Women, family, gender, and sexuality

SUSAN MOSHERSTUARD

During the Middle Millennium, polities the world over mirrored constituent families, almost all of a paternal and hierarchical character, although this was hardly new.

Whenever historians examine the lives of women, they investigate family and kinship ties focusing on societal assumptions about gender. Histories of men are far less likely to do so since authors assume that gender expectations and family roles fell more lightly on men's shoulders, particularly where men wielded the power and authority that warrants biographical treatment. As an analytical tool of history, however, the study of gender, which is largely acquired and not innate, encompasses the study of men and women.

Gender assumptions were more varied than a high level of generalization casually applied would have us believe. Gender was not a constant, nor was it systematized thinking, but rather remained largely notional in character, thus unexamined. That proved its greatest asset, but also a failing. Women in authority wielding power in their own right gave tacit acknowledgement to women's latent capacities even where gender assumptions denigrated women. In fact the more incapacitating gender dictums were trotted out when expedient, and seldom where women exercised power. In general, gender systems moved from somewhat diverse and flexible to more rigid in this era, while in western Europe schematically polar notions of gender became embedded in prevailing Scholastic dogma. Throughout Asia, North Africa, and Europe, war, conflict, and invasions constituted threats that led to subordinating women through a more pronounced emphasis on gender difference; crowding in this age of population increase may have been a factor as well. The Americas and parts of sub-Saharan Africa appear to have been exceptions to these generalizations.

Women and family in the Islamic world and South Asia

Family patterns over this millennium were subject to change due to the spread of religions, trade, the movement of peoples, and conquest as well as internal developments. The most dramatic early conquests were launched in the name of Allah and his Prophet Muhammad. These Islamic conquests introduced the Quran and shari‘a law, and conversion favored the subordination of women, although Islam aimed consciously at protecting women by specifying a marriage gift (mahr) to a wife. By the end of the era in East African societies, where conversion was often achieved through trade rather than conquest, shari‘a introduced a dower paid to a wife by contract. In al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) a marriage contract included a similar dower and further stipulated the number of wives a husband might have (polygyny).

At the highest level of Muslim society a few women achieved powerful roles and elite women were not excluded from the vital spiritual life of Islam. Wealthy women throughout Islam completed the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, which was regarded as praiseworthy, provided the rules of propriety were observed. Rabi‘a of Basra (713-801) found a position as a venerated Sufi mystic. Convents for women existed in Aleppo by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and also in Baghdad and Cairo in the same era. Literacy figured among wealthy women's accomplishments, through tutoring carried out in well-to-do households that valued literate daughters. In the thirteenth cen­tury Dayfa Khatun, wife, mother, and grandmother of successive Ayyubid sultans of Aleppo (and niece to the great Saladin) ruled as regent and in her own right, strongly influencing the policies of her dynasty.

Islamic invasions brought migrations of families from throughout Asia and even from East Africa to northern India, yet an older pattern of wealthy households that were large, co-residential and contained many generations of dependents persisted. It would be difficult to distinguish dependents whose presence marked a display of family piety from those who were non-free servitors. Furthermore, the status of dependents within such households changed over lifetimes. Girls often married by ten years of age to be raised in their husbands' households, and divorce was rare. Royal married women followed in the tradition of social duty and gave charity of their own personal property (Stridhana) that lay within their power. Giving food at the door was an extension of Islamic hospitality after the Muslim invasions as well. In the same era Buddhist inscriptions noted women giving charity, and in Jain

inscriptions women figured among donors. Islamic India followed familial practices known to other co-resident religious groups, which likely eased tensions among diverse religious communities in India's densely populated cities in the age of invasions.

In northern India women saw a momentous change in their condition with the introduction of kulinism, probably by Raja Vallala Sena of Bengal (r. 1158-69). According to this marital system, a woman was forbidden to wed below her rank, but she could marry up to three ranks superior to her own.

Women and family in Central and East Asia

The Franciscan William of Rubruck (1220-93), on a mission to Central Asia in 1253-5 said of Mongols before their conversion to Islam that “[i]t is the women's task to drive the wagons, to load the dwellings on them and to unload again, to milk the cows, to make their butter and grut (curds) and to dress the skins and stitch them together.”^[106] Turkic women sometimes ruled in collaboration with husbands, bringing the prestige of their own lineages to sustain their husbands' wars of expansion. Such a powerful wife, or a sister, or a daughter, was expected to manage the encampment and the collected wealth of the dynasty and even defend her people and flocks if called upon to do so. Custom sustained women in such roles and provided them with the control of property that enforced their authority even when it involved ordering out fighting men.

