Chapter 6: Political Life
Links to Original Sources
1. Kin Groups in Southern Africa, 17th Century
Information about gendered political relationships in kin groups and villages of the past often comes from outsiders. This site has a series of sources about the Khoikhoi people of southern Africa during the 17th century that come from Dutch settlers and merchants, with excellent introductions.
2. Queen Elizabeth I of England, Various Speeches, 1559–1601
Elizabeth I assumed the throne in 1558 at age 25, after the death of her brother Edward and older sister Mary. She immediately had to handle a number of key issues: doubts about her own right to rule, religious conflicts, financial problems, and the pressing matter of her marriage and the succession to the throne. This site presents several of her key speeches on these issues, including her marriage and religion, and her famous farewell speech to Parliament at the end of her life.
3. John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, 1558
John Knox, the Calvinist reformer of Scotland, was a strident opponent of women’s rule, believing it to be ungodly, unlawful, unnatural, and “monstrous.” In this work, he compares both Mary Tudor, the Queen of England, and Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scotland, with Jezebel. The work was published just after the Protestant Elizabeth came to the throne; Knox never apologized, and Elizabeth never allowed him into England.
4. Two Visits to the Court of the Sultana of the Ottoman Empire, 1550 and 1718
In the Ottoman Empire, the sultana, the primary wife of the ruling sultan, had her own court, patronized artists, architects, and religious establishments, and received visitors on her own. Though western Europeans often emphasized the exotic in their visits, her court was not very different from that of any other ruling monarch.
A Genoese letter, c.1550:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letter, 1718
5. Four Key Works on the Proper Basis of Government, Europe 17th–18th Centuries
European political theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries debated the proper bases of government. For Robert Filmer, the divine right of kings was based on patriarchal power given to Adam by God. For Thomas Hobbes, legitimate political power was based on an original contract in which monarchs had been given authority in return for order. For John Locke, individuals had formed contracts with governments to assure better protection for their property. For Jean Jacques Rousseau, private property had increased inequality and the wealthy had forced the less powerful to agree to political structures that reinforced their dominance; the only way out was a “social contract” in which individuals agreed to submit to the “general will of the people.” All of these works had implications for gender relations.
Filmer’s Patriarcha can be found at:
Hobbes’s Leviathan at:
Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government at:
Rousseau’s The Social Contract at:
6. The Way of the Samurai, 17th Century Japan
Centralized government was weak in many periods of Japanese history, and local landowners employed their own armed forces, known as "samurai." Samurai developed distinctive moral codes for masculine behavior, linked to military values. They were initially transmitted orally, but later written down, as in this 17th century example.
7. Women in the French Revolution, 1789–1815
This site has many original written, artistic, musical,and material sources on women’s actions and gender roles in the French Revolution, along with extensive analysis of the issues.
8. Ideals and Realities in the Soviet Union, 1932
The Communist revolution proclaimed gender equality, but the reality was more complex. This newspaper article suggests ways in which women continued to bear a disproportionate burden of family responsibilities, and affirms that actual services for families fell short of propaganda. This webite also has other sources on gender issues in the Soviet Union.
9. Maria Eugenia Echenique, The Emancipation of Women, 1876
Women around the world advocated for women’s rights in the 19th century. This is a speech of a prominent Argentine feminist.
10. Gender in the British Empire, 19th–20th Centuries
This site has a number of written and visual sources that provide insights into gender roles in Britain and its colonies during the growth and decline of British imperial power. With extensive contextualization.
11. Gender in the French North African Empire, 19th–20th Centuries
This site has a number of written and visual sources that provide insights into gender roles in the French colonies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco from the perspective of the French and the North Africans. With extensive contextualization.
12. Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story, England 1914
Emmeline Pankhurst, aided by her daughters Sylvia and Christabel, led the Women's Suffrage Movement in late 19th-century Britain. She and the other suffragists used confrontational tactics, and went to prison repeatedly. This is an excerpt from her autobiography.
13. The Passage of the 19th Amendment, United States 1919–20
This provides facsimiles of a series of articles from the New York Times detailing the passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in Congress and the battle to get the Amendment ratified by the states. The Amendment was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 19, 1920.
