Gender and World History: WHA discussion

    This was first sent to the H-World-discussion list and it refers to a
World History Association discussion, but I guess it might be relevant given
the parallel discussion on gender on this list too.

    I'm certainly not smart enough to grasp the obscure `Pomo' jargon
presently in use on this list - I have to admit I find Latin texts from the
eighth century easier to understand than this nebulous terminology - but at
least I do try to move beyond what are I think mostly empty generalities
towards concrete historical and social circumstances.

    Generalities such as - no personal offense intended - `heterosexuality
is at the core of the gender system' (of course - the majority of people
have always been heterosexual), `gender is intrinsic to unequal orders' (of
course - but HOW is it intrinsic) `like capitalism' (I wouldn't hold a
candle for the `feudalism' this posting is about either). Or `non-western
women are subject to the white, capitalist, male, global order.' (Yes -
obviously - and so is everybody else: this is a world SYSTEM -  remember?).
Or this one:  `women are pushed beneath the level of significance since
gender is radically deconstructed and fragmented. Such a radical pluralist
deconstruction of identity valorizes women as a group and apoliticizes
emancipatory narratives such as feminism and marxism' (no idea what that's
supposed to mean.)


    `Pomo' incrowd of this list and readers of `H-World' may, of course, by
all means skip this and go on with their very sophisticated discussions.

>Best wishes
>R.J. Barendse
>r.barendse@worldonline.nl
>Leiden University
>The Netherlands
>
>    Glad somebody else starts the discussion for there is indeed a lot to
>say on David Christian's request for a WHA-discussion but in that case we
>need to go further than merely affirm "we have indeed not spend enough
>attention to women" and express the pious wish "that we should".
>
>Pursuing David Mac Fahey's remark:
>>
>>Comparative study of family/household and of generations might be a useful
>>way of incorporating gender in world history.
>>
>>I suppose that we should start by defining gender.  Women aren't the only
>>people with gender.  Rather gender refers to the roles of men AND women
and
>>the meanings of masculinity AND femininity.
>
>    I totally agree with that - the problem with women's history - and we
>are dealing with a potentially revolutionary branch of scholarship here -
as
>it is
>written on the moment, is (apart from common child-illnesses like its
>infatuation with `pomo' jargon) really, well, that it is only about women.
>
>    This `women's tunnel-history' was a perfectly possible and perhaps a
>legitimate approach for the pioneer branch of women's history: twentieth
>century women's history when even apart from the voluminous writing
>from - well, mainly upper and mainly upper and middle-class - women
>themselves there's also the possibility to do `oral history'. The
>latter is a particularly useful approach when studying the life of
>working-class women, where what working class-women says often widely
>differs from what the official documentation says or with what the press
>writes for them.
>
>    I would not slighten the achievements of women's history for twentieth
>century historiography - it's through women's history above all that
>historians have began to approach what may be called the `structural
history
>of the twentieth century: that is that, say, the condom or the
>washing-machine had maybe had a deeper impact on people and on the economy
>than, say, World War I or the New Deal.
>
>    However, once you get before the eighteenth century - perhaps the
>seventeenth for place where female literacy was common like colonial
>America, England, Holland or some parts of Germany - sources from women
tend
>to run dry. This is not to say they do not exist - it is for example often
>forgotten that mysticism was very much a women's movement , both in
medieval
>Europe and in Indian Sufism and that there are several major female
mystical
>authors - but sources from women are rare all the same. Before 1700 women
>tend mainly to exist in tax-and in judicial records. Really the only way
you
>normally can find out what women think before 1700 is through testimonies
in
>court, but judicial records for obvious reasons tend to present a rather
>biased view of society.
>
>    Thus, women's history before 1700 tends to focus either on elite-women
>or on marginal groups which happen to be well documented in judicial
>records, such as prostitutes and `witches'. To study the overwhelming bulk
>of the women's population you have to rely on tax-records, which are
>typically concerned with the taxation of household units rather than women
>per se.
>
>    Headings like: manor Knutsford upon Tames (or Amuk Amukpur as the case
>might be), one free man, James (or Taran Sing or Leonidas), one free woman,
>Sarra (or Helena or Havida as the case might be), two children, six acres,
>one plough, assessment: 1 sterling (or one dinar or one solidus or one
rupee
>as the case might be) that's about all the information you have for 99% of
>the female population before 1700 in Western Europe or the Balkan or even
>before 1900 in India.
>
>    But there is an other and more important reason to agree with David:
>remember that most Eurasian/African societies before 1700 overwhelmingly
>consisted of small-scale mostly subsistence peasant households - generally
>contributing some form of taxes to some form of state. And in which the
>peasant-household is the unit of production.
