Books
Erika Kuhlman: Review of Mary P. Ryan's Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women & Men through American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
Analyzing over 500 years of American history through the lenses of gender inequality, gender hierarchy, and the relations of the sexes,Mary P. Ryan, John Martin Vincent Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, offers up a beautifully written and engaging study of how sexual differentiation has driven American history.
Deeming the process through which the distinctions between male and female have been created and recreated over the course of history a "mystery," Ryan's goal is not to unravel that history. Instead she believes that the variety and mutability of sexual difference in American history that she uncovers may help to dismantle the gender hierarchies erected in the past.
Her opening chapter deals with encounters between American Indians and Europeans.Here she shows how notions of gender differentiation varied among the Native American tribes when the Europeans arrived. Both groups changed their perceptions of gender differentiation over time as well.
As an example, Ryan cites the Algonquian Indians' dealings with the French and British in the mid-eighteenth century. Squaring off with his European counterparts and uprooted from his matrilineal heritage, the fate of the Algonquian chief Pontiac illustrated the unraveling of the traditional gender balance among the Algonquians. Later, when the tribes' prophets Tenkwatawa and Tecumseh entreated their braves to return to traditional ways, they nearly reversed conventional gender roles, enjoining men to take on the traditionally female role of farming.
The masculinization of American culture is shown to be connected to the rise of the British colonies that predated it. Puritan passengers bound for North America had already formed households before they boarded the ship. Once arrived, leaders codified the laws requiring obedience to various “fathers”: familial, civil, and religious. Property was inherited by first-born males, and widows often lost out to younger sons. Ryan then goes on to show how patriarchy declined in favor of “relatively symmetrical partnerships” of wives and husbands when the new nation was formed: although women were still denied the vote, they gained control of the republican household.
Ryan’s book suggests new ways of identifying historical eras by refusing to adhere to tradition. Instead, she offers chronologies as variable as her subject of gender categories and how they are recreated. For example, she calls one subsection of her chapter on the domestication of American culture “Between Patriarchy and Domesticity, 1750-1840,” rather than the revolutionary and early national periods (will anyone mourn the abandonment of the term “era of good feelings”!?). Her next chapter deals with gender and sexuality in the American south and covers roughly the same period. Some readers may object to the partitioning of races in this way; another problem related to race is the way in which American Indians are only treated in the European contact chapter, disappearing in the rest of the book (in the same way, homosexuality is only really dealt with in the 1960s activism section, as though it did not exist in U.S. history before that time).
Mysteries of Sex is marred by some imbalances, too. Ryan emphasizes developments in the eastern seaboard and the south, at the expense of the west. For example, in a subsection on suffrage entitled “The Woman Citizen Goes to Washington,” no mention is made of the first woman to actually go to Washington to legislate in 1916, Montana’s U.S. Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin. Ryan admits at the outset that her book is weighted toward women’s history, complaining the there is a paucity of secondary material on the history of men and masculinity.
In the chapter on developments since 1960, she notes that more men are taking on domestic duties with their working wives, but ends her commentary there. Yet elsewhere in the same chapter, she claims that women have busily crossed gender divides in work and education, while men have been content to rest on their privileged place in American society.
A more complete analysis here on contemporary masculinity and fatherhood may have helped illuminate how and why (and to what extent) men are claiming new roles in the home, and how women are responding. Even as women have battled for entry into traditionally male-dominated fields, they have also fought to maintain their privileged positions as the nation’s reproducers, contributing to instead of correcting what Ryan calls “the asymmetry between male and female.” Recent books on masculinity and fatherhood in American history, for example, Stephen M. Frank’s Life With Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), and Kathleen Gerson’s No Man’s Land: Men’s Changing Commitments to Family and Work (Basic Books, 1993), may encourage historians of gender to consider the impact of fatherhood on the “battle of the sexes.”
In Mysteries of Sex, Mary P. Ryan has crafted a highly readable, much needed survey of the gendered history of a nation. She convincingly demonstrates throughout her narrative that ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality across ethnic and social boundaries occupy a central place in the history of the United States.
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