HIEU 164 Chapter Notes - Chapter Article Notes: Atlantic World, Public Sphere, Masculinity
23 May 2018
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HIEU 164 – Article Notes – Restoring Miranda: Gender and the Limits of European
Patriarchy in the Early Modern Atlantic World
• Gender allows people to create structures for work, family, society
• Men had political, social, economic authority that women were supposed to submit to
• Importance of women's chastity and women's inferiority reinforced by religion and science
• European men using gendered ideas to define non-Europeans
o African men who washed and spinned cotton were feminine
o Europe as masculine, dominating force and Africans as feminine, submissive
o Interesting considering African men were able to successfully ward off Europeans and
conduct trade deals with them
• "From the European perspective, only conquest could bring such peoples in line with the divine
order"
• Europeans not being able to understand other gender systems
o "With each encounter, Europeans interpreted these incomprehensible gender structures as
failures that only reinforced European superiority"
Work
• Women's labor limited to the home, symbol of male authority and protected chastity
• Public sphere not for women
• Restrictions on women's mobility in public sphere to keep them confined to the home
• Widows of all classes held estates and protected their children
• In husband's absence, wife could run household
• Women taking control over incompetent men
• Women participating in occupations either formally or informally
• Europeans expected Atlantic cultures to mirror their gender system
o Mexican men moved into agricultural work, which was traditionally women's work
• Some Atlantic gender roles persisted based on need of labor, or lack of trying
• "They ridiculed what they saw as unmanly native men who refused to work in the fields, while
native men disparaged English farmers for engaging in what they saw as women's work"
• Growth of slave trade in Africa -> women dominating agricultural labor as lack of men
• African women as conduits of trade, going between the two cultures
• Because of lack of men in Africa, slave traders forced to take more and more women, so on
plantations, gender roles ignored
• Sexuality and reproduction forms of work for slave women
o "…soe asters sa reprodutio as a alue that slae oe rought to platatios"
• Slave women grew their own food and sold it, were hired out as day laborers
• In Spanish and Portuguese colonies, slaves worked for wages and could buy their freedom, and
turn around and get their own slaves
• Using gendered expectations about work to punish slaves
o Punishing lazy male slaves by giving them women's work
• Even though their ideal might not say it, women of all classes engaged in economic activity
• "…the realities of farig, ad the struggles of frotier life hidered ay rapid, idespread
adoption of the ideal European gendered division of labor"
Sexuality and the Family
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