Integrating Men's History into Women's History: A Proposition

By: Melinda S. Zook (Purdue University)

IN THE LATE 1970s AND EARLY 1980s, this journal published several articles on the importance and process of integrating women’s history into “regular history.”¹ Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it may be time to add a new perspective as to how we think about and teach gender in the classroom. Many of us now not only integrate women in our large western civilization, global, and United States surveys, we also devote whole courses to the history of women. Those survey courses in women’s history are the focus of this paper. I will argue that college undergraduates will be generally better served if those of us teaching women’s history survey courses retool and transform these classes into women’s and men’s history courses. In other words, that we consider replacing women’s history with a survey history of women and men.	1
Such a remodeling of the “traditional” women’s history survey raises topics and issues about which I believe feminists and others should at least be mindful. My argument is in no way an attack on the efficacy of courses devoted solely to women’s history or to women’s issues of any kind. Rather, it is a plea that we make the gendered history of men visible to students and that the most suitable place for incorporation of this subject matter is the survey women’s history course. Such courses are already staffed by historians sympathetic to a gendered vision of the past and trained to understand that gender is a social category, not a synonym for “woman.”	2
My argument for this transformation of the traditional women’s history survey course is three-fold. First, the goal of recreating as holistic and accurate a picture of the past as possible demands an accounting of the lives of boys and men together with those of girls and women. Secondly, there is a growing body of scholarship in gender and men’s history that in some cases challenges or at least revises some of our assumptions about women’s history. This work deserves incorporation into the curriculum. And lastly, the place to do this is at the survey level, where we reach the most undergraduates, in order to help them understand that both genders are social and cultural constructions that have changed throughout time. In short, we need to teach our students that women are not the only ones with gender, and that both masculinity and femininity are concepts that have been defined, restricted, limited, and challenged from time immemorial.	3
The goal of women’s history has always been, first and foremost, to restore women to history in order to gain a more perfect picture of the past. History is a humanistic enterprise and in order for it to be as human, complete, and honest as possible, the recovering of the experience of women has been fundamental. Surely women’s history has changed the profession as a whole far more than any of the other great trends in historiography, including social and cultural history. The work in feminist studies since the 1970s has changed the way we teach, the courses we teach, the textbooks we use, and in most colleges and universities the curriculum itself. The insights derived from feminist theory have been potent; and from its foundations we have bred discourse theory, queer theory, the history of sexuality, gender history, and men’s history.	4
Let us turn to the positive contributions of the latter—gender history and men’s history—and their potential use in the classroom. With its intellectual roots in feminist and cultural history, gender history first arrived on the scene in the 1980s and has flourished ever since. Gender history is relational history; a history of the power relations between men and women that are constantly changing, being negotiated, challenged, subverted, adopted, and adapted. Gender history also seeks to decode the cultural meanings associated with such terms as “female,” “male,” “masculine,” “feminine,” “womanly,” and “manly.” For some time now, feminist scholars have discussed the cultural meanings, discursive functions, and representations of woman, women, and femininity. But it has always been something next to impossible, particularly in the classroom, to discuss the changing attributes of femininity without contrasting them to masculinity—regardless of the context. As teachers, we do this. But new work in this area casts serious doubt on our presumptions about masculinity, particularly as an unchanging model or as a foil to femininity. Gender history asserts that since masculinity and femininity are relational constructs, the definition of one depends on the other. Hence we cannot begin to appreciate the attributes of masculinity at any given time until we have studied it not as an immovable standard but as a gender, subject to time and space. We are misguided and misinformed if we simply present men as the “traditional benchmark gender,” to borrow the words of sociologist Michael S. Kimmel, one of the founders of the new men’s studies, and women simply as “the other.”² This, among other reasons, is why gender and men’s history need be fully embraced by feminist historians and their findings disseminated at the classroom level. In a sense, women’s history will always be one-dimensional until we have fully explored the lives of boys and men and have incorporated that knowledge into our teaching.	5
But gender history, and gender studies as whole, are not without their weaknesses, especially in so far as the historian is concerned. Too often studies in gender history have focused almost entirely on representations of femininity and masculinity rather than the actual experiences of women and men. Too often their primary evidence has been drawn from literary and prescriptive pronouncements on the nature and behavior of the sexes. Feminist history has never been simply about textual representations of womanhood. Rather, it has sought to uncover the lived experiences of women in former times. Further, in so far as the construction of gender identities is concerned, there are historical contexts in which both sexes are not always present. Women and men in single-sex institutions (the cloisters, the monasteries, the medieval and early modern universities) may well have constructed their own gendered identities that had little to do with the other sex. This is one of the many reasons women’s history remains important and men’s history, rather than simply gender history alone, is also needed.³	6
