Bitchy History - Gender is a Scam - Part I： The Invention of Woman

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Bitchy History, where we cut through the myths and nostalgia to get to the raw, 1.00

00:00:17.360 unvarnished truth about the past. With sharp analysis, a feminist lens, and just the right 0.99

00:00:22.640 amount of bitchiness, we're here to show you that history isn't just something to study, 0.97

00:00:26.300 it's something to question. Let's get started. 1.00

00:00:30.000 Welcome back to Bitchy History, the podcast where we cheerfully dismantle all the things 1.00

00:00:36.480 you thought were just natural, from gender roles to political systems, and replace them 1.00

00:00:41.160 with the ugly truth. They were made up, usually by men with too much time on their hands and

00:00:46.040 reinforced by institutions that absolutely did not have women's best interests at heart.

00:00:51.360 Today we are kicking off a new arc for the show, Inventing Womanhood. Because here's

00:00:55.840 the deal. Woman isn't some eternal, unchanging identity handed down from biology like eye color 1.00

00:01:01.800 or bone density. No, women and men, too, for that matter, is a category that society's constructed, 0.96

00:01:09.600 enforced, and policed. And those definitions have changed wildly across time and place.

00:01:14.740 If gender were truly biological, then it would look the same in 13th century Florence,

00:01:19.500 Han Dynasty China, and Victorian London, and in your local Walmart parking lot. But it doesn't. 0.89

00:01:25.520 Gender changes. Gender adapts. Gender is rewritten as often as Hollywood reboots Spider-Man. 1.00

00:01:31.800 Take the colors pink and blue. Today, pink is a girl, blue is a boy. It's on baby shower 0.61

00:01:37.260 invitations, gender reveal cakes, and Target's toddler aisle. But go back a few centuries and

00:01:42.260 you'll find Jesus himself, yes, the Christ child, halo and all, painted in pink robes in the 1280s.

00:01:48.840 Or Baron de Holbeck, Enlightenment philosopher, striking a perfectly serious portrait in 1766

00:01:54.360 wearing rosy tones. Neither the painter Duccio nor de Holbeck was signaling feminine energy.

00:02:00.800 In fact, they were wearing what was considered to be a strong masculine color for the time.

00:02:06.080 So what happened? How did pink go from baby boy bold to baby girl delicate?

00:02:11.860 Why have everyone from priests to philosophers to politicians been continuously rewriting what

00:02:17.460 it means to be a woman? And what does it say about our supposedly natural categories when

00:02:22.120 they've been built, torn down, and rebuilt again like a bad HGTV series. Today we are going to dig

00:02:28.320 into the invention of gender categories, how clothing, religion, and philosophy constructed

00:02:32.720 the idea of being a woman. And yeah, we're going to be pretty bitchy about it, because you deserve 0.99

00:02:38.200 to hear something better than it's just biology. So let's start with the low-hanging fruit,

00:02:44.260 the pink and blue colors. Because if anything screams socially constructed nonsense, it's the

00:02:49.320 fact that pink, today's international symbol of girlhood, used to be the symbol for manliness.

00:02:54.960 Before the 19th century, nobody cared about pink or blue as a seriously gendered issue for infants.

00:03:00.660 In fact, nobody really cared about color in children's clothing at all. Babies and toddlers

00:03:04.920 were usually dressed almost identically, regardless of sex, usually in white dresses or something

00:03:10.780 similar. Why? Practicality. Plain cotton or linen could be bleached and cleaned much more easily

00:03:17.060 than any other color. Dresses were adjustable. They had hymns that could be let down as a child

00:03:22.240 grew. Parents weren't out here trying to make a political statement. They were just trying to

00:03:26.220 keep their messy little chaos goblins closed in something that could be easily washed.

00:03:30.960 The British Library reminds us that children didn't really start wearing more gender-specific

00:03:34.960 clothing until around six or seven years old, when they were a little less likely to destroy

00:03:40.120 everything they wore in the mud. Up until then, boys and girls were essentially indistinguishable

00:03:45.240 in their very bleach-friendly outfits. 0.89

00:03:47.620 So the next time someone tells you it's just natural to put a baby girl in pink, 0.85

00:03:51.420 picture your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents

00:03:53.940 dressing every toddler like a tiny Victorian poltergeist.

00:03:57.500 By the mid-19th century, things began to change.

00:04:00.440 Enter the rise of mass-produced children's clothing and, crucially, mass advertising.

00:04:05.640 This is when colors started getting marketed as gender-coded.

00:04:09.240 But here's the kicker.

00:04:10.060 It wasn't the way you think.