First comes she who is the pillar that upholds the house. If a respected guest comes to the house when her husband is absent, she gives him food and drink, she entertains him and honors him and sends him on his way. She is of the breed of Ayesha and Fatima, O my Khan! May her babies grow up, may such a wife come to your hearth.^[107]

With the conversion to Islam of the Mongol Ilkhan Ghazan in 1295, the authority of some highly placed women continued; the Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta (1304-1368 /9 or 1377) was astonished to see the power exercised by the wives of Ozbek, khan of the Golden Horde, in the 1330s.^[108]

In China there was a long tradition of property passing to daughters as dowry, and late Song laws designed to keep property within the patriline justified dowering daughters (marriage for daughters was set at age fourteen, sons at sixteen) before division to sons of equitable shares. As women became more identified with their husbands' lineages under the Song (960-1279), few divorced. An unmarried daughter without brothers might inherit three-quarters of an estate with only a quarter going to the agnatic kin. Less interested in the rights of daughters, the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) under Qubilai Khan (r. 1260-1295) allowed levirate marriage (with a brother's widow) but with reservations. In addition, because of the close connections between rights to land and military service, a man marrying a single female heir who took on his father-in-law's military service might inherit through his marriage. This influenced practice throughout China, and such households would not become extinct because property passed through women, but a daughter only inherited if she married a man who would perform the required military service. While the Ming Code that followed in 1397 self-consciously echoed the earlier Tang laws (624, revised 653) on family, it also incorporated Yuan property practices and a daughter only inherited if there was no one of the same surname who could be found.

Successful Chinese households were often units of production for textiles and other export goods like embroidered shoes; thus women with their servants played substantial roles in home production. In the words of the statesman-poet Liu Ji (1311-75), “One who builds a big house will hire many artisans, but there will be one master-artisan, and no one will dare decide on anything that thwarts his plans... When people of the four quarters obey one ruler, they are settled. When an army of a million men obeys one commander, it triumphs.”^[109] Widows might perform the role of master of production within a household and, surviving their husbands, they might also fulfill the obligation of preserving a deceased husband's lineage, demon­strating that Confucianism afforded some women important responsibilities. In China, immigrant Muslim textile workers, both women and men, pro­vided a home industry in vertically organized production of cloth of gold. Skilled families were brought to China by Yuan rulers; they produced gold- shot silk equivalent in value to gold itself.^[110]

Prosperity emerging in the Song era and continuing through the Yuan years into the Ming era enriched some households, resulting in some leisure for elite women for whom it became fashionable to pursue literacy. With the eleventh-century advent of printing in China, the imperial court lost its dominant role in the production of women's writing, leading to an upsurge in women's poetic compositions throughout China.^[111] Women exchanged poetry among households and, increasingly under the Ming, literate women helped educate their sons, who would face formidable examinations in which success promoted the fortunes of any family. Meanwhile in Japan, women wrote poetry and also prose works. Murasaki Shikibu's (973-1014/31) vener­ated Tale of Genji has been called the first psychological novel in world literature (see Figure 3.1).

In China the teachings of Confucius emphasized the cultivation of virtue, with men, at least, understood to be morally perfectible. In the social

Figure 3.1 Prince Genji visiting his wife, from Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) (The Art Archive / Alamy)

hierarchy, family and state flourished when all persons knew and performed their assigned duties; this governed the lives of both women and men, which within the family meant nurturing and protecting the old and the young. Beneath the level of high generality, Confucianism tolerated diverse prac­tices, even divorce, proving that China did not possess a uniform culture. Only the most wealthy and prestigious households practiced polygyny and the spread of Buddhism freed a few women from the constraints of family and marriage to become nuns. Foot-binding began among women at court during the Song dynasty, but spread widely only in the Ming era (1368-1644). Diversity in gender assumptions about women and their assigned roles failed to disturb underlying Confucian morality to any measurable extent.

Women and family in Europe

In the fragmented lands of medieval Europe, prone to invasions in the early part of our era and less successful in acculturating new populations than Asia, two distinct family patterns emerged. A Mediterranean large-family unit sanctioned by late Roman and canon (church) law existed in the Byzantine Empire, Italy, and Spain, while a small-family pattern, based on the neolo­cality of a newly married couple, thrived farther north. Marriage for both men and women occurred relatively late, that is, near twenty years of age. (In the south, men in their twenties married women fourteen to eighteen years of age.) Canon law prohibited divorce, but the powerful could obtain annulments from the church. Consent was grounds for valid marriage but seldom enforced. Marriage practices sustained new families in assarting (opening land to cultivation), or the pursuit of crafts and trade that underlay Europe's economic rise through the medieval centuries. Bride price (morgen­cap or its variants) predominated in both the north and south: by contract a bride received wealth from her husband that she owned and managed. After 1140 in Italy, and thereafter in Spain and southern France, dowry paid by the bride's father to the groom replaced the husband's major marital gift. Henceforth a woman owned her dowry as a natal inheritance, but her husband managed it. He was obligated by law to increase but never squander it, an unrealistic demand for a commercial economy with attendant risks.

