Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis PDF

Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis Author(s): Joan W. Scott Source: The American Historical Review , Dec., 1986, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053- 1075 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/...

Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis Author(s): Joan W. Scott Source: The American Historical Review , Dec., 1986, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053- 1075 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1864376 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1864376?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. 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 [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis JOAN W. SCOTT Gender. n. a grammatical term only. To talk of persons or creatur-es of the masculine or feminine gender, meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blun- der. (Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford, 1940). TH1OSE WHO WOULD CODIFY THE MEANINGS OF WORDS fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are mneant to signify, have a history. Neither Oxford dons nor the Academie FranUaise have been entirely able to stem the tide, to capture and fix mneanings free of the play of huinan 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 mnarried to any one among them") by deliberately misusing the grammatical reference. ' Through the ages, people have made figurative allusions by employing gramnmnatical termns to evoke traits of character or sexuality. For example, the usage offered by the Dictionnaire de la langue francaise in 1876 was, "On ne sait de quel genre il est, s'il est mile ou femelle, se dit d'un homnme tres-cache, dont on ne connait pas les sentiments."2 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 imore literal and serious vein begun to use "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 f'or Elizabeth XAeed, who taught me how to think abouLt gender and theory. It was first prepared f'or delivery at the meeting of' the American Historical Association in New York City, December 27, 1985. I amii deeply gratef'ul to Denise Riley, who showed me hlow a historiani might work with anid through theory: also to Janice Doane, jasmine Ergas, Anne Norton, and Harriet Whitehead, all members of' the senminar on "C(ultural Constructions of Gender" held at Brown University's l'etiibroke Center f'or Teaching and Research on Womeni durinig 1982-85. Suggestions and criticisms f'romii mnemiibers of' the fistorical Studies Workshop at the New School f'or Social Research, especially Ira Katznelsoni, C(harles Tilly, and Louise A. Tilly, f'orced me to clarify thie argtiment in important ways. Comments f'romii other f'riends and colleagues have also been extremnely helpf'ul, especially those of Llisabetta Galeotti, Raynia Rapp, Christine Stansell, and Joan Vincent. Donald Scott, as always, was at once nyiv niiost demanding and supportive critic. Oxfjord English Dictionary (1961 edn.), vol. 4. 2 E. Littre, Dictionnaire de Ia larnguefran(aise (Paris, 1876). 3 Raymiiond Williams, Keywords (New York, 1983), 285. 1053 This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  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- unsexed or neuter. In its most recent usage, "gender" seems to have first appeared among American feminists who wanted to insist on the fundamentally social quality of distinctions 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 women's 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 in 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 anid in sexual symbolism 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 who claimed that women's 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 reexami- 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 history."5 The way in which this new history would both include and account for women's 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, "Women's History in Transition: The European Case," Feminist Studies, 3 (Winter 1975-76): 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, Ill., 1976), 89. 6 The best and most subtle example is from Joan Kelly, "The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory," in her Women, History and Theory (Chicago, 1984), 51-64, especially 61. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  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" nmost often rests on Marx's elaborate (and since elaborated) theory of economic determination and historical change, "race" and "gender" carry no such associations. No unanimity exists among those who emnploy 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 ref'erences 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 formuLlations. They have done so for at least two reasons. First, the pro- liferation of case studies in women's history seems to call for some synthesizing perspective that can explain continuities and discontinuities and account for persisting 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, syllabi, and monographic work) points up the limits of descriptive approaches that do not address dominant disciplinary concepts, or at least that do not address these concepts in term-s that can shake their power and perhaps transf'orm them. It has not been enouglh for historians of women to prove either that women had a history or that women participated in the major political upheavals of' Western civilization. In the case of women's history, the response of mnost non-feminist historians has been acknowledgment and then separation or dismissal ("women had a history separate f'rom meni's, therefore let fenminists do women's history, which need not concern us"; or "womnen's history is about sex and the family and should be done separately from political and economic history"). In the case of women's partic- ipation, the response has been minimal interest at best ("my understanding of the French Revolution is not changed by kniowing 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 ineaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge? The answers depend on gender as an analytic category. For the mnost part, the attempts of historians to theorize about gender have remained within traditional social scientific frameworks, using longstanding formulations thiat 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 caulsation but also feminist commitments to analyses that will lead to change. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  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 women's 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 the 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 "women's 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. This 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 information about women is necessarily information about men, that one implies the study of the other. This usage insists that the world of women is part of the world of mnen, 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 as those that find a common denominator for diverse form-s 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 category imposed on a sexed body.8 Gender seems to have become a particularly useful word as studies of sex and sexuality have proliferated, for it offers a way of differentiating sexual practice from the social roles assigned to women and men. 7 For a review of recent work on women's history, see Joan W. Scott, "Women's History: The Modern Period," Past and Present, 101 (1983): 141-57. 