Gender History Research Paper

1. From Women’s History To Gender History

The historical study of women, which became a vital field of scholarly inquiry during the 1960s, first sought to recover the ways in which women participated in and were excluded from processes of social transformations and political change. The empirical investigation of the private (familial, sexual) and public (political) inequality of women in past societies drove the first decade of feminist social science. From its inception, women’s history had a dual character: its practitioners were historians, trained and employed in history faculties, but the arenas of debate that shaped their inquiry, paradigms and methodologies were most often housed in interdisciplinary programs, such as women’s studies.

In this first phase of women’s history studies, sex and class often figured as parallel forms of oppression: the female sex was viewed as a subordinate class, subjugated by a dominant class of men. In feminist scholarship the notion of patriarchy signaled a shifting understanding of sexual exploitation as the primary form of women’s oppression (see, e.g., Rubin 1975, Eisenstein 1978). Taking patriarchy as a hierarchical sexual order, women’s historians located its origins in ‘the private family’ and sought to examine the ways in which it was reproduced in social modes of production, divisions of labor, and property relations (Kelly 1976). The examination of the origins and practices of patriarchal structures and ideologies, and the recovery of the lost stories of female actors and women’s agency, significantly expanded the scope of scholarship on women and family, women and labor, social policy and social movements, and elevated ‘sex’ to a keyword of social analysis. Yet in furnishing a more complete rendering of the contemporary and past societies, the pioneering work of women’s history also revealed the limitations of the keyword ‘sex.’ Unitary analytical categories, such as those of ‘woman’ ‘women’ and ‘man’ ‘men,’ were based on fixed, rather than historically or socially variable, notions of biological sex, thus creating a cohesive history of the oppression of women that overlooked differences of race, class, ethnicity, and sexual preference. Further, the emphasis on the patriarchal oppression of women by men meant not only that women formed a homogeneous category, but also that they were most often studied in isolation from men, leading to a fragmented and partial understanding of the workings of sexual difference in society (Davis 1976).

As sex became a crucial category of social analysis in the 1970s, its impact on other keywords of social analysis, such as class or race, became a topic of intensive debate among social scientists. Labor historians and political theorists often attempted to fit women into prevalent notions of class, some by arguing that women formed a separate or parallel class of their own, others by examining the ways in which (female) gender presented an obstacle to the formation of cohesive classes. Still others circumvented the dilemma of ‘sex and class’ by ascribing to women the same class position, identity, and interests as those of their fathers, or husbands. Feminist historian Joan Gadol Kelly sought to transcend this theoretical impasse by formulating a ‘doubled vision’ of society, one that emphasized the ways in which both men and women’s identities of class were shaped by sex and class (Kelly 1979). In emphasizing the inextricable links between sex and class, women’s history studies also indisputably widened the scope of the political to include family and household, bodies and sexualities— all once considered as belonging to the sphere of the ‘private.’

Joan Kelly’s formulation of this doubled vision of society marks the point at which the concept of gender came into currency as feminist scholarship turned its attention to the ways in which ideologies, norms, and symbolic systems shaped identities, social institutions, and social relations. The editors of the pioneering collection, Sex and Class in Women’s History (Newton et al. 1983), for example, noted that they employed gender in order to understand the systematic ways in which sex differences cut through society and culture and conferred inequality upon women. This formulation makes it clear that even as ‘gender’ began to emerge from women’s history studies in the early 1980s, ‘women’ and ‘gender’ continued to be used as virtually interchangeable terms and scholarship on women continued to provide a foundation for study of gender in most fields (e.g., Hausen and Wunder 1992).

The intellectual forces driving the shift from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ were multiple. Despite the achievements of nearly two decades of accumulated scholarship in women’s history, the overarching narratives of progress, the chronological and conceptual framings of historical change, remained unshaken. While feminist historians had delivered powerful critiques of the public private dualism, widening the scope of the political to include family and household, bodies and sexualities, and had successfully dissolved the sex/gender distinction as well, the binary pairings of home/factory, production reproduction and production/consumption remained tenaciously in place. As feminist historians sought, empirically and theoretically, to overcome or dissolve these dualisms, they began to pose more fundamental challenges to established chronologies, categories and theories of social transformation (Kelly 1984).

