Gender and Cultural Forms

Abstract

I have described gender as one of the great faultlines of nineteenth-century cultural history. In this the history of the period is no different from that of any other century or culture, for social and cultural differentiation along the line of gender is one of the universals of human history What is special to the nineteenth century, however, is the prominence of that differentiation, and the prominence of the explicit efforts to alter its terms. Appropriate and inappropriate behaviour for women and men was the subject of intense and prolonged debate, with constant redrawings and redefinitions of the gender line, and increasingly confident challenges to the proscriptions and limitations placed upon women. Feminism, after all, is the invention of the nineteenth century, though conflict between the sexes, of course, is not. However, this chapter will not be centrally concerned with feminism, even in its cultural manifestations. Rather, it will seek to suggest the ways in which cultural forms themselves encode assumptions about gender. But this is to put the matter too neutrally. For gender differentiation is in large part a matter of culture — that is, the very ways in which people understand their own and others’ sexuality and its implications for behaviour are partly determined in the sphere of culture. So the gender assumptions that are encoded in cultural forms of all kinds are not the reflections of realities of gender differentiation that exist elsewhere, but are themselves those realities.