C H A P T E R 8

GENDER STRUCTURES IN CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS

The classical period introduced vital new developments in gender rela- tions. Each civilization generated some characteristic family arrangements, including how spouses were selected. More important still was the estab- lishment of clear ideas about gender associated with each of the major cul- tural systems. Confucianism, Hinduism, and Mediterranean philosophy formulated specific notions about men's and women's qualities and roles. These cultural formulations helped stiffen gender relations, because they could be passed down from generation to generation and become part of basic socialization patterns, creating unexamined perceptions among men and women alike. The gender structures that developed in the world's classical civiliza- tions built on those created in the earlier river-valley civilizations, rigidi- fying the existing distinctions between men and women and adding new sources through which these were supported and justified. The growing importance of sons generated a system, particularly in China and the Mediterranean, in which unwanted girl babies might simply be put to death, in a practice called female infanticide. As law codes were ex- panded, women's legal disabilities grew, and new restrictions were added on women at certain points in their life cycle, such as widowhood. In the epic stories told about the founding of classical civilizations, such as the Ramayana in India and the Aeneidm Rome, female characters either loyally support the hero or attempt to thwart him on his mission; they do not do great deeds on their own. In the philosophical systems that became the basis for Chinese and Mediterranean civilizations—Confu- cianism and the Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, respectively— women were regarded as necessary to the natural order of the universe

140 141 • THE CLASSICAL PERIOD, 1ooo B.C.E.-450 C.E. • • GENDER STRUCTURES IN CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIQ NS Ganga and Yamuna with Attendants. A sculpture of the river goddess Ganga (Ganges) from 9th- but clearly inferior and in need of male control. Along with these philo- century India, portraying her as life-giving. Reprinted by permission of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Nasli and Alice Heeramancck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase. sophical systems, religious beliefs that regarded women as both inferior and " dangerous to men's spiritual well-being grew more widespread during the classical period. Both philosophy and religion developed certain key texts that were memorized, discussed, debated, and elaborated in schools and other types of educational establishments generally open to men only. As the social distinctions between groups within civilizations grew more rigid, high-status men felt it increasingly important to seclude their daughters and wives from other men, and special women's quarters—termed the gyneceum in ancient Athens—were built within houses or house compounds. As they had in river-valley civilizations, women occasionally ruled territories in the classical period; female rulers whose names are known range from Lady Ahpo-Hel of Palenque among the Maya in the Yucatan to Empress Wu in China. Women's rule was often informal—they took over when their sons were young or their husbands were ill—but occasionally they ruled in their own right. Queens and empresses made significant contributions to the development of political structures, intellectual and cultural institutions, and religious systems, but their reigns were usually portrayed later as marked by turmoil and instability, if not worse. A woman who had power over a male ruler, for instance, his wife or concubine, was also generally portrayed in official histories as scheming and evil, with court historians and chroniclers— most or whom were male—developing a stereotype of the weak ruler as one who let himself be advised by women. Classical civilizations were not monolithic, however, and traditions also developed within them that lessened the distinctions between women and men in ways that were regarded as especially significant. In three of the major religions that developed during this period, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, women were regarded as capable of obtaining the ultimate women were active in winning adherents and in developing their own rituals. spiritual goal—perhaps through a longer and more difficult process than men These three religions, and also several smaller ones that developed during the had to undergo but not cut off from the goal entirely. In all three religions, classical period, such as Jainism in India, came to offer at least a few women devotion to gods (Hinduism) or particularly holy figures (Buddhism and the opportunity to choose a life of religious devotion instead of marriage and Christianity) provided male and female adherents with a feminine ideal and motherhood. object of devotion. Though in all three religions the most important leaders and thinkers were men,

