Investigations of a Dog

This is a brief introduction to one of my more experimental works in progress. Most people seem to think it’s a bit strange, and it could easily be a complete failure. The idea is to combine my interests in military history, gender, and eco-criticism by looking at a subject I’m familiar with (horses in early-modern war) from an unfamiliar angle.

When I was an undergraduate, Frank Tallett taught me to be careful to make a distinction between military theory and military practice. What drill books said armies should do in battles is not necessarily what they actually did. This is also an important principle in women’s history, where it is now generally recognised that prescriptive literature is more likely to represent the opposite of reality: if women actually were doing what the books told them to, there would have been no need to keep republishing them. Writers on cavalry tactics in seventeenth century England usually recommended stallions as the best war horses.

The administrative records of parliament’s armies during the English Civil War show that in practice mares and geldings were used as well as stallions. The commissaries responsible for taking delivery of horses from horse dealers and issuing them to the New Model Army kept an account book which records a total of 6,723 horses in 1645 and 1646 (PRO SP28/140 part vii). The consignments of horses issued to cavalry regiments were usually described in the account as “horses, mares, and geldings”. The word “horse” can be as ambiguous as the word “man” (although this in itself reveals something about gender assumptions). In this context it almost certainly refers to stallions as geldings and mares are referred to separately. However, the word “horse” on its own might just denote the species rather than the sex. This is more of a problem with the lists of horses donated to the Earl of Essex’s army in 1642 by parliament’s supporters (PRO SP28/131 part iii). These lists are more detailed than those for the New Model Army, describing each horse in detail and giving individual values. In many cases, sex is specified, but where only the word “horse” is given it isn’t clear whether this means a stallion or whether it means that sex is unspecified. Nevertheless, very few of the horses listed for the cavalry are specifically described as “mares”.

Feminism makes a significant distinction between sex and gender. Sex is defined as being essential: determined by the physical reality of the body and its biology. Gender is defined as being constructed: an ideology invented and perpetuated by human culture and society. This distinction is very important for women’s rights: there is no logical reason why having a vagina and a uterus should bar you from certain professions or make you earn lower wages. However, it can be difficult to separate sex and gender in practice. Gender ideology perpetuates itself by creating a false impression that it’s natural. This can lead to an assumption that gender follows automatically from sex, or even that there is no difference between gender and sex.

No assumptions about the origins of gender are safe, because we know absolutely nothing about how or when it originated. We only know that by the time of the earliest written records of human culture, gender ideology had gone way beyond the scientific facts of sexual dimorphism. In Making Sex (Harvard University Press, 1992), Thomas Laqueur showed that from ancient Greece to 19th century Europe, perceptions of sex and the body were distorted by gender assumptions and that scientific evidence was often misinterpreted to fit in with the dominant gender ideology. Although the specifics of Laqueur’s analysis have been heavily criticised, the general point about the insidious influence of gender on perceptions of sex can’t be denied, and this can make it difficult to separate sex from gender in historical records.

Language and culture lead to all humans being influenced by gender (gender roles can vary across cultures and over time, but as far as I know there is no evidence of cultures which have no gender at all). But what about animals? They have their own existence outside human language and culture. It seems unlikely that any animals have created their own gender ideology. In the wild, most animal behaviour is probably innate (although I don’t know enough about biology to be sure of this). Although animals have their own communication systems and might learn some behaviours, all the evidence suggests that humans are the only species whose brains and language are sophisticated enough to develop anything which we could define as cultural ideology. The most crucial thing is that no other animals are interested in each others thoughts to the extent that humans are. At Babel’s Dawn (a fascinating blog about the origins of speech), Edmund Blair Bolles talks about how experiments with chimpanzees have shown that they can be taught sign language in order to communicate with humans, but they show very little interest in communicating with each other.

This raises an interesting question about what happens when humans (who are obsessed with gender) interact with animals (who are probably incapable of knowing anything about gender). Whether they like it or not, animals are used and influenced by humans in many different ways. Since gender has had a huge influence on how humans perceive their own bodies, it might also be expected to influence how they perceive animals. The sex of animals is a biological fact, and this necessarily influences how they are used by humans. For example, you can’t milk a bull, and a cock can’t lay eggs. What I’m aiming to find out is whether it goes further than that. How far were human perceptions and uses of animals influenced by human gender ideology? Were there any roles which could have been performed equally well by either sex, but which were performed mostly or exclusively by one sex?

War is one of the most gendered aspects of human culture. Joshua Goldstein found that war has occurred in nearly every human culture ever recorded, and that women have mostly been excluded from combat roles in a way which is not consistent with sexual dimorphism. This makes war a useful case study for the relationship between animal sex and human gender. Were stallions better war horses than mares, or did the drill books just reflect the dominant gender ideology? Were mares used in practice because they were just as good as stallions, or because there weren’t enough stallions?

The situation is complicated by the common practice of castrating male horses. While there might be some parallels with human eunuchs, geldings were, and are, more numerous. In some ways, geldings are an artificially created third sex, which raises the question of whether they were considered male or not male, and where they would be placed on the chain of being.

This project will make use of the administrative records, drill books, and battle reports which I’ve been familiar with for a long time, but it also involves moving into cultural history and literary criticism. Some literary critics have already started looking at animals and gender in literature (for example, Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals, Palgrave, New York, 2002), but this has mostly focused on how animals were used as metaphors for human gender. I’ll be concentrating more on how humans imagined the animals themselves, which will mean dealing with some difficult questions about metaphors and reality. If literary texts consistently portray war horses as male and not female, that would suggest a dominant ideology at work. This might allow me to avoid the difficult question of author’s intentions, because if the idea is ubiquitous is doesn’t necessarily matter whether it entered the text consciously or unconsciously. If it can be shown that humans imposed their own gender ideology onto animals, that might make it easier to draw a line between sex and gender, and demonstrate how arbitrary gender is.

Right now I’m just trying to get my plans together, and thinking about methodology and sources. I’m heading into unknown territory with this research. It might change direction, or it might not work out at all, but I’m determined to try. At the very least it should be useful experience, and even if I don’t end up with anything worth publishing in print, there should be some interesting blog posts along the way.

Bibliography

1. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
2. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
3. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1992).