Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe

The authors of Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe set out in their book to answer the question of how the concept of gender matters to the study of modern Europe. The authors define gender as, “...a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” (8-9) The authors believe there are five major historical ruptures in modern European history in relation gender. The first moment was the assault on those of inherited status initiated during the democratic revolutions. (9) The second was one economic life was transformed by new practices and technologies during the Industrial Revolution. (9) The third was when economic actors focused fully on production beginning an era of colonialism around the world. (10) The fourth was when the European imperial states could no longer tolerate each others aggressiveness and expansion. (11). The fifth and final rupture was when the insistent that one's sexual desires and behaviors were essential to ones sense of self during the sexual revolution. (12) The goal of gender history as a whole, as opposed to woman’s history, is to de-naturalize gender roles by revealing how gender relations have changed over time and how they have been influenced by social conditions, society and politics, and family structure. (14)

One of the most influential sexual ideas in European history was the “one-sex model”. It was first formulated by Aristotle, who believed that women were simply imperfect men. He argued that, “...women were cooler: their need to expend fluids in menstruation and in breast feeding left them insufficient heat to develop exterior genitals...” (1) This model would prove to be the widely held belief regarding the sexes in Western Europe into the the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It shaped the Western views of women using science, which linked the sexual response of both sexes to their ability to...