Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-22dnz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T04:23:46.524Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - The gendering of power in the family and the state

from Part I - Global histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

Craig Benjamin
Affiliation:
Grand Valley State University, Michigan
Get access

Summary

The formation of states, empires, and trans-regional networks across Eurasia and northern Africa led to dramatic transformations in both social and political relations between men and women. This chapter analyzes the interactions and performances of individuals and communities whose traditional gendered identities and roles had become further complicated by the distinction between member and non-member of a political entity defined by law, sovereignty, and competition with other states as well as non-states. In China, family and the inheritance of property evolved along with the waxing and waning of the patriarchal system as well as the composition of the ruling class. Expanding states and empires required soldiers, administrators, and judges to wield and defend public authority. The formation and maintenance of states, empires, and trans-regional networks in the ancient world has traditionally been viewed as primarily a masculine enterprise, contrasted with the feminine world of the household and domestic economy.
Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further Reading

Ager, Sheila, “The Power of Excess: Royal Incest and the Ptolemaic Dynasty,” Anthropologica 48 (2006): 165–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ali, Kecia, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam, Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Barrett, Anthony A., Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire, New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Campbell, Brian, “The Marriage of Soldiers under the Empire,” The Journal of Roman Studies 68 (1978): 153–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cartledge, Paul, “Spartan Wives: Liberation or License?” in Whitby, Michael (ed.), Sparta, New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 131–60.Google Scholar
Cohn-Haft, Louis, “Divorce in Classical Athens,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 115 (1995): 114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, Kate, The Fall of the Roman Household, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, Kate, “A Father, a Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage,” Gender & History 23 (2011): 685702.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, James, “Bodymaps: Sexing Space and Zoning Gender in Ancient Athens,” Gender & History 23 (2011): 597614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, James, Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Fleck, Robert K., and Hanssen, F. Andrew, “‘Rulers Ruled by Women’: An Economic Analysis of the Rise and Fall of Women’s Rights in Ancient Sparta,” Economics of Governance 10 (2009): 221–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guisso, R. W. L., “The Life and Times of the Empress Wu Tse-t’ien of the T’ang Dynasty,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 1976.Google Scholar
Håland, Evy Johanne, “The Ritual Year of Athena: The Agricultural Cycle of the Olive, Girls’ Rites of Passage, and Official Ideology,” Journal of Religious History 36 (2012): 256–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herrin, Judith, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, Princeton University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Hollum, Kenneth G., Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.Google Scholar
James, Sharon L., and Dillon, Sheila (eds.), A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, Malden, ma: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuefler, Mathew, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity, University of Chicago Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Kuefler, Mathew, “The Marriage Revolution in Late Antiquity: The Theodosian Code and Later Roman Marriage Law,” Journal of Family History 32 (2007): 343–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Patriarchy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Leyser, Conrad, and Cooper, Kate, “The Gender of Grace: Impotence, Servitude, and Manliness in the Fifth Century West,” Gender & History 12 (2000): 536–51.Google Scholar
McCullough, William H., Japanese Marriage Institutions in the Heian Period, Cambridge, ma: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1967.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMahon, Keith, Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China, Han to Liao, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013.Google Scholar
Pohl, Walter, “Gender and Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages,” in Brubaker, Leslie and Smith, Julia M. H. (eds.), Gender In the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 2343.Google Scholar
Pomeroy, Sarah B., Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: Representations and Realities, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pomeroy, Sarah B., Spartan Women, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Powell, Anton, “Dining Groups, Marriage, Homosexuality,” in Whitby, Michael (ed.), Sparta, New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 90103.Google Scholar
Russell, Brigette Ford, “Wine, Women, and the Polis: Gender and the Formation of the City-State in Archaic Rome,” Greece and Rome 50 (2003): 7784.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saller, Richard P., Patriarchy, Property, and Death in the Roman Family, Cambridge University Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheidel, Walter, “A Peculiar Institution? Greco-Roman Monogamy in Global Context,” History of the Family 14 (2009): 280–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stevenson, Tom, “Women of Early Rome as Exempla in Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book 1,” Classical World 104 (2011): 175–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thapar, Romila, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Tougher, Shaun, “Social Transformation, Gender Transformation? The Court Eunuch, 300–900,” in Brubaker, Leslie and Smith, Julia M. H. (eds.), Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 7082.Google Scholar
Treggiari, Susan, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Twitchett, Denis C., and Loewe, Michael, The Cambridge History of China, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, vol. i.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×