Die Ordnung der Geschlechter: Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen und das Weib, 1750-1850

The author argues that from the Enlightenment to the middle of the 19th century a codification of the understanding of the two sexes happened that was constitutive for cultural modernity. In the second half of the 18th century, gender roles were still discussed by men and women in connection with politics and society. But then male resistance began to form. Parallel to a wave of popular writings on the “real destiny of women”, the emerging anthropology shifted the problem of gender differences from society to “nature”. In addition to the human sciences, the science of women arose. The doctors became the new "priests of nature", especially the experts on women as natural beings. Around the middle of the 19th century, the "gender difference" as a topic of political disputes has completely disappeared. In an abstruse code of scientific knowledge about the biology of women, it has degenerated into a purely anatomical fact in the textbooks of the newly emerging gynecology.