8 For an argument against the use of gender to emphasize the social aspect of sexual difference, see Moira Gatens, "A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction," in J. Allen and P. Patton, eds., Beyond Marxism? Interventions after Marx (Sydney, 1983), 143-60. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  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 of sexuality. These descriptive usages of gender have been employed by historians most often to map out a new terrain. As social historians turned to new objects of study, gender 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 of 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 of separate spheres (sex or politics, family or nation, womnen or men) in the writing 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 power 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 in 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 wondcrfully 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 implications, 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.9 The first, an entirely feminist effort, attempts to explain the origins of patriarchy. The second 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 Thelory in the Age of the Family (New York, 1986). This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  1058 Joan W. Scott 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 men's 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 women's 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 women's reproductive labor and (male) ideological mystifications of it.") 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 miight in some not too distant future eliminate the need for women's bodies as the agents of species reproduction. 1' If reproduction was the key to patriarchy for some, sexuality itself was the answer for others. Catherine MacKinnon's bold formnulations were at once her own and characteristic of a certain approach: "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxismi: that which is most one's own, yet mnost taken away." "Sexual objectifi- 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 outside ideology, discoverable as an unmediated, experienced fact. Although sexual relations are defined in MacKinnon's analysis as social, there is nothing except the inherent inequality of the sexual relation itself to explain why the system of power operates 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 relationships," how this system works is not explained.'3 Theorists of patriarchy have addiressed the inequality of males and females in important ways, but, for historians, their theories pose problems. First, while they offer 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 how gender inequality structures all other inequalities or, indeed, how gender affects 0 Mary O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London, 1981), 8-15, 46. " Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York, 1970). The phrase "bitter trap" is O'Brien's, Politics of Reproduction, 8. 12 Catherine McKinnion, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," signs, 7 (Spring 1982): 515, 541. '3 Ibid., 541, 543. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  G(ender 1 '59 those areas of lif'e that do not seemn to be connected to it. Second, wlhethei- domination conmes in the form of' the nmale appropriation of' the f'enmale's reproductive labor or in the sexual objectification of' womiieni by meni, the analysis rests on physical diff'erence. Any physical difference takes on a universal and unchanginig aspect, even if' theorists of' patriarchy take into accoutrt the existence of' changing f'orms ancd systemls of gender inequality. I4 A theory that r-ests on the single variable of physical difference poses problemls for historians: it assumLes a consistent or inherent imieaning for the hunman body outside social or culturcal construction and thus the ahistoricity of' gender itself'. History becomes, in a sense, epip)henomenal, providing endless variations on the unchanging theme of' a fixed gender inequallity. Marxist f'eniists halve a move historical approach, guided as they are by a theory of history. But, whatever the variations and( adaptations have been, the self- im-posed requirenmenit that there be a "mater-ial" explanation for gencder has limited or at least slowed the development of new lines of' analysis. Wlhether- a so-called dual-systems solution is proffered (one that posits the separate but interacting realmiis of' capitalismn and patriarchy) or an analysis based imiore firmly in orthodox Marxist discussions of' nodes of production is dleveloped, the explanation for the origins of' and chaniges in gender systems is found outside the sexual division of' labor. Families, 11ouseholds, andl sexuality' are all, finally, products of' changing modes of production. That is how Engels conIcluded his explorations of'the Origits o/ the Family; 15 that is where economist Heicdi Hartmann's analysis ultimately rests. Hartmannl insisted on the importance of' takin-g into account patriarchy acnd capitalism as separate but interacting systeims. Yet, as her argument unif'olds, econom-ic causality takes precedence, and patriarchy alwvays develops and changes as a f'unction of' relations of' production. Wheni she suggested that "it is necessary to eradicate the sexucal division of labor itself' to end inale dlomi-niation," shie meant ending job segregation by sex.'f Early discussions anmonig NMarxist f'emiiinists circlecl around the samne set of problems: a rejection of' the essentialism of' those who would argue that the "exigencies of biological reproduction" letermirle the sexual divisioni of' labor under capitalismi; the futility of' inserting "nmodes of' reproduction" into discussions of mnodes of productionl (it remnains an oppositionial category and1 does not assume equLal status with inodes of' produiction); the recogniition that economic systems do not directly determine gender relationiships, indeed, that the subordin-ation of' womlen pre-dates capitalismi and continues under socillismii; the searclh nonetheless For ani interestinig discussion of the str-enigths and limits of the ter-mi ' patrliar chyv, see tlhe exchange b)etween historians Sheila Rowbotham-i, Sally Alexander, anid Barbara Tavlor in Raphael SlulLtel, ed., Peoplehs History (ia(d Sociallst Theory (London, 1 981), 363-73. Fre(derick Enigels, D'he Originls Of the Famtily, Puivate 1Propert-Y, antid the Stlte (1 884; repr-int ecdn., New Y'ork, 1972). fi Heidi Hartmann, 'Capitalism, Patriar-clhy, and job Segregation by Sex," Si gns, 1 (Spring 1976): 168. See also "The Unhappy Marriage of Marlxismn and Feminlismii: Fowards a 'More Progressive Unioni," Capitol (ltld Class, 8 (Summer 19-79): 1-33; "The Family as the LocuLs of Gender, Class, and( Political StruLggle: The Examlple of HoUsework," Signs, 6 (Splring 1981): 366-94. