What this kind of gender essentialism does, as other feminist scholars have also been at pains to point out, is ignore that women are also capable of cruelty and violence. Men, too, can be nurturing and creative. The “feminist recourse to an imaginary past needs to be cautious,” argues Butler. The qualities we define as “masculine” and “feminine” are shaped by social and cultural forces. There’s no basis for assuming that what sound suspiciously like nineteenth-century Western beliefs about gender were held by people living in completely different societies thousands of years ago.
