There is no question that mass and social media today is causing much of the gender confusion in our world. It seems every commercial today must include a homosexual couple. News outlets and other media seem to be constantly looking for ways to laud the LGBTQ+ movement and shame its critics. The news show 20/20 was the force that thrust transgenderism into the mainstream with its April 2015 interview of Bruce Jenner.
While this is all true, the problem goes back quite a bit further and even in ways one might not think of. The problem originated with the early mass media of newspapers and magazines promoting more narrow definitions of gender roles that, necessarily, left some people out.
Most of history
Throughout most of history, a boy learned how to be a man and a girl learned how to be a woman from their parents and neighbors. It is important to keep in mind that everyone usually lived in a rather small corner of the world. Villages and towns were small, isolated places, and while there was commerce with other locations, it was through relatively few conduits; traveling was a rare occurrence for most people. Even when cities arose, most people lived in a relatively small neighborhood within the city. This is illustrated by the strong ethnic enclaves which arose in various cities in the US with few people wandering too far outside of their neighborhood.
For a child, this meant that the men and women they saw were relatively few and usually most were somehow related, even if it be as a third cousin once removed. Those who were not somehow related in the village were still of the same cultural and ethnic background, generally sharing the same culture, upbringing, values and religion. This meant there would be a great homogeneity between the men in the area and the same for the women.
As a result, as a girl would grow up, the women around her would be her models as to how a woman looks, acts, and lives her life. There was, essentially, only one way in which girls and women would dress, and this would be accepted as natural and correct. Every girl would learn what feminine modesty, as well as attractiveness, was within her culture, and she would aspire to this and never dream of being anything different. Obviously, there would be differences in how each would look, but with a relatively limited genetic variation, there would be a relatively limited range of looks.
So, within a given town or area, the women would have similar builds, complexion, hair color, etc. For instance, if a young woman had a more square build, odds are a number of others in the area did so as well, so this was understood as feminine. In fact, in that town an overly curvy woman would have been looked on as odd. This meant the girls did not feel pressured to look like something which they were not genetically able to be.
The same, of course, could be said of boys and men. The image for the boy was his father, uncles, and similar men who he would likely grow to look like. Whether he would be able to have much facial hair or not was going to be normal for him. If he was taller or shorter, by international standards, he would be closer to the norm within his hometown.
The same could be said for how one would fulfill gender roles. In fact, a child would generally be raised in such a way that fitting within their general role would be natural. Here men’s occupations are instructive. Generally, a boy would grow up to do the same job as his father. If the father was a blacksmith, the boy grew up around the forges, helping as he could based on his age. Eventually, he would take over as the blacksmith and on it would go. This became such the norm that the job title “smith” would eventually become the family name: Smith. The concept of growing up to be whatever he wanted to be would be totally foreign to him. This same dynamic included what we now call gender roles.
Life as Partnership for Survival
For most people, life was a partnership in carrying the load required for survival and, hopefully, some measure of thriving. This was the case for the whole range of life. Even children, as soon as they were able, would contribute to the family in the tasks of farming, gardening, cooking, hunting and otherwise feeding the family. This would then extend to earning some measure of wealth for the family to trade for other things needed for life. This was about survival, not pursuing one’s dreams.
Naturally, the division of labor within the family was drawn in lines based upon practicality and ability. This became the foundation for the local gender roles. Women did what was better for them to do and men did what was better for them to do.
Because women are the ones who bear children (which is a biological fact and was unquestionable until a few years ago), their roles tended to be taking care of the tasks closest to the home. A pregnant woman could not travel far and would not risk compromising the child by taking on physically dangerous work. Likewise, for most of history a woman would nurse a child for around three years since there was no formula, baby food, or easy means of pureeing food. This meant her tasks would have to be ones which could be done with the child(ren) close by and relatively safe. In other words, the tasks within the house and surrounding yard.
Thus, when a girl would grow up, she would aspire to do those same tasks, and those would be what her mother would train her to do. Furthermore, women are normally more designed for this, from their physique to their interests. Psychologists have often observed that women and girls tend to be more interested in people than things. This comes from the necessity, and even God-given design, for them to attend to the needs of their children. Obviously, some were better at some things than others. Some were more object oriented in their makeup like men, but they would also learn from their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and other women how to tend to the tasks which they needed to.
Conversely, men were the ones who would generally take on the more dangerous roles. First, this was because men, generally, have stronger bone and muscle structures, in particular upper-body strength, than women. Another aspect to this, which is often overlooked, is how the man would be the more expendable in regard to raising children. I am not arguing a child isn’t best raised by a father and mother; however, in a “primitive” society, if a child is 9 months old and its mother dies, it will likely die if there is not another nursing mother who takes it in because it cannot nurse, but it could survive if its father dies.
Men also tended to the more dangerous roles away from the home because the family could continue in their absence as the mother was feeding the children and tending to the home. Thus, the man could go off hunting or trading for days or weeks at a time, and the household could continue during his absence.
Another physiological aspect that is very politically incorrect but still true is men’s and women’s brains are different. For instance, a man has a smaller corpus callosum, which is the nerve bundle which joins the two halves of the brain.[1] This means the woman is more likely to draw in many varied factors, including the safety of everyone, at all times. Meanwhile, the man is better at shutting out fears to put himself in danger and face the bear or enemy threatening him and/or his family.
Therefore, for most of history, men and women had roles based upon their biological differences. While not all fit the mold easily, there was more expectation and formation to help guide them into those roles. The question was never if one is or will be a man or woman, but how does one be a man or woman as defined by their community.
Likewise, when you are in smaller communities, some things like courtship and marriage are greatly simplified. Since people reproduce boys and girls at essentially an even rate, this means that there was generally a simple pairing.[2] Thus, if a given village has five boys and five girls of marriageable age, it simply becomes a matter of which is the best match for which. Then each marriage, as is always the case, involved a negotiation of how those roles look for those two individuals.
Thus, for most of history, ideas like not fitting a narrow gender identity were unthinkable and everyone was more formed directly into the roles by their small society. Also, when life is more of a challenge to survive, questions like “is this the real me?” are silly, if ever even thought of. Rather, everyone assumed they were following the very design of the world, and, for Christians, the way God made them, and that was that.
In the next post, we will look at how the industrial revolution and the Victorian Era started to change this, including the introduction of mass media.
[1] Bruce Goldman, “How Men’s and Women’s Brains Are Different,” Stanford Medicine Magazine, 22 May 2017, https://stanmed.stanford.edu/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different/.
[2] Interestingly, humans have slightly more boys than girls, which seems to be a natural off-set to the more dangerous roles that boys and men take.