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  1 060) Joan VV. Scott for a materialist explanation that excludes natural physical differences.'7 An important attempt to break out of this circle of problems came from Joan Kelly in her essay, "The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory," where she argued that econornic and genider systems initeracted to produce social and historical experi- ences; that neither system was causal, but both "operate simultaneously to reproduce the socioeconomnic and male-dominant structures of [a] particular socia order." Kelly's suggestion that gender systems had an independent existence provided a crucial coniceptual opening, but her commitment to remain within a Marxist framework led her to emphasize the causal role of economic factors even in the determination of the gender system: "The relation of the sexes operates in accordance with, and through, socioeconomic structures, as well as sex/gender ones."I Kelly introduced the idea of a "sexually based social reality," but she tendled to emphasize the social rather than the sexual nature of that reality, and, most often, "social," in her usage, was conceived in terms of economic relations of produLction. The most far-reaching exploration of sexuality by American Marxist feminists is in Powers of Desire, a volume of essays published in 1983.1' Influenced by increasinig attention to sexuality among political activists and scholars, by French philosopher Michel Foucault's insistence that sexuality is produced in historical contexts, anid by the conviction that the current "sexual revolution" required serious analysis, the authors made "sexual politics" the focus of their inquiry. In so doing, they opened the question of causality and offered a variety of solutions to it; indeed, the real excitement of this volumne is its lack of analytic unanimity, its sense of analytic tenision. If individual authors tend to stress the causality of social (by which is often mneant "economic") contexts, they nonetheless include suggestions about the importance of studyinig "the psychic structuring of gender identity." If "gender ideology" is sometines said to "reflect" economic and social structures, there is also a crucial recognition of the need to understand the complex "link between society and enduring psychic structure. "20 On the one hand, the editors endorseJessica Benjamin's point that politics must include attention to "the erotic, fantastic components of human life," but, on the other, no essays besides Benjamin's deal fully or seriously with the theoretical issues she raises.2' Instead, 17 Discussions of Marxist feminism incltude Zillah Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York, 1979); A. Kuhn, "Structures of Patriarchy and Capital in the Family," in A. Kuhn and A. WVolpe, eds., Feminism and Materialism (London, 1978); Rosalind Coward, Patriarchal Precedents (Lon(lon, 1983); Hilda Scott, Does Socialism Liberate Women? (Boston, 1974); Jane Humphries, "Workinig Class Family, Women's Liberation and Class Struggle: The Case of Nineteenth-Century British History," Review of RadicalPoliticalEconomics, 9 (1977): 25-4 1; Jane Humphries, "Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working Class Family," CambridgeJournal of Economics, 1 (1971): 241-58; and see the debate on Humphries's work in Review of Radical Political Economics, 12 (Summer 1980): 76-94. I Kelly, "Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory," 61. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of SexoalitN (New York, 1983). 21) Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp, "Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Anthropology," in Powers of Desire, 53. 21 "Introduction," Powers of Desire, 12; and Jessica Benjamin, "Master and Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Dominationi," Powers of Desire, 297. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Gender 1061 a tacit assumption runs through the volume that Marxisnm can be expanded to include discussions of ideology, culture, and psychology and that this expansion will happen through the kind of concrete examination of evidence undertaken in most of the articles. The advantage of such an approach lies in its avoidance of sharp differences of position, the disadvantage in its leaving in place an already fully articulated theory that leads back from relations of the sexes based to relations of production. A comparison of American Marxist-feminist efforts, exploratory and relatively wide-ranging, to those of their English counterparts, tied more closely to the politics of a strong and viable Marxist tradition, reveals that the English have had greater difficulty in challenging the constraints of strictly determinist explanations. This difficulty can be seen most dramatically in the recent debates in the New Left Review between Michele Barrett and her critics, who charged her with abandoning a materialist analysis of the sexual division of labor under capitalism.22 It can be seen as well in the replacement of an initial femiriist attempt to reconcile psy- choanalysis and Marxism with a choice of one or another of these theoretical positions by scholars who earlier insisted that some fusion of the two was possible.23 The difficulty for both English and Arnerican feminists working within Marxism is apparent in the works I have mentioned here. The problem they face is the opposite of the one posed by patriarchal theory. Within Marxism, the concept of gender has long been treated as the by-product of changing economic structures; gender has had no independent analytic status of its own. A REVIEW OF PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY REQUIRES a specification of schools, since the various approaches have tended to be classified by the national origins of the founders and the majority of the practitioners. There is the Anglo-American school, working within the terms of theories of object-relations. In the U.S., Nancy Chodorow is the name most readily associated with this approach. In addition, the work of Carol Gilligan has had a far-reaching impact on American scholarship, "2 Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas, "Rethinking Women's Oppression," New Left Review, 144 (March-April 1984): 33-71; Michele Barrett, "Rethinking Women's Oppression: A Reply to Brenner and Ranmas," New Left Revieuw, 146 (July-August 1984): 123-28; Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, "The British Women's Movement," New Left Review, 148 (November-December 1984): 74-103; Michee Barrett, "A Response to Weir and Wilson," Newi Lefi Review, 150 (March-April 1985): 143-47; Jane Lewis, "The Debate on Sex and Class," New Left Review, 149 (January-February 1985): 108-20. See also Hugh Armstrong and Pat Armstrong, "Beyond Sexless Class and Classless Sex: Towards Feminist Marxism," Studies in Political Econtomy, 10 (Winter 1983): 7-44; Hugh Armstrong and Pat Armstrong, "Comments: More on Marxist Feminism," Studies in Political Economv, 15 (Fall 1984): 179-84; and Jane Jenson, "Gender and Reproduction; or, Babies and the State," unpublished paper, June 1985, pp. 1-7. 23 For early theoretical formulations, see Papers oni Patriarchy: Conference, Lontdoni 76 (London, 1976). I am grateful to Jane Caplan for telling me of the existence of this publication and for her willingniess to share with me her copy and her ideas about it. For the psychoanalytic position, see Sally Alexander, "Women, Class and Sexual Difference," History Workshop, 17 (Spring 1984): 125-35. In seminars at Princeton University in early 1986,Juliet Mitchell seemed to be returning to an emphasis on the priority of materialist analyses of gender. For an attempt to get beyond the theoretical impasse of Marxist feminism, see Coward, Patriarchal Precedents. See also the brilliant American effort in this directioll by anthropologist Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975): 167-68. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  1062 Joain W. S(ott includinig history. Gilligan's work draws on Chodorow's, although it is concerned less with the construction of the subject than with moral development and behavior. In contrast to the Anglo-American school, the French school is based on structuralist and post-structuralist readings of Freud in terms of theories of' language (for femninists, the key figure is Jacques Lacan). Both schools are concerned with the processes by which the subject's identity is created; both focus on the early stages of child development for clues to the f'ormation of gender identity. Object-relations theorists stress the influence of actual experience (the child sees, hears, relates to those who care for it, particularly, of course, to its parents), while the post-structuralists emphasize the centrality of language in communicating, interpreting, and representing gender. (By "lan- guage," post-structuralists do not mean words but systems of meaning-symbolic orders-that precede the actual mastery of speech, reading, and writing.) Another dif'ference between the two schools of thought focuses on the unconscious, which for Chodorow is ultimately subject to conscious understanding and for Lacan is not. For Lacaniarns, the unconscious is a critical factor in the construction of the subject; it is the location, nmoreover, of sexual division and, for that reason, of continuing instability f'or the gendered subject. In recent years, feminist historians have been drawn to these theories either because they serve to endorse specific findings with general observations or because they seenm to off'er an important theoretical formulation about gender. Increasingly, those historians working with a concept of "women's culture" cite (hodorow's or Gilligan's work as both proof of' and explanation for their interpretations; those wrestling with f'eminiist theory look to Lacan. In the end, neither of these theories seems to me entirely workable for historians; a closer look at each may help explain why. My reservation about object-relations theory concerns its literalismn, its reliance on relatively small structures of' interaction to produce gender identity and to generate chanlge. Both the family division of labor and the actual assignment of tasks to each parent play a crucial role in Chodorow's theory. The outcome of prevailing Western systemns is a clear division between male and female: "'The basic f'emninine sense of' self is connected to the world, the basic masculine sense of self' is separate."24 According to Chodorow, if f'athers were more involved in parenting and present mnore often in domestic situations, the outcome of' the oedipal drama might be different.25 2 1 Nancy Chodorow, 7The Rel5rodiu dition of Mothering: Psvchoaiialysis aInd( the Soc iolog y (l Getnder (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 169. 25 "My aCcoUnt suLggests that these gender-related issues mlax be influenced du(-ing the period of the oetlipus comlplex, biut they are not its onl focus or outcome. 'The negotiation of these issues occurs in the conitext of' I)roa(ler object-relational and ego processes. These broader processes have equal inlHuenice on psyclhic structure f'ormation, ani( psychic life and relational modes in men an(l women. They accouLnt for (litf'ering modes of identification and orienitationi to heterosexual objects, f'or the more asy mmetrical oecdipal isstues psychoanalysts describe. These outcomes, like mor-e traditional oedipal otutcotnes, arise f'roml the asymmetrical organiLzation of' parenting, with the nmotlher's role as primary parent atn(d the f'ather's typically greater remoteniess atid his investment in socialization especially in areas concerned with geinder-typing." (Chodorow, Reproductiont of Mothering, 166. It is imnportant to note that thiere are dif'ferences in interpretation and approach between C,hcodorow and British object- This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Gender 1063 This interpretation limits the concept of gender to family and household experience and, for the historian, leaves no way to connect the concept (or the individual) to other social systems of economy, politics, or power. Of course, it is implicit that social arrangements requiring fathers to work and mothers to perform most child-rearing tasks structure family organization. Where such arrangements come from and why they are articulated in terms of a sexual division of labor is not clear. Neither is the issue of inequality, as opposed to that of asymmetry, addressed. How can we account within this theory for persistent associations of masculinity with power, for the higher value placed on manhood than on womanhood, for the way children seem to learn these associations and evaluations even when they live outside nuclear households or in households where parenting is equally divided between husband and wife? I do not think we can without some attention to symbolic systems, that is, to the ways societies represent gender, use it to articulate the rules of social relationships, or construct the meaning of experience. Without meaning, there is no experience; without processes of signification, there is no meaning (which is not to say that language is everything, but a theory that does not take it into account misses the powerful roles that symbols, metaphors, and concepts play in the definition of human personality and human history.) Language is the center of Lacanian theory; it is the key to the child's induction into the symbolic order. Through language, gendered identity is constructed. According to Lacan, the phallus is the central signifier of sexual difference. But the meaning of the phallus must be read metaphorically. For the child, the oedipal drama sets forth the terms of cultural interaction, since the threat of castration embodies the power, the rules of (the father's) law. The child's relationship to the law depends on sexual difference, on its imaginative (or fantastic) identification with masculinity or femininity. The imposition, in other words, of the rules of social interaction are inherently and specifically gendered, for the female necessarily has a different relationship to the phallus than the male does. But, gender identification, although it always appears coherent and fixed, is, in fact, highly unstable. Like words themselves, subjective identities are processes of differentiation and distinction, requiring the suppression of ambiguities and opposite elements in order to assure (and create the illusion of) coherence and common understanding. The idea of masculinity rests on the necessary repression of feminine aspects-of the subject's potential for bisexuality-and introduces conflict into the opposition of masculine and feminine. Repressed desires are present in the unconscious and are constantly a threat to the stability of gender identification, denying its unity, subverting its need for security. In addition, conscious ideas of masculine or feminine are not fixed, since they vary according relations theorists who follow the work of D. W. Winicott and Melanie Klein. Chodorow's approach is best characterized as a more sociological or sociologized theory, but it is the dominant lens through which object-relations theory has been viewed by American feminists. On the history of British object-relations theory in relation to social policy, see Denise Riley, War in the Nursery (London, 1984). This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  1064 Joan W. Scott to contextual usage. Conflict always exists, then, between the subject's need for the appearance of wholeness and the imprecision of terminology, its relative meaning, its dependence on repression.26 This kind of interpretation makes the categories of "man" and "woman" problematic by suggesting that masculine and feminine are not inherent characteristics