Meanwhile under common law in England, a single woman could own property as a feme sole, but lost ownership rights over it when she married, only to have them returned to her if she became a widow. Women's property rights had substantial impact on women's familial and economic roles. Where they owned the proceeds of their labor, or anticipated that ownership, women participated in production and trade (see Figure 3.2). The revived Roman dotal regime introduced in the twelfth century in the south curbed women's management of wealth, and their roles in the workplace diminished. This affected families, because women's authority in marriage generally stems from wealth they bring into the marriage over a lifetime.

Although most women married, some single women formed their own households in medieval Europe and others joined together in Christian monasteries. Women numbered among the most venerated saints of their day. The church worked to enclose nuns but under some circumstances it tolerated sisterhoods such as the Beguines, who lived in towns and provided social services to the community. Literacy was an expectation for at least some women in religious houses and orders, and literary works have come down to us from nuns, including the abbess, poet, composer, and scientist Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). A few laywomen also wrote wide-ranging works: Anna Komnene (1093-1153) composed The Alexiad, a major source of Byzantine political history for the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, that is,

Figure 3.2 German family spinning, sixteenth century (Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy)

the era of the crusades, and Trotula of Salerno composed a famous treatise on women's diseases.^[112]

MedievalJewish families often lived in uneasy proximity to their Muslim or Christian neighbors, and women’s decorous behavior ideally deflected notice that could lead to persecution. By the Late Middle Ages, Jews in Europe were required to wear defining garb, like shoes of mismatched color, but this did not prevent persecution or expulsions. Jewish women married young with a dowry, and both they and Jewish men had the right to initiate divorce. In CairoJewish women were not as strictly enclosed as their Muslim neighbors, although contact outside the Jewish community was regarded as more dangerous for women than for men. Jewish women enjoyed more opportunities to pursue literacy and careers than women in the Christian West or Islam. In twelfth-century Cairo, divorced Karima worked as a broker in embroidered textiles, and Licoricia of Winchester became a successful banker and mainstay of her family until her murder in 1277. Jewish women became physicians patronized by their Islamic and Christian neighbors. While ritually disadvantaged, in economic life there was no substitute for Jewish widows who perpetuated businesses and collected from debtors, especially non-Jews.

Religion and women

The leading religions of the day did not necessarily seek to discredit women, although they were hierarchical and paternalistic without exception. Each advocated some safeguards for women's rights, but local law or custom easily eroded these.

If the Buddha opened the path of enlightenment to women and men, soon monks subordinated nuns to their rule. Christianity ordained men as priests because they, not women, were made “in the image of Christ,” and medieval Talmudic scholars argued for the superiority of man over woman, defined as the “other.” Among the proselytizing religions, Islam favored sequestering women, although the Quran only demanded modesty befitting family honor; harems were much older institutions, yet they persisted. When Jews, Christians, Buddhists, or Muslims enclosed women, they intended to shield men from temptation. The universal religions of the medieval world all spoke of man as the generic norm, which made women perhaps not less worthy, but in a sense, less human. Still, women mystics in the Christian West like Catherine of Siena, who sent her visionary epistolary admonitions to the pope and European rulers, wrote numerous texts illuminating an alternative experiential Christianity that was distinct from the dominant theology of the age. Cults of female nuns, saints, and mystics compensated somewhat for marginalization, but such spiritual empowerment was limited to a few.

In western Europe, Aristotelian ideas about gender were reintroduced by the universities and schools, and most fully articulated in the thirteenth century by the Scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). Scholastics argued about ‘woman' as a universal category and employed defining polar­ities. For Aquinas woman was passive, whereas man was an active agent in the image of God. These new essentialist Scholastic polarities were but­tressed with other aligned traits: man was formative, tending toward perfect, odd, one, right, square, at rest, straight, light and good; woman was material, deprived of the tendency toward perfection, even, plural, left, oblong, moving, curved, dark and evil.^[113] The very simplicity of the scheme recommended it.

