APWH

A big thank you to those of you who were able to be at JFK this morning to take the multiple choice exam!
For all period 6&8 please read the packet on gender and World History to be prepared for Tuesday. We will do some work on it in pods.
If you didn't get the packet ... it is here!! Please read and study!

APWH

Land, Power and Gender

by Sarah Shaver Hughes

In preindustrial economies, ownership of land is more important than we easily grasp. It was the base of power of noble families and monarchs. First, let's consider the importance of land to ordinary people. Whether you owned land was next in importance only to whether you owned yourself. Before 1500 in much of the world, land was not "owned," but controlled by groups who apportioned its use. In either system of individual deeds or group possession, access to land in fact came through families. It was a right acquired by inheritance and by marriage. Our natural, English-based instinct is to believe that both farming and owning land were normally male traits. That, however, has not always been true everywhere.

• In much of Southeast Asia before penetration by Chinese, Muslim, and European merchants and settlers, land was held on the female, or matrilineal side of the family. A man gained access to farmland when he married and moved to his wife's village; if they divorced, he lost his right to farm her land.
• In many parts of Africa and the pre-Columbian Americas, land was either assigned by the community to women or to newly married couples to farm jointly or separately.

In most of Europe, the Middle East, India, and China, where there was individual title to land, power accompanied ownership. Obviously, a big landowner had power over tenants. Less noticed is the power within families. This power often subordinated young men and women to their elders. How often do we talk about this as a cause of migration? It certainly was an aspect of the voluntary migration of single men and women to the Americas, as well as of the forced transportation of slaves.

In discussing land and property rights, try to find opportunity to mention the inheritance rights of women under Islamic law, which were far superior to those of European women or U.S. women until the late nineteenth century. This is important because of the pervasive stereotypes of oppressed Muslim women. Although Islamic law required that a son's inheritance be twice the amount of a daughter's, it specified a division in which all children participated. European legal systems allowed, and sometimes favored, giving all land to an eldest son. Daughters had no recourse to exclusion from their father's will, and even if they did inherit, their husbands would control their property. We are not discussing this as a matter of love or feelings, but as raw economic power within the family and the society. In Mughal India and Ottoman Turkey, there were wealthy women, married or widowed, who invested in trade and managed estates. Did they make the same choices as men? We don't yet know, but they certainly had more control over their personal lives because of their wealth. And an ordinary Turkish woman who inherited a small vineyard had more leverage in negotiating her married life than her Chinese counterpart did.

But let's turn back to land and power among the ruling aristocratic classes. The best stories are those of the informal politics of the womb in the palace. Unfortunately, world history classes seldom leave us enough time to develop the complex cast of characters necessary to understand how a slave concubine could place her son on the throne or how Eleanor of Aquitaine’s inheritance placed her in seats of power in France and England. Most monarchs and powerful nobles were male, but some were female. These women were sometimes heroic, usually ruthless, occasionally evil. Elizabeth I of England was exceptional because she did not have children to protect and promote. When making a point about, for instance, the rise of the nation state in Europe, there is no reason not to choose a queen as an illustration instead of a king. From the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the assortment of European queens from which to choose is very large: Isabelle of Spain, Christina of Sweden, Elizabeth and Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria. Western monarchy in this early modern period offered more political power to women than democracy would until the election of Margaret Thatcher.

APWH Gender in Daily work

Nearly all societies have divided tasks by gender. This is an easy point to develop when discussing earliest foraging societies. But, in laying the foundation for a course beginning in 1000 C.E., you might review the common roles of men and women in agriculture, as well as in foraging and pastoral economies. The main generalization I would hope students might begin to learn is that men alone did not feed, clothe, and house their families — men and women did so. Then, when encountering a new society, one should learn to ask:

• Who did which work?
• Did men plough the fields of wheat and oats?
• Who harvested?
• Did women hoe the corn or potatoes?
• Who transplanted the tobacco or rice?
• Who herded the livestock or milked the cows?

Most adults — men and women — had to work growing food in more historical circumstances than not. Elite men and women might use class privilege to gain exemption from the fields or employ the slaves gained by conquest in their stead. But we need to look beyond the histories written by a learned (usually male) elite to see who was doing the work and how the tasks were divided.

Artisanal activities are another area in which women's work is often hidden in household production, a term that sometimes disguises a society's most valuable products. Think about who cultured the worms, spun the thread, and wove the cloth that spawned the international silk trade. Men may have predominated in the caravans carrying the fabric along the silk route, but the trade would not have existed without the labor of women in Chinese homes. In the winter 2000 issue of the Journal of Women's History, Lynda Bell explains how women continued to produce the silk cocoons in the twentieth century even as both spinning and weaving moved from the home to factories. She offers an excellent case study of the ways in which industrialization caused shifts in gender tasks, but still left the Chinese economy dependent on women's domestic farm labor. Before industrialization, spinning any fiber has usually been a girl's or a woman's job around the globe, but either women or men may weave. Over many cultures, masculinity is associated with metalwork and with trees, both growing them and working the wood.

Once some of these generalizations are mastered, it is interesting to note exceptions. If women are working the bellows or sawing the wood, what does it say about that culture? Who are the women? Are they priestesses, smiths, or slaves who can be assigned work without regard to gender? When weaving that has been women's work becomes a male job, the same sort of questions should be asked, as well as whether the type of loom has changed. We should ask such gender questions because these changes are almost certainly indicative of other social changes in employment of slaves, in power of classes, of migration, of technology, or of trade.