but subjective (or fictional) constructs. This interpre- tation also implies that the subject is in a constant process of construction, and it offers a systematic way of interpreting conscious and unconscious desire by pointing to language as the appropriate place for analysis. As such, I find it instructive. I am troubled, nonetheless, by the exclusive fixation on questions of "the subject" and by the tendency to reify subjectively originating antagonism between males and females as the central fact of gender. In addition, although there is openness in the concept of how "the subject" is constructed, the theory tends to universalize the categories and relationship of male and female. The outcome for historians is a reductive reading of evidence from the past. Even though this theory takes social relationships into account by linking castration to prohibition and law, it does not permit the introduction of a notion of historical specificity and variability. The phallus is the only signifier; the process of constructing the gendered subject is, in the end, predictable because always the same. If, as film theorist Teresa de Lauretis suggests, we need to think in terms of the construction of subjectivity in social and historical contexts, there is no way to specify those contexts within the terms offered by Lacan. Indeed, even in de Lauretis's attempt, social reality (that is, "material, economic and interpersonal [relations] which are in fact social, and in a larger perspective historical") seems to lie outside, apart from the subject.27 A way to conceive of "social reality" in terms of gender is lacking. The problem of sexual antagonism in this theory has two aspects. First, it projects a certain timeless quality, even when it is historicized as well as it has been by Sally Alexander. Alexander's reading of Lacan led her to conclude that "antagonism between the sexes is an unavoidable aspect of the acquisition of sexual identity... If antagonism is always latent, it is possible that history offers no final resolution, only the constant reshaping, reorganizing of the symbolization of difference, and the sexual division of labor."28 It may be my hopeless utopianism that gives me pause before this formulation, or it may be that I have not yet shed the episteme of what Foucault called the Classical Age. Whatever the explanation, Alexander's formulation contributes to the fixing of the binary opposition of male and female as the only possible relationship and as a permanent aspect of the human condition. It perpetuates rather than questions what Denise Riley refers to as "the dreadful air of constancy of sexual polarity." She writes: "The historically 2t Juliet Mitchell and jacqueline Rose, eds., jacques Lacan anid the Ecole Freudienne (Londoni, 1983); Alexander, "Wotnen, Class and Sexual Difference." 27 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), 1 59. 28 Alexander, "Women, Class ancl Sexual Difference," 135. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Gender 1065 constructed nature of the opposition [between male and female] produces as one of its effects just that air of an invariant and monotonous men/women opposi- tion."29 It is precisely that opposition, in all its tedium and rnonotony, that (to return to the Anglo-American side) Carol Gilligan's work has promoted. Gilligan explained the divergent paths of moral development followed by boys and girls in termis of differences of "experience" (lived reality). It is not surprising that historians of women have picked up her ideas and used them to explain the "different voices" their work has enabled thein to hear. The problems with these borrowings are manifold, and they are logically connected.3" The first is a slippage that often happens in the attribution of causality: the argument moves from a statement such as "women's experience leads them to make moral choices contingent on contexts and relationships" to "women think and choose this way because they are womlen." Implied in this line of reasoning is the ahistorical, if not essentialist, notion of woman. Gilligan and others have extrapolated her description, based on a small sample of late twentieth-century American schoolchildren, into a statement about all women. This extrapolation is evident especially, but not exclusively, in the discussions by some historians of "women's culture" that take evidence from early saints to modern militant labor activists and reduce it to proof of Gilligan's hypothesis about a universal female preference for relatedness."' This use of Gilligan's ideas provides sharp contrast to the more complicated and historicized conceptions of "women's culture" evident in the Feminist Studies 1980 symposium. 2 Indeed, a comparison of that set of articles with Gilligan's formulations reveals the extent to which her notion is ahistorical, defining womian/man as a universal, self-reproducing binary opposition-fixed always in the same way. By insisting on fixed differences (in Gilligan's case, by simplifying data with more mixed results about sex and moral reasoning to underscore sexual difference), feminists contribute to the kind of thinking they want to oppose. Although they insist on the revaluation of the category "female" (Gilligan suggests that women's moral choices may be more humane than men's), they do not examine the binary opposition itself. We need a refusal of the fixed and permanent quality of the binary opposition, a genuine historicization and deconstruction of the terms of sexual difference. We must become more self-conscious about distinguishing between our analytic vocabulary and the material we want to analyze. We must find ways (however imperfect) to continually subject our categories to criticism, our analyses to self-criticism. If we employ Jacques Derrida's definition of deconstruction, this 20 Denise Riley, "Summary of Preamble to Interwar Feminist History Work," unpublished paper, presented to the Pembroke Center Semninar, May 1985, p. 11. 30 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Ps'chological 7Theory and Womlen's Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). ' Usef'ul critiques of'Gilligan's book are: J. Auerbach, et al., "Commentary on Gilligan's In a Different Voice," Feminist Studies, 11 (Spring 1985); and "Women and Morality," a special issue of Social Research, 50 (Autumn 1983). My comments on the tendency of historians to cite Gilligan come f'rom reading unpublished manuscripts and grant proposals, and it seems unfair to cite those here. I have kept track of the references for over five years, and they are many and increasing. 3 Femtinist Studies, 6 (Spring 1980): 26-64. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  1066 Joan W. Scott criticisnm means analyzing in context the way any binary opposition operates, reversing and displacing its hierarchical construction, rather than accepting it as real or self'-evident or in the nature of thingsi3 In a sense, of course, feminists have been doing this for years. The history of feminist thought is a history of the refusal of the hierarchical construction of the relationship between male and female in its specific contexts and an attempt to reverse or displace its operations. Feminist historians are now in a position to theorize their practice and to develop gender as an analytic category. CONCERN WITH GENDER AS AN ANALYTIC CATE(GORY has emerged only in the late twentieth century. It is absent from the major bodies of social theory articulated from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. To be sure, some of those theories built their logic on analogies to the opposition of male and female, others acknowledged a "woman question," still others addressed the formation of subjective sexual identity, but gender as a way of talking about systems of social or sexual relations did not appear. This neglect may in part explain the difficulty that contemporary feminists have had incorporating the term gender into existing bodies of theory and convincing adherents of one or another theoretical school that gender belongs in their vocabulary. The term gender is part of the attempt by contemporary f'eminists to stake claim to a certain definitional ground, to insist on the inadequacy of' existing bodies of theory for explaining persistent inequal- ities between women and men. It seems to me significant that the use of the word gender has emerged at a moment of great epistemological turmoil that takes the form, in some cases, of a shift from scientific to literary paradigms among social scientists (from an emphasis on cause to one on meaning, blurring genres of inquiry, in anthropologist Cliff'ord Geertz's phrase),34 and, in other cases, the form of' debates about theory between those who assert the transparency of facts and those who insist that all reality is construed or constructed, between those who def'end and those who question the idea that "man" is the rational master of his own destiny. In the space open-ed by this debate and on the side of the critique of science developed by the humanities, and of' empiricism and humanism by post-structuralists, feminists have not only begun to find a theoretical voice of their own but have found scholarly and political allies as well. It is within this space that we must articulate gender as an analytic category. What should be done by historians who, after all, have seen their discipline dismissed by some recent theorists as a relic of humnanist thought? I do not think we should quit the archives or abandon the study of the past, but we do have to change some of the ways we have gone about working, some of the questions we 31' By "deconstruction," I mean to evoke Derrida's discussion, which, though it surely did not invent the procedure of' analysis it describes, has the virtue of theorizing it so that it can constitute a useful metho(l. For a succinlct andl accessible discussion of' Derrida, see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory a tid Criticism (after Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), especially 156-79. See also Jacques Derrida, O/t'Grammatolog, (Baltimore, 1976); jacques Derrida, Spuns (Chicago, 1979); and a transcription of Pembroke Center Seniniar, 1983, in SulbjectslObjects (Fall 1984). 3 Clifford Geertz, "Blurred Genres," Aniericav Scholar, 49 (October 1980): 165-79. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Gender 1067 have asked. We need to scrutinize our methods of' analysis, clarify our operative assumptions, and explain how we think change occurs. Instead of a search f'or single origins, we have to conceive of processes so interconnected that they cannot be disentangled. Of course, we identify problems to study, and these constitute beginnings or points of entry into complex processes. But it is the processes we must continually keep in mind. We must ask more often how things happened in order to find out why they happened; in anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo's formulation, we must pursue not universal, general causality but meaningful explanation: "It now appears to me that woman's place in human social life is not in any direct sense a product of the things she does, but of the meaning her activities acquire through concrete social interaction.35 To pursue meaning, we need to deal with the individual subject as well as social organization and to articulate the nature of their interrelationships, for both are crucial to under- standing how gender works, how change occurs. Finally, we need to replace the notion that social power is unified, coherent, and centralized with something like Foucault's concept of power as dispersed constellations of unequal relationships, discursively constituted in social "fields of force."-3ti Within these processes and structures, there is room for a concept of human agency as the attempt (at least partially rational) to construct an identity, a life, a set of relationslhips, a society with certain limits and with language-conceptual language that at once sets boundaries and contains the possibility for negation, resistance, reinterpretation, the play of metaphoric invention and imagination. My definition of gender has two parts and several subsets. They are interrelated but must be analytically distinct. The core of the definition rests on an integral connection between two propositions: gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived diff'erences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of' signifying relationships of power. Changes in the organization of social relationships always correspond to changes in representations of power, but the direction of change is not necessarily one way. As a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, gender involves four interrelated elements: first, culturally available symbols that evoke multiple (and often contradictory) representations-Eve and Mary as symbols of woman, for example, in the Western Christian tradition-but also, myths of light and dark, purification and pollution, innocence and corruption. For historiains, the interesting questions are, which symbolic representations are invoked, how, and in what contexts? Second, normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meanings of the symbols, that attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric possibilities. These concepts are expressed in religiouis, educational, scientific, legal, and political doctrines and typically take the form of a fixed binary opposition, categorically and unequivocally asserting the meaning of male and female, masculine and feminine. In fact, these normative statements depend on NlMichelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, "The Uses and Abuses of Anthropology: Reflections on Feninlism aind Cross-Cultural Understanding," Signs. 5 (Spr-ing 1980): 400. 36 Michel Foucault, The Histonr of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Initroduction (New York, 1980); Michel Foucault, PowerlKnowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77 (New York, 1980). This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  1068 Joan W. Scott the ref'usal or repression of alternative possibilities, and, sometimes, overt contests about them take place (at what moments and under what circumstances ought to be a concern of historians). The position that emerges as dominant, however, is stated as the only possible one. Subsequent history is written as if these normative positions were the product of social consensus rather than of conflict. An example of this kind of history is the treatment of the Victorian ideology of domesticity as if it were created whole and only afterwards reacted to instead of being the constant subject of great differences of opinion. Another kind of example comes from contemporary fundamentalist religious groups that have forcibly linked their practice to a restoration of women's supposedly more authentic "traditional" role, when, in fact, there is little historical precedent for the unquestioned performance of such a role. The point of new historical investigation is to disrupt the notion of fixity, to discover the nature of the debate or repression