Within the particular (non-proselytizing) religions of Asia there were no specific articles of faith or dogma to dictate gender terms. The duality Yin- Yang, in which each partakes of the other, as well as a sexual dyad of Outer and Inner, had emerged early in China and remained remarkably resilient identifiers for female and male, perhaps because they were not justified by religious dogma like polar notions found further west. In South Asia the assumption that only goddesses with consorts were beneficent, while unmar­ried goddesses were dangerous, influenced gender, but not always in nega­tive ways: male asceticism was revered but feared, and women were assumed to have the power of life (sakti) in India, an antidote to asceticism's extremes.¹¹ In Tamil South Asia, misogynous pronouncements about women were balanced by paeans of praise to women's desirability and beneficence.

Among various peoples of Mesoamerica parallels were drawn between childbirth and warfare, and noted in the daily cycle of the sun god. Comparable praise fell to those who died in battle and those who died in labor: of one who died in childbirth, “her husband and parents rejoiced... for it was said she went not to the land of the dead but to the heavens, to the house of the Sun."1²

Although it is difficult to gain specific information about women and religion in North America in this era, it appears that the Iroquois-Algonquin tribes (Haudenosaunee) broke with the male-dominant pattern. Five, some­times six, united Iroquois tribes expanded their territory through conquest much like Eurasian peoples, but not at the same cost of subordinating women. The gantowisas (women's council) came into existence during this era and balanced the male council. Matriliny sanctioned by religious practices charac­terized longhouse clan culture and the gantowisas had the right to determine the agenda for men's council meetings. No less warlike in regard to external enemies, the gantowisas successfully advocated peaceful government among the Iroquois tribes, played major roles in forming alliances, and may have participated significantly in creating a constitutional form of government.

Slavery and gender

One topic that may help elucidate Middle Millennium gender assumptions, family life, and sexuality is domestic slavery and the web of exchange that ^{[114] [115] provided slaves to families. Wealthy families worldwide raised comfort levels by recourse to slaves. Contrary to Marc Bloch's sanguine view that slavery was no longer relevant to Western society after the ninth century, European slavery had revived by the thirteenth century and was preponderantly female in composition. In this era slavery was mainly domestic in nature, although wars in the Mediterranean and the Muslim invasions into India introduced a supply of male slaves into trade on a sporadic basis. In Europe female domestic slaves came from foreign lands, and might be labeled schismatics, heretics, or pagans, prompting the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) to sanction unfree condition for them.}

In households of this era with their high ratios of hard labor to family welfare and production, slavery answered needs, but so also did contract labor, wage-earners, those receiving bed and board, and non-resident menial workers. Slaves produced goods for trade alongside family members and other servants and dependents. Experience in cloth production raised the prices of some skilled female slaves. In Venice, slaves were hired out to artisans like shoemakers and learned skills, but slaves performed the more onerous tasks associated with production, while free persons assumed skilled and highly recompensed work.

Young female slaves were traded at times to be concubines. In China, skills in music, dance, and recitation were valued, so a slave concubine might be trained in the arts and educated to write to please her master. Accom­plished slaves were traded among men, or given as gifts. In Baghdad Ibn Butlan's eleventh-century guide went to lengths to explain how to judge slave girls.^[116] The birth of a master's child to a slave in an Islamic household led to the mother's manumission upon the death of the master. This was one of the limitations on slavery prescribed by Muhammad and meant that a few legal means were at hand for women to escape slavery, although this did not imply escape from the family or harem; nevertheless the child of a former woman slave was legitimized and might even become a sultan. In Christian households the birth of a child did not free a slave: the expressed will of the master was necessary. This led to confusion about rights in communities where both religious groups lived, such as Valencia in the Iberian peninsula. In 1261, Christian townspeople here changed their laws to conform to Muslim practice.

Large households in China employed written contracts for enslavement, as did port cities in Northwest India, while in the West, towns recorded slaves by cartularies. China, Northwest India, and Europe demarcated free and slave populations with legal precision because of a general reliance on written contracts to police property rights. In China contracts were based upon the seventh-century Tang Code, and in India on laws in port cities; in Europe, Roman law precedents from the sixth-century Code of Justinian dictated terms. Notable similarities occurred in China and Europe. A contracted sale of an eleven-year-old girl dated 731 in China demanded forty bolts of silk, a high price; the contract specifies the names of all parties, including the slave and guarantors, noting the slave came from inferior classes. In 1281 in Ragusa/Dubrovnik a buyer contracted to buy young Moysa of Hlum or Herzegovina at the steep price of seven and one half grossi. Slavs such as Moysa were so common as slaves in Europe that “Slav” is the root of the word “slave” in many European languages.

