The Opposite Sex 

Article by Emily Williams. Edited by Rose Colville. Additional Research by Robyn Hall. 

Ask any man or woman to describe the opposite sex in three words and the obvious stereotypes automatically surface. Of four women asked, all four said men were lazy, two said men were self-orientated and insensitive and two said they were self-important. Of the same number of men asked, two said women were emotional, two alluded to vanity and all four believed women to be irrational. 

Even in a society where sexism is not officially acceptable, both sexes are inclined to fall back on age-old stereotypes when describing gender difference. Pigeon holing the opposite sex is at once defensive and assertive. Why do stereotypical portraits of the opposite sex imply conflict? The historical roots run very deep but the idea of man and woman as distinctly separate concepts originates in the 1600s when woman stopped being seen as a variant of man (1 sex model) and began to be cast as an altogether different entity, triggering new perceptions of gender difference that seemingly persist today. So how and why were ideas about men and women that persist in modern culture formulated inthe period 1600-1800? 

My (admittedly limited) survey revealed one of the key themes of gender difference. Women are seen as emotional beings, men as insensitive, uncaring. This idea is by no means new. Throughout the early modern period, women are portrayed as having an inferior level of control over their own bodies and emotions. The origins of this idea grew from the bible and the figure of Eve as a symbol of female weakness to emotion. The medieval and early modern scientific theories were constructed to uphold this idea and justify the subordination of women to male rule. Using the four humour theory women were presented as the biological antithesis of men. Men were hot and dry and thus bigger, stronger, braver, more aggressive and more intelligent. Women were cold and wet giving them a weak, sedentary nature, smaller brains (they lack the heat to drive blood to the brain) and prone to bouts of hysteria, irrationality and lust. Later theories argued that women had finer nerves that made them predisposed to mental illness. Women were consumed by feeling where as men had the strength to suppress it. 

As we can see, there is a great deal of continuity between the era in which these ideas were developed and present day stereotypes. The concept of women as irrational and men as rational underpins many of the other stereotypes associated with each sex. Two accusations thrown at women by men surveyed for this article were those of vanity and gossiping whilst men seem to be cast as self-important and argumentative by our women. Again we can see these ideas mirrored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The growth of polite society during this period helped construct these ideas. Literature of the time saw men and women as opposites that nonetheless could balance each other out in social situations and conversation. Men inhabited the public sphere, the world of academia and business and were prone to heavy, pedantic, self-important and often overly heated or aggressive conversation. Women on the other hand were liable to talk only of trivial, light conversation often about fashion or shopping and social gossip*. Prescriptive literature at the time argued that the two complimented each other and provided polite conversation. These differences dictated the education that women received, and their role in society. Women were educated so as to prepare them for sociable, caring, domestic and charitable roles but not for academic, scientific, rational pursuits, which they were in any case barred from. Thus we again see that our modern perceptions are the product of old social ideas developed in an entirely different historical context. 

Lastly, the unanimous accusation thrown men was that of laziness. It was certainly the first word that entered my head when considering this article. But what do we refer to when we use this term? It is fundamentally rooted in dispute over the division of labour, which is documented even in the pre-industrial period. The male head of house was, and to some extent still is, expected to be the breadwinner for his family and derives his status and identity from this role. Among the middle classes at least, this allowed women to solely participate in polite society, charity and in managing the household. However for poorer families, women’s wages were a vital addition to that of the breadwinner. Due to domestic responsibilities and a male dominated work environment, women were often limited to low status and flexible work in the fields or in the home production of textiles and commodities. Women had to shoulder multiple expectations as mothers, wives, housekeepers and as financial contributors. At the same time they were denied the respect and status of full time work because of the limited employment options open to them and the other domestic tasks that needed to be performed. It is possible to argue that conflict was, and is, generated by the difference in the way that men and women define work. For men, work was something that was grounded in the formal workplace and gave them social status and identity. Women on the other hand were used to seeing their “work” as a flexible category that could encompass paid work, domestic work, care work, agricultural work and so on. This trend only increased with industrialization as more women enter the workplace full time. In contemporary society, it is common for men and women to work similar hours yet managing the household is not always shared and is still associated with women. Hence men seem to us lazy. More accurate would be to say that they are relatively lazy or selectively lazy (when it comes to domestic chores).

Here we have traced ideas about gender difference through history to the periods in which they gained a stronghold. However, there is no denying that many of these traits do often apply to actual differences between men and women. The dilemma is how reconcile gender stereotyping as something culturally constructed, with the inescapable fact that these generalisations do represent, to a certain extent, social realities. Are we socialized along gender lines from day one? Have the concepts canonised during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries become a social reality as they became accepted as truth? There is plenty of research on the differences between the brains of men and women but I think it is important to bear in mind that culture shapes how we are raised as boys and girls and thus shapes how we behave and think. If culture is constructed by society, it is subjective and not grounded in any universal truths and therefore we should logically question our own assumptions about what we perceive to be the gender divide. 

*The term gossip originally referred to women, usually friends or family, who attended a woman whilst she was pregnant. The term has come to mean talking about idle affairs or rumours normally associated with the lives of other people. Some historians have suggested that it only gained this pejorative meaning because men disliked being excluded from the birthing ritual, which gave women unprecedented levels of power. The gossips also more generally provided women with collective social power which could be exercised in defence of one of their members such as in the case of an unfaithful husband and thus it was used negatively by men wishing to trivialise something that they in fact had no power over.

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