The term "gender" is employed in this study to distinguish biological diff erences between male and female bodies, i. e. sex, from socio-culturally constructed attributions of “meaning to sexed bodies and the behavioural expectations that result from these ascriptions (gender).”79 The aim is to illustrate how gendered social roles developed in the early eighteenth century and how they were articulated in its media. The terms "masculine" and
"feminine" are used in this study to describe characteristics typically associated with men on the one hand and women on the other hand. However, it is understood that these terms are not necessarily linked to a person's sex and, as a consequence, are not necessarily used corresponding to it: A man can be described as feminine, a woman can be described as masculine. Thus, it is important to distinguish between "male" and "female" on the one hand and
79 D. Herman, M. Jahn and M.L. Ryan, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2005) 195.
"masculine" and "feminine" on the other hand, as the one category refers to sex, the other category refers to the performance and construction of gender.
Essay periodicals constituted sites of cultural constructions of gender, as text and social practice merged in them. They provided information about the way that contemporaries conceptualised and talked about gender. In the early eighteenth-century, the body and sexual diff erence were describable in ways that were relatively open, in comparison to those that prevailed towards the end of the century.80 Many critics have argued that the early eighteenth century was in fact a time of transition in which the older one-sex model was replaced by a new two sex-model. Thomas Laqueur accounts for this fact as follows:
Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we now know it was invented.
The reproductive organs went from being paradigmatic sites for displaying hierarchy, resonant throughout the cosmos, to being the foundation of incommensurable diff erence: “women owe their manner of being to their organs of generation, and especially to the uterus,” as one eighteenth century physician put it. Here was not only an explicit repudiation of the old isomorphisms but also, and more important, a rejection of the idea that nuanced diff erences between organs, fl uids, and physiological processes mirrored a transcendental order of perfection. Aristotle and Galen were simply mistaken in holding that female organs are a lesser form of the male’s and by implication that woman is a lesser man. A woman is a woman, proclaimed the
“moral anthropologist” Moreau in one of the many eff orts to derive culture from the body, everywhere and in all things, moral and physical, not just in one set of organs. Organs that had shared a name – ovaries and testicles – were now linguistically distinguished. Organs that had not been distinguished by a name of their own – the vagina, for example – were given one. Structures that had been thought common to men and women – the skeleton and the nervous system – were diff erentiated so as to correspond to the cultural male and female.81
80 See: I. Schabert, Englische Literaturgeschichte: Eine neue Darstellung aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1997) 336-40.
81 T. W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1990) 150.
According to Laqueur, the eighteenth century a time that experienced a more thorough division between male and female bodies and characters than this had previously been the case. Against the backdrop of new developments such as the growth of the middle classes and the rise of capitalist mercantile cultures in the London metropolis, the question of what determined masculinity and femininity was open to negotiation and less routed in assumptions of innateness than before. Not only economical innovations, but also intellectual advancement infl uenced the time’s concepts of masculinity and femininity, as Laqueur describes:
By the end of the seventeenth century, the various intellectual currents that made up the transformation of human understanding known as the scientifi c revolution – Baconianism, Cartesian mechanism, empiricist epistemology, Newtonian synthesis – had radically undermined the whole Galenic mode of comprehending the body in relation to the cosmos. This meant the abandonment, among other things, of the anatomical isomorphisms between men and women and also the purging from scientifi c language of the old metaphors that had linked reproduction to other bodily functions, to the natural world, and to the Great Chain of Being itself.82
In contemporary philosophy, power hierarchies between the sexes were taken less for granted than before the late seventeenth century; the natural order, exemplifi ed by the Great Chain of Being, had lost its prevalence: “For Hobbes as for Locke, a person is essentially a sentient being, a sexless creature whose body is of no political relevance.” Divine law and nature, the same manifestations of God’s will that partly lost their validity in the eighteenth century, were now taken into account concerning sex and gender roles. The transcendent cosmic order that had justifi ed not only royal authority, but also the power of a slaveholder over his slave lost its infl uence. Even though philosophers like Locke and Hobbes questioned these power structures and outlined the arbitrariness of these mechanisms of subordination, they did not question male hegemony, neither in the public sphere of the state nor in the private sphere of the home. Nevertheless, women’s subordination was no longer seen as built into the world order. According to Laqueur, it was no longer based on “old-fashioned reasons like the superiority of spirit over matter
82 Laqueur, Making Sex 154.
or the historical dominance God granted Adam.”83 Instead, the subordination of women was represented as having arisen because of the fact that they were disadvantaged owing to their reproductive functions. Women with children were represented as being in a vulnerable position, “which allows the man to conquer her and her children and thereby create paternal rights by contract, by conquest in Hobbesian terms.”84 My work is based on the accounts of gender construction Laqueur formulated for the eighteenth century. His theory emphasises the importance of the early eighteenth century as a point in time when concepts and convictions about sex and gender that were valid for centuries began to lose ground. This change is neither comprehensive nor abrupt, but can be understood as a process, observable in political, medical and, of course periodical discourse of the time.
Changing conceptions of sex and gender and the question of how they were refl ected in contemporary texts has been of interest for generations of scholars, but only recently have researchers paid more attention to periodicals as a genre in their own right. In the following, I will summarise the most important cornerstones, paying particular attention to the research-history of The Female Tatler.