14. Florence Farmborough’s Journal of the Russian Front, 1914–18
Farmborough was an English nurse working on the Russian front during World War I. This site has excerpts from her diary with her observations of the war and the active roles played by women as caretakers of the wounded and as soldiers, with good introductory discussion.
15. “No Job for a Woman”: The Effects of War on Women’s Lives, 20th Century Britain
This site, run by the Imperial War Musuem in London, displays images documenting the ways in which war has affected women’s lives in the 20th and 21st centuries, primarily in Britain, including photographs, posters, and advertisements. It considers both how women participated in the predominantly male domain of the military, and how war affected women’s extramilitary lives.
16. Filipino Comfort Women Tell their Stories, 20th Century
Forced sex has been part of war and conquest throughout human history, and modern armies have provided soldiers with sex through a variety of means. Commanders often authorized brothels, and during World War II the Japanese forcibly conscripted hundreds of thousands of women to serve as “comfort women” for their troops. Shame kept many of these women silent for decades, but recently they have begun to speak out and demand justice. This site has an excellent introduction to this issue, and provides oral testimony of Filipino “comfort women,” along with newspaper articles, photographs, and newsletters.
17. Voices of Support for the Equal Rights Amendment, United States 1980s
In 1972, the United States Congress passed the equal rights amendment (ERA), banning sex discrimination. Most states ratified it very quickly, but organized opposition emerged in the southern and western states, led by antifeminist activist Phyllis Schafly, and the ratification process stalled; the proposed amendment expired in 1982. These documents by men and women provide arguments for its passage. In the final document, a men’s rights advocate assessed potential legal benefits men might receive if it passed.
18. Women in Southeast Asian Politics, 1900–2000
This site provides a number of sources on women’s attempts to negotiate political spaces in the realms of official and unofficial power in Southeast Asia in the 20th century in the context of nationalism and postcolonial struggles.
Suggestions for Further Reading
The books in this list are organized by the topics noted below, and then in alphabetical order by author within each topic. Most of them have descriptions taken from the book jacket or from the publisher’s website. These descriptions are written by the author or the publisher to sell the book as well as to explain its contents. They thus do not necessarily represent my opinion of the book, but I have included them here so that you can get an idea of a book's contents and approach and thus better judge whether it would be useful for your purposes.
General Studies
Kin Groups, Tribes, and Villages (from 10,000 BCE)
Hereditary Aristocracies (from 3000 BCE)
Warfare
Citizenship and Nationalism (500 BCE–2000 CE)
Women’s Rights Movements (1800 CE–2010 CE)
Colonialism, Anticolonialism, and Postcolonialism (1500 CE–2010 CE)
General Studies
Howell, Jude and Diane Mulligan, eds. Gender and Civil Society: Transcending Boundaries. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Over the last two decades there has been considerable enthusiasm for the concept of civil society amongst researchers, practitioners and activists. Yet despite this enthusiasm for the concept, the gendered nature of civil society and the impact of feminist organizing on civil society has received minimal attention. This edited volume seeks to address this gap in a diversity of contexts, including the US, East and Central Europe, China, the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, Central America and Chile. It not only draws together the concepts of gender and civil society, but also adopts an international perspective, highlighting the diverse trajectories of women organizing in different country contexts and the historical, cultural and political specificities of civil society.
Martinez, Andrea and Meryn Stuart, eds. Out of the Ivory Tower: Feminist Research for Social Change. Toronto: Sumach, 2003.
A collection of essays, which demonstrate that feminist scholars are producing a rich and diverse body of knowledge within their universities. The essays also bring to the fore a constellation of concerns that are linked to the broader women's movement and to global feminism, ranging from recovering histories to the rise of global connectivity.
Nelson, Barbara J. and Majma Chowdhury, eds. Women and Politics Worldwide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
This important collection of essays is the first to analyze the complexities of women's political participation on a cross-national scale and from a feminist perspective. The book surveys forty-three countries, chosen to represent a variety of political systems, regions, and levels of economic development to examine the extent of women's participation in political and economic decisions, women's political goals in different countries, and their potential to mobilize for change.
Pankhurst, Donna, ed. Gendered Peace: Women’s Struggles for Post-War Justice and Reconciliation. New York: Routledge, 2008.