00:04:11.600 In fact, pink was for boys and blue was for girls.

00:04:14.180 A 1918 issue of Earnshaw's Infants Department, a trade publication, explained it like this.

00:04:19.780 The generally accepted rule is pink for boys and blue for girls.

00:04:23.740 Why? Because pink, as a lighter version of red, was associated with strength, war, and masculinity.

00:04:30.280 Blue, meanwhile, was linked to the Virgin Mary, who was traditionally depicted in soft blue robes,

00:04:35.680 making the color feminine, delicate, and spiritual.

00:04:38.840 Imagine explaining that to someone today at a gender reveal party.

00:04:42.240 Actually, Karen, pink is for your son because it's a baby-sized version of blood and fire.

00:04:46.940 Blue is for your daughter because the Virgin Mary wore it.

00:04:49.220 Now, put down the confetti cannon before you start another forest fire.

00:04:52.780 So when did pink switch teams? 1.00

00:04:55.380 For that, we need to fast forward to post-World War II America. 1.00

00:04:59.080 During the war, women had been wearing overalls, factory uniforms, military gear, in fact. 0.88

00:05:05.160 Fashion was practical and androgynous because bombs were dropping

00:05:08.380 and no one was worried about whether their lipstick matched their shoes.

00:05:11.760 That said, later on in this series, we will be talking about the fact that people did

00:05:16.720 care about your lipstick matching your shoes during the war.

00:05:21.640 It's a weird period.

00:05:23.360 That's not to say that women weren't encouraged to look their best to remind men what they 0.95

00:05:27.180 were fighting for, but no one expected women to rivet something while wearing a frilly

00:05:31.200 dress. 1.00

00:05:32.160 But once the war ended, society wanted to shove women back into the home, and what better 1.00

00:05:36.660 way to do it than by reinventing femininity? 1.00

00:05:40.000 Enter Mamie Eisenhower, First Lady of the United States. 1.00

00:05:44.040 Mamie adored the color pink. 1.00

00:05:46.100 It matched her skin tone and her blue eyes. 1.00

00:05:48.740 She looked great in it.

00:05:49.840 At Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 inauguration, she wore a rhinestone-studded pale pink ball gown with opera gloves.

00:05:56.960 The message could not have been clearer.

00:05:58.880 Rosie the Riveter could feel free to pack up her denim. 0.98

00:06:01.960 Femininity was back, and it was a blushing color. 0.99

00:06:05.760 Mamie became so associated with pink that she was dubbed the mother of pink. 0.97

00:06:10.320 Advertisers jumped on the trend like a rabid TikTok influencer. 1.00

00:06:13.960 Pink kitchens, pink bathrooms, pink cotton balls.

00:06:16.760 Pond's cold cream was sold in pink compacts. 1.00

00:06:19.500 Even sanitary napkins were dyed pink so women could, you know, 0.98

00:06:22.860 feel dainty while they were menstruating. 0.60

00:06:24.820 Because nothing says, I don't get cramps, like pink-colored Kotex. 0.97

00:06:30.340 Mamie herself played into the stereotype with lines like,

00:06:33.160 Ike runs the country, I turn the pork chops, which is both horrifying and deeply on brand for the 0.76

00:06:39.120 1950s. Hollywood also helped cement the pink takeover. In the 1957 film Funny Face, fashion 0.98

00:06:46.060 editor Maggie Prescott, based on real-life Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, belts out the anthem Think

00:06:52.300 Pink, urging women everywhere to embrace the color. Prescott even sings about banishing blue and

00:06:57.940 burning black, two colors that, incidentally, women had worn in abundance during wartime as

00:07:03.320 morning clothing and denim workwear. But tell her if she's got to think. Think, think, face.

00:07:09.140 Think, think, face. Think, face, do. Think, face, do.

00:07:27.940 Some women use the color as a type of armor. Donna Mae Mims, the first woman to win a Sports Car 1.00

00:07:33.240 Club of America championship in 1963, painted her helmet, her cars, and her jumpsuits pink. 0.68

00:07:39.160 She called herself the Pink Lady. Why? Because if she leaned into femininity,

00:07:43.120 she could compete against men without seeming too threatening. Historian Lynn Peril calls this

00:07:48.320 tactic pinkthink, using pink to signal harmlessness, then go out and smoke the competition. 0.99

00:07:54.700 Politicians do it, too. 1.00

00:07:55.940 Hillary Clinton, often accused of being too masculine, 1.00

00:07:58.920 appeared on the cover of People magazine in a bright pink jacket during her 2008 presidential run. 0.74

00:08:03.940 The jacket softened her image while she was literally campaigning

00:08:07.540 to break the highest-hardest glass ceiling exists.

