Читать книгу A Companion to Global Gender History - Группа авторов - Страница 45

During Europe’s medieval period, the centralized government and codified laws of the Roman and Carolingian empires gave way to smaller units of territorial power presided over by local chieftains and their armed retainers. In the absence of a single ruler who could dominate over others, and in the face of almost endemic warfare, local individual families came to serve as vital sources of stability. Under the feudal system characteristic of Europe between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, political power became fragmented and personal; it rested in the hands of that landed military ruler or lord who could command the loyalty of the warriors around him, the knights who pledged their homage, a term deriving from the French word for man, homme. “I will be your man,” they pledged their lords in return for prerogatives of wealth and behavior that set them apart from the vast majority of men and women of this period and constituted them as an aristocracy, explicitly betraying the masculine nature of the warrior societies that comprised feudal Europe. But despite the overwhelmingly male composition of the ruling duchies, principalities, and kingdoms that dotted the European countryside, the elite wives, sisters, and daughters of local rulers and knights found a great deal of scope within which they might exercise power and administer the law, mostly as the agents of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, but sometimes in their own right as well. As members of powerful families, they might enjoy power themselves.

Despite the existence of laws that prohibited women from holding political office, serving as commanders of armed men, presiding over manorial courts, or sitting on royal or municipal councils – all justified by earlier Roman beliefs that women lacked intelligence, were weak‐minded (imbecilitas sexus), wily, and avaricious – elite women did all of these things (Shahar, 1983). The power of feudal lords derived from their ownership of the source of wealth in their societies, land. To the extent that elite women owned land, as they did increasingly during and after the reign of Charlemagne in the ninth century CE, or in place of their husbands and fathers, who were often away from the manor engaging in military campaigns, women carried out the functions of law, taxation, justice, administration, and war that attended the possession of estates. Abbesses, presiding over church lands, ordered knights to fight in battles. Queens and noblewomen drew up law codes, like the Usages of Barcelona, one of the first written law codes to appear after the demise of the Carolingian empire. And between 1100 and 1600, at least thirty women had sovereign authority in Europe, not as regents for their underage sons or absent husbands or fathers (Monter, 2012).

The regularity with which women exercised power and their great visibility in medieval times excited much comment from disapproving males. The French conjured up an ancient piece of legislation, the Salic Law, which, they said, prohibited women from ruling as queens in their own right because they lacked, inherently as women, juridical authority. The monk Liutprand of Cremona, attributed the power of what he called the “pornocracy” of women to their shameful sexual proclivities and their corruption of men. How else explain that Ermengarde, Marquess of Ivrea, “held the chief authority in all Italy” except to aver that “the cause of her power, shameful though it may be even to mention it, was that she carried on carnal commerce with everyone, prince and commoner alike…. Ermengarde’s beauty, in this corruptible flesh, roused the fiercest jealousies among men: for she would give to some the favours she refused to others” (McNamara and Wemple, 1977)? His statement reflects the widespread and deep‐seated Christian understanding of women, drawn from the story of Adam and Eve, as especially carnal, lustful creatures responsible for Original Sin and man’s fall from grace, a depiction shared by and carried forward into political thought by one of the most significant theorists of his or anyone’s day, Niccolo Machiavelli.

The political ideas laid out in 1513 in Machiavelli’s The Prince and other writings constitute a shift in worldview concomitant with that of the Renaissance weltanshauung as a whole. In medieval times, the stability of any given European society depended upon the mutual dependence of individuals and groups of people, organized into estates, upon one another. Medieval Europeans imagined their social order to be a “great chain of being,” with God the Father and the angels at the top, followed by monarchs, aristocrats, and everyone else. Women held their various positions on the chain by virtue of their relationship to men as wives or daughters; as women, they were inferior and subordinate to men, as God had demonstrated in making Eve out of Adam's rib. The Renaissance introduced a different, more recognizably modern understanding of humans and human society in which autonomy, not dependence, was the goal for which men strived; freedom and self‐government on the part of individuals and of political communities became positive ends. Beginning in the sixteenth century, dependence took on overtones of femininity and childishness, characteristics to be avoided by men as much as possible, as they threatened to destroy men’s autonomy, their very manliness. Machiavelli expressed the concerns about masculinity felt by many of his contemporaries in his near obsession with the concept of virtu (or virtue).