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often harsh and unkind treatment of young women in real life. (In the Family Structures Mediterranean and, later, in the rest of Europe, where mothers-in-law usually Other than individuals who remained unmarried for religious reasons, and—in did not live in the same household with a married couple, this is not a some cultures—slaves, most people in classical cultures married, and the common theme; here, the malicious older woman who causes harm is family group was the central institution. This family group varied in size and generally a stepmother.) composition from culture to culture, and within one culture, according to Despite conflicts in real life, marriage and motherhood were increasingly wealth and social status. In some areas of the world most households were idealized during the classical period. Girls were trained from a very young nuclear, made up largely of parents and their children, with perhaps one or age in the skills and attitudes that would make them good wives and mothers, two other relatives; in others, an extended family of brothers and their spouses instructed that their primary purpose in life was to serve their husbands and and children lived in a single household or family compound. Wealthier children. Weddings were central occasions in a family's life, with spouses households also contained unrelated servants and slaves and, often, younger chosen carefully by parents, other family members, or marriage brokers. relatives whose parents had died or older widows. All these individuals, Much of a family's resources often went to pay for the ceremony and setting whether adults or children, blood relatives or unrelated, were generally under up the new household. Opportunities for divorce varied in the classical world, the authority of the male head of household, usually the grandfather or oldest but in many cultures it was nearly impossible, so the choice of a spouse was married brother in an extended household. Boys as well as girls remained undertaken carefully, after much consultation with relatives and often with under their father's control until they married, and perhaps beyond if they astrologers or other people who predicted the future. Weddings themselves continued to live in an extended household. were held on days determined to be lucky or auspicious, a determination Most classical cultures were patrilocal, with women leaving their own arrived at independently for each couple. families on marriage and going to live with their husbands, often in a different Because most classical cultures were patrilineal, giving birth to sons was village. In some cultures, the woman retained strong ties to her birth family central to a continuation of the family line, with women and men offering and considered herself part of two families, whereas in others these ties were prayers and sacrifices to accomplish this and marking sons' births with special weak, with the woman contacting her birth family only in grave emergencies. ceremonies or rituals not performed for the births of daughters. Additional In China, for example, a woman was never inscribed on the official family list ceremonies were conducted throughout boys' early years to keep them of her birth family, so that she would never be honored as one of their healthy, in an effort to counteract the high rates of child mortality created by ancestors by later generations; she was instead inscribed on that of her diseases. Women also carried out other rituals within the household designed husband's family once she had had a son. Women who had no sons simply to maintain family harmony, promote the family's well-being, and assure the disappeared from family memory. In cultures in which extended families lived favor of spirits and deities. Most of the religious systems accepted in classical together or in close proximity to one another, a woman came under the control cultures were highly ritualistic, with the performance of certain rites and of her father- and mother-in-law as well as her husband when she married. ceremonies regarded as more important than holding any specific belief, so Because relationships between mothers and sons were often intense in these that these actions gave meaning to women's lives, making them important in cultures that put so much emphasis on male children, a new bride's interaction the maintenance of culturally significant values. with her mother-in-law was often very difficult. Spiteful and cruel mothers-in- The injunction to marry did not simply apply to women, however. law became stock figures in the literature and stories of classical cultures— Unmarried men in most classical cultures were not regarded as fully adult, particularly in China and India—reflecting what was and until the advent of Buddhism and Christianity, there were no

144 H5 • THE CLASSICAL PERIOD, 1000 B.C.E.-450 c.E. • ■ GENDER STRUCTURES IN CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS • institutionalized forms of lifelong celibacy for men, though they might spend Beyond the Family a period of time as students before they were married or as religious devotees away from their families once they had married and had the necessary sons. Though both women and men derived their identities largely from their Marriage, rather than signifying simply the attaining of a specific age, was the families, in both theory and reality, men were also involved in the world way in which men normally escaped the control of their own fathers. It beyond the household. The family served as the basis for men's place in the remained a permanent state for most men; women whose first husband died world, whereas for women it was the location of their place in the world. often lived the rest of their lives as widows—in some classical cultures, they Though they might learn to read and write, women in classical cultures came to have no other option— but men quickly remarried. Having children, generally did so within the household, while upper-class men attended particularly sons, was just as important for men as for women, perhaps even schools, academies, and other formal institutions of learning. Women's re- more so, and various ways were devised to provide sons for a man whose ligious rituals sometimes took them to a neighborhood temple but more often wife did not have one: taking second or third wives or concubines, were performed at household altars and shrines. Women's occupations were legitimizing a son born of a woman who was not a wife or concubine, often those that could be done within the walls of a house, such as spinning adopting a nephew or an unrelated boy or young man. A woman whose and weaving. Increasingly in classical cultures, the only women seen outside husband had died before she gave birth to a son might be expected to remarry the household were those of low status—servants and slaves bringing water his brother, so as to produce a son that was legally regarded as the child of her from wells or marketing in classical Greece, lower-caste women weaving or deceased husband. (This practice is called a levirate marriage.) making the black eye makeup termed khol in India, peasants whose work The kingdoms and empires of the classical world regarded the family as needs required collaboration between men and women. Thus this spatial the basis of society—population was generally counted by households, not by separation of men and women was an issue of social as well as gender individuals, with rights to participate in positions of political and religious structures, for the women who were most likely to be found outside the leadership determined by membership in certain families or clans. household, in contact with men who were not members of their families, were Intellectuals also saw the family as the basis of society in political and social those of low status. theory, the microcosm of larger society and the place in which cultural values This link between public appearances and status can be seen most dra- were anchored. In classical China, for example, Confucianism taught that the matically in the case of women who provided sexual services and enter- order and harmony of the universe began with order and harmony in the tainment for men, mainly in the cities. Along with women who supported smallest human unit; if things were disrupted in families, they would themselves through prostitution, in most classical cultures there were also necessarily be disrupted in the larger political realms. In Rome as well, some who combined sexual services with dancing, singing, and educated military victories and defeats were often attributed not simply to the skill of conversation, often in government-run brothels. Such women had a very armies but also to the stability or instability of family life. Classical Athens ambiguous position: they were clearly dishonorable, and their children could broke with this to some degree, but here, too, political theorists such as Plato not be married into good families, but they also might be quite wealthy and thought that the family and state were intimately related to one another; the highly educated. Even among such women, however, status was determined perfect state, wrote Plato in The Republic, could be achieved only if political by level of seclusion; high-status courtesans had their own households or at leaders were separated from their families at birth, so that they were not least remained inside brothels, whereas low-status prostitutes walked the tempted to make decisions that would benefit their relatives. streets. In many ways, not only prostitutes but all women had an ambiguous relationship to the institutions and structures that were developing in classical cultures, while the male experience was more straightforward. A man

