GENDER AND THE ‘NATURAL’ BODY

In the Greek world, to have a body defined the human condition. Although gods were visually represented with bodies that appear human, these were qualitatively different from those of people (Osborne 2011: 185–215; Vernant 1991: 27–49), placing mortals lower in the cosmological hierarchy, and tying them to the need to eat, drink, reproduce, grow up, grow old and die. Gods, of course, did not eat food, though humans must. And because gods were immortal they were not compelled to die or reproduce, even though in myth they do quite a lot of reproducing. Indeed, when gods presented themselves to humans they regularly took on the form of a human body (e.g. Euripides Bacchae 4, 53–4; Homer Il. 4.86–7, 5.121–32; Od. 7.20).

Gender construed as polar opposition played a powerful role in shaping thought, belief and behaviour about the body in the classical world; although Greeks and Romans acknowledged and named various ‘in-between’ gendered behaviours and roles, these were usually characterized as problematic in some way, and not ‘natural’. Many of these ancient ideas about bodies (and the gendered characteristics believed to be inherent in them) had a very long afterlife, and worked their way into both western and Islamic thought, where they remained deeply lodged into early modern times (Tarlow 2011: 70–1; eighteenth-century anatomists were explicitly rejecting ancient constructions of the body, though the link between bodily decline and morality remained strong in popular belief, 88–9).

The previous chapter explored the structure of families and households as institutions. This chapter will focus on a selection of the temporal and demographic processes that shaped and changed them and their members, while transmitting and reproducing gendered values, hierarchies and structures.

FAMILY ‘LIFE CYCLES’ AND ‘LIFE COURSES’

For ancient Greece we know more about the ideals than the realities of family life cycles, although there have been some attempts to reconstruct ‘typical’ ones (Gallant 1991: 27–30), based largely on Athenian evidence. It seems that family ‘life cycles’ and virilocal residence patterns (where women move to live with their husband or husband’s family) favoured the male line and agnatic connections for the most part, even though kinship was bilateral. On marriage (see Chapter 2), men effectively remained in the oikos into which they had been born, while women moved to a new one but retained their identity with and attachment to their natal household. Women therefore lived out their lives in two (or more) households, men in one.

For the Roman world, there are more hard data available but the most complete data sets, from Egypt (Bagnall and Frier 1994: 57–74), reveal patterns that may not be typical of the wider Roman world, within which there was probably considerable local diversity. The most striking feature of the households represented in these census returns is the wide morphological variation within even a single community. It is clear that in many cases the ‘nuclear family’ is likely to be an accident of survival; most of the numerous instances consist of older couples with children, suggesting that young couples on marriage generally moved in with parents, usually the groom’s parents, but became ‘nuclear families’ when the older generation died (Bagnall and Frier 1994: 61). A significant number of households consisted of co-resident adult brothers with their families. Large, complex households seem to have been significantly more common in villages than in the urban areas. Many but not all households had slaves (more in the town), mostly domestic servants, and more female than male.

THE ECONOMICS OF GENDER

Economics in most societies is gendered in two fundamental ways:

1. Ideally and in practice, tasks, jobs and occupations are assigned and undertaken first by gender, often before other factors such as status and age come into play. Even if ideals do not always precisely determine reality, they are important in terms of structuring gendered hierarchies which configure differential access to wealth and property. Some routes to the acquisition of wealth filter out individuals by gender, most often women, but also specific types of men. Obviously, almost everywhere wealth carries with it power and influence over others. More specifically, gender may be a significant (though not the only) factor in the control by one person over the time, labour and consumption of another.

2. In most past societies, in both law and custom (Gould 1980), women and men of the same status generally had different relationships to property, and to material goods more broadly. This often limits the access of women to economic resources in comparison with men of the same status. On the other hand, wealth and high status can mitigate or override normal gendered expectations; in many societies elite women can do things that lower-status women usually cannot.

Consumption, how people use material goods in ways beyond the bare utilitarian, is a key aspect of wealth in its social context (Graeber 2011; Mullins 2011). There is usually a considerable degree of social consensus on the particular qualities and attributes assigned to material goods. Therefore what is consumed, in what quantities and in what contexts all contribute to the construction of social and political identities as well as to status and socio-political hierarchies more broadly. Different people have different relationships to material objects, and gender is one of the major fault lines.