which has also characterized the history of sexuality. Historians of women, gender, and sexuality have tended to have a narrower range of focus, choosing to study individuals, families, circles of friends, and other small groups, and have been worried that these would get lost in narratives that emphasize impersonal processes. Their analyses have generally stayed within one nation, and many within one region or city.
This lack of intersection is beginning to change, however, which is what makes this book possible. It is based on hundreds of articles and books that focus on gender and related topics in different parts of the world, and increasing numbers that make comparisons, evaluate exchange and interaction, study borderlands and migration, and otherwise incorporate theory and methods that also characterize world/global history. There was very little of this when I published the first edition of this book 20 years ago, but the amount of scholarship that is both gendered and global grows steadily. This scholarship is based on new research, and also on reevaluating older research with an eye to assumptions about gender that are incorrect or misleading. For example, the Supreme Being in the Maa language of the Maasai and other groups in East Africa is known as Enkai, a feminine singular noun, and envisioned as a woman. Christian missionaries and European colonial officials generally referred to Enkai instead as “he” when writing in English, as this fit with Christian understandings of what Supreme Beings should be. Doing comparative or world history often means relying on translations – there is simply no way to know all the languages of even a part of the world – but translation always involves choice, and in this case the choice was wrong. So newer scholarship about the Maasai, and about encounters between the Maasai and Europeans, corrects Enkai’s gender. Feminist world historians emphasize the importance of finding translations and using secondary studies that are more accurate and thus culturally sensitive, especially for things as central as gender (or Supreme Beings).
Before delving into what the new scholarship on gender in world history reveals, it is valuable to look at some of the key issues that gender historians have wrestled with in more detail. These have shaped the path historians and scholars in other fields have taken as they approach the past.
Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
Just at the point that historians and their students were gradually beginning to see the distinction between sex and gender (and an increasing number accepting the importance of gender as a category of analysis), that distinction became contested. Not only were there great debates about where the line should be drawn – were women “biologically” more peaceful and men “biologically” more skillful at math, or were such tendencies the result solely of their upbringing? – but some scholars wondered whether social gender and biological sex are so interrelated that any distinction between the two is meaningless.
For example, although most people are born with external genitalia through which they are categorized “male” or “female” at birth, some are not. Their external genitalia may be ambiguous, a condition now generally termed “intersex,” though earlier termed “hermaphroditism.” Closer physical examination may also reveal internal sexual and reproductive anatomy that do match those usually defined as “male” or “female.” In earlier times most intersex people were simply assigned to the sex they most closely resembled, with their condition only becoming a matter of historical record if they came to the attention of religious, medical, or legal authorities. Since the nineteenth century this gender assignment was sometimes reinforced by surgical procedures modifying or removing the body parts that did not fit with the chosen gender. Thus in these cases “gender” determined “sex” rather than the other way around.
Because the physical body could be ambiguous, scientists began to stress the importance of other indicators of sex difference. By the 1970s chromosomes were the favored marker, and quickly became part of popular as well as scientific understandings. In 1972, for example, the International Olympic Committee determined that simply “looking like” a woman was not enough, but that athletes would have to prove their “femaleness” through a chromosome test; an individual with certain types of chromosomal abnormalities would be judged “male” even if that person had been regarded as “female” since birth, and had breasts and a vagina but no penis. The problem with chromosomes is that they are also not perfectly dichotomous, but may involve ambiguous intermediate categories, so that more recently the source of sex differences has also been sought in prenatal hormones, including androgen and testosterone. Tests came to evaluate all of these factors: in 2009, the International Association of Athletics Federations required South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya to undergo an examination of her external genitals, internal reproductive organs (through ultrasound), chromosomes, and hormones before it would allow her to compete as female.
Given the uncertainties in most “biological” markers, the intensity of the search for an infallible marker of sex difference suggests that cultural norms about gender (that everyone should be a man or a woman) are influencing science. Preexisting ideas about gender shape many other scientific fields as well; the uniting of sperm and egg, for example, was long described as the “vigorous, powerful” sperm “defeating all others” and attaching itself to a “passive, receptive” egg. (The egg is now known to be active in this process.)
The arbitrary and culturally produced nature of gender has been challenged by transgender as well as intersex individuals. Transgender, or simply “trans,” is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex they are assigned at birth. “Transsexual” is often used for those transgender people who decide to transition to the gender with which they identify through sex reassignment surgery, now often called gender confirmation surgery, which has been available since the 1950s. (In this, the word “sex” refers to the physical aspects of a sexed body, not sexual orientation, as being transgender is not related to sexual orientation.) Transgender individuals may also understand themselves to be a third gender that is neither male nor female, both male and female, moving between male and female, or in some other way outside a dichotomous gender system. Because in English and many other languages pronouns are gendered, new pronouns have been developed. These have included “ze” and “hir,” and since 2010 the singular “they” has become increasingly common, chosen by people whose gender identity is nonbinary or by those who don’t want to go by pronouns with a traditional gender association.
Over the past several decades, the trans rights movement has advocated worldwide for legal recognition and other rights. Both activists and scholars often linked gender and sexual categories into an ever-lengthening list, which settled in the 2010s into LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) or LGBTQ+, with the “+” representing all other possible categories.
As has been true with the women’s and gay-rights movements, people involved in the trans movement also study people in the past they identify as sharing their experiences, as do scholars interested in gender and sexuality more broadly. Some use gender-neutral pronouns when a historic figure engages in actions that suggest they saw themselves as somehow outside the gender binary or whose gender identity changed over their life.
Finding individuals who were outside a dichotomous gender system has not been difficult, as many of the world’s cultures have a third or even a fourth and fifth gender, often with specialized religious or ceremonial roles. In some cultures, gender is determined by one’s relationship to reproduction, so that adults are gendered male and female, but children and old people are regarded as different genders; in such cultures there are thus four genders, with linguistic, clothing, and behavioral distinctions for each one. In a number of areas throughout the world, including Alaska, the Amazon region, North America, Australia, Siberia, Central and South Asia, Oceania, and the Sudan, individuals who were originally viewed as male or female assume (or assumed, for in many areas such practices have ended) the gender identity of the other sex or combine the tasks, behavior, and clothing of men and women. Some of these individuals are intersex and occasionally they are eunuchs (castrated males), but more commonly they are morphologically male or female. For them, gender attribution is not based on genitals, and may change throughout their life. The best known of these third-gender individuals are found among several Native American peoples, and the Europeans who first encountered them regarded them as homosexuals and called them “berdaches,” from an Arabic word for male prostitute. Now most scholars and the individuals