The dissatisfaction with biological essentialism as an explanation of sexual inequality, for example, focused new attention on the power of language—of discourses—to construct these inequalities socially and to anchor them in social practices and institutions. The work of analytically distinguishing gender from sex also took place in a more public context, namely in the arenas of debate about ‘identity politics’ in the USA and Britain, in which once-cohesive ethnic, racial, national or sexual identities were increasingly understood as multiple, mutable, even contradictory. The context for a redefinition of gender became broader as race also came to be viewed as a social construction rather than a genotypic or phenotypic form of difference. At the same time, the unitary category ‘woman’ began to break down, as historians of race, particularly in the USA, castigated feminists for the false homogenizing of women and patriarchal oppression. Emphasizing the inextricability of gender and racial identities, feminist scholars of race argued that this category could only be dissolved by bringing race more centrally into the analysis of power (Higginbotham 1992). Feminist scholars of Western empires approached the history of white women’s feminism as implicated in imperial ideologies, institutions, and practices. They called upon historians of white women’s oppression to confront the racist, nationalist, and imperialist legacies of Western feminism (Amos and Parmar 1984).

2. The Turn To Gender History

Although a shift from women to gender was already well underway by the mid-1980s, the publication of Joan Scott’s essay Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis (Scott 1986), marks the turning point at which the two terms became distinct in the field of history studies. In the Anglo-Saxon academy the turn to gender as a cultural, linguistic, or discursive construct took place within a broader paradigm shift known as ‘the linguistic turn’ in the social sciences. The linguistic turn, a catch-all phrase representing a new receptivity of social scientists towards poststructuralist literary criticism, linguistic theory, and philosophy, as well as cultural and symbolic anthropology, signaled a new view of language as constituting historical events and human consciousness rather than as simply reflecting social reality (Toews 1987, Canning 1994). Scott’s article, together with her essay collection, Gender and the Politics of History (Scott 1988), made explicit the theoretical innovation of gender, summoning ‘mainstream’ historians to consider gender as an essential category of historical analysis and unleashing a torrent of controversy, not least in the fields of women’s studies and women’s history.

At the same time Denise Riley (1988) interrogated the category ‘woman,’ noting its inherent and historically founded instability and pointing toward feminism as precisely the site at which that instability was systematically contested, taken apart and reconstructed. In this sense the turn to gender dissolved some of the stalwart categories of women’s history, including both ‘woman’/‘women’ and feminism, with ‘experience,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘agency,’ soon to follow. Furthermore, the breakdown of the category ‘woman’ and the more explicit formulation of gender as relational, as a category and process by which femininity and masculinity are mutually constituted, spurred the opening of gender history towards a more serious study of masculinity.

In the USA and Britain, feminist scholars of race also intervened at this juncture with powerful critiques of the categories and practices of women’s history. Defining race as a ‘metalanguage,’ as the ‘ultimate trope of difference,’ African–American critics explicated the powerful effects of race on the construction and representation of gender, class, and sexuality. Understanding race as a ‘double-voiced discourse’ revealed the ways in which it shaped both the oppression and self-representation of minorities (Higginbotham 1992).

3. Controversies And Debated In Gender History

Gender gained an analytic status of its own first by severing the links between sex-gender and biology and then by freeing it from the remnants of Marxism that hinged the production of gender to changing economic structures (Scott 1986). This process necessitated not only the dismantling of familiar concepts, but also the exploration of new methodologies that would illuminate the workings of language and symbols and their dissemination throughout society and culture. Feminist historians also debated the implications of extending gender historical inquiry to masculinity and men. Some of the controversy about these questions took place as an integral part of the debates among social historians on the ‘linguistic turn,’ while others were more specifically framed by the previous practices and boundaries of women’s history. Historians of women feared, for example, that studying gender as a cultural, discursive, or linguistic construction in which masculinity and femininity are relationally and mutually constituted, would render female actors and women’s agency invisible and obscure male oppression of women, ultimately producing a gender-neutral historical discourse (Bock 1991). Others suspected that the study of masculinity, while discovering the ways in which ideals of manliness were imposed upon men, might shift attention away from men’s participation in those institutions and practices that oppressed women.

3.1 Gender And The Keywords Of Social Analysis

The turn to gender, like all theoretical and methodological innovations, was an uneven and protracted process, as different fields and national scholarly arenas manifested widely differing responses to this challenge. The extent to which methodologies, concepts, and theories were redefined to meet this challenge also varies across these divergent contexts. In some cases women’s history was simply renamed ‘gender history,’ leading to a protracted phase of interchangeability of the two without significant changes in concepts or methodologies. In other national contexts where the work of recovering the absent female subjects began later, historical research on women continues to provide the foundation for a more explicitly theoretical engagement with gender. In still other settings, where the turn to gender history coincided with the rediscovery of masculinity and men, gender history denotes a dual engagement with the histories of both masculinity and femininity.

