the assumption that gender-related features of the environment are relatively passively encoded by children, rather than actively processed. Future research should aim to test these assumptions.

The Gender Identity and Adjustment and Individual Differences categories reflected growth and evolution in theories and topics addressed by the literature, but also suggested the need for further integration of these topics into core theories and research. Both categories featured a number of studies addressing the topic of body image; however, this aspect of identity is not usually included in models and measures related to various aspects of gender identity, such as gender typicality (e.g., Egan and Perry 2001 ). Rather, body image is generally discussed in terms of its relation to psychological adjustment (e.g., eating disorders). Nonetheless, body image has obvious relevance to children’s gender identity development and future research should aim to incorporate this idea more directly into theories and studies of gender identity. For example, body image might have relevance to children’s sense of gender typicality, with children who have bodies and body images that are closer to societal ideals for their gender feeling more typical for their gender.

Finally, the vast majority of studies addressed cognitive and socialization processes. Only one published study directly focused on biological ideas about gender development ( Rodgers et al. 1998 ). Studies focusing on biology may have been virtually nonexistent because such articles are more likely to be published in journals that are oriented to the biological sciences, and may be due to this journal’s greater emphasis on socialization and feminist perspectives. Indeed, the name of this journal— Sex Roles —emphasizes roles, which connotes socially learned and prescribed behaviors. Research studies investigating of biological factors, such as hormones, also tend to be complex and expensive and are conducted by a relatively small group of investigators interested in gender development (e.g., Alexander and Hines 2002 ; Berenbaum and Snyder 1995 ; Wallen 1996 ). Nonetheless, research involving a biological perspective has gained momentum in recent decades and would be a valuable addition to the body of research represented in Sex Roles.

Looking forward, as gender development researchers and contributors to Sex Roles , we should also consider what areas of research are most important to address given current inequalities, societal problems, and shifting cultural and demographic features of society and the endpoints we are interested in achieving for future generations of girls and boys. Social issues concerning educational practices and improving school outcomes have become gendered discussions (Does the gender gap in education now favor girls? Should single-sex education be encouraged or discouraged?), and these issues warrant the attention of researchers. Changes in media also provide new areas for research investigation. For instance, the ubiquity of and interest in social networking for adolescents suggests that researchers should consider how virtual, immediate, and potentially continuous social connections among adolescents influences personal and social dimensions of gender development. Biological and cultural changes suggest how the lines between adolescence and younger ages are becoming blurred. The earlier ages of puberty and increased sexualization of young girls are examples of topics that require additional research attention ( American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls 2007 ).

Summary and Conclusion

In this paper, our primary goal was to describe trends in research on gender development published in Sex Roles over the past few decades. Overall, the topics receiving the greatest emphasis—Gender Differences, Socialization, and Stereotyping, and to a somewhat lesser degree, Gender Identity—were relatively stable over time. The prevalence of articles documenting gender differences is logical given that gender differences—whether real or perceived, small or large in magnitude—was the starting point of interest for which the field came into existence and that many researchers are ultimately interested in explaining. Gender differences have long captured the public’s interest and have been used to justify myriad laws, policies, and practices in the public and private spheres. The emphasis on gender socialization and stereotyping is also consistent with the prominence of socialization theories beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the journal’s mission to provide a feminist perspective. The Gender Identity category was especially varied and rich; the studies in this category clearly reflected the broad influence of Bem’s measure, but also included work influenced by Kohlberg’s (1966) ideas about gender constancy, and newer multidimensional models of gender identity.

Gender development has progressed a long way from the initial study of gender differences, and has continued to move forward steadily. Leaders in the field have encouraged increasingly precise and clear terminology, more sophisticated methods and analytic techniques, and a greater diversity of topics of study. Assumptions made about one domain of gender development predicting all others have been questioned, and the multidimensionality of gender has been highlighted, as evidenced here in the many topics covered by researchers. Sex Roles has played an important role in the growth of the field by providing an outlet dedicated to disseminating research on the wide array of topics associated with gender development. In the next 35 years, our hope is that the journal will continue to play a leadership role in the field, and to promote more diversity in topics, methods, and ages employed in gender development research.

Acknowledgments

The paper was supported in part by a research grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD045816-01) awarded to the Carol Lynn Martin and Richard A. Fabes; a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research grant (R01 HD04994) to Diane N. Ruble; and a National Science Foundation IRADS grant (0721383) Funds from the T. Denny Sanford Foundation also supported work on this paper. Funding also was provided by the School of Social Dynamics and the Challenged Child Project at Arizona State University.