In South Asian households, slaves were preferred for certain tasks forbid­den to those regarded as “untouchable,” such as preparing food. From the eleventh century onward, the Muslim invasions of Islam produced slaves at numbers never before seen in this region. In the era of Mahmud of Ghazni's expeditions into northwestern India, 1000-25, newly defeated and enslaved Indians attracted a brisk trade to local markets; this led to a diaspora of Indian slaves into Central Asia. Under the Delhi sultanate (1206-1556) observers wrote of a glut of low-priced Indian slaves in markets. In contrast to Christian slave systems and those elsewhere in the Muslim world, in northern India slaves possessed some rights, including marriage and a father's paternal rights over offspring.

Most religions tolerated slavery and justified the trade in slaves, as did Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council. The Prophet Muhammad, in “lightening the fetter [of slavery] riveted it ever more firmly in place” in Islam by demanding some restraints on the absolute authority of slave- owners.^[117] In India keeping domestic slaves conferred prestige upon a family, and as an indigenous system reliant on slave-brokers, the trade was not dependent on conquest. China maintained distinct and separate markets for slaves, servants, and male heirs; only female slaves purchased young were likely to change their status over a lifetime if they found favor as concubines. Masters determined legitimacy of all offspring of the household in any case.

The Tang Code regulated sale of slaves strictly: “Male and female slaves, like money and goods, are for their owner to dispose of,” and law codes saw society rigidly divided into privileged, commoners, and inferiors like slaves.^[118]

While it would be difficult to locate any state or empire of the Middle Millennium that was economically dependent on slavery, domestic slavery flourished among those wealthy enough to afford slaves. The legal scope of the family included its power over slaves. Women owned slaves, and particularly in the Middle East and Europe a slave sometimes accompanied a bride to her new home. It was a pious act to free slaves in wills in Europe and the Islamic world, and manumission is widely regarded as a softening influence on medieval slavery. However, to put a cynical face on it, manu­mitting an old slave served to lessen the owner's burden for slaves' welfare. The Roman law principle “the child of my slave is my slave” remained a feature of European law and was handed down to plantation enterprises when Europeans began colonization: Crete by the thirteenth century, then the Atlantic islands, finally the Americas.

By the end of the Middle Millennium, slave systems were poised for a take-off. Not only were the first plantation-slave systems developing, but galley-slaves reappeared in the Mediterranean. The fourteenth-century Otto­mans built the first standing army in Europe out of enslaved Christian boys known in the mamluk army as Janissaries; they were forbidden to marry. In China slaves continued to be luxuries, and in Europe the price of slaves rose over the centuries, which meant that domestic slavery was an indication of increasing prosperity and the unequal distribution of wealth among families. Enslavement was often the result of a local war, but many children were sold into slavery by their destitute parents, so that slavery reflected disparity in wealth across regions linked by trade as well as within societies. Slavery was largely condoned, its contractual dimensions and coercive means tolerated.

Domestic slavery, reliant largely on women, characterized the Middle Millennium in much of the eastern hemisphere, and societies maintained the legal systems policing slavery that they had inherited from earlier times although slavery seldom still served as a delivery system for essential agricul­tural labor. Perpetuation of domestic slave systems rested on a master's assumption of paternal rights and ownership of a female slave's offspring. Because they were chattels, women slaves' reproduction rights were bought and owned, reinforcing notions of female dependence and passivity. No longer just the property of rulers and a small elite, domestic slaves familiar­ized a broad spectrum of urban persons with chattel-slavery's coercive capacities.

Sexuality

Gender remains the salient category of analysis when considering sexuality in this era, because sexual responses and reproduction were apprehended through gender distinctions. Travelers' observations reveal how diverse understandings were and how severely societies judged the sexual practices of others. Observations reflected a male gaze that assumed that women were compliant with men's desires. Having remarked on polygyny among the Mongols, Marco Polo (1254-1324) noted that Qubilai Khan provided magnifi­cent and separate palaces for his four wives. The khan's harem included four or five hundred young women selected from the province of Ungut, known for the beauty of its women; this superfluity inspired Polo to wonder. He commented that these young women were later distributed among the khan's nobles as an honor.^{[119] [120]} The Syrian Arab emir Usama ibn Munqidh (1095-1188) asked a Frankish father of a motherless girl leaving the baths of Tyre why he had taken her inside. He answered, “Her mother died, and so she has no one who will wash her hair. I brought her into the bath with me so that I might wash her hair.” Usama overcame his misgivings and responded, "[t]hat's a kind thing you're doing.” He was more shocked by a Frankish husband in the baths of Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man who had his pubic hair shaved, following local custom, and liked it so well he led in his wife to have the same performed on her and watched as it was done by the Muslim attendant. Easy-going attitudes toward privacy and sexual propriety sug­gested to Usama that Franks had no shame, and neither did they have the sense to feel jealous when other men approached their wives.1⁷ Despite their often-touted permissiveness, Indians regarded castration for eunuchs who served as government officials or guarded harems as an abhorrent practice. Western Christians shared this attitude, although they made an exception for the castrati who sang for them. Shocking sexual practices were those prac­tised by other cultures.