While the study of women once sought to fit female subjects into existing categories of social analysis, the turn to gender prompted more fundamental critiques, expanded meanings, and redefinitions of the keywords of social analysis. The concept of ‘class,’ for example, was at the heart of debates about both gender and the linguistic turn, leading some feminist scholars to call for an emancipation from class as a ‘privileged signifier of social relations and their political representations’ (Alexander 1984), while others have analyzed both middle-class (Davidoff and Hall 1987) and working-class formation (Clark 1995) as processes of differentiation in which gender is always centrally implicated. Eschewing models of class formation that seek to link economic, social, cultural, and political levels or stages of development, others have analyzed class as political language, emphasizing the significance of gender in the process of assigning and contesting the contingent meanings of class (Scott 1988, Sewell 1990, Canning 1992).

Other social-scientific terms, like ‘public sphere’ (Fraser 1992, Ryan 1992), ‘civil society’ (Pateman 1988, Hull 1996), and more recently, ‘citizenship’ (Lister 1997) have also been the site of fruitful rethinking by scholars of gender. Similar to the location of class in socioeconomic structures, citizenship is embedded in legal and constitutional frame-works and theories of state and nation formation. Gender scholarship on citizenship has critiqued models of citizenship as a progressive process of acquisition of civil, political and social rights, as outlined, for example, in T. H. Marshall’s classic, Citizenship and Social Class (1950). New considerations of the gender dimensions of this term have analyzed citizenship as a process, as a set of claims upon the state and public sphere rather than as a historically fixed outcome or legal status. The historical meanings of citizenship can thus be understood to encompass not only those who possess citizenship rights, but also those excluded from them.

3.2 Gender, Sexuality, Body

Other key terms in the vocabulary of interdisciplinary gender studies, which were redefined in the course of the paradigm shift from women to gender, are those of ‘sexuality’ and ‘body.’ In addition to critiquing and redefining keywords of social and historical analysis, such as class and citizenship, the turn to gender also generated new waves of scholarship on topics which had been submerged within the complex of women and sex and which came into their own once gender had been analytically distinguished from sexuality and body.

Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, historians sought to analyze the historically specific domains in which sexualities were produced, such as the systems of medical knowledge and state moral regulation that defined both normal and deviant sexuality in nineteenth-century Europe, dispersing these definitions throughout the institutions of state and social reform (Mort 1987). In this sense, it is possible to view sexuality as a more specific site of definition, intervention and experience than gender. A new emphasis on the importance of desire in the articulation of sexuality suggested that sexuality might be understood as a site of agency which was quite distinct from gender. Yet Judith Butler (1990) posited gender as lived, at least in part, through sexuality, as embodied and performed through the production and ascription of sexualities. In recent years, studies of homosexualities have raised new questions about the implications of transgressive sexualities for the study of gender, suggesting that they disrupt gender categories by breaking up the neat opposition of male female, masculine/feminine and by unmasking ‘the epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality’ (Butler 1990, Puff 1998).

‘Body,’ the term in the vocabulary of gender that was most deeply embedded in biologism and essentialism, was inextricably linked to sex before the ‘linguistic turn’ began to disentangle these terms. During the first wave of women’s studies, the body had been the foundation for unities and shared experiences of women. The ‘discursivation’ of the body, which took place in the course of the ‘linguistic turn,’ not only detached the body from unchanging notions of physical difference, but also examined bodies as sites of inscription—as instruments of changing cultural meanings. While the advent of the discursive body delivered the final blow to biological determinism, it also raised new questions about the particular embodiedness or bodily mediation of female experiences that remained central in feminist historical research (e.g., Duden 1991). In the debates of the early 1990s about the relationship between discourse and experience, for example, the body became a litmus test of this relationship (Butler 1993, Bynum 1995).

In the course of the 1990s, then, body history became a prolific offshoot of gender history. Both theoretical debate and empirical research in the field have shifted recent discussions towards exploration of the process of embodiment, which takes bodies as sites of mediation between constructions of the body and its materialized experiences (pain, birth, death, illness, dismemberment) and suggests new frameworks for examining the ways in which bodies are lived, experienced and acted upon by the subject and the social collectivity (Grosz 1994, Gatens 1996).

While the turn to the concept of gender spawned new waves of historical scholarship on sexualities and bodies, gender history later expanded the scope of its inquiry to two new fields of historical inquiry: the history of consumption and history of empires. The study of consumption in Western societies was invigorated in part by the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, which made clear the ways in which consumption, as well as production, structure capitalist societies. Although consumption has historically been identified with femininity, Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes (1987) argued convincingly that domesticity, the ideology of the British middle classes, was vested in complex and elaborate practices of consumption and display. With gender as a framing concept, the historical study of consumption has expanded in recent years to encompass analysis of a social and cultural formation— consumer society—through the lens of commodification, spectatorship, commercial exchange and welfare reforms, each of which can be analyzed in conjunction with the gender identities produced through these processes (DeGrazia and Furlough 1996). Throughout the 1990s gender and sexuality also had a central place in the history of empire and figured centrally in new understandings of nations, empires, and imperial social formation.