This volume makes a contribution to the growing literature on women, conflict and peacebuilding by focusing on the moments after a peace accord, or some other official ending of a conflict, often denoted as ‘post-conflict’ or ‘post-war’. Such moments often herald great hope for holding to account those who committed grave wrongs during the conflict, and for a better life in the future. For many women, both of these hopes are often very quickly shattered in starkly different ways to the hopes of men. Such periods are often characterized by violence and insecurities, and the official ending of a war often fails to bring freedom from sexual violence for many women. Within such a context, efforts on the part of women, and those made on their behalf, to hold to account those who commit crimes against them, and to access their rights are difficult to make, are often dangerous, and are also often deployed with little effect. Gendered Peace explores international contexts, and a variety of local ones, in which such struggles take place, and evaluates their progress.
Stearns, Jill. Gender and International Relations: An Introduction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. In the book, Jill Stearns illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion. The book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.
Kin Groups, Tribes, and Villages (from 10,000 BCE)
Joyce, Rosemary A. Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica. Austin: University of Texas, 2001.
Gender was a fluid potential, not a fixed category, before the Spaniards came to Mesoamerica. Childhood training and ritual shaped, but did not set, aFdult gender, which could encompass third genders and alternative sexualities as well as "male" and "female." At the height of the Classic period, Maya rulers presented themselves as embodying the entire range of gender possibilities, from male through female, by wearing blended costumes and playing male and female roles in state ceremonies. This landmark book offers the first comprehensive description and analysis of gender and power relations in prehispanic Mesoamerica from the Formative Period Olmec world (ca. 1500-500 BC) through the Postclassic Maya and Aztec societies of the sixteenth century AD. Using approaches from contemporary gender theory, Rosemary Joyce explores how Mesoamericans created human images to represent idealized notions of what it meant to be male and female and to depict proper gender roles. She then juxtaposes these images with archaeological evidence from burials, house sites, and body ornaments, which reveals that real gender roles were more fluid and variable than the stereotyped images suggest.
Hereditary Aristocracies (from 3000 BCE)
Barman, Roderick J. Princess Isabel of Brazil: Gender and Power in the Nineteenth Century. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002.
As the elder daughter of an emperor whose wife had presented him with no sons, Isabel stood to inherit the monarchy of Brazil with the passing of Dom Pedro II. On three separate occasions, Isabel was named regent, or head of state, when her father was required to leave the country for extended periods. On each occasion, she served as the dutiful daughter, following her father's instructions to the letter and resisting any attempts at personal aggrandizement. During her third regency, as her father recuperated in Europe, rather than accumulate personal power and oppose the forces of republicanism and abolition, Isabel personally led the struggle to pass the Gold Law of 1888 abolishing slavery throughout Brazil, thus ridding the country of one of the institutions upon which traditional monarchical Brazil was based and speeding the downfall of the monarchy, the monarchy she would inherit, in 1889. Princess Isabel of Brazil examines Isabel's role as an extraordinary woman who had access to material wealth and education and power, in patriarchal nineteenth-century Brazil. Professor Barman looks at how her life was constrained by her subordinate roles as daughter, wife, mother, and even as empress-in-waiting, using the fascinating career of Isabel to examine the interplay of gender and power in the nineteenth century.
Crawford, Katherine. Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2004.
In a book addressing those interested in the transformation of monarchy into the modern state and in intersections of gender and political power, Katherine Crawford examines the roles of female regents in early modern France. The reigns of child kings loosened the normative structure in which adult males headed the body politic, setting the stage for innovative claims to authority made on gendered terms. When assuming the regency, Catherine de Medicis presented herself as dutiful mother, devoted widow, and benign peacemaker, masking her political power. In subsequent regencies, Marie de Medicis and Anne of Austria developed strategies that naturalized a regendering of political structures. They succeeded so thoroughly that Philippe d'Orleans found that this rhetoric at first supported but ultimately undermined his authority. Regencies demonstrated that power did not necessarily work from the places, bodies, or genders in which it was presumed to reside. While broadening the terms of monarchy, regencies involving complex negotiations among child kings, queen mothers, and royal uncles made clear that the state continued regardless of the king--a point not lost on the Revolutionaries or irrelevant to the fate of Marie-Antoinette.
Johns, Susan M. Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm. New York: Manchester University, 2003.