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As noted above, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, well before the second wave feminist movement developed in the West in the USA, UK and France. Nonetheless, her work became one the most influential texts across all these countries during the emergence of the women’s movement and her statement that ‘one is not born but becomes a woman’ has come neatly to encapsulate feminists’ rejection of essentialism in favour of sociological understandings. Crucial in the development of such understandings has been the introduction of a term that Beauvoir did not use: ‘gender’. We have already used this term in the introduction and this first chapter, indicating that we can take for granted that, as students of sociology and as members of your specific culture, you will undoubtedly have a working understanding of what that term means, such has been the impact of feminist thinking on both sociology and everyday life. In non- academic contexts, however, ‘gender’ is now often used interchangeably with sex (most commonly on official forms which ask you to identify your ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ as male or female). Some clarification is therefore needed. In short, gender refers to the social division between men and women; masculinity and femininity are thus understood as social attributes rather than natural ones.

Historians of feminism in the West identify a first wave of feminist activism, located from around the 1840s to the 1920s, culminating in the achievement of women’s right to vote in many democracies in the 1920s (Banks, 1990). The first wave of feminists campaigned against social inequalities between women and men and the disadvantaged position of women in society, but they did not develop a specific sociological concept – gender – as an analytical device. However, in their focus on education, employment, equal rights and, above all, the status of women in relation to men, first wave feminism began to identify what we now understand as gender – a social division between women and men. Evangelical, equal rights and socialist feminisms, which developed from the 1840s, all shared an assumption that some form of public intervention could be used to achieve better conditions for women through changes in politics, laws or cultural values [4]. Let us sketch some brief examples, beginning with the equal rights tradition, which has perhaps remained the most durable strand of feminist activism.

In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a text that influenced both American and British first wave feminisms, Mary Wollstonecraft engaged with the emergent and urgent concern with rights brought about by the French and American revolutions. She deliberately echoes the classic statement of (male) human rights made by Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1792), arguing that women could equally fulfil the conditions of citizenship if given equal opportunity for education and employment. The implication of this is that access to employment and education affect the relative social positions of men and women and produce divisions between them, based not on biology, but on social exclusion and inequality. Such an analysis compels us to think of these groups as socially created rather than being defined solely or overwhelmingly by their biological or spiritual ‘essence’.

Wollstonecraft acknowledged the different impacts on women of their economic positions, although her concern is really for ‘idle’ upper-class women, arguing that:

With respect to virtue, to use the word in a comprehensive sense, I have seen the most in low life. Many poor women maintain their children by the sweat of their brow, and keep together families that the vices of the fathers would have scattered abroad; but gentlewomen are too indolent to be actively virtuous, and are softened rather than refined by civilisation. (1972 [1792]: 16)

Her critique challenged not only the economic dependence of ‘gentle women’, but also the emerging gender framework of the time for the middle classes, which separated men and women into the workplace and home, respectively, and which Catherine Hall (1992) subsequently named the ‘domestic ideology’.

Although located within the equal rights or liberal feminist tradition, Wollstonecraft touches upon the impacts of class position, an issue which came to dominate the development of socialist feminism in the latter part of the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain when the influence of Marxist analyses of capitalism gradually displaced earlier forms of socialism (Banks, 1990: Ch. 4). Socialist feminism focused on oppression within the domestic realm, necessitated by capitalism’s need for a social unit to reproduce and maintain a working- class labour force and for a system of marriage that protected the property and inheritance rights of the capitalist class [5]. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was also raising these issues of women’s economic position in marriage in the American context, publishing ‘Women and Economics’ in 1898, in which she argued that marriage obliged women to perform domestic labour for free, subordinating them economically and thus socially. Again, the emphasis is clearly on how women are made into women by virtue of their social class, their economic situation, and through religious and cultural beliefs around femininity.

The beginnings of the idea of gender are evident in these first wave ideas – not as a specific concept but rather as a gradual movement towards explanations for women’s position that do not rely on essentialist arguments. A caveat needs to be added here, however, not least because the issue re- emerges in second wave feminism (see Ch. 2.8): some aspects of equal rights/liberal, socialist and, above all, evangelical feminisms still either assumed or actively deployed the notion of an essential female difference from men, derived from biology and the maternal impulse, and/or an innate moral superiority, particularly in issues of sexuality. This is evident in the first wave feminist campaigns against prostitution in Britain and the USA.

Comprehensive regulation of prostitution began during the nineteenth century in Britain and the USA, provoked by increasing awareness of these activities in the newly urbanized towns created during industrialization. Crucially, regulation was the result of pressure from both religious and cultural moralists (including many women) and feminists who wanted to secure the protection of women, with these two groups often joining forces in political campaigns. The first of a series of Contagious Diseases Acts was introduced in 1864 in England to regulate sexually transmitted diseases among military personnel (who were all men in this era). However, both the framing and implementation of the law focused on women as the problem – allowing police to arrest any women suspected of being a prostitute and force them to undergo medical examination. Feminist campaigns against this law were led by Josephine Butler, who argued that women were being unfairly stigmatized by the ‘double standard’ of sexual morality, forcing them to bear the responsibility for, and consequences of, male sexual behaviours [6].

The ‘double standard’ referred to the common biologically essentialist understanding that men had compelling, natural sexual needs and could not be held responsible for trying to satisfy them by using prostitutes. Blame for transmitting disease, therefore, fell on the women who worked as prostitutes. They were seen as immoral for engaging in sex and thus going against the ideal of women as non- sexual and innocent of sexual desire (as illustrated in section 1.1 above). The consequence of enshrining such essentialist ideas into law is that the force of regulation becomes directed at women rather than men. While feminists argued vigorously against this injustice, many of the religious moralist and feminist campaigners also argued that women were naturally more moral and less sexual, only falling prey to such sin or immorality through financial circumstances or pressure put on them by men.

Victorian cultural ideals of asexual femininity arose in conjunction with the exclusion of women from many forms of paid employment and their relegation to unpaid domestic labour within marriage, all of which was a consequence of the reorganization of gender relations accompanying industrialization (Gilman, 2008 [1898]; Weeks, 1989; Hall, 1992). This new standard of femininity initially arose among the middle classes, since working- class women often had to work, either in domestic service or in industry. They were, nonetheless, subject to the same cultural ideology of femininity – working- class respectability in sexual morals and behaviour was based on the emerging middle-class ideology of femininity (Mort, 1987; Mason, 1994).

The movements that tried to challenge the ‘double standard’ of sexual conduct did, however, acknowledge that collective social regulation, in the form of laws, moral campaigns and providing alternative income through employment, could influence and change behaviours of both men and women. Thus, even in the essentialist aspects of first wave feminism, there are small inklings that masculinities and femininities are open to collective social influence through political reform campaigns and, more significantly, that cultural attitudes and men’s and women’s socio- economic locations also contributed to the formation of gendered conduct and identity.

Your World: Are there still ‘double standards’ when it comes to the sexual behaviours of men and women in your culture? Does this differ by age, ethnicity, class, sexual identity?