Men’s sudies, of which men’s history is a part, has become increasingly visible on United States campuses in the last twenty years. As Michael S. Kimmel has written, men’s studies seeks “neither to replace nor to supplant women’s studies; quite the contrary. Men’s studies seeks to buttress, to augment women’s studies, to complete the radically redrawn portrait of gender that women’s studies has begun.”⁴ Neither women’s history nor women’s studies has anything to fear from the study of men.⁵ Moreover, it is unlikely that this new area of investigation will ever have the revolutionary impact of women’s studies on the academy. But it does reinforce and help complete the work of feminist scholarship.	7
One of the ways in which men’s and gender history can complement women’s history is by providing a fuller treatment of that seemingly monolithic and multivalent concept known as “patriarchy.” One current weakness in feminist studies as presented in the classroom is the use and abuse of the term “patriarchy,” especially as we find it bantered about by students, graduate assistants, and even by ourselves. Numerous students have complained to me over the years about courses in the Women’s Studies Program and in literature in which instructors have used this term time and again without defining it. I then ask them, “what do you think the instructor meant?” They inevitably tell me it has something to do with white males who are responsible for all that has illed the world. I am aware that students can be unreliable sources. Maybe they missed the class in which the term was defined or were sleepy. But I do think this term must be defined squarely by its context, and in light of all that it has meant (and means), not just for women, but also for men.	8
Domestic patriarchy, for example, the patriarchy of home and hearth, was as much the world of husbands, fathers, and sons as it was that of wives, mothers, and daughters. Men had private as well as public lives. But because so much historiography has for so long focused on the private sphere as the realm of the feminine alone, the domestic side of male lives has often been ignored. As historian John Gillis points out, fatherhood remains “underdeveloped as an area of historical study, especially in comparison to motherhood.”⁶ But parenthood has no stable social identity or fixed meaning, and we need to ask, as we have for motherhood, how fatherhood has changed historically, both as a behavior and as a cultural ideal. Clearly, it is impossible to understand the formation and exercise of patriarchy and thus the making of the dominant male identity until we have studied the system comprehensively, which means understanding the obligations, responsibilities, and privileges of marriage and fatherhood for men. The pressures, demands, liberties, and education of sons as well, are crucial to exploring the working of patriarchy. Masculinity and patriarchy go hand in hand; and what we need to know is, what makes a boy a man? As the historian John Tosh put it, “Manliness expresses perfectly the important truth that boys do not become men just by growing up, but by acquiring a variety of manly qualities and manly competencies a part of a conscious process which has no close parallel in the traditional experience of young women.”⁷	9
Women as mothers have had as much input, if not more, in the formation of the male identities of their sons as have their fathers. After all, both parents have been telling their sons from time immemorial, “to be a man,” and a good part of what that means is upholding patriarchy. The influence of women in the molding of their sons and hence the sustaining of patriarchy needs to be examined further. In a social system as comprehensive and as hegemonic as domestic patriarchy in the European and Anglo-American worlds (and elsewhere), it is not too farfetched to surmise a degree of female complicity.	10
Lastly, patriarchical ideals were hardly transhistorical. The answers to that fundamental question of how men gained and maintained power over women changed with each new context. In early modern Europe, it is by no means a given as to whether men or women benefited more under patriarchy. For example, feminist scholarship has persuasively argued that the political patriarchies of early modern England and France were more agreeable to female influence than the all-male democracies and republics to come.⁸ But without a true understanding of what patriarchy (or patriarchies, political, social, and domestic) actually meant for men, we will never understand what it meant for women.	11
This brings us to the importance of incorporating men’s history into women’s history. The worst fallacy we can commit is to shrug off men’s history by asserting that all history has been men’s history. So often courses on anything other than women’s history are perceived as men’s history and sure enough they are likely to be about men as soldiers, sovereigns, revolutionaries, writers or scientists; in short, about men in their public positions. But they are not about men as men. Traditional history never concerned itself with the changing nature of masculinity, never mind sodomy, molly houses, youth abbeys, men’s fashions, boy scouts, sporting clubs, hunting parties, codes of honor, male domesticity, male aggression, male friendship, dandies, fops, or transvestites. This is the task of the new scholarship in men’s history, asserting as it does that masculinity is problematic, not automatic. Manhood is not innate or natural or some “eternal, a timeless essence that resides deep in the heart of every man,” and hence invisible.⁹ Rather it is a construction of cultural meanings and prescriptions that is forever changing and reactive, in part, at least, due to changing definitions of femininity.	12