00:08:11.460 Still haven't broken that one.

00:08:13.280 Even villains use pink strategically.

00:08:16.100 The plastics in Mean Girls declare,

00:08:18.020 on Wednesdays we wear pink, weaponizing color as social control. 0.99

00:08:22.400 Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter hides her authoritarian cruelty under frilly pink suits. 1.00

00:08:27.900 Pink isn't inherently soft or sweet, but it is a weaponized signal of it. 1.00

00:08:32.560 The lesson here? Color isn't biology, it's branding.

00:08:36.060 Pink has been the outfit of Jesus, a philosopher's choice, a first lady's aesthetic, a villain's camouflage, and a feminist politician's armor. 1.00

00:08:45.540 If gender were truly natural, pink wouldn't have spent the last thousand years 1.00

00:08:49.500 switching teams more often than a professional athlete. 0.60

00:08:52.580 So no, your baby girl isn't born loving pink.

00:08:55.780 She's born loving milk.

00:08:57.460 The rest is marketing. 1.00

00:08:59.460 If color coding reveals the surface-level nonsense of gender,

00:09:03.260 religion reveals its roots.

00:09:04.620 Because once you put patriarchy in the mouth of God, good luck arguing with that.

00:09:09.640 In Confucian thought, the universe itself was structured by yin and yang,

00:09:13.160 complementary forces meant to balance each other. Sounds great. Except yin got stuck with all the

00:09:18.480 worst adjectives. Yin was dark, passive, cold, and lowly. Guess who was yin? Yeah, women, obviously.

00:09:26.360 Yang, on the other hand, was bright, active, warm, noble. Yang represented men, of course.

00:09:32.040 Han Dynasty scholar Dong Zhanzu literally wrote, yang the venerable, yin the lowly. In other words,

00:09:38.240 the cosmos itself said that men were better. The Book of Changes laid out rules that a woman's 1.00

00:09:43.600 place was inside and a man's place was outside. Women were confined to the domestic inner sphere 1.00

00:09:48.900 while men controlled the outer sphere, not because of economics or politics, but because the universe 1.00

00:09:54.120 allegedly demanded it. So instead of patriarchy being a system of power, it was rebranded as a

00:09:59.900 cosmic balance, or as I like to call it, universal gaslighting. Of course, exceptions did exist.

00:10:06.080 Empress Wang Zetan became China's only female emperor in the Tang dynasty,

00:10:11.140 but she was treated as an anomaly, even a monstrosity in some ways.

00:10:15.380 Historians painted her as ruthless, unnatural, or scheming precisely because she disrupted their whole script of the yin and yang. 0.98

00:10:23.000 Patriarchy only works if outliers get labeled as freaks. 0.96

00:10:27.340 Meanwhile, in the West, Christianity was busy running its own gender scam. 1.00

00:10:31.460 And spoiler, it wasn't great for Eve.

00:10:34.180 Tertullian, a church father in the 3rd century, called women the devil's gateway.

00:10:38.400 Why? 0.99

00:10:39.120 Because Eve ate the fruit, tempted Adam, and according to him, caused the fall of mankind.

00:10:43.920 Thanks, Eve. 0.91

00:10:44.800 Because you had a snack, every woman after you gets blamed for sin, suffering, and mortality. 0.61

00:10:49.920 Augustine doubled down, teaching that women were spiritually weaker, naturally subordinate,

00:10:54.540 and needed male authority to guide them.

00:10:56.980 And St. Paul's letters didn't help. 1.00

00:10:59.040 I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man. 1.00

00:11:02.060 She must be quiet. 1.00

00:11:03.420 That verse has been quoted for hundreds of years to justify silencing women in both the church 0.98

00:11:07.560 and politics. This wasn't just about pews. It shaped law, education, and daily life. Women

00:11:13.380 were barred from the priesthood, kept from higher learning, and shamed for being too

00:11:17.100 independent. Eve eats one piece of fruit and suddenly every woman in history has to pay for 1.00

00:11:22.280 it. Meanwhile, Adam also ate the fruit, but apparently men get to blame that one on peer

00:11:27.200 pressure. Medieval sermons targeted women for vanity, gossip, lust, portraying them as walking 1.00

00:11:33.480 sin factories. And if you think this theology is just dusty history, think again. Modern

00:11:38.620 complementarian churches still use Eve to argue against female pastors and leadership.

