The Archaeology of Gender in Historic America

Summary

Gendered social relations are fundamental to human experience. The ways in which individuals understand their roles as gendered beings and their relationships to other gendered beings is constantly pushed and pulled by forces both internal and external to the individual and the family/social/economic unit to which they belong at multiple scales from the household to the community to the nation. Identity, sexuality, cultural prescriptions for social roles, socioeconomic class, ethnic heritage, life cycle, and other dimensions of the cultural world create tensions between societal structures, gender ideals, and individual choices. Consequently, gender was created, negotiated, codified, and reproduced through objects used in cultural rituals, the spatial organization of houses, the construction of village landscapes, and the institutions of society. In this paper, I explore critical themes of gender in historic America and how historical archaeology contributes to elucidating this aspect of past human experience.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 126