The scholarship on men’s history is vast, growing, highly respectable, and accessible (see Appendix A for a short bibliography for Europe). There are at least four academic publications devoted to men’s studies which, of course, publish men’s history, as do many feminist journals.¹⁰ There are several extremely useful web sites for men’s studies, complete with bibliographies and sample syllabi.¹¹ A paperback series by Longman called “Women and Men in History” is designed for classroom use.¹² Naturally, as with any new field, the coverage is rather uneven. Among the contributors to men’s studies, sociologists are ahead of the historians; and among historians, Americanists have made greater strides than Europeanists and others. Still, the knowledge yielded from this growing body of work deserves dissemination at the classroom level and not just the specialized upper division course or graduate seminar. Moreover, there are many feminist, cultural, and social histories that have long been available (for example, Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre or Steven Ozment’s Madelena and Balthasar) that reveal as much about the behavior, experiences, and representations of men and manhood as they do about women and womanhood. Many of these are the texts I plan to use in my revised “history of women” course (see Appendix B for my syllabus).	13
Allow me to present one example of the importance of this new work. Scholarship in men’s history and the history of sexuality has already challenged categories of homosexual and heterosexual identity. The work of Anthony Bray, Ronald Trambach, and Tim Hitchcock has convincingly shown that before the eighteenth century, early modern English men did not define themselves in terms of their sexual behavior.¹³ Rather they constructed themselves from a variety of behaviors and attributes. Honor, martial courage, a reputation for honesty, respect in the community as a good householder (as one who controls his wife, children, and servants)—these were some of the raw materials out of which men fashioned their identities. But in the early eighteenth century we find the establishment of “molly houses,” not only in London but in Paris and Amsterdam as well. “Mollies” were groups of men who came together for sociability and to engage in sexual acts. They congregated in urban alehouses and adopted effeminate mannerisms and fashions. Here is one of the first instances in modern Western Europe where we find a recognizable gay subculture resulting, as one might imagine, in a rising chorus of homophobia. The molly, characterized by cross-dressing and sodomy, provided men with an “other” against which to contrast and define themselves. The masculine standard increasingly became the exclusively heterosexual, plain-dressing, manly man.	14
In other words, it should interest us that the “other” was not always simply “woman,” for there was another “other” that played into the making of the modern western male. But naturally the story is still more complicated. Just as women were constantly negotiating and reshaping their identity and the various meanings of femininity, so men did as well. The masculine standard was always being challenged, complicated, subverted, and revised. In John Tosh’s book on the domestic lives of men, entitled A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, he shows how nineteenth-century Englishmen were increasingly caught between two ideals of proper masculine behavior. One ideal emphasized the male as a head of household, whose prime responsibilities were domestic: to establish a home, protect it, provide for it, control it, to train its young aspirants. The other ideal, a backlash to the first, scoffed at the “tyranny of the five o’clock tea,” and emphasized manliness through homosocial pursuits: boy scouts, men’s clubs, outdoor sport, and carrying forth the white man’s burden, conquering and carving out empires.¹⁴ The Great War transformed gender ideals once again, particularly for the “soldier boys” (as Paul Fussell called them) returning from the front. What we see, in the course of time, is a dominant masculinity (what the sociologist R. W. Connell calls “hegemonic masculinity”), constructed and continually revised in opposition to femininity, and perhaps more important, in opposition to numerous subordinate masculinities (such as gay life) which are seen as undermining patriarchy in the eyes of both men and women.¹⁵	15
My point is simply this, that without studying the various constructions of masculinity throughout time we can never hope to adequately compare and contrast them with the meanings of femininity. Nor can we truly assess the power realities of the two sexes. Over fourteen years ago, the historian Susan Mosher Stuart wondered if it were not possible that “women and by implication men, exhibited far different ‘natures’ in the medieval centuries than they do now.” Perhaps the “system of relations between women and men is so socially constructed and has altered so substantially over the centuries in the West that we no longer recognize antecedents to present roles.”¹⁶ I have often posed this question to my Renaissance women’s history students: would we recognize our former selves? We have learned a lot about women since 1987, but Stuart’s query cannot be fully answered until we learn about the “nature” of men throughout history as well. There are times in every women’s history course in which the discussion inevitably becomes one of “us” (women) and “them” (men). The problem is, I am beginning to think that we may well have been mistaken about “them” all this while.	16
I teach courses in medieval and early modern Europe, as well as European women’s history, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The course I am in the process of transforming is currently entitled, “The History of Women in Renaissance Europe.” I find this an exciting and rewarding course to teach; for one thing, it generates far more class discussion than any of my other classes. But, in recent years, I have become dissatisfied with the course for two main reasons. The first is that during the course of the lectures and discussions we are often learning as much about male behavior and identity as we are about women. But because the relevant literature on masculinity and male lives is not being presented (and for a long time, it did not exist), we end up making assumptions with which I am increasingly uncomfortable. For example, with a topic like youth abbeys in early modern Europe, the students are actually learning as much about male behavior and expectations as they are about women. Early modern society was merciless in pillorying men who appeared to surrender control of their wives. The man who was not master of his own home courted the scorn and abuse of his neighbors. What then does this tell us about the workings of patriarchy at the village level, about the constructions of manhood, and about the relationships of married men to one another and to single men? These questions need to be fully investigated and made a part of the learning experience in the classroom in an informed manner.	17