4. Current Issues And Future Directions

This brief survey of gender historical scholarship indicates that the concept of gender has successfully broadened and deepened the meanings of some of the keywords of historical analysis, forged new arenas of scholarly inquiry, and helped to refurbish epistemologies and methodologies of historical analysis. Gender history has moved from the periphery once occupied by the ‘herstory’ of early women’s history to the center in some historical fields, while in others it remains distant from the problems that define the field. The historical narrative of the French Revolution has been significantly transformed by gender scholarship, which went far beyond analyzing the exclusion of women from revolutionary citizenship during Jacobin rule to revise broader understandings of the crisis of state (e.g., Lynn Hunt’s notion of ‘family romance’), the emergence of the body politic, civil society, and notions of citizenship. The history of labor and labor movements, began to diminish in the late 1980s after two decades of field-defining scholarship, only to be significantly revived and recast through the wave of gender and labor scholarship of the midto late 1980s (Frader and Rose 1996). The histories of slavery in the antebellum South, of colonialism, empires, and postemancipation societies have been rewritten as scholars explore the ways in which gender inequalities underpinned racial and imperial dominance. Gender has become a vital part of new scholarship on the two world wars, including military history. Yet other fields, such as the histories of the Weimar Republic or the Third Reich, for example, remain immune to the impulses of gender, despite an impressive accumulation of research on both women and gender for both periods. Few would dispute that contests over masculinities and femininities are a crucial part of the post-World War I crisis of ‘bourgeois Europe.’ Yet in the historiography of Weimer Germany gender is meaningful mainly in those realms remote from high politics—realms as diverse as popular culture and sexual reform organizations. Nor has gender figured in the dramas of state, democracy, or the fragile social body of the 1920s. Recent scholarship on the Third Reich offers abundant evidence that the Nazis pursued, relentlessly and violently, a gender project, which was at the heart of the racial state they envisioned and built. But this knowledge does not significantly inform interpretations of the collapse of the Weimar Republic or the Nazis’ mobilization of German society and economy for war and genocide. This uneven reception of gender history in various fields will undoubtedly shape the dynamic of gender history in years to come.

The relationship of gender history to ‘mainstream’ history has been of growing concern to those who formulated its emergence from women’s history in the early 1980s. Joan Kelly’s three-pronged project of renovating categories, chronologies, and theories of social transformation explicitly aimed at rewriting historical metanarratives, as she sought to do in her own essays on the Renaissance. Given the accomplishments of feminist history in recasting categories of historical analysis, it is now important to assess the potential of gender history to reconstruct historical narratives and to produce new syntheses of historical events and processes (e.g., Hunt 1998). Several dilemmas remain regarding gender history and the historical metanarratives it set out to subvert: should, for example, the empirical and conceptual achievements of gender history be assimilated into existing metanarratives? Should they inspire the composition of new metanarratives or prompt the abandonment of metanarratives altogether? These questions can perhaps be resolved first by breaking these metanarratives into their composite parts and examining the singular moments of subversion and incorporation along the narrative thread. Either task—that of revising existing narratives or that of composing new ones—requires a certain kind of piecework in which historical changes are rearranged on time lines and brought into new relationship with one another.

Attention to the temporalities of gender history, and to how they fit or diverge from those of established metanarratives, has only recently become possible. The genealogy of gender might be traced back to the eighteenth century, when humanist notions of the individual were synonymous with masculinity. The embodiment and masculinization of the male citizen during the French Revolution also provided the stage upon which women staked their first claims for inclusion in the terms of both equality and difference. The extensive scholarship on women and gender in nineteenth-century Europe encompasses the history of a wide range of public feminisms and domestic ideologies, the emergence of ‘women’ as social category, of ‘women’s labor’ as a social question, and the dissemination of these ideologies and social categorizations, which redefined both femininity and masculinity, through the media of the emergent social and natural sciences. This suggests (a) that the history of nineteenth-century Europe could now be rewritten from the perspective of gender, and (b) that the temporality of gender history may not follow the political or social chronologies of existent metanarratives. A rethinking of twentieth-century history may uncover distinct temporalities of a different gender history, one in which gender norms and ideologies were ruptured at points of political and cultural crisis but not necessarily restored at moments of political reconstruction and stabilization. This trajectory of twentieth-century gender history may indeed help to explain its extraordinarily embodied violence. The work of aligning the temporalities of gender history with those inscribed in established historical metanarratives represents the first step towards a history that admits distinct temporalities and allows for dissonance within grand narratives.

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