>
>     In a predominantly peasant-society there are - apart from agrarian
>technology and the levy of revenue - two other factors paramount to
>production and for a satisfactory model of the evolution of pre-industrial
>society we need to consider both: the environment and population-growth.
>
>    Now,  views on population-growth under pre-industrial conditions have
so
>far
>been very much dominated by a simple Malthusian model: given high
>child-mortality and given the role of children as both an `old age
>insurance' and as
>hands on the farm, peasant-families tended to take large numbers of
>children. So that population tended tendentially to outrun environmental
>resources: ancien regime type crises were thus typically classic Malthusian
>crises.
>(One leading proponent of this view being for example Emmanuel Le Roy
>Ladurie.)
>
>    New research on population-growth in medieval and early modern Europe
>has
>increasingly shed doubt on this view. Peasant-populations (and that means
>first and foremost female peasants) it now increasingly appears did not
have
>the `rabbit-strategy of survival' (as I once called it in jest) but had
ways
>to limit and to some extent plan the population, be it by extending
>breast-feeding, be it by coitus interrupts, delaying marriage, be it by
>infanticide, be it by abortion. It has been argued that conscious limiting
>of population  was only true of late-medieval European peasant populations
>and that elsewhere peasants had the `rabbit strategy'. But it is by now
>becoming clear this was true for peasant populations everywhere too: in
>Japan, in India, or in the Byzantine Empire as much as in early modern
>Islam.
>
>    One factor involved here is that pre-modern peasant families were
(well,
>very generally speaking) `rational peasants' who were well able to adjust
>family-size (and hence the size of the workforce) to the demand for their
>products.
>
>    Another is that family-size and hence pressure on resources depended on
>gender-roles within peasant families and on the larger nexus of `gendered
>relationships' between peasant-families and societies. (For medieval
>villages - in Europe as much as in the Byzantine Empire and I think
medieval
>Islam too - were not the `windowless self-sufficient monads' they are often
>perceived as. Instead they had an often very large component of outsiders
>from the villages living there, and a large labor-force employed in
>services - blacksmiths, net-makers, fishermen, priests what have you - so
>that villages stood in constant contact with wider society).
>
>    Therefore - gender was an absolutely critical components for the
>development of the economy. As most economies in Afrasia were subject to
>ancien regime type crises with population outrunning climatic and
>environmental resources relative to the agrarian technology available (as
in
>the global depression of the mid-thirteenth and seventeenth century) and
>vice-versa to movements of agrarian colonization as in the global upsurges
>of the tenth-twelfth century and in the fifteenth-seventeenth century.
>
>    For medieval and early modern peasant populations were in my view not
>very different from present Third World peasantry's: the amount of children
>very much depended on factors like women's education, the status of women
>within the family, the judicial status of the peasants and of
women-peasants
>in particular, the demand for products from village-industries (and don't
>forget `proto-industrial' work-forces were predominantly female) and the
>rate of urbanization. Many pre-industrial cities had a lot in common with
>present Third World cities: they had an excess of men over females, very
>high rates of mortality and couples there tended to have fewer children as
>housing was both expensive and crammed.
>
>    If this is right and population reproduction rates depended, above all,
>on the status of women and if (as seems reasonably sure) economic, and
hence
>societal, development depended on the amount of people the environment
could
>sustain with the given agrarian techniques (a choice which again very much
>depended on the judicial status of the peasantry)  then it's not merely the
>issue for World-history to give `more consideration to women' but instead
>gender-relations become a critical issue for history at large.
>
>    For gender-relations are not embedded within our genes or biology -
>which is why I, unlike David Christian, do not think we can learn much from
>relationships within groups of primates for world-history - but evolved
>together with long-term economic cycles. Hence, as gender-relations were
>structured by economic cycles and as cycles had differential impacts on
>classes gender-relations were also structured by class. (For most
societies,
>in what I call the Afro-Eurasian ethnosphere rather than the
`world-system',
>were class-societies, including many nomadic societies)
>
>    Let me give three concrete examples of what I'm thinking about. I will
>here stress pre-modern history rather than modern for the obvious reason
>that the literature on contemporary history is so much larger and
>world-history is obviously easier for our modern `globalized' age than for
>the pre-1500 period. There is clearly a `World History' for the twentieth
>century but even many contributors to this list would doubt that for the
>pre-modern period - I would like to refer back to the `global
>feudalism'-discussion in this regard.
