ABSTRACT
This book is about gender and print culture and the historical roots of the dynamic relationship that exists between the two. The proliferation of books on gender history has, by now, ensured that the topic is by no means a marginal one, with standard works on early modem England incorporating without compunction the obligatory chapter (or indeed few pages) on ‘women’ or ‘gender’ (the two are still often used interchangeably).1 The reader may balk at the prospect of another tome on the subject. Yet, for all the volumes that have now been written on gender as a primary ‘dialectic of power’2 in history, we are still only just beginning to gauge the precise mechanisms through which dominant discourses in society shape our understanding of the ‘natural’ expression of the innate capacities of both sexes.3 Moreover, our attention to the
1 See for example Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century. British Political and Social History, 1688-1832 (London, 1997), pp. 8-12. For a critical analysis of this interchangeability between these categories, see Joan Scott, ‘Women’s history’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (2nd. edn., Cambridge, 1993), pp. 4266. 2 Adrian Wilson, ‘A critical portrait of social history’, in A. Wilson (ed.), Rethinking Social History (Manchester, 1993), pp. 22-3. 3 Carole Pateman argues that ‘the difference between the sexes is represented as the quintessentially natural difference’. In The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, 1988), p. 16. See also Butler, Gender Trouble, p. viii; Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?' Feminism and the category of ‘women’ in history (London, 1998), p. 5; see also Andrew Cooper, ‘Theorizing gender’, in I. Reid and E. Stratton (eds), Sex Differences in Britain, (2nd. edn., London, 1989), p. 13. The distinction between ‘sex’ as a biological given and ‘gender’ as a social construction is widely employed: see for example, Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia, N. Y., 1988), pp. 42-5; Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds), Sexual Meanings: the cultural construction of gender and sexuality (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1-6; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘Writing history: language, class and gender’, in T. de Laurentis (ed.), Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Wisconsin, 1986), pp. 38-52; Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 5-7;
question of gender is still myopic in its over-emphasis upon the female sex. For example, one corollary of the trend for regarding ‘women’s history’ as ‘gender history’ is that the focus of gender history is often assumed to be those areas which were undoubtedly of particular relevance to women’s lives, notably the private sphere of marriage, the household, and childbearing.4 This tends to encourage a false dichotomy between public and private spheres along gender lines. Certain aspects of life may be seen to be of mutual interest to men and women, while others may be deemed to be of specific male or female concern at different historical moments, but there may also be a considerable overlap between the two.5 The delineation of gender roles is unintelligible unless regarded as a mutually interdependent process which counterbalances male and female roles. The term ‘gender’, as deployed throughout this book, is taken to be a fluid and relational concept which changes over time, and differs according to cultural setting.6 Within this analytical framework, the male gender is taken to be as much a social construction as the female.7