that leads to the appearance of timeless permanence in binary gender representation. This kind of analysis must include a notion of politics as well as reference to social institutions and organizations-the third aspect of gender relationships. Some scholars, notably anthropologists, have restricted the use of gender to the kinship system (focusing on household and family as the basis for social organ- ization). We need a broader view that includes not only kinship but also (especially for complex, modern societies) the labor market (a sex-segregated labor market is a part of the process of gender construction), education (all-male, single-sex, or coeducational institutions are part of the same process), and the polity (universal male suffrage is part of the process of gender construction). It makes little sense to force these institutions back to functional utility in the kinship system, or to argue that contemporary relationships between men and women are artifacts of older kinship systems based on the exchange of women.37 Gender is constructed through kinship, but not exclusively; it is constructed as well in the economy and the polity, which, in our society at least, now operate largely independently of kinship. The fourth aspect of gender is subjective identity. I agree with anthropologist Gayle Rubin's formulation that psychoanalysis offers an important theory about the reproduction of' gender, a description of the "transformation of the biological sexuality of individuals as they are enculturated."38 But the universal claim of psychoanalysis gives me pause. Even though Lacanian theory may be helpful f'or thinking about the construction of gendered identity, historians need to work in a more historical way. If gender identity is based only and universally on fear of castration, the point of historical inquiry is denied. Moreover, real men and women do not always or literally fulfill the terms of their society's prescriptions or of our analytic categories. Historians need instead to examine the ways in which gendered identities are substantively constructed and relate their findings to a range of activities, social organizations, and historically specific cultural representations. T'he best efforts in this area so far have been, not surprisingly, biographies: Biddy '7For this argument, see Rubin, "Traffic in Women," 199. 3 Rubin, "Tratfic in Women," 189. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Genider 1069 Martin's interpretation of' Lou Andreas Salome, Kathryn Sklar's depiction of Catharine Beecher, Jacqueline Hall's life of Jessie Daniel Ames, and Mary Hill's discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.3' But collective treatmnents are also possible, as Mrinalini Sinha and Lou Ratte have shown in their respective studies of the terms of construction of gender identity f'or British colonial administrators in India and British-educated Indians who emerged as anti-imperialist, nationalist leaders.40 The first part of my definition of' gender consists, then, of all four of these elemnents, and no one of them operates withouit the others. Yet they do not operate simultaneously, with one simply reflecting the others. A question for historical research is, in fact, what the relationships among the four aspects are. The sketch I have offer-ed of the process of constructing gender relationships could be used to discuss class, race, ethnicity, or, for that matter, any social process. My point was to clarify and specify how one n-eeds to think about the effect of gender in social and institutional relationships, because this thinking is of'ten not done precisely or systematically. The theorizing of gender, however, is developed in my second proposition: gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. It might be better to say, gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated. Geinder is not the only field, but it seems to have been a persistent and recurrent way of enabling the signiification of power in the West, in Judeo-Clhristian as well as Islamic traditions. As such, this part of' the definiition mnight seemn to belong in the normnative section of the argument, yet it does not, for concepts of power, though they may build on gender, are not always literally about gender itself. French sociologist Pierre Bouridieu has written about how the "di-vision du monde," based on references to "biological differences and notably those that refer to the division of the labor of procreation and reproduction," operates as "the best-f'ounded of collective illusions." Established as an objective set of references, concepts of gender structure perception and the concrete and symbolic organization of' all social life.4' To the extent that these references establish distributions of' power (differential control over or access to material and symnbolic resources), gender becomnes implicated in the conception and construc- tion of power itself. T'he Frenich anthropologist Maurice Godelier has put it this way: "It is not sexuality which haunts society, but society which haunts the body's sexuality. Sex-related dif'ferences between bodies are continually summoned as testimony to social relations and phenomena that have nothing to do with sexuality. Not only as testimony to, but also testimnony for-in other words, as legitimation."42 39 Biddy Martin, "Fenminisnm, Criticism and Foucauilt," Nez( Gernsan Critique, 27 (Fall 1982): 3-30; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Cathairine Beecher: A Study itn Amlericant Domtesticity (New Haven, Conn., 1973); Marv A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Cilman: 7he Making of a Radical Femirinist, 1860-1896 (Philadelphia, 1980). tO Lou Ratt6, "Gender Ambivalence in the Indian Nationalist Movement," unpublished paper, Pemhroke Center Seminar, Spring 1983; and Mrinalini Sinha, "Manliness: A Victorian Ideal and the British Inperial Elite in India," unpublished paper, Departnment of History, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1984. " Pierre Bourdieu, Le Serns Pratique (Paris, 1980), 246-47, 333-461, especially 366. -12 Maurice (Godelier, "The Or igins of Male Dominationi,' NewJ Le/i Review, 127 (May-Jtnne 1981): 17. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  1070 Joan W. Scott The legitimizing function of gender works in many ways. Bourdieu, for example, showed how, in certain cultures, agricultural exploitation was organized according to concepts of time and season that rested on specific definitions of the opposition between masculine and feminine. Gayatri Spivak has done a pointed analysis of the uses of gender in certain texts of British and American women writers.43 Natalie Davis has shown how concepts of masculine and feminine related to understandings and criticisms of the rules of social order in early modern France.44 Historian Caroline Bynum has thrown new light on medieval spirituality through her attention to the relationships between concepts of masculine and feminine and religious behavior. Her work gives us important insight into the ways in which these concepts informed the politics of monastic institutions as well as of individual believers.45 Art historians have opened a new territory by reading social implications from literal depictions of women and men.46 These interpretations are based on the idea that conceptual languages employ differentiation to establish meaning and that sexual difference is a primary way of signifying differentiation.47 Gender, then, provides a way to decode meaning and to understand the complex connections among various forms