00:11:44.020 In the medieval Islamic world, jurists faced a tricky question. What about people who didn't

00:11:48.780 fit neatly into the context of man or woman? Islamic law recognized a category that roughly

00:11:55.280 it was equivalent to being intersex. And here's the key. The legal system needed to slot every 0.96

00:12:00.940 person into a gendered role because inheritance, marriage, and prayer rituals depended on it. 0.88

00:12:06.120 So jurists developed elaborate rules to decide whether someone should count as male or female,

00:12:11.380 sometimes based on physical signs, sometimes based on behavior. The results? Even when reality

00:12:16.720 showed that human sex didn't always fit into two neat boxes, the law worked overtime to shove

00:12:22.300 people into them. Congratulations, your body is complicated, but our paperwork only has two 1.00

00:12:27.640 checkboxes. Better luck next time. By the time we get to Greek philosophy and Enlightenment thinkers,

00:12:33.600 gender policing had new branding. Reason versus nature. Aristotle wrote in Generation of Animals 0.99

00:12:40.340 that women were essentially incomplete men, misbegotten males. He thought the male body 0.87

00:12:45.900 was the perfect form and the female body was a failed attempt. Women contributed matter in 1.00

00:12:50.960 reproduction, men contributed the form and soul. Without men, women were just incomplete vessels. 0.99

00:12:57.000 Imagine being so committed to misogyny that you look at half the population and say, 1.00

00:13:01.140 looks like a factory defect to me. Fast forward to the Enlightenment. Philosophers are busy writing

00:13:07.700 about liberty, equality, and universal rights. Except when it comes to women. Rousseau in Emile, 0.98

00:13:13.760 1762, laid out his vision of education. Boys should be trained in reason, independence,

00:13:18.920 and civic virtue. Girls, they should be educated to please and serve men. Their role was to charm,

00:13:24.720 to soothe, to reinforce male authority. So in the same breath that Enlightenment thinkers declared

00:13:30.180 all men are created equal, they invented new justifications for why women were naturally

00:13:35.120 excluded from the category of universal man. By the 19th century, these ideas fused with

00:13:41.160 imperialism and race. Gail Betterman shows how manliness became a marker of civilization itself.

00:13:46.700 White middle-class men claimed their virility, intellect, and self-control proved their 0.58

00:13:52.040 superiority, not just over women, but over all colonized peoples. The binary between man and 0.66

00:13:57.960 woman mirrored the same binary between civilized and savage. By the time the 19th century rolled

00:14:04.460 around, patriarchy had already been dressed up in religious robes, cosmic philosophy,

00:14:09.080 and enlightenment contradictions. But the Victorians managed to weaponize science itself.

00:14:14.820 They didn't just say women belonged in the home because Eve sinned 0.96

00:14:17.700 or because Aristotle thought they were defective.

00:14:20.180 They brought out microscopes, calipers, and medical textbooks 1.00

00:14:23.360 and announced with a straight face that biology proved that women belonged in the home. 1.00

00:14:29.020 Victorian Britain was obsessed with dividing the world into categories, 1.00

00:14:32.260 male, female, public, private, civilized, savage.

00:14:35.660 Gender wasn't just an identity, it was a cornerstone of the social order. 0.78

00:14:39.120 And the proof that this order was natural was about to get a lab coat makeover. 0.86

00:14:44.000 Men with calipers and medical titles would soon claim to measure women into their proper place, 0.69

00:14:49.280 but the full story for that is in our next episode.

00:14:52.460 Victorian society built an entire ideology out of pseudoscience, the doctrine of separate spheres.

00:14:58.200 Men were designed for the public sphere, politics, business, academia, while women were just 0.92

00:15:03.300 naturally suited for the private sphere, the home. This wasn't just cultural, it was reinforced 0.69

00:15:08.660 legally and architecturally. Houses were designed with male studies for intellect and female 0.51

00:15:13.940 parlors for hospitality. One room was for thinking, the other was for pouring tea. 1.00

00:15:19.300 The British Academy has shown how this ideology was enforced, not just culturally but legally. 0.89

00:15:24.540 Married women lost their legal identity under the concept of coverture, which I've done an

00:15:28.760 entire episode on way back in the series. They couldn't own property in their own right. Their 1.00

00:15:34.180 duty was to be the moral guardians, mothers, and wives. The angel in the house became the ideal,

00:15:39.860 Pure, selfless, moral, endlessly sacrificing. 0.82

00:15:43.000 And if you didn't fit the angelic mood, you were a fallen woman, a social problem, a scandal.