>
>    But to be sure to fully consider the impact of gender relations on
>population growth and its relationship to the environment we are dealing
>with a vast research-program for which the sources, furthermore, are often
>simply not available. Probably that's a particular problem for Africa since
>I suspect oral sources tend to start from the status quo of
>gender-relationships in the here and now and project these back into the
>past:
>
>    1.) Reproduction-rates of servant/slave vs. free populations: In early
>Medieval Europe (8 th - 10 th century) slaves - which in the Carolingian
>period still amounted to roughly 30% of rural population - had far fewer
>children than free populations. This had a lot to do with the judicial
>status of women: children from free women became free men, whereas children
>from a slave women remained slaves. Thus, there was little animo to marry
>slave-women. Many slave-women thus remained unmarried, hence were not a
good
>old age investment (for I would argue pre-modern peasant-familes were very
>rational decision-makers - you simply starved if you didn't run your farm
>economically). And hence - probably - slave-household resorted to female
>infanticide to curtail the number of women. Thus giving rise to a severe
>excess of men among unfree populations. Due to slower reproduction-rates,
>therefore, slavery tended to gradually die out in western Europe if not
>constantly replenished by spoils of conquest and purchases of slaves.
>Albeit - the cash-starved late Carolingian Empire could not afford to buy
>large numbers of slaves from the Slavonic countries, nor could it replenish
>its dwindling supplies of slaves by conquest. Thus there was a slow,
>gradual, emancipation of bonded populations and, hence, a raising of the
>status of the peasantry which was one factor in the increase in
agricultural
>production from the tenth century onward. For, obviously, if all the fruits
>of your work go to your owner there's not much of an incentive to produce
>more.
>
>    Now, oddly, I found the same structure to exist among `villain'
>populations in seventeenth/eighteenth century India: that is a low number
of
>children and a very large excess of men (2 women to three men) so that,
here
>too, villain populations had probably constantly to be replenished by
>purchase or conquest which contributed to the de-stabilization of society
>(and, indeed, to the rise of colonialism) as `free populations' were
>enslaved by mercenary bands of slave-raiders or sold after `razzias'. On
>the other hand - free populations, with ample shares in both trade and land
>had very high rates of reproduction (often 6 to 8 children per family) too.
>So
>that in India as much as in medieval Europe the status of peasants tended
>tendentially to improve, if peasant populations were not occasionally
>overrun and enslaved by conquerors that is. This was, for example I think,
a
>critical mechanism in the evolution of society in Kerala in South India -
>where agrarian productivity was quite low precisely because much of its
>population was of servile status.
>
>    Now, get me right here (unlike what Geoffry de St. Croix thinks) that
>slave- and serf-populations tend to die out if not constantly replenished
is
>NOT a tendential law of `unfree'-production for there are plenty of
contrary
>cases. As that of fifteenth-sixteenth century Russia where unfree
>populations tended to have higher reproduction-rates than free populations.
>It very much depends on the division of agrarian tasks, gender-roles and on
>the global economic climate. For example, if `unfree peasants' can have
>their own plots of land to sell products to the plantation or to the
demesne
>and if prices for these products are rising, they may well `invest' in
large
>number of children to work their own plot. (Again, these are rational
>peasant household economies).
>
>
>    2.) Rapid growth of `frontier' populations: this is equally attested
for
>tenth century Europe as for Colonial America. Growth of free peasant
>populations in 'frontier' lands tends to be primarily endogenous: that is
>frontier populations tend to have large numbers of children partly because
>they need much labor to work untilled lands, partly since the population
>tends to be quite young and - this is less certain for medieval Europe -
>since women tend to be well-educated, highly skilled and often had a high
>status and thus a high price (for dowries etc.).
>
>    Women are a good investment therefore and there is thus no reason to
>practice female infanticide (if only by spending less attention to female
>than to male babies). The population tends to have a more equal sex-ratio
>than is common among peasant populations (which mostly have a surplus of
>men) pushing up again the number of women of child-bearing age. That means
>typically the population on the `frontier' is growing more rapidly than in
>the old `core'-areas. However, in the `Old World' (a critical difference
>with America) `free' (or `non-feudalized') frontier-areas were also
>typically less productive than `old core'-areas (where there was a host of
>dues and impositions weighing down on the peasantry) and therefore there
was
>a big risk of periodic famines on the `frontier'. This tended not only to
>curtail the population-growth on the frontier. But it might even - for
>mid-thirteenth century western Europe and I think  in Russia then too -
>spell trouble for the economy as a whole.
>
>    Again - this structure is not confined to Europe for the nineteenth
>century Punjab `Canal colonies' had a similar demographic structure to
>medieval European `frontiers'. And - although demographic evidence is very
>scarse in pre-nineteenth century South Asia - I think this is an older
>structure in Indian history as well. As in the relationship between the
>coast of Tamilnadu, which is an `old agrarian core' (somewhat comparably
>heavily taxed) and the dry `frontier - regions' of Konkundad. Which because
>of their more rapid growth in the eleventh/thirteenth century than the
coast
>I think became the core-region of the Vijayanagar-Empire. Vijaynagar unlike
>the Pallavas and Cholas was centered on the vigorous `free' newly colonized
>regions in the hinterland rather than on the Coromandel Coast.