146 *47 • THE CLASSICAL PERIOD, 1ooo B.C.E.-450 C.E. • • GENDER STRUCTURES IN CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS • in classical Athens or Rome was either a citizen or not and had certain rights China and privileges based on his status; a man in classical India belonged to a certain caste and performed the rituals required of that caste; a man in China who took By the period of the Zhou dynasty, certain structures were in place in China the imperial scholarly examination could obtain a position as a court official or that made the life experiences of women and men dramatically different. The governor. Women in Athens were not citizens, though they could pass this aristocracy came to have surnames, which determined the clan to which an status on to their sons; in India, they married only within the caste of their upper-class man belonged and to which he owed loyalty and obedience. This fathers, but they did not go through a ceremony marking their caste status or loyalty was due not only to living members of his clan but also to his need to observe most rituals regarding purity and pollution; in China, they ancestors, for upper-class men were expected to carry out a series of rituals wrote poetry and occasionally histories but could never hold an official position honoring their ancestors throughout their life and to have sons so that these or take the imperial examinations. A woman's position in any of the social rituals could continue. Honoring the ancestors became an integral part of groups that were becoming increasingly distinct in the classical period was Confucianism, which also emphasized the balanced but hierarchical generally mediated by her relationship to a man and could change on marriage, relationship between Heaven—the superior, creative element—and Earth— remarriage, or widowhood. Thus, for her, the rhythm of her personal life cycle the inferior, receptive one. Proper human relationships, especially family —when she married, whether she had children and how many, when her relationships, were those that were modeled on the relationship of Heaven and husband died—was generally more important than it was for most men, whose Earth, hierarchical and orderly. All aspects of family relationships had proper lives were shaped more by large economic patterns or by the political institu- etiquette and rituals attached, which became more elaborate over the centuries tions that are generally seen as the central accomplishment of classical cultures. and were recorded in books, including the Five Classics that formed the basis Though individual women often had a great deal of political power, politics was of Confucian teachings. Though both women and men were viewed as es- generally conceptualized and to a large degree practiced as a system that sential to the cosmic order, women were expected to be subordinate and regulated relations between men. In all classical civilizations, lower-class deferential; these expectations were codified as the "three obediences" to women suffered less inequality in relation to men than most of their upper-class which a woman was subject—to her father as a daughter, to her husband as a sisters. Their work was essential to the family economy, which prevented their wife, and to her son as a widow. The other major philosophical-religious system of classical China, Taoism, promoted stronger notions of male-female being completely subordinated or confined to decorative and marital roles. complementarity, but even Taoists, as well as later Chinese Buddhists and Christians, grew up in a system that emphasized gender hierarchy. Cultural Differences The most powerful women in classical China were those attached to the So far we have been discussing developments in gender structures that were imperial household as the emperor's wives and concubines or as the widows shared by many classical cultures, but these did not work in precisely the of former emperor. The principal wife of an emperor was considered the legal same fashion in each civilization. Particular cultures placed different mother of all his children, no matter who their biological mother might be. emphases on gender distinctions and supported different kinds of family When an emperor died, this woman became the empress dowager, and she arrangements, and women had slightly different opportunities to was often the most important woman at court, for she generally chose the accommodate themselves to patterns of change in each society. Thus spouses for the children of the emperor and often controlled who had regular comparison must be added to gain an understanding of the overall direction of access to the new emperor. The few women in classical China who became change. highly learned were generally attached to the