00:15:48.160 The system was self-perpetuating. 0.99

00:15:50.180 Science claimed that women were naturally domestic. 1.00

00:15:52.920 Society forced them into domestic roles. 1.00

00:15:54.840 And then science pointed at women in domestic roles and said, see, nature wins again. 0.86

00:15:59.380 It was a loop. 0.50

00:16:00.740 And this was a scam with global implications. 1.00

00:16:03.560 Gender became a template for empire. 0.99

00:16:05.840 Victorians claimed women were naturally submissive. 0.90

00:16:08.400 and they also claimed that non-Europeans were the same, childlike, irrational, effeminate. 0.94

00:16:14.100 Colonized men are cast as effeminate, colonized women were cast as hypersexual. It was the same 0.96

00:16:19.560 trick repeating, naturalizing white male hierarchy by declaring it biologically inevitable.

00:16:25.680 Of course, not everyone bought into it. Writers like John Stuart Mill argued for women's rights.

00:16:30.640 Early feminists pointed out the absurdity of claiming women were too delicate for intellectual 0.97

00:16:34.720 labor when poor women were working in factories, fields, and households the entire time. But the 0.99

00:16:40.100 weight of science was heavy, and it reinforced cultural norms that we're still dealing with

00:16:44.680 today. The British Library makes it clear. Women were portrayed as pure, moral, and domestic,

00:16:50.320 not because they always were, but because society demanded it. Literature, sermons,

00:16:54.800 magazines all hammered this idea into place. Women who strayed from it, working-class women, 0.99

00:17:00.020 unmarried women, women in public life, were treated as deviants. And here's the ridiculous 0.97

00:17:05.220 part. For all their obsession with women's supposed fragility, Victorian men relied on women to keep 0.95

00:17:11.100 their entire system running. Women managed the households, raised the children, upheld the moral 0.95

00:17:16.420 standards, and in many cases still worked outside the home. Of course, by the late 19th century,

00:17:22.100 this ideology was under strain. The rise of women's suffrage movements, women entering universities, 1.00

00:17:27.300 and challenges to imperialism in general exposed cracks in the system. 0.90

00:17:32.100 But instead of admitting gender was a human construct,

00:17:35.040 defenders doubled down.

00:17:36.440 They insisted that the very survival of civilization

00:17:39.060 depended on keeping men and women in their natural roles. 0.99

00:17:42.900 And doesn't that sound familiar? 0.97

00:17:44.620 Even today, when conservatives rail against gender ideology,

00:17:48.160 they're replaying the same exact Victorian panic.

00:17:51.520 Back then, it was the womb shriveling from too much math.

00:17:54.420 Today, it's society collapsing if someone puts their pronouns in an email signature.

00:17:59.000 The script hasn't changed, it's just been updated with a few new costumes.

00:18:02.860 So let's pause here.

00:18:04.000 We've traced the invention of gender categories from colors to cosmic philosophy,

00:18:08.480 from Eve to Aristotle, and now into the Victorian obsession with science and spheres.

00:18:13.440 Each step claimed to reveal the truth of womanhood,

00:18:16.140 but each step was simply reshaping the scam to fit the needs of men at the time. 0.68

00:18:20.900 In our next episode, we will be diving into the full-blown age of scientific policing.

00:18:25.520 We'll look at how medicine handled intersex bodies, how sex testing in sports tried to enforce binaries,

00:18:31.100 and how thinkers like Judith Butler blew up the myth of natural categories.

00:18:35.580 We'll see how the panic over gender has repeated itself every time the system is challenged. 0.87

00:18:40.640 Because here's the truth.

00:18:41.960 Gender is not timeless. It's fragile.

00:18:44.380 It needs constant reinforcement through sermons, laws, pseudoscience, and pink kitchen sets.

00:18:49.560 because if it weren't propped up, it might just collapse under its own set of contradictions.

00:18:54.660 And if that's not the definition of a scam, I don't know what is. 1.00

00:19:01.240 That's it for this episode of Bitchy History. If you enjoyed the show, don't keep it to yourself. 0.90

00:19:06.080 Subscribe, review, and share it with someone who loves history as much as we do.

00:19:10.280 Until next time, stay curious and keep questioning the world around you.

00:19:14.640 History. History. History. History.

00:19:17.680 History.

00:19:18.080 Wanna be a tripe?

00:19:48.080 Thank you.

00:20:18.080 Thank you.

00:20:48.080 Thank you.

00:21:18.080 Thank you.

00:21:48.080 Thank you.

00:22:18.080 Thank you.

00:22:48.080 Thank you.

00:23:18.080 Thank you.

Bitchy History - October 26, 2025

Gender is a Scam - Part I： The Invention of Woman

Episode Stats

Transcript