>
>    It would be tempting to go into this for Chinese history or for the
>history of Java - where I think we have somewhat similar structures and,
>indeed, to try to read the Islamisation-process on Java in terms of
agrarian
>colonization and contrasts between the status of peasants (and particularly
>female peasants) between core and frontier but others certainly know far
>more about that.
>
>
>    3.) Reproduction-rates of the nobility: as I stated five months ago
>there are disconcerting parallels between the cultures of the various
>`horse-nobility's throughout Eurasia in the tenth/twelfth century. These
not
>only relate to their way of fighting on horseback but - also I'm beginning
>to think - to their pattern of reproduction.
>
>    Basically, I think as agricultural surpluses were growing in the tenth
>century and as war became increasingly an affair for `specialized' noble
>`knights' on horseback (rather than for the royal retinues, the huskarls of
>western-Christianity and the Turko/Mongol noekar, or the farmer-warrior -
>stratiotes -  levies of the Byzantine Empire) there was a `demographic
>revolution' amongst the nobility. There was still an older `core' of the
>nobility (Carolingian in Europe, mixed Varangian and I suspect Khazar in
>Russia and Cok Turkic in the Altai) but the nobility was strengthened by
>absorbing large numbers of junior `cadets' of often serf-status, or in the
>Turkish case probably by absorbing cadets from acephalous hunter/gatherer
>tribes. I suspect the formation of Rajput (maybe Nayyar) lineages in India
>took place in a similar way and in the same period.
>
>    Both by drawing-in large numbers of junior cadets and by having very
>large numbers of children - we know that for European nobility's but one
>typical characteristic of Turkic/Mongol nobility's was as well that the
>Khans tended to have droves of children and concubines - nobilities thus
>tended to rapidly multiply, giving way to two tendencies.
>
>    One was a tendency for junior nobles to seek their own allod and thus
>establish their own lineages, be it in the Holy Land, be it in Ireland or
>Prussia - or (for the Turks) to seek allods in the service of the
Khalifate,
>the Fatimids, the Saljuqs or (maybe) the Ching dynasty. One cause for the
>various noble expansion movements of the eleventh century: the crusades as
>much as the much vaster movement of Turkic expansion throughout Eurasia
and,
>indeed, North Africa.
>
>    Second, as the noble ranks became increasingly overcrowded by the
>twelfth century and land free for conquest began to dwindle, there was - I
>think - a tendency of nobilities to close themselves-off to newcomers by
>stressing both `noble behavior, `versatility in courtly culture' and
>increasingly  also by drawing judicial dividing lines between themselves
and
>possible pretenders. One of such mechanism being laws stressing the lord -
>vassal relationships in Europe but I think in the same period you see
>similar tendency in Byzantine and Turkic law.
>
>    Now - since noble households centered on noble women (the men being
>often away) one way of the nobility to fence themselves off - and a very
>important one - was to stress courtly behavior between the sexes. This
would
>be one way to interpret the rise of European courtly poetry in the
>twelfth/thirteenth century but the theme of the `junior knight' in hopeless
>love with his distant `domna' not only occurs in Provencal poetry of the
>twelfth/thirteenth century but also (and significantly enough) in courtly
>Persian poetry (Nizami) of the same period. Persian, of course, was
>increasingly then turning into the `courtly vernacular' of sultanates and
>khakanates throughout Eurasia much the same as French became the `courtly
>vernacular' of  Western Europe in that period.
>
>     I have wandered far and wide in this posting but I hope I have given
>some indication that comparative study of gender relationships, linked to
>population and, hence, economic movements are indeed a `frontier' of
>world-history for this century.
>
>    For there are still vast issues to be investigated: thus, for example,
>we know very little about attitudes towards sex and, more importantly, how
>these involved with the economy. There is, I'm told, for instance a vast
>body of medieval Arab `pornographic' writing which should make the mouth of
>any Arabist water - it should be a fun topic - but which Arabists have so
>far neglected. Perhaps since it's deemed an indecent topic, Arabists are
>after all very serious people. But more importantly perhaps since there is
>not really a theoretical frame on how to interpret this literature. We now
>know Arab peasant and urban populations practiced birth control, much like
>those of Western Europe but on whether these patterns of birth-control were
>cyclical like in Europe we have simply no information.
>
>    I don't know whether you can do `World history' by thus stressing
>concrete cases rather than formal and - I often feel empty - categories as
>Ricardo urges me (like maybe patriarchate or women's subjection for
`women's
>history') but I'm trying my best.
>