The female body generally bore the burden of erotic messages in this age. In Japanese painting, provocative nude figures incited desire. In Persian painting the partially and alluringly dressed women of the harem were favored. In the Christian West a clothed woman personifying luxuria repre­sented sexual allure through rich fabrics and jewels. With the classical revival of the Renaissance, nudity again entered the repertoire of erotic imagery. High-ranking women and men of the Maya of Mesoamerica wore a long straight tunic, while semi-nude male warrior figures appeared in loincloths that eroticized their genitals.

Scientific thinking tended to approach the issue of sexuality through the lens of gender. The Chinese concept of Outer and Inner explained coitus in terms of dominance and male vitality; Yin-Yang characterized male and female sexual production that gave birth to all things in subsequent gener­ations. In the Christian West active and passive were gendered divisions that explained reproduction following Aristotle or one-seed theory. The West, along with Islam, also respected humoral arguments publicized by Galen (c. 130-200/217cE) that explained the generation of sexual organs, their functions, and coitus. This system associated women with moist and cold, and men with dry and hot, stressing the latter as sole generators of seed. In the Islamic world, another inherited ancient discourse on women's produc­tion of sperm created a physiological link between a woman's emission of semen and procreation (two-seed theory), and advocated female sexual pleasure that induced women to produce “seed.”

Indian society paid little attention to sexuality in public discourse perhaps because there were fewer associations of sexuality with a condition of sin. Early marriage policed sexuality for most families in India with virginity required of brides, although “public” women to whom men had easy access were tolerated here as in the rest of Eurasia. Kama, or pleasure, included sexual pleasure and stood as one of the three aims in life along with dharma (duty and destiny) and artha (wealth). In its instruction manual component, the Kama Sutra stressed that women's sexual pleasure held primacy over men's, at least theoretically. Sexuality was tied to creativity, the power of life. Thus sexuality might be viewed as essentially divine activity, and families celebrated it ritually in homes, and in temples within the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. In South Asia medical authority promoted ideas about body, mind, and soul that stressed balance (ayurveda). Excessive loss of semen created imbalance for men, and biological cycles were advocated to determine when coitus should occur. In Tantric practice male sexual arousal was encouraged but then turned inward in a quest for higher bliss. While such traditions suggest that women were to be prized, rather than demeaned, for their potent sexuality, there is little evidence to attest to this happening. The medical, religious, and philosophical ideas surrounding sexuality appear to have been a male discourse with little direct application to the social and sexual lives of women. Still, the shape-shifting from female to male and back again as well as the transvestism found in the Rig Vedas and Upanishads held imaginative possibilities for women as well as for men.

Commensurate attitudes toward what was deviant stemmed from similar­ities in medical and scientific understandings of sexuality and reproduction. Turning to early Sanskrit typologies of sexual orientation, the Caraka identi­fied eight sexual abnormalities, and the somewhat later Susruta identified six (first two centuries ce). Each list identified a masculine lesbian female as deviant, but all other types were dysfunctions (bent penis, impotence) or sexual behaviors (voyeurs) and practices (same-sex fellators) associated with men. No distinctions were made among sexual practices, anatomical abnor­malities and impotence. Homosexual practices, such as taking the bottom or “passive” position in sexual encounters, were viewed as a congenital condi­tion and blame, if any, was assigned to the parents' sexual practices. In India partners of passive men were regarded as normal. More troubling was anal intercourse, due to fear of pollution attached to defecation.

Islam demanded virginity for brides and was less tolerant of homosexual­ity at least in religious law. The hadith (reports of the Prophet's exemplary statements and actions) decreed that both active and passive homosexual partners should be stoned. By Byzantine law, from the eighth-century Ecloga onward, active and passive partners were to be punished with the sword. The Frankish canons of Nablus of 1120, evidently influenced by Byzantine legislation, demanded the burning of partners. Yet ardent homoerotic love poetry existed side-by-side with harsh punishments throughout the Middle East. In Islam sultans numbered young boys among the women in their harems. The literature of Sufi mysticism included rapturous love poems addressed to male lovers, which became a way of symbolizing union with the divine. While love poems appear to be about unrequited yearning, they represented a popular literary genre appreciated by a wide swath of society.

