3 - After Patriarchy: Gender Identities in the City

Summary

This chapter posits that a crisis of the patriarchal gender order was a central component of the crisis that beset the anciens régimes in Russia and China, one that became implicated materially and symbolically in the processes of social and political transformation that led to revolution. This crisis had little to do directly with capitalism but was inextricably bound up with the impact of capitalist modernity on a traditional dynastic polity and a patriarchal rural society. The attack on the traditional familial order – and, in particular, advocacy of the so-called ‘woman question’ – served as tropes though which contemporaries (usually men) could reflect on the backwardness of their societies and make demands for radical political change and, in addition, articulate their own social and gender anxieties and aspirations. There is little consensus as to how far actual gender roles and identities of migrants from the countryside to the cities underwent transformation as a consequence of the onset of capitalist modernity. An earlier literature tended to assume that the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft was accompanied by a ‘modernization’ of gender roles. Among historians, Edward Shorter offers the most cogent exposition of this view, arguing that traditional communities were characterized by strong interpersonal ties, by ‘surveillance’ of personal and interpersonal behaviour, by ‘instrumental’ rather than ‘affective’ values in marriage and family, and by ‘massive stability’; whereas with the onset of modernity, the family became separate from the community, and familial and sexual relationships became based on ‘sentiment’ and ‘individual self-realization’.