Gender Roles and Professions: A Historical Perspective

Gender plays an important component to the types of professions men and women pursued from the middle ages to the early modern period. The sexual division of labor was largely designated by the perceived capabilities of each gender, which was greatly influenced by its society and culture. Labor and space were also restricted by gender, and women were generally attached to the home or had low-skilled jobs. These activities were regulated and policed by society, which indicated that patriarchy was never isolated from gender and the profession. In the labor force, men and women had worked for survival and wages from the Roman to the early modern period in Europe, but femininity had rarely been tied to capitalism, the economy, and the profession.

Women were perceived as weak, and were closely compared to the idealization of masculinity. Whereas it cannot be argued that there was a single definition to masculinity or femininity, women were the means to prove masculinity amongst other men. Men were considered tough and “symbolized the moral uprightness and self-discipline,” and women were considered to be soft and delicate.. As a gender, they were associated with “their love of luxury, the languor of their minds, the ease with which they gave themselves to their emotions, and their dissolute morals.” Femininity was associated with the ills of society, and they were meant to be policed and restricted. These negative connotations of women were expressed even in witchcraft paintings, where Niklaus Manuel Deutsch’s drawing, titled Witch, depicted an older woman’s deteriorating body. The value of women and their labor, as the gender roles indicate, were considered suspect or were placed in the shadows of

These divisions of labor cannot be discussed as static representations of society, but as a “murky boundary between work for subsistence and work for the market.” During the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries in Europe, both men and women participated in the market by selling goods, earning wages, and running business establishments, amongst other activities. Kimmel argued that child bearing was considered one of the main categories of sexual difference, which restricted women’s access to certain professions. Moreover, women were tasked with “brewing, baking, caring for poultry and animals [,]…working wool and flax into cloth, and also watching children, cleaning house, and preparing meals” as part imposed by societies expectation of gender. As Judith M. Bennett argued, whereas occupations of women changed through time, their work continued to be low-skilled and low-paid. Men’s jobs was the primary household economy and were publicly recognized by their profession, which was not the same case for women. The sexual division of labor also reflected the sexual inequality between the sexes, where the distribution of labor and resources was