HIST 332 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Middle Ages, Misogyny, Renaissance Of The 12Th Century

• School: McGill University
• Department: History
• Course: HIST 332
• Professor: Paula Clarke

Document Summary

Conditioned what women were able to do/expected to do. How they were seen and how they were thought to behave. Approach of gender constructs which assumes concepts of women and men and their expected behaviours are constructed by society, they are part of a system of nurture instead of nature. Gender construct is based on distinction between sex and gender. Gender: identity you develop later, characteristics that arise from that. Concept of gender is relatively new during this period. Useful in recognizing that sex does not determine behaviour and we have to distinguish between nature and between social expectations that can be changed. Advantage: one is not locked in to any system of behaviour + concept of gender enlarges the discourse. Women"s history began in the 1960s + 1970s with second wave feminism and was seen as a sideline. People did not make the distinction between sex and gender, they tended to think sex determined everything.