2 Historical Roots of Contemporary Theory There is no widely accepted framework for understanding the facts set out in chapter 1.There are several conflicting ways of looking at them.The aim of the next three chapters is to come to grips with these approaches and derive from them a systematic basis for understanding gender. The first step is to ask where they eame from and how they gained their present shape.The outline in this chapter is far from being a complete history of ideas.That would be a massive undertaking in its own right.Yet we need some kind of historical framework,on the principle that social theory never occurs in a vacuum.It must always be understood,and evaluated,as itself a practice with a context. Secular Morality Social-scientific theories of gender are a Western invention,as far as I know,and definitely a modern one.Other civilizations have had their own ways of dealing with human sexuality and the relations between the sexes.As Indian eroticism and Chinese family codes illustrate,these can be as sophisticated and elaborate as anything the West has created.But they are different kinds of cultural formation. Nor was this perspective part of European culture from the start.Sex and gender in the writings of medieval and Reformation intellectuals were,by and large,items in a debate about the moral relationships among men,women and God.Such a framework