148 149 • THE CLASSICAL PERIOD, 1000 B.C.E.-450 C.E. • • GENDER STRUCTURES IN CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS • imperial household and, despite their own learning, often agreed with There were also traditions that stressed the power of women. Many of the Confucian teachings about women's inferiority. Hindu deities are goddesses, who range from beneficient life-givers, such as Land in China—the most basic form of wealth—was held largely by Devi and Ganga, to faithful spouses, such as Parvati and Radha, to fierce aristocratic families, passed jointly from generation to generation by the male destroyers and disease bearers, such as Kali and Durga. Women performed members of the lineage. Because daughters left the family on marriage, they religious rituals either on their own or with their husbands and were active in had no rights to land, although complicated exceptions were occasionally the bhakti movements, popular devotional movements that stressed intense made for girls who had no brothers, in which they held land in trust for their mystical experiences. Hindu stories stressed women's service to men but also sons or in which their husbands were adopted into the family. Some peasant gave credit to initiative, cleverness, love, and sensuality—ingredients families also owned land and, like nobles, passed it down in the patrilineage, different from the emphases of Confucian culture in China. For its part, in although many were completely landless and worked on noble estates. Almost theory the Buddhist path to enlightenment (nirvana, or nibbana) is open to all all peasants married, not because of Confucian principles but because marital regardless of sex or caste; one needs simply to shed all earthly desires. couples and their children were the basic unit of agricultural production; Like Confucianism, Hinduism saw family life and procreation as reli- procreation was an economic necessity, to supply supplementary family labor gious duties; all men and women were expected to marry, and anything that and replace population lost to disease, and not simply a religious duty. interfered with procreation, including exclusively homosexual attachments, was seen as negative. In Buddhism, the spritually superior life was one that renounced all earthly desires, including sexual ones, and nuns and monks India were warned about both homosexual and heterosexual relationships. Hinduism and Buddhism were the most important determinants of gender Buddhism was never completely comfortable with women who gave up structures in classical India because they shaped all aspects of life, not simply family life, however, and the ideal woman in Buddhism—both historically what we might consider the religious realm. Both of these religions came to and in sacred texts—was more often than not a married woman with children incorporate many different ideas and traditions, some of which stressed gender who supported a community of monks or who assisted men in their spiritual hierarchy and some gender complementarity. In Hinduism, higher-caste boys progress, rather than a nun. and men went through various ceremonies marking their status and spent a period of time studying sacred texts, while girls and women did not. A girl Classical Mediterranean Society married very early and then went to live with her husband's family, where she honored his ancestors and performed rituals designed to prolong his life. If In contrast to classical India, gender structures in the Mediterranean, until the such rituals were ineffective, women could expect a long period of dismal advent of Christianity, were shaped more by secular ideas and aims than by widowhood, during which they were considered inauspicious—that is, unlucky religious systems. Ideas about gender originating in classical Athens were —and so not welcome at family festivities or rituals. Though there is some sharply hierarchical. Aristotle (384-322 B.CE.), the most influential disagreement about this in Hindu sacred texts, most of them teach that a philosopher in Western civilization, saw only males as capable of perfection woman can never gain the final state of bliss, known as moksba, without and described women—and all female animals—as "deformed males." Thus having first been reborn a man. Some Buddhist texts also regarded women as the perfect human form was that of the young male and the perfect not capable of achieving enlightenment unless they first became men, and relationship one between two men. Athens developed an institutionalized Buddhism placed all nuns under the control of male monks. system of pederasty, in which part of a young upper-class male's training in cultural and political adulthood included an often sexual