To determine inclusion, we used several parameters. In addition to including studies that had children as direct participants, we also included studies that had children or child development as the targets of study (e.g., maternal reports about children, parents’ gender-typed discipline strategies). Second, we included studies that involved content analyses of children’s media (e.g., gender-typed behaviors displayed in children’s cartoons). Third, studies with a primary purpose of reporting the psychometric properties of a measure developed for and used with children were also included. We excluded studies that were based on a college student sample or that included participants 17 years and older if the primary purpose of the study did not concern adolescence. Moreover, we did not include retrospective studies, and we did not include non-empirical theoretical and review papers.

Contributor Information

Kristina M. Zosuls, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 873701, Tempe, AZ 85287-3701, USA.

Cindy Faith Miller, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

Diane N. Ruble, Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.

Carol Lynn Martin, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

Richard A. Fabes, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

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Gender Roles in Society

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A Simple Way to Understand the Origin of Gender Roles

We can understand gender differences via the "influence matrix.".

Posted July 27, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

As evidenced by the infamous Google Memo debacle a few years ago , there is much confusion in our society regarding the best way to think about gender similarities and differences. From the vantage point of the unified theory, people are generally using only two “vectors” in thinking about sex and gender, when the reality is that we need three.

The two vectors are the so-called "biological" and "social" forces. The biological generally refers to the genetic, physiological, evolutionary, and hormonal “nature” dimension, whereas societal roles, norms, ideals, and expectations for how men and women ought to act form the "social force" dimension. What is missing in this analysis is a clear understanding of the human mental architecture that is neither a purely "biological" nor "social" force.

A recent article in the American Psychologist on gender stereotypes makes the problem clear. Alice Eagly and colleagues examined the gender stereotypes of people in the United State from 1946 to 2018.

Specifically, Eagly et al. examined perceptions of men and women on agency , which the authors define as the tendency to “orient toward the self and one’s own mastery and goal attainment (e.g., ambitious, assertive , competitive),” and communion , which the authors define as the tendency to orient toward the “other and their well-being (e.g., compassionate, warm, expressive).” The authors note: “Communion prevails in the female stereotype, and agency in the male stereotype.”

Consistent with my point above about "biology" versus "society," the Eagly article explains that there are two primary ways of understanding why people tend to see men as more agentic and women more communal. They state: “Although some people ascribe such trait essences to biology, others instead ascribe them to socialization and social position in society” (Rangel & Keller, 2011).

The article does not explore human mental architecture , nor core mental relational tendencies, like attachment style. For the article, the authors examined stereotypes on agency and communion over 50+ years in the U.S. They also included a third construct, competency (i.e., the extent to which men or women were perceived as the generally more or less competent or intelligent). What did they find?

Over the years, women were seen as increasingly more competent, such that they now are rated as the more competent and intelligent group. We should note that this is an interesting and somewhat counterintuitive finding, given the claims by some that modern society is pervasively sexist. I agree with Eagly et al.'s interpretation of this finding, which is that as women have been given the freedom to attain and have now regularly outpaced men in things like educational attainment, people are evaluating their general competence accordingly.

Our primary focus here is on the agency and communion variables. Given the remarkable change in attitudes toward gender in the last 50 years, and the huge societal push to see men and women as having no essential (i.e., nonsocially constructed) differences, and all the work to challenge gender stereotypes and move away from a socially constructed gender binary, it seems to me that a basic, straightforward prediction would be that the differences between the stereotypes that people have about men being more agentic and women being more communal would be expected to go way down.

After all, if we are awakening to the idea that the gender identity binary is simply a function of the social construction of reality, then shouldn't our newfound freedom allow us to be unshackled from these primitive notions and allow people to toss off the shell of rules imposed upon them by society?

What did the study find? A massive convergence, stemming from enlightenment about the true nature of gender as a social construction? Not at all. In fact, they found basically the opposite.

The perceived differences between men and women increased over the years. Women are now seen as even more communal, whereas men generally stayed the same on their perceived agentic advantage. This means that the perceived distance between the key personality features of the two genders is now even greater than 50 years ago.

In the words of the authors: “In sum, U.S. poll data show that it is only in competence that gender equality has come to dominate people’s thinking about women and men. For qualities of personality, the past 73 years have produced an accentuated stereotype of women as the more communal sex, with men retaining their agency advantage."

