Passage A During the 1990s, the study of history witnessed both a dramatic integration of the study of women’s history into the historical mainstream and a transition from the subject of women to the issue of gender. Women as individuals receded into the background, and something more abstract called gender relations came to explorations of how an imagined domesticity, or separate sphere for women, shaped culture and politics.
This scholarship demonstrates the explanatory potential embedded in gender, but it also reveals why the topic “women” is now so often dismissed as too narrow and particular a category to illuminate historical processes. Where the study of the history of women is seen today as having celebratory content—its effort is to find offers an analytic framework within which to analyze social and political structures.
And yet I am left to wonder what we have lost as we turn our attention to gender. I share the suspicion of many of my colleagues that gender obscures as much as it reveals: that in focusing on in which individual women engaged their worlds.
Passage B Part of the Roman emperor Augustus’s response to the disorder and disharmony of the Triumviral Wars (32–30 B.C.E.) was to promote laws aimed at restoring old-fashioned Roman morality. Augustus presented the peace and stability of Rome as resting upon the integrity of the Roman family, and he paid particular attention B.C.E. and 9 C.E. that penalized adultery and rewarded bearers of legitimate children.
When Augustus thereby rooted Roman prosperity and peace in the Roman family, he drew particular attention to women as significant participants in the system: their good behavior was partly responsible for the health of the state. Thus in this period, the gender roles assigned to women were becoming at once more constrained position in the state by accepting the title Pater Patriae, “Father of the Fatherland.”
Within such a sociopolitical setting, it should occasion no surprise that Augustan-period artists drew on the iconography of the household in imagining the empire. Images of women concisely expressed Augustus’s imperial project, a control of domestic space the present look like the idealized past.
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