Читать книгу A Companion to Global Gender History - Группа авторов - Страница 18

Over time, the emergence of private property, complex societies and economies, and the conduct of wars and military campaigns in the ancient Middle East several thousand years before the Christian era gradually brought increased gender divisions and new forms of inequality. Of course, the growing complexity of societies did not by itself create gender divisions or inequalities, as the highly developed Egyptian Empire (3100 BCE–1000 BCE) illustrates. By the fourth century BCE in Egypt’s complex system of independent city‐states under the leadership of a pharaoh or king, linked by economic activity along with cultural and religious practices, literate men held both government positions and the dominant roles in the state bureaucracy. Elite women also served as queens, pharaohs, and priestesses. Non‐elite women worked as artisans and farmers, alongside men, and often in family agricultural labor in this society, where agriculture had developed as early as 8500 BCE. Women also engaged in the professions (Lesko, 1998). Women’s opportunities for holding public office diminished over time, but elites experienced the fewest gender divisions, and equality of men and women remained a formal characteristic of Egyptian legal, marriage, and inheritance systems. The relative gender equality of Egyptian society differed from other complex societies, such as Israel, Mesopotamia, and Asia where legal systems often established formal gender inequality.

Women in ancient Sumer (3500–1200 BCE), a highly developed, urban and agricultural society in the Euphrates River valley, performed work similar to that of men as farmers, potters, spinners, weavers, and laborers, reigned as queens and served as priestesses (Lesko, 1998: 28). Yet working women earned lower wages than men and men’s status increased as they assumed responsibility for valued tasks such as clearing land, plowing, and planting. The development of new bronze weaponry, the emergence of a standing army, and the exclusion of women from the military in the third and fourth millennia BCE also increased gender disparities.

The same phenomenon occurred in Assyria (1900–1000 BCE) where dependence on trade and the growing importance of private property fueled Assyrians’ military aggressiveness, reinforcing male domination and the repression of women. Assyrian women could not own property, could not inherit, and generally assumed a “private,” rather than “public,” role in society. Although less severe in its regulation of women than Assyria, Hebrew society (1500–500 BCE) also illustrates how a high value placed on private property and the development of a strong military contributed to men’s dominant position in society. Although women farmed and contributed to the economic life of their families, they were excluded from the military and were legally and economically subordinate to their husbands. Overall, women experienced a relative decline in status as the societies of the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean became more highly militarized.

Similar conditions prevailed in China where the simultaneous development of bronze tools – wheels and plows – improved the efficiency of agriculture, artisan production, and weaponry. As in Egypt and Hebrew society, men and women shared agricultural labor. But as in other increasingly complex economies and societies, women’s and men’s shared participation in the economy did not always translate into equality in other areas. Male warriors and government administrators in the Chinese kingdoms of the Shang (1500 BCE–1200 BCE) and Zhou (1200–700 BCE) enjoyed high status. Although women labored in agriculture and assumed domestic duties, in Han China (second century BCE) their economic contributions did not bring them high social status. Gradually, urbanization, social stratification, and the growth of more complex economies led to diminishing opportunities for women. The same was true in the highly stratified society of third‐century India, where the economic activities of virtually all women were circumscribed within the home.

The similarity of these patterns over the globe is remarkable, despite occasional differences. Social and economic complexity, not time period or geographic location, powerfully influenced the relationship between gender and labor. In the relatively highly stratified, militarized, and expansionist societies of the Greco‐Roman Mediterranean, women’s labor, essential to the survival of communes and city‐states, bought women farmers and domestic producers a certain amount of independence. In Greece, they spun wool and wove cloth and practiced the fertility rites that farmers believed would bring abundant grain harvests (Katz, 1998). Women could also own property and manage businesses. Nonetheless, in legal and social terms, Greece was a very patriarchal society where the highly militarized city‐state of Sparta rewarded men’s military service with higher social status and “democratic” Athens relegated women to the home. In ancient Rome, although noble women occasionally held powerful positions as property owners and respected rulers, lower‐class women did not benefit from the same social status, despite their economic contributions. Committed to imperial expansion, the Romans also celebrated aggressive masculinity on the battlefield and institutionalized male power in most spheres of life. Even though middle‐class women could own their own businesses such as dye works or brothels, over time they retreated more from public life. In the first century under Augustus, the Roman Empire rewarded women who bore at least three children with legal rights as independent persons, which might seem to be a recognition of women’s reproductive labor but was actually motivated by imperial worries about maintaining population levels (McNamara, 1998: 83).

Historians speculate that with the expansion of the Roman Empire the authority and power of fathers diminished, allowing upper‐class women to exercise some political and legal control. In 212, the Emperor Caracalla gave all free men and women equal legal and economic rights. Some 300 years later the Emperor Justinian incorporated women’s rights – such as the right to own property – into his famous code of laws. But under the Christian Empire in the West, despite their recognition of the spiritual equality of men and women, and women’s ability to hold offices in early Christian groups, religious thinkers represented women as fundamentally inferior to men. Christianity’s ideas about gender later influenced women’s inferior position in society overall.