The authors used tortured logic to try to defend their social role construction view that “gender stereotypes stem from people’s direct and indirect observations of women and men in their social roles.” Although clearly social roles play a huge part in how people experience their gender and sexuality , from the vantage point of the unified theory, it is not the primary origin/source of the gender differences (see here, here , and here for analyses of gender from this perspective).

So what is the source of the gender differences in agency and communion? On aggregate, human males and females have different relational tendencies.

Just as the description of agency suggests, on average men tend to be more “self-over-other” oriented, whereas on average women are more “other-over-self” (i.e., communal). (Hopefully, readers will be clear that aggregate claims of population-level differences are different than claims about specific individuals).

This is not hard to understand when we map the human relationship system using the "Influence Matrix." The Influence Matrix says that humans have an intuitive mental architecture that (pre-verbally) guides their perceptual-motivational-emotional ways of being the world in relation to others.

Specifically, we humans automatically and intuitively map our place in the “social influence matrix.” That is, we are constantly tracking self-in-relation-to-other, and use that to act accordingly. Here is the map.

The idea is that folks perceive self-in-relation-to-other on these dimensions. We track first our "relational value and social influence," which is the black line. And we also track our relative power (dominance-submission), love (affiliation-hostility), and freedom (autonomy-dependency).

How we see ourselves in relation to others on these process dimensions plays a guiding role in navigating the social world. It is important to note that basically all scholars of the human condition agree that humans are social animals and that they care about things like attachment and love and status and power.

And it is generally agreed that these drives are not socially constructed, but are at the core of our structure and existed long before modern society. From this vantage point, it is a function of our mental structure rather than our "socialization" that gives rise to patterns like the fact that if we don't experience high relational value in our development, then we are much more likely to get depressed (see here ).

Directly relevant to the issue at hand, we see the Influence Matrix includes two “self-other” quadrants, one of which is the upper left corner and the other is the lower right. The upper left is “self over other” and emphasizes the poles of dominance, autonomy (i.e., independent goal attainment), and hostility. The lower right, aka the “other over self,” quadrant emphasizes affiliation, dependence (i.e., longing for connection and need for approval), and submissive deference to others.

In other words, the Influence Matrix clearly maps the core representations of the central features of "agency" and "communion."

It is essential that we recognize that this human mental architecture existed long before the social construction of reality (which is perhaps only 50,000 to 150,000 years old), and is certainly much older than ideas about what is socially justifiable for how men and women should act in the 21st century.

The Matrix goes back to a time when we were primates rather than persons; thus we are talking about tens of millions of years . The Influence Matrix analysis directly accounts for the counterintuitive finding from the Eagly article and provides a frame that explains why gender stereotypes are so "robust" (to use their word).

To begin with, the Matrix explains in a direct and straightforward way why there are “self-over-other” and “other-over-self” tendencies and archetypes in the first place. Notice, this says nothing about males/masculinity or females/femininity per se . It simply says something about the mental architecture needed to navigate the social world. However, we can then use basic logic to understand why, on aggregate, males/men tend toward the former and females/women the latter.

For example, long before we were humans, females were giving birth and taking care of their young. Is it any surprise at all that their architecture would be more relationally oriented? My point is that we can analyze the general relational features of being a male and female human primate and see that males tend to lean relatively more toward self-over-other, whereas females tend to lean toward other-over-self.

This analysis means that Eagly et al have the explanatory sequence backward. Rather than social roles driving the perception of difference, it is clear from this analysis that the mental architecture is prior, and is the primary driver of the personality differences and people's perception of them.

As such, the Matrix helps explain other "counterintuitive" findings about gender role/job preferences, like the Nordic gender-equity paradox , which is the finding that greater gender equity in social roles and expectations is associated with greater (not lesser) divergence in things like employment preferences.

The real point is that our society is painfully confused in its understanding of sex and gender differences ( and similarities !). A core reason for our confusion is we have an unhelpful "biology" versus "sociology" binary—as if these are the only two forces, and we need to choose either one or the other.

Of course, in the real world, forces are interacting all over the place. Moreover, there are "mental" forces that are neither "biological" nor "social." Rather, we need a clear analysis of the animal-mental dimension of complexity, which as the Tree of Knowledge shows us, is its own plane of complex adaptive behavior and is different from both the "Cell-Life" biological plane and "Person-Culture" societal plane.

