efforts by government officials, missionaries, and eventually the Communist leadership under Mao Zedong to end the practice. Footbinding was not accepted by other East Asian societies, although the importation of Confucian ideas from China later restricted women’s capacities to perform ceremonies of ancestor worship and to inherit family land in Korea and Vietnam.
Footbinding tied women physically to the household and thus kept them out of public view, as did other practices found in a great many cultures around the world. In many areas, women have been secluded by law or custom, either in particular parts of the house – the gyneceum in ancient Athens or the harim in the Ottoman Empire – or by veiling. The first records of veiling come from the ancient Near East in about 3000 BCE, where the links between this practice and household seclusion were already recognized, for the ancient Akkadian word for veiling is the same as that for shutting a door. However it was accomplished, secluding women generally involved or at least began with the elites in any society, for the vast majority of cultures could not afford to lose the labor power of half of their workers; slave and peasant women were generally not secluded, and their activities made the enclosure of elite women possible. Sometimes seclusion was more clearly an issue of status than gender. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, elite males rarely left their households, conducting their business through agents and obtaining their education through tutors; as the pinnacle of Ottoman society, the sultan never left his palace, but required all those who had business with him to meet him there. (This is another example of the complex interplay between “public” and “private.”)
Other than very elite men in some cultures, however, and one or two groups around the world such as the Tuareg of northern Africa in which men were veiled, attempts to restrict visual and physical contact between men and women have led to the seclusion of women. As we will see in later chapters, women in some areas have developed their own interpretation and understanding of the meaning of veiling, viewing it as empowerment rather than restriction and a means of asserting cultural or national identity. This is a good example of the way in which practices originally based on one idea about the nature of men and women can be reinterpreted when the social or political context changes, or be understood differently by various individuals or groups.
Many cultures that did not practice seclusion or veiling developed norms of conduct for women that were demonstrations of their dependent status. Women in some parts of India were expected to adopt a deferential posture when speaking with men, and in Japan were expected to drop their eyes when in public to avoid making eye contact with men. Restrictive norms have often been justified with reference to “tradition,” but may, in fact, have been recent innovations. In India, for example, the British government expanded upper-caste Brahmanic customs into Hindu law, which put greater limitations on the mobility and independence of lower-caste married women than they had experienced earlier. The 1898 Civil Code in Japan limited women’s civil rights sharply, denying them existence as legal persons and requiring inheritance to pass through the male line, a break with earlier customs. Women in Japan today generally use a form of deferential and softer speech commonly called “women’s language” claimed to be an ancient tradition but which may actually have been invented during the early twentieth century, the period in which this Civil Code was enacted.
Women’s lack of legal status as persons was actually a common feature in many of the world’s written law codes, which have sometimes regarded women as a form of property. In most cultures until the nineteenth or twentieth century (or until today), marriage explicitly established a relationship of husbandly authority and wifely obedience. This relationship was often enshrined or symbolized in wedding ceremonies in which the wife vowed to obey her husband, or put a body part such as a hand, foot, or head, under the husband’s foot or within his hands. In many areas, a married woman was generally legally subject to her husband in all things; she could not sue, make contracts, or go to court for any reason without his approval. In Europe and European colonies, this principle was supported by the Christian view of marriage as a union through which husband and wife became “one flesh.” In England and later in the British Empire (and after the American Revolution, the United States) this legal doctrine was known as “coverture,” a word derived from the idea that a married woman’s legal identity was “covered” by that of her husband. All goods or property that a wife brought into a marriage – termed her dowry – and all wages she earned during the marriage were considered the property of her husband. Only when women’s rights activists in the nineteenth century campaigned for them were married women’s property acts gradually enacted, allowing married women to control property, inherit, write wills, and keep their earnings. In the United States, the last laws giving a husband control over all family property – what were known as “head and master laws” – were repealed in Louisiana only in 1979, after they had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and only in 1981 were laws passed in France that allowed a married woman to sell any of her own property without her husband’s permission.
Ideologies of Egalitarianism
Norms and laws that restricted women’s activities or placed them in a position subservient to men were numbingly common throughout the world, which can make studying women’s or gender history often seem quite depressing. Along with individuals and groups that ignored or overcame these restrictions through their actions, however, there have also been many that developed ideas supporting greater gender egalitarianism or otherwise enhancing the situation of women; since the mid-nineteenth century, these ideas have slowly been translated into legal changes. Such ideashave generally been labeled “feminism,” a word developed first in French in the 1890s, though there are great disagreements about the limits, meaning, and implications of this word. Some advocates of women’s rights have used and continue to use other words to describe themselves, such as “womanist” or “mujerista,” while others note that feminism should always be used in the plural to emphasize its diversity.
Individuals and groups have challenged or rejected gender hierarchies for centuries. In Europe, Christine be Pizan (1364–1430), a well-educated Italian woman, wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in 1402, the first extended defense of women by a female author. Because her work challenged misogyny and extolled the achievements of women, Christine is often termed the “first feminist,” but she was soon followed by others. The Venetian poet Modesta Pozzo (1555–1592), writing under the pen name Moderata Fonte (“moderate fountain”), produced The Merits of Women: Wherein Is Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (first published 1600), the main point of which is captured in the title. In The Equality of Men and Women (1622), Marie le Jars de Gournay, the protégée of the French writer Michel de Montaigne and editor of his works, built on the arguments of Christine de Pizan to argue that the equality of men and women rested on divine law. In the seventeenth century, English women petitioned Parliament, arguing that they had an “equal interest with the men of this Nation” in the “good Laws of this Land.” In the late eighteenth century, women extended language about the rights of man that had been proclaimed in the American and French Revolutions to women. The English writer Mary Wollstonecraft asserted in 1792, “Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.”[5]
Women in some Native American groups already had political rights and responsibilities in the eighteenth century that European women sought to gain. In North America, Cherokee governing councils included women, as did those of other tribes. Cherokee women were part of the diplomatic missions sent to negotiate with Europeans and after the American Revolution with Americans. They were surprised to see no women among the Euro-American negotiators, and occasionally asked about this, or admonished them: “Let your Women hear our Words.”[6]
Much early research within women’s history involved finding and celebrating “feminist foremothers.” The works of women such as Christine de Pizan and Mary Wollstonecraft were reissued and translated, and the writings of other feminists – most, though not all, of them women – were discovered and analyzed. These investigations generally focused first on white European or American women whose ideas led directly to the nineteenth-century women’s rights movements, but by the 1980s research into pioneering advocates of women had broadened to include Buddhist and Catholic nuns, female