The same is true when the class discusses Lynn Hunt’s famous piece on Marie-Antoinette, where she argues that the real threat to male republicans by the presence of women in the public sphere (before and during the French Revolution) was not so much the monstrosity of the manly woman but that of the womanly man; or, in other words, the feminizing effect women supposedly had on men.¹⁷ This piece always launches us into a lively discussion about heterosexual male fears then and now, and it is the young men who often dominate these debates. They want to talk about it, and given the right atmosphere, both women and men are generally open to new perspectives and diverse models of manhood. There can be no better place for a discussion such as this than in a class dedicated to a frank analysis of the ways men and women have defined, treated, loved, and abused one another in former times.	18
The second reason for my interest in transforming this class came about in 1993 when Purdue’s School of Liberal Arts began requiring that all entering freshmen take one gender-related course as part of their degree. Purdue is far from unusual in demanding this kind of undergraduate requirement. Currently, all of the Big Ten Universities, plus Penn State, instruct their undergraduates to take a series of core requirements, including a “gender,” or as some have it, a “diversity” requirement. Purdue’s gender requirement has considerably boosted enrollments in departmental women’s history courses. I usually have around fifty students in my European women’s history course, and the American survey does even better with between seventy-five and one hundred students. But more important than sheer numbers, the new curriculum has dramatically altered the dynamics of the classroom. My course went from predominantly female to a nearly even gender ratio; it also went from students who wanted to be there to students who had to be there.	19
So, there is no shortage of students and certainly no shortage of male students in these courses. Purdue has 165 history majors of which 108 are males. The university as a whole enrolls 31,000 undergraduates, fifty-seven persent of whom are men. My point here is that my experience at Purdue is not with small groups of motivated young women who really want to learn about the female past. But with far larger groups of men and women, both of whom most often come to women’s history only to satisfy a requirement and are often initially hostile or at best indifferent. This is not to complain, because as we all know the process of converting sullen or angry students and watching them enjoy a class despite themselves is always deeply satisfying. In this regard, women’s history is the most rewarding class I teach. But it could be even better, and I think more valuable to the men and women I teach if they were shown at the beginning that the course is not about “Us vs. Them,” oppressors (men) and victims (women).	20
Naturally, any course devoted to a gendered vision of the past would examine the privileged position of men and the often marginalized position of women, but it would do so by extensively treating both the experiences of women and men. It would not privilege or ghettoize the female experience. I think both young men and women would be more sympathetic to the material and to the position of women in former times if it were presented in this manner. Secondly, such a course would show these young people that there is no standard sexual identity and that manliness is just as much a fabricated identity as femaleness; that, in short, men have gender too. I think this news would be enormously comforting to many of our male students who perhaps do not exactly fit right into the undergraduate ideal of maleness (which at Purdue, as far as I can tell, has something to do with looking as much like each other as possible). Finally, such a course would demonstrate that patriarchy is not just some vast right wing conspiracy that we vaguely know is out there but cannot quite pin down. It is a working concept; a way of understanding how men and women ordered their world, thereby restricting and defining both male and female agency.	21
When we started teaching women’s history over thirty years ago we hoped, in part, to empower women by helping them understand the lives of their sisters in former times. I first taught women’s history in 1993 at Georgetown University, where there had been no such official course. Seven savvy, self-motivated women signed up for it. Well, times have changed. Perhaps we are victims of our own success. The gender requirement at many colleges and universities demands the teaching of women’s history in large lecture rooms filled equally by men and women. Initially, at least, it is not a particularly empowering atmosphere for young women, who often feel uncomfortable or cowed by the presence of men. Perhaps then, along with the other reasons articulated above, we need to change the way we have taught this course. We must do so in part, so the women do not feel uncomfortable or guilty or embarrassed in front of the men; and in part, to show the men the fun ways that they too have been made to conform throughout history, as well as the ways in which they made others miserable.	22

