.merican listorical, ssociation Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis Author(s): Joan W. Scott Source: The American Historical Review, Vol 91, No 5 (Dec, 1986), pp. 1053-1075 Published by: American Historical Association StableUrl:http://www.jstor.org/stable/1864376 Accessed:11/08/201010:38 Your use of the jStOR archive indicates your acceptance of jSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the jSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showpublisher?publishercode=aha Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed of such transmission JstOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support(@jstor. org American Historical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review OR ittp://www.jstor.org
Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis Author(s): Joan W. Scott Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075 Published by: American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1864376 Accessed: 11/08/2010 10:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aha. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. American Historical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org
Gender: A Useful Category of Historical anal JOAN W. SCOTT To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine gende of the male or fer is either a jocularity(permissible or Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English n usage THOSE WHO WOULD CODIFY THE MEANINGS OF WORDS fight a losing battle, for words like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history. Neither Oxford ncaise have been entirely capture and fix meanings free of the play of human invention and imagination Mary Wortley Montagu added bite to her witty denunciation "of the fair sex"("my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance of never being married to any one among them by deliberately misusing the grammatical reference I Through the ages, people have made figurative allusions by employing Imatical terms to evoke traits of character or sexuality. For example, the usa offered by the Dictionnaire de la langue francaise in 1876 was, "On ne sait de quel genre il est, s'il est male ou femelle, se dit d'un homme tres- cache, dont on ne connait pas les sentiments. "" And Gladstone made this distinction in 1878: Athene has nothing of sex except the gender, nothing of the woman except the form. "3 Most recently-too recently to find its way into dictionaries or the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences-feminists have in a more literal and serious vein beg gender"as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes. The connection to grammar is both explicit and full of unexamined possibilities. Explicit because the grammatical usage involves formal This article is for Elizabeth Weed, who taught me how to think about and theory. It was first December 27. 1985. I am deeply grateful to Denise Riley, who showed historian and Harriet Whiten all members of the seminar on "Cultural Constructions of Gender"held at Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women during 1982-85. Suh, Research, especially estions and criticisms from members of the Historical Studies Workshop at the New School for So Ira katznelson. Charles Tilly, and Louise A. Tilly, forced me to clarify the argument Comments from othe lly those of Elisabetta (aleotti, Rayna Rapp, Christine Stansell, and Joan Vincent. Donald Scott, as always, was at once my most demanding anug6l edn ) vol 4 1 Oxford English de la langue fr (Paris, 1876) Raymond w Keyords(New York, 1983), 285
1054 Joan w. Scott rules that follow from the masculine or feminine designation; full of unexamined possibilities because in many Indo-European languages there is a third category In its most recent usage, gender" seems to have first appeared among American feminists who wanted to insist on the fundamentally social quality of distinction based on sex. The word denoted a rejection of the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as " sex"or"sexual difference. " "Gender"also stressed the relational aspect of normative definitions of femininity. Those who worried that womens studies scholarship focused too narrowly and separately on women used the term"gender"to introduce a relational notion into our analytic vocabulary According to this view, women and men were defined in terms of one another, and no understanding of either could be achieved by entirely separate study. Thus Natalie Davis suggested in 1975, It seems to me that we should be interested the history of both women and men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex any more than an historian of class can focus entirely on peasants Our goal is to understand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past. Our goal is to discover the range in sex roles and in sexual mbolism in different societies and periods, to find out what meaning they had and how they functioned to maintain the social order or to promote its change." 4 In addition, and perhaps most important, "gender"was a term offered by those ho claimed that womens scholarship would fundamentally transform discipli- nary paradigms. Feminist scholars pointed out early on that the study of women would not only add new subject matter but would also force a critical reexam- nation of the premises and standards of existing scholarly work. We are learning, wrote three feminist historians, "that the writing of women into history necessarily involves redefining and enlarging traditional notions of historical significance, to encompass personal, subjective experience as well as public and political activities It is not too much to suggest that however hesitant the actual beginnings, such a methodology implies not only a new history of women, but also a new histor The way in which this new history would both include and account for women experience rested on the extent to which gender could be developed as a category of analysis. Here the analogies to class(and race)were explicit; indeed, the most politically inclusive of scholars of women's studies regularly invoked all three categories as crucial to the writing of a new history. 6 An interest in class,race,and gender signaled first, a scholar's commitment to a history that included stories of the oppressed and an analysis of the meaning and nature of their oppression and second, scholarly understanding that inequalities of power are organized along at least three axes Natalie Zemon Davis, "Womens History in Transition: The European Case, "Feminist Studies, 3 Vinter197576:90, Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Shrom Dye, "The Problem of Women's History, "in Berenice Carroll, ed, Liberating Women's History(Urbana The best and most subtle example is from Joan Kelly, "The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theor in her Women, History and Theory( Chicago, 1984), 51-64, especially 6l
