Key Points from Stewart
Premise of book: People can live and act together only by
creating social arrangements that make them predictable
and trustworthy.
1. Explanations of sex differences that argue that biology
makes men and women act differently are wrong, but so are
explanations that claim that culture provides sex roles that
“make people do what they do.”
2. Biology, society and culture are cultural resources that
people may or may not use.
Similarly, Swidler argues that culture is a “tool kit.”
3. One of the reasons men have limited the behavior range
of women is because it is one way of “managing problems
of living and acting together.”
4. People who reject these traditional social arrangements
have to create new ones that allow men and women to live
together as equals.
5. People can’t create alternatives until they realize that
they have responsibility for social life, e.g., that it is
socially constructed.
Roy on the social construction of gender
People are divided into gender but so are roles, activities,
qualities, traits, emotions, or objects (e.g., doctoring,
leadership, rage, souped-up cars, child care, cooperation,
sentimentality, flowers).
Cross-cultural variation
Other sex/gender categories: berdache (male bodies
but third gender), Hijras (intersexed males who
become social women), eunuchs (males with genitals
removed).
Yoruba: male/female bodies don’t determine social
position, age is most important category.
Gender of behaviors varies: Tahitians have few
differences between men and women (pronouns don’t
indicate sex), Semai of Malaysia are all “retiring and
submissive.”
History of gender
Gender differences probably arose with tools and
permanent settlements.
The shift to agricultural production led to reduction in
women’s economic roles and rise of patriarchy.
Dominant sex model in the West until recently was
one-sex model (women were inferior version of men).
“About 1800, Anglo-Europeans reconceptualized how
they imagined sex differences, treating men and
women not as superior and inferior versions of the
same creature but as polar opposites.”
Roy on Changing Gender in Anglo-European Society
In pre-modern times, women and men were more alike than
they are now. “The modern sense of women being
‘feminine’—as being weak, soft, emotional, and in need of
male protection—was not common.”
Roy thinks a key moment in defining women as subordinate
was when “a new class of celibate men gained control of
the Catholic Church and educational institutions.” This led
to the exclusion of women (and married men) from
positions of leadership, the defining of women as sexual
temptresses, and the association of celibacy with virility.
“Modern Anglo-European notions of femininity and
masculinity arose with the separation of private and public
life,” which was connected to capitalism moving workers
out of their homes.
“A woman’s place is in the home”: femininity became
associated with the holistic and emotional social relations of
the private sphere and the “authentic self,” which was a
new construction.
“It’s a man’s world”: masculinity “means being objective,
rational, nonemotional, and able to play a specific role
without getting too wrapped up personally.”
Opposition to women’s suffrage and the creation of
Mother’s Day must be understood within the framework of
the separate spheres. The fight for women’s suffrage was
successful because it embraced, rather than challenged, this
construction.