For the medieval Christian church, sodomy was abhorrent and secular authorities punished it as a crime, but this was true for all fornication, which was punished by anything from simple fines to capital punishment. Whether male-male or male-female, the crime of sodomy was described as an abomination and drew heavier prosecution as the medieval era progressed. This led to widely varying rulings about which specific acts were encom­passed; these ranged from anal intercourse to the crime of heresy.

Christians and Jews attached the sin of adultery to both husband's and wife's out-of-wedlock sexual acts, whereas ancient Rome had understood adultery as a sin of wives only. UnlikeJews, Christians considered celibacy a highly prized condition, even more so virginity. For continence, the twelfth­century Speculum virginum (Mirror of Virgins) awarded married women thirtyfold, widows sixtyfold, and virgins one hundredfold in heaven. Accolades were lavished on virginity, an invention of sorts of medieval Christianity.^[121] Penitential manuals, church councils, and the Gregorian reform initiatives of the eleventh century enforced chaste behavior on regular and secular clergy but with less-than-perfect outcomes.

China appears to have confronted fewer difficulties with same-sex rela­tions among men. Confucian ethics did not encourage lifelong celibacy although Buddhism did; both expected women to be virgins at marriage. While homosexual men were recognized as deviant, this did not shame a family or lineage. Male prostitutes worked in towns and some were trans­vestites who garnered considerable public notice. A wealthy man might pursue a homoerotic relationship within his home by bringing in a man or boy in place of a concubine for his pleasure. While obscure language often veiled homoerotic sentiments in poetry, the envoy Tao Gu, in his Records of the Extraordinary, stated flatly, “Nowadays in the capital those who sell themselves number more than ten thousand. As to the men who offer their own bodies for sale, they enter and leave places shamelessly.”^[122] Same-sex marriages were sometimes celebrated in China.

In some places sexual and gender categories became interwoven, but in others they were not. In China male homosexuality and lesbianism were not seen as related, nor was there a scientific classification for “homosexual”; active and passive roles defined deviance. In India males with cross-gender behavior or characteristics were compared to disorderly and lewd young girls or prostitutes; as such, they might be seen as a third gender. Muslims neither celebrated homosexuality nor regarded it as particularly heinous, despite religious condemnation; avoidance ruled, and homosexuals never constituted a third gender. In North America, men who dressed and acted as women (called berdache later by Europeans but today more generally known as “two- spirit people”) were considered a third gender and some apparently took husbands. In western Europe the category of a third gender was sometimes attached to the celibate, which included all priests and monks who were reliably celibate, and women consecrated as holy virgins. A wide range of behaviors characterized groups that fell outside heterosexual typologies.

The old assumption that women who engaged in sex with women escaped condemnation has lost credence in the face of research. Women attracted to women were not regarded as dangerous to the social order to the same degree as men attracted to men, but in the West such women were punished as sinners, albeit “silent sinners.”^[123] In Islam, which acknowledged same-sex desire in women, the terms sahiqu, sahhaqa, and musahiqa denoted action or behavior rather than emotional attachment. In Arabic erotic literature, les­bians were noted as women who met together and taught each other how to achieve pleasure, and in religious law lesbian acts were punished less severely than male homosexual acts. In Indian medical literature, the mascu­line woman or lesbian was not blamed; instead, like her male counterpart, responsibility was assigned to her parents. In China, Ming literature viewed lesbians as a male fantasy of utopian polygamy: where there is love between two women, no jealousy exists and they unite with the same man. Rivalry is eliminated so a man enjoys his pleasure without jeopardizing peace and harmony in the home.^[124] Throughout Eurasia, men expressed doubt that women derived pleasure from same-sex relations.

Despite the endemic shortage of women in this era that left many men without partners, nuclear families were presumed to contain and police intimate relations and were expected to form the chief bulwark against sexual excess and deviance for both men and women. Not surprisingly, sex trades flourished where unmarried men congregated. Islam advocated polygamy and concubinage in families as one solution to women's sexual excess and deviance, sacrificing the benefits from the solidarity of a monogamous pair invested in their offspring. With sex ratios unfavorable to women here as elsewhere, lifelong Muslim bachelors were deprived of licit sexual lives, which jeopardized their full manhood as understood by Islam. The more monogamous West never contained and policed male sexuality successfully, although religious and civic authorities increasingly regulated family sexual practices. Jewish rabbis exhorted husbands to restrain lust and Christian priests tried to forbid coitus in Lent and on Holy Days, that is, much of the calendar year.