Gender 1055 The litany of class, race, and gender suggests a parity for each term, but, in fact, that is not at all the case. While"class" most often rests on Marxs elaborate(and since elaborated) theory of economic determination and historical change, "race and"gender"carry no such associations. No unanimity exists among those whe employ concepts of class. Some scholars employ Weberian notions, others use class as a temporary heuristic device. Still, when we invoke class, we are working with or against a set of definitions that, in the case of Marxism, involve an idea of economic causality and a vision of the path along which history has moved dialectically. There is no such clarity or coherence for either race or gender. In the case of gender, the usage has involved a range of theoretical positions as well as simple descriptive references to the relationships between the sexes Feminist historians. trained as most historians are to be more comfortable with description than theory, have nonetheless increasingly looked for usable theoret ical formulations. They have done so for at least two reasons. First, the pro- liferation of case studies in womens history seems to call for some synthesizing perspective that can explain continuities and discontinuities and account for sisting inequalities as well as radically different social experiences. Second, the discrepancy between the high quality of recent work in women's history and its continuing marginal status in the field as a whole(as measured by textbooks do not address dominant disciplinary concepts, or at least that do not address these oncepts in terms that can shake their power and perhaps transform them. It has not been enough for historians of women to prove either that women had a histor or that women participated in the major political upheavals of Western civilization In the case of womens history, the response of most non-feminist historians has been acknowledgment and then separation or dismissal ("women had a history separate from mens, therefore let feminists do womens history, which need not concern us;or"womens history is about sex and the family and should be done separately from political and economic history"). In the case of women,s partic- ation, the response has been minimal interest at best("my understanding of the French Revolution is not changed by knowing that women participated in it). The challenge posed by these responses is, in the end, a theoretical one. It requires analysis not only of the relationship between male and female experience in the past but also of the connection between past history and current historical practice How does gender work in human social relationships: How does gender give meaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge? The answers depend on gender as an analytic category or the most part, the attempts of historians to mained within traditional social scientific frameworks, using longstanding formulations that provide universal causal explanations. These theories have been limited at best because they tend to contain reductive or overly simple generali- zations that undercut not only history's disciplinary sense of the complexity of social causation but also feminist commitments to analyses that will lead to change
1056 Joan w. Scott A review of these theories will expose their limits and make it possible to propose an alternative approach. 7 THE APPROACHES USED BY MOST HISTORIANS fall into two distinct categories. The first is essentially descriptive: that is, it refers to the existence of phenomena or realities without interpreting, explaining, or attributing causality. The second usage is causal; it theorizes about the nature of phenomena or realities, seeking an understanding of how and why these take the form they do In its simplest recent usage,"gender"is a synonym for"women. "Any number of books and articles whose subject is womens history have, in the past few years, substituted"gender"for"women"in their titles. In some cases, this usage, though vaguely referring to certain analytic concepts, is actually about the political acceptability of the field. In these instances, the use of"gender"is meant to denote he scholarly seriousness of a work, for"gender "has a more neutral and objective sound than does"women. Gender"seems to fit within the scientific terminology of social science and thus dissociates itself from the(supposedly strident) politics of feminism. In this usage, "gender "does not carry with it a necessary statement about inequality or power nor does it name the aggrieved (and hitherto invisible) party. Whereas the term"womens history"proclaims its politics by asserting (contrary to customary practice) that women are valid historical subjects, "gender includes but does not name women and so seems to pose no critical threat. Thi use of "gender"is one facet of what might be called the quest of feminist scholarship for academic legitimacy in the 1980s But only one facet. Gender"as a substitute for"women"is also used to suggest that infor implies the study of the other. This usage insists that the world of women is part of the world of men, created in and by it. This usage rejects the interpretive utility of the idea of separate spheres, maintaining that to study women in isolation perpetuates the fiction that one sphere, the experience of one sex, has little or nothing to do with the other. In addition, gender is also used to designate social relations between the sexes. Its use explicitly rejects biological explanations, such s those that find a common denominator for diverse forms of female subordi- nation in the facts that women have the capacity to give birth and men have greater muscular strength. Instead, gender becomes a way of denoting "cultural con- structions-the entirely social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men. It is a way of referring to the exclusively social origins of the subjective identities of men and women. Gender is, in this definition, a social exed body. Gender seems to have become a particularly useful word as studies of sex and sexuality have proliferated, for it offers a way f differentiating sexual practice from the social roles assigned to women and men 7 For a history, see Joan w. Scott, Women's History: The Modern Period. "Past and Moira Gatens, "A Critique Marxism? Interventions after Marx(Sydney, 1983), 143-60