Notes* Earlier versions of this paper were given at the Midwest British Studies Conference, University of Cincinnati (October 2000) and the Women’s Studies Brownbag Series, Purdue University (March 2001). I wish to thank Hilda Smith and my colleagues, Nancy Gabin and Elliott Gorn for their comments.¹ Peter G. Filene, “Integrating Women’s History and Regular History,” The History Teacher XIII 4 (August 1980): 483-92; Anne Chaplan, “Placing Women in the High School European History Survey,” The History Teacher XII 3 (May 1979): 337-47; Glenda Riley, “Integrating Women’s History into Existing Course Structures,” The History Teacher XII 4 (August 1979): 493-99; Abby Wettan Kleinbaum,” Women’s History and the Western Civilization Survey,” The History Teacher XII 4 (August 1979): 501-06; Kathryn Kish Sklar, “A Conceptual Framework for the Teaching of U.S. Women’s History,” The History Teacher XIII 4 (August 1980): 472-81.² “Rethinking Masculinity: New Directions in Research” in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, ed. Michael S. Kimmel (London: Sage Publications, 1987), 11.³ Nancy F. Partner has also argued that focusing on gender alone “dehumanizes the individual” and simplifies the idiosyncrasies of the individual “self.” See her essay, “No Sex, No Gender,” History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, eds. Brian Fay, Philip Pomper, and Richard T. Vann (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 288.⁴ Michael S. Kimmel, “Rethinking Masculinity: New Directions,” 10-11.⁵ There are those, of course, who disagree. See Mary Evans, “The Problem of Gender for Women’s Studies,” Women Studies International Forum 13, 5 (1990): 457-62; Diane Richardson & Victoria Robinson, “Theorizing Women’s Studies, Gender Studies and Masculinity: The Politics of Naming,” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 1 (1994): 11-27. However, both of these articles speak to a European context and both find the replacement of women’s studies with gender studies the real threat.⁶ John R. Gillis, “Bringing Up Father: British Paternal Identities, 1700 to Present,” Masculinities 3, 3 (Fall 1995), 2.⁷ John Tosh, “What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History Workshop Journal 38 (1994), 181.⁸ Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract: Aspects of Patriarchal Liberalism (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1988); Joan Landes, Women in the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).⁹ Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 4.¹⁰ Men and Masculinities (formerly Masculinities); Journal of Men’s Studies; Men’s Studies Review; Men’s Studies News (newsletter of the American Men’s Studies Association).¹¹ See www-unix.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/programs.html which lists various gender studies programs. For sample syllabi, see www.umbc.edu/cwit/syl-hist.html. For a bibliography, see www.anu.edu.au/%7Ea112465/mensbiblio/menstudies.html.¹² Titles in this series include: Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (1999); Dawn M. Hadley, ed. Masculinity in Medieval Europe (1998).¹³ For an overview of this argument, see Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen, “Introduction,” English Masculinities: 1600-1800 (New York: Longman, 1999), 1-6, and Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700 to 1800 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), ch. 5; also see, Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Boston: The Gay Man’s Press, 1992); Ronald Trumbach, “London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Sexuality XI, 1 (1977): 1-33.¹⁴ John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 1-8, 195-97.¹⁵ R.W. Connell, “The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History,” Theory & Society 22 (1993): 597-623.¹⁶ “Introduction,” Women in Medieval History and Historiography, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), i.¹⁷ Lynn Hunt, “Chapter 4: The Bad Mother,” in The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Appendix A: Men’s History: A Short Bibliography for Europeanists
(excluding articles & those titles cited in the notes)
Adams, Michael. The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of the War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.Breitenberg, Mark. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.Brod, Harry. ed. The Making of Masculinities: the New Men’s Studies. Boston: Allen & Unwmin, 1987.Cohen, Michele. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century. London & New York: Routledge, 1996.Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.Lees, Clara A. ed. Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.Maccubbin, Robert Purks. ed. ‘Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.McAleer, K. Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siecle Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.Mosse, George. L, The Image of Man: the Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.Nye, Robert A. Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.Peristiany, J.G. & J. Pitt-Rivers, Honour and Grace in Mediterranean Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.Roper, Michael and John Tosh eds. Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800. New York & London: Routledge, 1991.Rosen, David. The Changing Fictions of Masculinity. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.Turner, James G. ed. Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Appendix B: Sample Syllabus PURDUE UNIVERSITY The Department of History The History of Women and Men in Early Modern Europe Dr. Melinda Zook University 322 494-4122 [email protected] Course Description
This course studies the history of women and men in early modern Europe (1450-1800). It explores the images, roles, and experiences of women as wives, mothers, nuns, nobles, artisans, heretics, peasants, and scholars; as well as the images, roles, and experiences of men as husbands, fathers, monks, nobles and knights, artisans, heretics, peasants, and scholars. This course examines how gender identities and relations developed and changed in the eras of the Renaissance, Reformation, Age of Scientific Discovery and Democratic Revolutions. Topics include: family forms, marriage, and sexuality; sanctity and the religious life; the law, political participation, and power; heresy, witchcraft, and popular culture; and the rise of modern science and feminism.
