Gender 101: gender (un)done in two different societies

For the past month I have been teaching a course on antiquity, and one thing that strikes me the most is the question of gender orientations in different parts of the world during roughly the same era. In this post I therefore which to show to example of how two different cultures arranged gender and in the end show how these connects to gender theory at large as well as what these organisations may say about our own time. But first some remarks about gender in history writing in general can be in place. 

When it comes to history, the subject is often the history of the elites which to a large degree can be connected to historians focus on texts. In a society where the division of labour makes it hard to achieve overall literacy, it is mainly two groups during the classical era that stands out as being able to write. The first is the social elites, whom needs to write to both conduct political work and their trades. A second, lesser known group, that was able to write was slaves. This often surprises my students but it has to do with the material conditions of book production at the time where the only way to copy a work was to do the copying by hand, since the printing press would not be invented in the western world until around the 15th century. Since this copying was a tiresome work, it was in antiquity often left to the slaves whom learned to read and write. This does however not mean that all slaves could read or write, nor that they could write what they pleased. Instead, the writings were done as copying the manuscripts of the elites. The consequence of this is that it only exists a few first hand editions that can supply us with knowledge on everyday life of people that did not belong to the elite. What we known about womens conditions are therefore either the women of the elites, or how the elite perceived everyday life. Therefore, a history of gender often takes the form of women with the W as a united class, which truly is not the case. 



With this disclaimer in mind we can however see a clear division of labour within the higher social stratas of the social elites in ancient greece. This division meant that society had two seperate spheres, the public political one which was largely a male affair and a private sphere bound to the home, which was governed by women. This meant that women did not have the ability to act politically and that they also did not adhere to the male fighter ideal. Another intresting aspect is that age of entering marriage throughout the classical era in this part of the world was very low for women and a common ideal was that the female should not about the world outside of the home. For men, it was the contrary with marriages thus often containing an age gap of over 10–15 years in the norm. 

If we however start to look at a society which came into the iron age a bit later we meet a people known as the germanians, which are described in detail by the roman writer Tacticus in the first century after christ. The society described in Tacticus work is however largely different from the greece one, where females were supposed to know about the world outside of the home and to a large degree took part of everyday life. In almost admiring terms, Tacticus describes how the germianic people does not marry until both parties have experience of the world outside their local tribe. Similar notions have also been discussed during the viking era, where women had the opportunity to both run a household as well as functioning as priestess, artisans and most likely warriors. 

What we see here is two societies that are close to eachother in time, but who have arranged their gendered patterns strikingly different. And this is perhaps one of the most clearcute evidence of why biological stance on gender roles are entirely untrue. It was not until christianity were introduced in scandinavia that women become more and more subordinated in society. Therefore, we can not speak of such a thing as a natural order of the genders. Instead it seems likely that structures in society largely affects the division of labour. In the neo-right that we are currently seeing on the rise in Europe, it is often highlighted that feminist ideas go against nature. But in the in the end history, and life itself, tells a different story. The construction of gender enables or disables certain room for action, but since it is a construction it will never follow a clear cut biological idea. 

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