gender 1057 Although scholars acknowledge the connection between sex and (what the sociologists of the family called)"sex roles, "these scholars do not assume a simple or direct linkage. The use of gender emphasizes an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but is not directly determined by sex or directly determining These descriptive usages of gender have been employed by historians most ofter to map out a new terrain. As social historians turned to new objects of study, gende was relevant for such topics as women, children, families, and gender ideologies This usage of gender, in other words, refers only to those areas--both structural and ideological-involving relations between the sexes. Because, on the face of it, war, diplomacy, and high politics have not been explicitly about those relation- ships, gender seems not to apply and so continues to be irrelevant to the thinking f historians concerned with issues of politics and power. The effect is to endorse a certain functionalist view ultimately rooted in biology and to perpetuate the idea separate spheres(sex or politics, family or nation, women or men)in th of history. Although gender in this usage asserts that relationships between the sexes are social, it says nothing about why these relationships are constructed as they are, how they work, or how they change. In its descriptive usage, then, gender is a concept associated with the study of things related to women. Gender is a new topic, a new department of historical investigation, but it does not have the analytic ower to address(and change) existing historical paradigms Some historians were, of course, aware of this problem, hence the efforts to employ theories that might explain the concept of gender and account for historical change. Indeed, the challenge was to reconcile theory, which was framed n general or universal terms, and history, which was committed to the study of contextual specificity and fundamental change. The result has been extremely eclectic: partial borrowings that vitiate the analytic power of a particular theory or, worse, employ its precepts without awareness of their implications: or accounts of change that, because they embed universal theories, only illustrate unchanging themes; or wonderfully imaginative studies in which theory is nonetheless so hidden that these studies cannot serve as models for other investigations. Because the theories on which historians have drawn are often not spelled out in all their plications, it seems worthwhile to spend some time doing that. Only through such an exercise can we evaluate the usefulness of these theories and, perhaps articulate a more powerful theoretical approach Feminist historians have employed a variety of approaches to the analysis of gender, but they come down to a choice between three theoretical positions. g The first, an entirely feminist effort, attempts to explain the origins of patriarchy. The econd locates itself within a marxian tradition and seeks there an accommodation with feminist critiques. The third, fundamentally divided between French post-structuralist and Anglo-American object-relations theorists, draws on these For a somewhat different approach to feminist analysis, see Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family(New York, 1986)
1058 Joan w. Scot different schools of psychoanalysis to explain the production and reproduction of the subject's gendered identity. Theorists of patriarchy have directed their attention to the subordination of women and found their explanation for it in the male"need"to dominate the female. In Mary O'Brien's ingenious adaptation of Hegel, she defined male domination as the effect of mens desire to transcend their alienation from the means of the reproduction of the species. The principle of generational continuity restores the primacy of paternity and obscures the real labor and the social reality of womens work in childbirth. The source of women's liberation lies in"an Adequate understanding of the process of reproduction, an appreciation of the contradiction between the nature of womens reproductive labor and(male) ideological mystifications of it. 10 For Shulamith Firestone, reproduction was also the bitter trap"for women. In her more materialist analysis. however. liberation would come with transformations in reproductive technology, which might in some not too distant future eliminate the need for womens bodies as the agents of species reproduction. II If reproduction was the key to patriarchy for some, sexuality itself was the answer for others. Catherine MacKinnon's bold formulations were at once her own and characteristic of a certain approach: "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away cation is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality Man fucks woman; subject verb object. "12 Continuing her analogy to Marx MacKinnon offered, in the place of dialectical materialism, consciousness-raising as feminism's method of analysis. By expressing the shared experience of objectification, she argued, women come to understand their common identity and so are moved to political action. For MacKinnon, sexuality thus stood outsid ideology, discoverable as an unmediated, experienced fact. Although sexual relations are defined in MacKinnon's analysis as social, there is nothing except the herent inequality of the sexual relation itself to explain why the system of power perates as it does. The source of unequal relations between the sexes is, in the end, unequal relations between the sexes. Although the inequality of which sexuality is the source is said to be embodied in a"whole system of social elationships, "how this system works is not explained. 13 Theorists of patriarchy have addressed the inequality of males and females in important ways, but, for historians, their theories pose problems. First, while they otter an analysis internal to the gender system itself, they also assert the primacy of that system in all social organization. But theories of patriarchy do not show hor gender inequality structures all other inequalities or, indeed, how gender affects Mary OBrien, The Politics of Reproduction(London, 1981),8-15,46 i Shulamith Fi Politics of Reproduction, 8 e, The Dialectic of Sex(New York, 1970). The phrase"bitter trap"is O Brien's 12 Catherine McKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theor Sgs,7( Spring1982):515.541 3hid,541,53
gender 1059 those areas of life that do not seem to be connected to it. Second, whether domination comes in the form of the male appropriation of the female reproductive labor or in the sexual objectification of women by men, the analy rests on physical difference. Any physical difference takes on a universal and Inchanging aspect, even if theorists of patriarchy take into account the existence of changing forms and systems of gender inequality. A theory that rests on the single variable of physical difference poses problems for historians: it assumes a consistent or inherent meaning for the human body--outside social or cultural construction-and thus the ahistoricity of gender itself. History becomes, in a sense, epiphenomenal, providing endless variations on the unchanging theme of a fixed gender inequality Marxist feminists have a more historical approach, guided as they are by a theory of history. But, whatever the variations and adaptations have been, the self imposed requirement that there be a"material"explanation for gendler has limited or at least slowed the development of new lines of analysis. Whether a so-called dual-systems solution is proffered (one that posits the separate but interacting realms of capitalism and patriarchy)or an analysis based more firmly in orthodo Marxist discussions of modes of production is developed, the explanation for the origins of and changes in gender systems is found outside the sexual division of labor. Families, households, and sexuality are all, finally, products of changing modes of production. That is how Engels concluded his explorations of the Origins of the Family: 1.s that is where economist Heidi Hartmann's analysis ultimately rests Hartmann insisted on the importance of taking into account patriarchy and capitalism as separate but interacting systems. Yet, as her argument unfolds, economic causality takes precedence, and patriarchy always develops and changes as a function of relations of production. When she suggested that"it is necessary eradicate the sexual division of labor itself to end male domination she meant ending job segregation by sex. s early discussions among Marxist feminists circled around the same set of problems: a rejection of the essentialism of those who would argue that the ' exigencies of biological reproduction"determine the sexual division of labor under capitalism; the futility of inserting"modes of reproduction"into discussions of modes of production(it remains an oppositional category and does not assume equal status with modes of production); the recognition that economic systems do not directly determine gender relationships, indeed, that the subordination of women pre-dates capitalism and continues under socialism; the search nonethele between historians Sheila Rowbotham, Sally Alexander, and Barbara Taylor in Raphael samuel, (m'G For an interesting discuss of the strengths and limits of the term"patriarchy, "see the exchan Frederick Engels. The Origins of the Family, Pri ate Property and the State(I88-1: reprint edn I Heidi Hartmann, "Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex. Signs, I (Spring 1976): 168. See also"The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: 'I i More Progressive Union. " Capital and Class. 8(Summer 1979): 1-33: "The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Polit ical Struggle: The Example of Housework. "Signs, 6i(Spring 1981):366-0-4