Gender and Modern
Identity
Sarah Richardson
Overview
• Introduction: What is modern identity?
• Case study: Bayly’s use of Girodet’s portrait
• Historiographical trends
• Joan Scott
• Social Science/Davidoff and Hall
• Masculinity
• Class v Gender
Gender & Identity
• How are markers of identity: class, age, gender, sexuality and
ethnicity represented?
• How are identities constructed?
• What does the category of ‘gender’ offer to an understanding
of modern identity?
Gender & Identity
• Many women’s historians have presented an almost
unchanging story of timeless, endemic patriarchy and
misogyny.
• It has also been assumed that ‘men’ were an
unproblematic norm
Voices
‘Without question, our first inspiration was
political. Aroused by feminist charges of
economic and political discrimination . . . we
turned to our history to trace the origins of
women's second-class status.’ (Carroll Smith
Rosenberg)
‘When I started working on women's history
about thirty years ago, the field did not exist.
People didn't think that women had a history
worth knowing.’ (Gerder Lerner)
Voices
Black identity is ‘a narrative, a story, a history. Something
constructed, told, spoken, not simply found’ (Stuart Hall)
Anne-Louis Girodet’s
Portrait of JeanBaptiste Belley, Ex
Representative of the
Colonies exhibited in
Paris in 1798.
Case Study
Christopher Bayly’s use of
Girodet’s portrait tells us much
about history, historians and
gender identity
‘the most splendid
visualisation of the
“universalising intention of the
revolution”’
• Belley: former Senegalese slave who
worked to abolish slavery in the colonies
• Representative of the French colonies
elected in San Domingue in 1793
• Spoke in debate in in 1794, when a
unanimous decision was taken to abolish
slavery. Lost seat in 1797.
• Lost from records in the struggles of
Haitians against the Napoleonic army,
which was attempting to reinstate
slavery.
• Leaning against bust of the
encyclopaedist Abbé Raynal, critic of
slavery and of colonial policy.
• Artist has 'united two very different
citizens of the French nation in a Janusfaced double portrait'.
• Yet there is no equality between these
two figures, rather much ambivalence.
• This portrait tells us about modernity a modernity structured through
particular images of masculinity and
racial difference.
Bayly and Gender
• Gender merits little discussion in
Bayly’s book
• Binaries of gender, of class and
of race are central to the
definition of ‘being modern’
• Questions of identity and
difference need to be part of our
picture of the Making of the
Modern World alongside
discussions of states and wars
and revolutions to enable us to
understand what kind of people
modern people are.
Historiography of gender identity
• the emergence of gender history
• the social science approach.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender
and the Politics of History
(1985)
Distinction between Sex & Gender
• Sex is biologically determined
• But see Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976-86)
• Laquer’s analysis of the ‘one-sex’ model which was prevalent
in science before eighteenth century
Male and Female reproductive organs demonstrating
correspondence as drawn by Andreas Vesalius in Tabulae Sex
1558
Gender
• Gender is a cultural/social
phenomenon.
• Gender is what a given society makes
of sexual/biological differences.
• If sex deals in men and women,
gender deals in concepts of femininity
and masculinity.
• Gender is ‘a social category imposed
on a sexed body’. (Scott)
• ‘Gender is a constitutive element of
social relationships based on
perceived differences between the
sexes, and gender is a primary way of
signifying relationships of power.’
(Scott)
• Approach relied on poststrucuturalism and discourse analysis.
• Language plays primary role in
construction of gendered identity.
• ‘Gender is a “category”, not in the
sense of a universal statement but …
in the sense of public objection and
indictment, of debate, protest,
process and trial.’ (Bock)
• Such theoretical methods would
initiate new areas of historical inquiry
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine
Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and
Women of the English Middle
Class, 1780-1850 (1987): ‘In
particular, our concern has
been to give the neglected
dimension of gender its full
weight and complexity in the
shaping and structuring of
middle-class social life in this
period.’
Social science approach
• Categories of gender, race
and class are central to any
social structure
• Importance of rhetoric of
‘separate spheres’ in
establishing boundaries
• Male dominated public
sphere/female dominated
private sphere
Critiques of ‘separate sphere’
model
• Discourse neither novel to nineteenth century nor applied to
one social class
• ‘several spheres’ more appropriate model
• ‘public’ and ‘private’ were ideological constructs used in
different ways rather than fixed, unchanging entities
Critics of ‘gender history’
• Runs the risk of abandoning attempts to ‘get at women’s real
experiences in the past’
• Portrays women as lacking ‘agency’ trapped inexorably in a
web of discourse
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful
Delight (1992).
The narrative of the woman
confined to the domestic/private
sphere is juxtaposed with other
narratives: of women shoppers in
Department stores, East End
prostitutes, girl victims of white
slavery, striking factory match girls,
bourgeois charity workers, and
emerging feminists.
Masculinity
• History of masculinity evolved from work on women’s history
• Men’s movement questioned modern patriarchal gender roles
• ‘if we live in a man’s world it is not a world that has been built
upon the needs and nourishment of men. Rather it is a social
world of power and subordination in which men have been forced
to compete if we want to benefit from our inherited masculinity’
(Seidler, Rediscovering masculinity)
• Historians looked back into history to search out more positive
conceptions of masculinity.
Victorian Masculinity: which picture is more
apposite?
Masculinity and Race
Thomas Babington Macaulay on the
Bengal people:
‘His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs
delicate, his movements languid. … There
never perhaps existed a people so
thoroughly fitted by habit for a foreign
yoke.’
Class & Gender
• An understanding of modernity
needs to include issues of class
and gender (as well as race).
• See Catherine Hall’s analysis of
Peterloo which considers the
gendered experiences of Samuel
Bamford and his wife Jemima
Samuel Bamford, 17881872
What does this image tell us about class, gender and modernity?