By mapping the mental architecture of the human relationship system, the Influence Matrix fills in the missing piece of the puzzle. With it, perhaps we can achieve more light and less heat on this polarizing issue.

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at James Madison University.

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Stereotypes and Gender Roles

Many of our gender stereotypes are strong because we emphasize gender so much in culture (Bigler & Liben, 2007). For example, children learn at a young age that there are distinct expectations for boys and girls. Gender roles refer to the role or behaviors learned by a person as appropriate to their gender and are determined by the dominant cultural norms. Cross-cultural studies reveal that children are aware of gender roles by age two or three and can label others’ gender and sort objects into gender categories. At four or five, most children are firmly entrenched in culturally appropriate gender roles (Kane, 1996). When children do not conform to the appropriate gender role for their culture, they may face negative sanctions such as being criticized, bullied, marginalized or rejected by their peers. A girl who wishes to take karate class instead of dance lessons may be called a “tomboy” and face difficulty gaining acceptance from both male and female peer groups (Ready, 2001). Boys, especially, are subject to intense ridicule for gender nonconformity (Coltrane and Adams, 2008; Kimmel, 2000)

By the time we are adults, our gender roles are a stable part of our personalities, and we usually hold many gender stereotypes. Men tend to outnumber women in professions such as law enforcement, the military, and politics. Women tend to outnumber men in care-related occupations such as child care, health care, and social work. These occupational roles are examples of typical Western male and female behavior, derived from our culture’s traditions. Adherence to these occupational gender roles demonstrates fulfillment of social expectations but may not necessarily reflect personal preference (Diamond, 2002).

Gender stereotypes are not unique to American culture. Williams and Best (1982) conducted several cross-cultural explorations of gender stereotypes using data collected from 30 cultures. There was a high degree of agreement on stereotypes across all cultures which led the researchers to conclude that gender stereotypes may be universal. Additional research found that males tend to be associated with stronger and more active characteristics than females (Best, 2001); however recent research argues that culture shapes how some gender stereotypes are perceived. Researchers found that across cultures, individualistic traits were viewed as more masculine; however, collectivist cultures rated masculine traits as collectivist and not individualist (Cuddy et al., 2015). These findings provide support that gender stereotypes may be moderated by cultural values.

There are two major psychological theories that partially explain how children form their own gender roles after they learn to differentiate based on gender. Gender schema theory argues that children are active learners who essentially socialize themselves and actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes into gender categories, which are known as schemas . These schemas then affect what children notice and remember later. People of all ages are more likely to remember schema-consistent behaviors and attributes than schema-inconsistent behaviors and attributes. So, people are more likely to remember men, and forget women, who are firefighters. They also misremember schema-inconsistent information. If research participants are shown pictures of someone standing at the stove, they are more likely to remember the person to be cooking if depicted as a woman, and the person to be repairing the stove if depicted as a man. By only remembering schema-consistent information, gender schemas strengthen more and more over time.

A second theory that attempts to explain the formation of gender roles in children is social learning theory which argues that gender roles are learned through reinforcement, punishment, and modeling. Children are rewarded and reinforced for behaving in concordance with gender roles and punished for breaking gender roles. In addition, social learning theory argues that children learn many of their gender roles by modeling the behavior of adults and older children and, in doing so, develop ideas about what behaviors are appropriate for each gender. Social learning theory has less support than gender schema theory but research shows that parents do reinforce gender-appropriate play and often reinforce cultural gender norms.

Gender Roles and Culture

Hofstede’s (2001) research revealed that on the Masculinity and Femininity dimension (MAS), cultures with high masculinity reported distinct gender roles, moralistic views of sexuality and encouraged passive roles for women. Additionally, these cultures discourage premarital sex for women but have no such restrictions for men. The cultures with the highest masculinity scores were: Japan, Italy, Austria and Venezuela. Cultures low in masculinity (high femininity) had gender roles that were more likely to overlap and encouraged more active roles for women. Sex before marriage was seen as acceptable for both women and men in these cultures. Four countries scoring lowest in masculinity were Norway, Denmark, Netherlands and Sweden. The United States is slightly more masculine than feminine on this dimension; however, these aspects of high masculinity are balanced by a need for individuality.

Culture and Psychology Copyright © 2020 by L D Worthy; T Lavigne; and F Romero is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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