Chapter 9 Flashcards
What is marriage?
-a socially constructed and gendered social institution
What is marriage governed by?
-norms and laws that determine the rights and responsibilities of spouses
What has changed over time with marriage?
-the role and nature of marriage
What did the Puritans believe about women?
- they were the weaker vessel
- less control over physical and emotional passions
What did the Puritans say about sex?
-sex should be restricted to intercourse between heterosexual married people aiming to reproduce
What was forbidden for the puritans?
-all non marital and non reproductive sexual activities
What happened if someone Puritans sex rules?
-punished by fines, whipping, public shaming, ostracism, or even death
What were the Puritans scandalized by?
- the sexual lives of North America’s Indigenous peoples because they were more open minded and permissive
- than Europeans
What did many tribes accept?
- casual sex
- monogamy and polygamy
- homosexuality
- gender nonconformity
Did Indigenous people often care who the father of the child was?
-no
What emerges together when societies transition from foraging to settled agrarian societies that cultivate crops?
-private property and patriarchy
During history, what was the only way to prove paternity?
-to control women’s sexual freedom
Once communities put down roots, what concerns were there?
- passing their wealth down to their heirs
- didn’t want women to become pregnant with other men’s children
What practical reasons did the Puritans sexual repression have?
- group survival
- because they were threatened by illness, war, and starvation
- causing them to focus on penal vaginal sex only
In preindustrial societies what was life like?
- most men and women worked and lived at home on the farms
- children were necessary for work
What happened to life when industrialization occurred?
- it separated work from home
- children cost a lot more now
Define commodification (the making of something into a commodity)
- goods transition from something a family provided itself
- into something bought with a wage
How, in industrial times, did couples limit their reproduction?
-condoms, they were cheap
What were toddlers in cages?
-in the era of tenement housing, large families in small spaces put babies in cages attached to the window to get fresh air
What happened in the 1800s with the Victorian era?
- people abandoned the idea that sex was only for reproduction
- began to think sex was for love
What did the Victorians introduce?
- the gendered love/sex binary
- a projection of the gender binary onto the ideas of sex and love
- women are believed to be motivated by love and men by sex
What did the Victorians do that changed traditional Puritan thinking?
- reversed Puritans beliefs about women’s voracious sexuality
- the victorians feminine dress love and masculinized sex
What did early feminists think they could convince their contemporaries and why?
- that women’s were men’s equals
- if women were more spiritual
What did Protestant churches do?
- they pushed women to be more spiritual
- to supposedly be considered equal to men