Gender and the Politics of History

Rating:
Summary: Foundational Work in Gender History
Review: Joan Scott's "Gender and the Politics of History" is one of the landmark books in the field of gender history. What is gender history, you ask? To a large degree, that's a question this book is trying to answer. This book can be regarded as an explanation of *what* gender history is (as Scott defines it, at any rate), why it's important, and how it can be done.

Essentially, the book is a set of collected essays organized around the idea of "gender and the politics of history". The first few essays are polemical/theoretical-- and in them, Scott puts forth her argument as to what gender is and why it's an important category of historical analysis. In many ways, these are the most important essays in this volume-- and I *highly* recommend them as a primer to folks who are interested in learning more about why historians are now talking about "gender". In a nutshell, Scott argues that that one of the most fundamenal ways in which people, in all times and plaes, have organized their intellectual/cultural/political world has been through the use of gender-- and that historians should treat gender as a fundamental category of historical analysis-- along with class, nationality, etc. In making this argument, Scott carefully distinguishes between what she calls "gender" (i.e. by which she means the network of arbitrary and socially constructed meanings, ideas, and assumptions that are attributed to masculinity and feminity *and* the way in which these meanings are deployed in everyday life and discourse) and mere "sex" (mere biological/anatomical distinction between men and women). This is subtle point, but it's an essential one-- and it has many important implications for Scott's view of gender history. Of especial note, it means that she understands writing about the history of gender to be a specific kind of intellectual/cultural history-- she is *not* talking about merely writing the social history of women. For her, gender is an idea that gets used in discourse because it involves very basic, and highly value-laden assumptions-- and the task of the gender historian is to understand *how* and *why* it has been used and changed. Scott thus sharply distinguishes what she would call "gender history" from the so-called "women's history" that was pioneered back in the 70s (whose main emphasis was to recount how women had been dominated and abused in the past and to correct the errors of previous historians who had ignored the contributions and experiences of women).

The remainder of the essays fall into three groups. One pair of essays are historiographical-- they are methodological critiques of two of the most seminal works on English labor history: E.P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" and Gareth Stedman Jones' "Languages of Class". Though Scott recognizes-- and lauds-- the contributions of both of these works, she also notes that they ignore the role that notions of gender played in the formation of working class identities and politics. She also suggests how their descriptions of the 19th century English class would be different if they *had* considered gender as a factor.

The next set of essays are case studies in how gender can be used to explore different issues pertaining to 19th century French labor history. While the actual arguments here aren't probably going to be interesting to anyone but other labor historians, these essays are more valuable as illustrations of how Scott's methodology can actually be used in practice. The variety of sources she uses in these essays (including several whose use of gendered categories is subtle) shows just how powerful, and useful, a tool that gender analysis can be in the writing of history (labor history, at any rate), regardless of the source material.

The final pair of essays are more concered with "historians" today than with the past. In one, Scott address the famed sexual discrimination trial against Sears in which both sides hired femal labor historians to testify about the history of sexual discrimination. In this, Scott shows how their own claims were shaped by notions of gender-- notions that they did not consciously articulate, but which seemed to lay in the background as unstated assumptions. The final essay has to do with how one might try to deconstruct the "false opposition" that our own contemporary value system has established between the notions of equality and difference-- particularly in the field of legal rights and opportunities.

Overall, this is an important, thoughtful, and extremely influential book. I *highly* recommend it to all historians or would-be historians-- and I'd especially recommend it to anyone who's really not sure what gender history is supposed to be or why anyone would want to do it. I could make a few criticisms of some small details (e.g. pointing out the title probably should be "Gender, Class, and the Politics of History" or "Gender, Labor, and the Politics of History" to reflect the fact that's Scott's primary interest is in applying gender theory to the field of labor history-- or that a lot of her criticisms of straw-men like "conventional labor history" and "traditional intellectual history" are unfair), but those really are minor nitpicks in an otherwise eye-opening and profoundly important work.