(and judges) in North America and Europe regard mothers as “naturally” better parents than fathers, and the list could go on and on. Laws that proclaim gender equality are supported in the abstract, but are often not enforced, and may even be counteracted by other laws – especially those regarding marriage, divorce, and inheritance – which have a much greater impact in terms of day-to-day opportunities than abstract statements. On some issues it is clearly easier to make laws than to change longstanding attitudes and ideas about the proper roles and nature of women and men. Change also produces stress. Some studies of psychological and physical health indicate, for example, that people with more conservative notions of gender are healthier than those who are more open to change,for the uncertainty of change can lead to stress. Thus in times of rapid change, people may hang on to what they see as more “traditional” notions of gender and sexuality as an anchor of stability, and support leaders who promise a return to these.
If one takes a long view, however, even in areas where traditions are very strong, there are clear signs of change in norms and laws. Though laws prohibiting gender discrimination are not always enforced, they are at least part of most constitutions and legal codes developed in the twentieth century, which would have been unthinkable (or regarded as laughable) several centuries earlier. Though some young women hesitate to call themselves feminists, many of the demands of the feminist movement are now accepted as self-evident, at least in theory: equal pay for equal work, access to education, legal equality. And voices proclaiming “we should all be feminists” come from many parts of the world. Grassroots women’s groups are using local and village courts to curtail domestic violence, and exploring religious and cultural traditions for teachings that support greater opportunities for women. They have made it clear that many sources of ideas and norms are ambiguous, and that what really matters is how prescriptive statements play out in the real world.
Further Reading
It is hard to know where to begin with suggestions, for the amount of materials is vast, and the works mentioned in the Further Reading for every chapter all contain information about ideas and norms.
Analyses of ideas in Asia include Lisa Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 1998); Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Mandakranta Bose, ed., Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia (New York: Routledge, 2001); Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Helen Creese, Women of the Kakawin World: Marriage and Sexuality in the Indic Courts of Java and Bali (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004); Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Miyako Inoue, Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
On ideas in Europe, see: Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Elaine Fantham et al., Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff, eds., Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain (Syracuse, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees, eds., Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Ulrike Gleixner and Marion Gray, eds., Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe, 1750–1830 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2006).
On Latin America, see Lowell S. Gustafson and Amelia M. Trevelyan, eds., Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relations (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2002); Sylvia Chant with Nikki Craske, Gender in Latin America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Erin O’Connor, Mothers Making Latin America: Gender, Households, and Politics since 1825 (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014).
On Africa, see Karen Armstrong, Shifting Ground and Cultural Bodies: Postcolonial Gender Relations in Africa and India (New York: University Press of America, 1999); Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl A. McCurdy, eds., “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001); Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes, and Gary Minkley, eds., Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (New York: Rodopi, 2002). Interesting comments on recent changes in gender norms globally are provided in Sylvia Chant and Cathy McIlwaine, Three Generations, Two Genders, One World: Women and Men in a Changing Century (London: Zed Books, 1998).
Works that look at law as well as ideas include Mary Ann Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law: State, Law, and Family in the United States and Western Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Erin P. Moore, Gender, Law, and Resistance in India (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Srimati Basu, She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property, and Propriety (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); Kimberly Gauderman, Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003); Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, Women of Jordan: Islam, Labor, and the Law (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003); Elisabeth Meier Tetlow, Women, Crime and Punishment in Ancient Law and Society: The Ancient Near East (New York: Continuum International, 2004); Judith Tucker, Women, Family and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Sara L. Kimble and Marion Röwekamp, eds., New Perspectives of European Women’s Legal History (London: Routledge, 2016); Xiaoping Cong, Marriage, Law and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Ilan Peled, Law and Gender in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible (London: Routledge, 2019).
Sherry Ortner’s essay about nature and culture has been reprinted in her The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996). Further discussions about the links between gender and nature include Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980) and Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (2nd edn., Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993); Vera Norwood, Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Virginia Scharff, ed., Seeing Nature through Gender (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Douglas A. Vacoch, ed., Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature (London: Routledge, 2020).
More general analyses of the role of gender in science historically include Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); David Noble, A World without Women: The Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Knopf, 1992); Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Differences in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman, eds., Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2006); Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-modern Gynaecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). A good overview of ideas about menstruation is provided in Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), and of contraception in Lara Marks, Sexual Chemistry: An International History of the Pill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
For the history of masculinities, Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (2nd edn., Berkeley, CA: University of California