/50 W • THE CLASSICAL PERIOD, 1ooo B.C.E.-450 C.E. • • GENDER STRUCTURES IN CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS • relationship with an older man. (Formal homosexuality between adults, ing entertainments. Within the family, law gave wives some protection however, was condemned and open to legal punishment.) In the same way that against abuse, modifying the disciplinary inequality of the earlier republic. Confucianism made women's subordination part of the cosmic order, But women's conditions deteriorated again in the later empire. Aristotelian biological and political theory made it part of nature: "The male is The classical Mediterranean was home to a wide range of religious by nature fitter for command than the female ... the inequality is permanent." beliefs and practices, and in the 1st century C.E. Christianity was added to this This inequality was not simply a matter of theory but was also reflected in mixture. In some of its teachings on gender, Christianity was quite Athenian life, for citizen women did not participate in education, politics, or revolutionary. The words and actions of Jesus of Nazareth were very civic life and were generally secluded in special parts of the house. Slave favorable toward women, and a number of women are mentioned as his women were not secluded; in fact, their work, such as buying and selling goods followers in the books of the New Testament, the key religious text for at the public market or drawing water at neighborhood wells, made the Christians. Women took an active role in the spread of Christianity, seclusion of citizen women possible. Women from outside Athens were preaching, acting as missionaries, and being martyred alongside men. Early engaged in a number of occupations, the most famous of which was being a Christians expected Jesus to return to earth again very soon and so taught that hetaera, a resident in one of the city-run brothels, in which upper-class men one should concentrate on this "second coming." Because of this, marriage spent considerable time. These aspects of Athenian life—certain types of and normal family life should be abandoned, and Christians should depend on homosexuality, prostitution, slavery, and the subordination of women— their new spiritual family of cobelievers—an ideal that led some women and disturbed later scholars of the classical period such as Edith Hamilton and H. D. men to reject marriage and live a celibate life, either singly or in communities. F. Kitto, who chose to leave them out of their discussions of the glories of This rejection of sexuality also had negative consequences for women, Athenian democracy and philosophy. however, because most early church writers—who were male and often In contrast to Athens, classical Rome developed a notion of the family that termed the church fathers—saw women as their primary temptation and is in many ways close to that of China and India, in that the family, rather than developed a strong streak of misogyny. Some of these writers, most the individual man, was considered the basis of the social order. This family prominently Augustine (354-430 C.E.), were dualists who made sharp was patriarchal, with fathers, particularly during the republican period, holding distinctions between the spiritual and the material, the soul and the body, and strong control over their female and male children and husbands control over identified women with the less valued material aspects of existence. Women their wives. Both men and women married early, at roughly the same age, a were generally forbidden to preach or hold most official positions in the marital pattern both supported by and supporting the Roman ideal that church. Thus, like Hinduism and Buddhism, Christianity offered husbands and wives should share interests, property, and activities. Spousal contradictory and ambiguous messages about proper gender relations and the loyalty was often used metaphorically to represent political loyalty in a way relative value of the devotion and worship of male and female adherents. that would have seemed bizarre to Greek political theorists. During the late republican and imperial period, upper-class men were often absent from their Conclusion homes on military or government duties in Rome's rapidly expanding territories, which left women more responsible for running estates and Gender differences had been abundantly clear in river-valley civilizations, managing businesses and property. No Roman woman was named emperor in but they intensified during the classical period, creating greater gaps between her own right, but as the wives and mothers of emperors, they frequently men and women. This change was most evident in the upper classes, though influenced imperial politics. Respectable women had more opportunities in it tended to put pressure on gender patterns in society more generally. Rome public than the Greeks had tolerated, including attend- during the early empire was a partial exception to this pattern,

I$2 *S3 • THE CLASSICAL PERIOD, 1ooo B.C.E.-450 c.E. • but in China, India, and Athens, the stipulations and family arrangements accompanying Confucianism, Hinduism, and Greek city-state politics tended to define women's roles and the perceptions of women with growing rigor. Why did this rigidification occur? To some extent, the creation of more systematic cultural statements, such as Confucianism, almost unwittingly formalized gender ideas, by pulling less systematic inequalities into more elaborate ideological systems and tying gender structures to notions of society and the cosmos. Many historians believe that, on the whole, growing prosperity in agricultural civilizations created the means and facilitated the motivation to treat wives more as ornaments, as a sign of the family's wealth and success, and also to try to isolate and control them more fully, in order to assure male monopoly over their sexual activities and resulting offspring. This explains the particular focus on the upper classes as centers of innovation in gender thinking. Another contributing factor may have been more formal activities of governments, which reduced (though did not eliminate) women's informal power roles in individual families. Certainly, as we have seen, the creation of a more elaborate political sphere spurred men to try to define public life as their own, establishing a new occasion for men and women, the public and the familial, to be separate. Yet there were tensions about gender within each of the civilizations, and the distinctions among cultures are significant as well. Cultural change, particularly the expansion of Buddhism in Asia and the rise of Christianity in the Middle East and Mediterranean, both strengthened and questioned existing gender structures. This simultaneous challenge and reinforcement would continue in the postclassical period, when contacts between cultures increased.

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