Conclusion

Gender assumptions and women's experience provide litmus tests of family flexibility, resilience, and the capacity to use the talents of all. Women in the Middle Millennium had dynamic histories, but this is not to say that gen­dered expectations for women were perforce benign by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, in regulating families, religious and civil authorities superintended family members strictly and frequently imposed restrictions on women. Gender expectations changed little for men; patriarchal insti­tutions dominated throughout, and except for lands with little or no contact with Eurasia, became more hierarchical among men - favoring wealth and advanced age at the expense of youth - by the end of the Middle Millennium than when it began.

Gender was a cultural artifact that imposed on men's and women's lives harshly and restrictively at times, at others more leniently, as circum­stances and mores dictated. Under threat of war or conquest or loss, sequestering women often intensified, but traditions of women warriors, from samurai maidens in Japan to shieldmaidens in Scandinavia, suggest that under threat women sometimes escaped from gender imperatives, and societies imagined that women and men shared capabilities. The weight of gendered scientific reasoning fell heavily on thinking about sexual acts and behaviors; this represented an enduring legacy from the era to modern times.

Chinese law codes' expectations created sufficient commensurability through rulings on marriage, paternal rights over children, and inheritance so the contour of “family” itself was manifest, and the same appears true for the customs of time-tested kin groupings in India. Islamic conquest imposed shari‘a law that defined family in India, Southeast Asia, and across the Middle East and North Africa, although Islam failed to eliminate regional differences in its wide reach. Among Jews, legal writings, ethical preaching, and local rabbis defined family, demanding submissive roles for Jewish women, although this could lead to rebellion as well as compliance. Christian Europe was exceptional because “family” as an entity attaining definition first occurred in medieval times, as David Herlihy has argued.^[125] Thereafter monogamous families evolved, becoming more hierarchical, while civil and ecclesiastical laws increasingly oversaw family life.

Around the world marriage had become more monogamous by 1500, with Christian Europe and European Jewry rejecting polygyny, and Chinese marriages among commoners remaining monogamous; India reflected a comparable pattern. Monogamous marriage meant care for elderly parents and more investment in offspring's welfare, such as reliable marriage gifts for daughters and inheritance for sons at the death of a father.

In the West both law and gender constructs permitted women's participa­tion in economic growth in the early phases of the Commercial Revolution, but then disadvantaged women during later phases, when wealth was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few; often women were reduced to unacknowledged and menial roles in the economy. In the Mediterranean region, among Jews and Christians dowry in coin awarded to daughters allowed land and other wealth to be held intact for sons until their father's death. Thereafter legal partnerships - contracts like fraterna (pact of brothers) and societas (association) - prolonged joint family ownership, encouraging continuation of business “houses” like banks that promoted economic growth. In addition, the inheritance system of primogeniture, which governed royal holdings and peerages in England and France by the thir­teenth century, spread socially and in time would result in an infinite right to entail landed property in some European countries, resulting in a further concentration of wealth.

According to Timur Kuran, both joint family ownership and primogeni­ture benefited the West when compared to Islam, where partible inheritance under shari‘a law called for the immediate partition of assets to offspring at the death of a father.^[126] Earlier Muslims had taught Westerners about con­tractual business instruments; ironically, Muslim business enterprises remained short-lived while the West would benefit from more enduring contractual arrangements because Westerners applied contract law to kin liaisons.

In this age, public institutions promoted family welfare but also monitored family behaviors. Islam embarked on private provision of public welfare, including schools, through the waqf system of pious foundations directed by donors. Gains in literacy increased families' access to political information in China through government schools, including charity schools. In the West religious and civic foundations like orphanages emerged and schools opened up a world of information to youth. Meanwhile, care of elders remained a largely unmediated family obligation.

Late marriage for both women and men, as practiced in the northwest of Europe, still benefited the economy in 1500 since late-marrying women, like their husbands, brought wealth to marriage, along with marketable skills, while women's child-bearing years were truncated, resulting in smaller families. Plague and war also served as positive checks on population growth, but these factors were not unique to Europe. Since most lands linked by trade grew in wealth in this period, families prospered in many locales, but in the West Jews and Christians experienced prosperity as higher per capita income, while more easterly lying societies with earlier marriage and higher birth rates were set for future population increase. In the long run this placed Western families on an enhanced footing as they entered modern times.

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