Drawn from the Latin vir, which means “man,” virtue signified the capacity of human beings to govern themselves. Whether that capacity derived from God, from nature, or from reason, as later enlightenment thinkers would have it, the self‐knowledge and self‐command articulated in the ideal of virtue enabled “political man” to subordinate private interests to the public good. For Aristotle, as we have seen, the oikos, or landed household, provided the requisite material basis upon which independence and thus virtue and citizenship rested. Machiavelli substituted the bearing of arms for the possession of oikos. It was a preeminently masculine quality; indeed, the possession of virtue signaled the existence of a “real man,” a man ready and able to take action on behalf of himself and the political community (Pitkin, 1984). Just as virtue constituted the highest form of manliness for Machiavelli, its opposite, effeminato, signified the despicable qualities of passivity and dependence, the qualities most closely associated with women and those that disqualified them and men who resembled them from the realm of politics.

The most troubling and difficult challenges virtuous men faced in public, political life were those thrown up by fortuna, or fortune. The term has a long etymology, but in Machiavelli’s usage it conjures up forces – whether deriving from nature or from God – of unpredictability, caprice, mystery, and subversiveness that intrude on men’s efforts to control the circumstances of their lives and of their states. For Machiavelli, fortune is quite obviously gendered: arrayed against the masculine virtue, it acts as the feminine principle that must be “mastered” if men are to prevail in their personal and public lives. In this sense, politics constitutes an arena in which sexual battle takes place, in which the sexual conquest of women serves as the requisite outcome if virtuous men, whether princes or republicans, are to succeed in furthering their political goals. Women cannot be allowed to engage in political life for they will bring chaos, violence, and upheaval to societies. In one chapter of his Discourses entitled, “How a State Falls Because of Women,” Machiavelli warned that “women have caused much destruction, have done great harm to those who govern cities, and have occasioned many divisions in them…. I say, then, that absolute princes and governors of republicans are to take no small account of this matter” (Brown, 1988; Pitkin, 1984).

Machiavelli’s ideas about women and politics, however modern his theories about the political behavior of states and rulers might be, offered nothing new of substance to debates about women’s political participation. They closely resembled the thinking of classical Greeks, Romans, and Christian fathers, who believed that Eve's transgressions had stained all women with her sin. Construed as insatiably lustful, with sexual appetites greater than men's, women of the early modern period were perceived to be potential agents of damnation and destruction, requiring the mastery of men to preserve their propriety and honor, and the stability of the social and political order itself. It was not for nothing that Elizabeth I placed enormous emphasis upon her status as the virgin queen. In repudiating her sexuality, at least symbolically, she could better downplay her femininity and fashion herself a masculine ruler.

Perhaps the best known and most influential of all the tales spun out to explain and legitimate political authority is that of social contract theory, especially that associated with the writings of Englishman John Locke. His works justified the deposition of James II in 1688 by members of parliament on the grounds that the king had failed to live up to the terms of an original social contract by means of which human beings left behind an existence in the state of nature and established a civil society. This contract, he wrote, recognized the so‐called “natural” rights of men to life, liberty, and property, and bound its parties – the ruler and the ruled – to certain obligations, failing to live up to which the contract could be voided and the ruler overthrown. Locke’s ideas reverberated throughout eighteenth‐century Europe and North America, providing American colonists and French revolutionaries with a powerful legitimating tool as they built their arguments for their revolutionary actions. The doctrine of liberalism that emerged from Locke’s political theory also provoked the creation of a somewhat coherent argument about women sharing in its precepts and would provide nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century feminists throughout the world with the ammunition they would need for their battles to bring women into the world of politics and gain for them recognition and respect as political actors.

Early seventeenth‐century Britons understood the world in which they lived to be fundamentally, properly, and irrevocably hierarchical. Hierarchies of gender mirrored those of status based on landownership in rural areas and on guild structures in the towns. Just as subjects of the crown knew themselves to be subordinate to their monarch, farmers knew themselves to be fully subordinate to their landlords, and apprentices and journeymen/women to their guild masters, so too women understood themselves to be subordinate to their fathers and their husbands. Patriarchal rule – whether it be of master to man or man to woman – prevailed (Kent, 1999).

Patriarchy in state and society as well as in the family rested on the ancient presumption that the male head of household held property not simply in his land and his animals, but in his wife and his children as well. Although never legally classified as chattel – property – of men, married English, Welsh, and Scottish women faced restrictions in common law that rendered them, for all intents and purposes, the property of their husbands. At the very least, common law doctrines institutionalized the inferiority and subordination of women to men. Under the law of coverture, unique to England and its colonies, married women had no legal existence apart from their husbands: they had no legal rights to property, to earnings, to freedom of movement, to conscience, to their bodies, or to their children; all belonged to their husbands. If a woman was raped, the crime was perceived as a form of theft, not from her, but from her husband or male relatives; cases of adultery were prosecuted only in those instances where the woman involved was married. Women lost their names when they married. All of these circumstances combined to suggest that women were the property of men, in fact if not in law. Certainly they meant that women did not enjoy the autonomy, the independence, that was a vital prerequisite for formal political participation (which, indeed, most men did not possess either, though not because they were excluded by law). By 1600, only in rare and exceptional cases did individual women vote for or hold public office.