Required TextsWilliam Shakespeare, MacbethSteven Ozment, Magdalena & BalthasarJudith Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance ItalyElizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern EnglandLonda Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women & the Origins of Modern ScienceLynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French RevolutionSelected readings handed out in class. Requirements
Students will write three analytical essays based on the readings and take two exams, a midterm and final.
Grading
Each Essay is worth 20% = 60%

Each Exam is worth 20% = 40%
Schedule of Lectures, Discussion, & Assignments Week 1—Introduction: Women, Men, History & Theory
Required Readings:
Handout: Joan Kelly, “The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” from Women, History, Theory Handout: Michael S. Kimmel, “Rethinking Masculinity: New Directions in Research,” from Changing Men Week 2—The Ancient & Medieval Heritage
Required Readings:
Handout: Margaret Sommerville, “The Basis of Subjection,” from Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern SocietyHandout: Selections from St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theolgica and Giovanni Boccaccio, The Raven Week 3—Families
Required Readings:
Handout: David Herlihy, “Domestic Roles and Family Sentiments in the Later Middle Ages” from Medieval HouseholdsSteven Ozment, Magdalena & Balthasar, complete. Week 4—The Italian Renaissance & The Image of Man
Required Readings:
Handout: Baldasar Castiglione, The Courtier & Juan Luis Vives, Instruction of a Christian Woman.Handout: Heidi Wunder, “Construction of Masculinity and Male Identity in Personal Testimonies,” from Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe Week 5—Did Women Have a Renaissance? (Did Anyone?)
Required Readings:
Handout: Joan Kelley, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” from Women, History, and TheoryHandout: Anthony Fletcher, “Prologue: Men’s Dilemmas,” in Gender, Sex and Subordination Week 6—The Church: Mystics, Saints & Sinners
Required Readings:
Judith Brown, Immodest Acts, complete. Week 7—The Peasantry and Daily Life
Required Readings:
Handout: Barbara Hanawalt, “Household Economy,” from The Ties That BoundHandout: Pierre Goubert, “Peasant Marriage,” from French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century Week 8—The Good Householder
Required Readings:
Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England, complete. Week 9—The Reformation & The Counter-Reformation
Required Readings:
Handout: Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “The Reformation of Women,” from Becoming Visible: Women in European HistoryHandout: Lyndal Roper, “Blood and Codpieces: Masculinity in the early modern German Town,” from Oedipus and the DevilHandout: Selections from Martin Luther, Table Talk Week 10—Witchcraft, Women & Popular Culture
Required Readings:
Shakespeare, Macbeth, complete. Week 11—The Rise of Modern Science
Required Readings:
Londa Schriebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?, chapters 1-4. Week 12—The Enlightenment & Romanticism
Required Readings:
Londa Schriebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?, chapters, 5-7, 10.Handout: William Wordsworth, “She was a Phantom of Delight.” Week 13—The French Revolution
Required Readings:
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance & The French Revolution, Introduction and chapters, 1-4. Week 14—Looking AheadHandout: John Tosh, “The old Adam and the new man: emerging themes in the history of English Masculinities, 1750-1850,” from English Masculinities, 1660-1800Handout: Karen Offen, “Contextualizing the Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1790-1914),” from Becoming Visible

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