But the ideology of gender, like any other ideology, is never static. Changes taking place in politics bring about changes in ideology as well, exposing inconsistencies and contradictions. Because ideologies are always uneven and often contradictory in their applicability to or effect on various people in society, they produce possibilities for resistance to them, possibilities for change. In the years leading up to the outbreak of civil war in England in 1642, for example, proponents of royal absolutism and of parliamentary supremacy in government developed a series of justifications for their respective positions. Supporters of Charles I put forward arguments based on divine right and patriarchy, but they also resorted, from time to time, to contract theory to make the case that the people of England, Scotland, and Wales had ceded all of their rights to the monarch when they made their original contract of subjection to the ruler. They compared this imaginary “social contract” with the monarch to that of the marriage contract between husband and wife, whose contractual nature – which virtually all Britons accepted without question – consisted only of the consent that the parties to it gave upon taking their vows. The marriage contract established a relationship of male governance and female obedience, and it could not be revoked. Royalists were on firm ideological ground in making such an argument about marriage; by drawing an analogy to it, they were able to insist that, just as in marriage, the agreement to obey the social contract with the monarch, once entered into, was binding. Resistance to the monarch by his subjects was akin to a wife violating her marriage vows; both were a sin against God, no matter how egregious the abuse a husband might heap upon her. Just as there was a covenant “instituted by God betweene King and People,” wrote the royalist Sir Dudley Digges in 1643, “so there is a contract between Husband and Wife, the violation of which on the man's part doth not bereave him of his dominion over the woman”(Shanley, 1979). The idea that subjects might justifiably rebel against their monarch was as absurd as the idea that a wife might end her subjection to her husband either by their mutual agreement to divorce or because he abused her.

The best known and most influential of the works bearing on the family, John Locke's Two Treatises on Government, published in 1688, placed familial relations on the ground of contract theory based in natural law. Locke argued that the parties to the contract might stipulate the terms of their relationship within marriage. He further insisted that because all human beings – men and women alike – are free in a state of nature, there could exist no predetermined terms or conditions bearing on the parties to marriage, except that of producing and caring for children. As long as the obligations to care for the children born to a married couple continued to be met, that couple might terminate their marriage contract if the ends to which it had been directed were completed. Moreover, husbands did not, Locke claimed, enjoy any absolute sovereign power in marriage by virtue of their sex. He could not completely shrug off societal norms of male supremacy in marriage, noting that where husband and wife disagreed about how their “common Interest and Property” should be administered, “it naturally falls to the Man's share, as the abler and stronger,” to make the final determination. Nevertheless, he qualified the exercise of a husband's power to areas of common concern, and argued that these, too, might be regulated by contract. Locke was far in advance of other thinkers of his time in regard to marriage and the relationship of husband and wife within it, but his work did not immediately change the way society thought about marriage or the laws that regulated it. However, in conjunction with the acceptance of contract theory that accompanied and justified the removing of James II from the throne and the replacing of him with William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution, it did open the door to possibilities of divorce (Shanley, 1979). So powerful were Locke's philosophical formulations against domestic patriarchy that the Church of England felt compelled to alter its doctrine in 1705 to acknowledge the mutual and reciprocal rights and obligations of men and women in marriage. In 1753, the Marriage Act gave parliament jurisdiction over marriage law, making possible a slow liberalization of divorce laws. In the nineteenth century, feminists and reformers called upon his individualistic assumptions about human beings to effect changes in property law and marriage law that directly benefited women.

Locke's Two Treatises of Government both reflected and contributed to a developing split between public and private virtue in the minds of contemporaries. Its theoretical formulations separated civic or public authority on the one hand, and familial or private authority on the other, providing philosophical legitimation for closing down the possibilities women had to participate in political affairs. In rebutting earlier patriarchal arguments based on analogies of state and familial power, Locke distinguished between the state and the family as civic entities, relegating the family to a private sphere disconnected from politics. In separating the two, and in insisting that qualification for participation in the public political sphere rested on property ownership and independence of the control or influence of others, Locke effectively excluded women from political activity. Married women, we have seen, could not own property under common law. Moreover, even if women did own property, under an equity settlement or as femes sole, they were considered dependent upon men within the family and therefore disqualified from public life. Henceforth, in ideological terms, women would occupy the private sphere of home and family, where they could best display the moral and especially sexual virtue now expected of them; men would demonstrate virtuous behavior in the public sphere of work and politics.