of human interaction. When historians look for the ways in which the concept of gender legitimizes and constructs social relationships, they develop insight into the reciprocal nature of gender and society and into the particular and contextually specific ways in which politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics. POLITICS IS ONLY ONE OF THE AREAS IN WHICH GENDER can be used for historical analysis. I have chosen the following examples relating to politics and power in their most traditionally construed sense, that is, as they pertain to government and the nation-state, for two reasons. First, the territory is virtually uncharted, since gender has been seen as antithetical to the real business of politics. Second, political history-still the dominant mode of historical inquiry-has been the stronghold of resistance to the inclusion of material or even questions about women and gender. Gender has been employed literally or analogically in political theory to justify or criticize the reign of monarchs and to express the relationship between ruler and ruled. One might have expected that the debates of contemporaries over the * Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," Critical Inquiiy, 12 (Autumn 1985): 243-46. See also Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York, 1969). An examination of how feminine references work in najor texts of Western philosophy is carried out by Luce Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985). 44 Natalie Zemon Davis, "Womeni on Top," in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1975), 124-5 1. q"' Caroline Walker Bynum,Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Calif., 1982); Caroline Walker Bynum, "Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women," Representations, 11 (Summer 1985): 1-25; Caroline Walker Bynum, "Introduction," Reli ion and Gender: Essays on the Complexity of Symbols (forthcoming, Beacon Press, 1987). 4" See, for example, T. J. Clarke, The Painiting of Modern Life (New York, 1985). '4 The difference between structuralist and post-structuralist theorists on this question rests on how open or closed they view the categories of difference. To the extent that post-structuralists do not fix a universal meaning for the categories or the relationship between them, their approach seems conducive to the kind of historical analysis I am advocating. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Gender 107 1 reigns of Elizabeth I in England and Catharine de Medici in France would dwell on the issue of'women's suitability f'or political rule, but, in the period when kinship and kingship were integrally related, discussions about male kings were equally preoccupied with masculinity and femininity.48 Analogies to the rmarital relation- ship provide structure for the argumeints of' Jean Bodin, Robert Filmer, and John Locke. Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution is built around a contrast between ugly, murderous sans-culottes hags ("the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of' women") and the soft f'emininity of Marie-Aintoinette, who escaped the crowd to "seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband" and whose beauty once inspired national pride. (It was in reference to the appropriate role for the f'eminine in the political order that Burke wrote, "'To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.")49) But the analogy is not always to marriage or even to heterosexuality. In medieval Islamic political theory, the symbols of political power alluded most often to sex between man and boy, suggesting not only f'orms of acceptable sexuality akin to those that Foucault's last work described in classical Greece but also the irrelevance of womein to any notion of politics and public life.50 Lest this last comment suggest that political theory simply reflects social organization, it seems important to note that changes in gender relationships can be set off by views of the needs of state. A striking example is Louis de Bonald's argument in 1816 about why the divorce legislation of the French RevoluLtion had to be repealed: Just as political democracy 'allows the people, the weak part ot political society, to rise against the established power," so (livorce, "veritable domestic democracy," allows the wife, "the weak part, to rebel again-st marital al-uthoritv'... "In order to keep the state out of the hanids of the people, it is necessary to keep thie famnilv out of the hands of wives and children."5' Bonald begins with an ainalogy and(I thein establishes a direct correspondence between clivorce and democracy. Harkirig back to mnuch earlier argumeints about the well-ordered f'amiily as the foundation of the well-ordered state, tlle legislation iS Rachel Weil "The (rowsn Has Fallen to the Distaff: Gender andI Politics in the Age of 'atharine (le Medici," Cioticual latrix (IPrinceton Working Papers in Wonmen's Studlies), I (1985). See also Louis Montr-ose, "Shcapinig Fa stitsies: Figtirationis of Gender andl Power in Elizabethan Ctulture," Represen- tationis, 2 (Spring 198 3 6 1-94 auiul Lynn H-lunt, "Hlerctiles andcl thie Radical Image in thle Frenclh Revolution," Rel)resentatiotis, 2 (Sprinig 198"3): 95-117. -'1 Edmundtic Btii ke, Reflections onl the} Frenich Revsolutioti (1 892; reprinlt ednl., New X'ork, 1909), 208-09, 214. kSee jean Bodin Six Books o 'the Commotraoelth ( 1606; reprint etin., New York, 1967); Robert Filnmer, Patrilarcha and Other I olitical Work., e(l. Peter- Laslett (Oxford, 1949); andj ohn Locke, Two Treatises (J' Governmevnt (1690; reprinit c(dn. ( ambridge, 197(0). See also Elizaheth Fox-Genovese, "Property and Patriarchy in Classical Boti-geois Political Theory," Radical History Review, 4 (Spring-Summiiiier 1977): 36-59; antI Mary Lynd(loni Shaniley, "Marriage Contract antI Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English Political Thought," Western Politic(l Quearterly, 32 (March 1979): 79-91. I1) I amil gratetul to Ber-nar(d Lewis for thie reference to Islam. Miclel FouLcault, Historie d(e la Sexualite, vol. 2, L'foage des plczisirs (Paris, 1984). One wonder-s in situLationis of this kind( what the terms of the subject's gend(er identity are an(d whether FreuLdianl tlheorv is suLfficient to describe the process of its construLction. 0n womleni in classical Athens, see Marilyni ArthlLtr, " 'Liberate(d Womlani: The Classical Era," in Renate Bridlenthal an(d ClaUdia Koonz, edts., Becomtinlg Visible (Boston, 1976), 75-78. 5 Cited in Roderick Phillips, "Womiien andl Family Break(dowvn in Eighteenth Century France: Rouen 1780(-180(0(,".Sociol listory, 2 (May 1976): 217. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  1072 loan W. Scott that imnplemented this view redefined the limits of the marital relationship. Similarly, in our own time, conservative political ideologues would like to pass a series of laws about the organization and behavior of the family that would alter current practices. The connection between authoritarian regimes and the control of women has been noted but not thoroughly studied. Whether at a crucial mnoment f'or Jacobin hegemony in the French Revolution, at the point of Stalin's bid for controlling authority, the implementation of Nazi policy in Germany, or the triumph in Iran of' the Ayatollah Khomeni, emergent rulers have legitimized domnination, strength, central authority, and ruling power as masculine (enemies, outsiders, subversives, weakness as feminine) and made that code literal in laws (forbidding women's political participation, outlawing abortion, prohibiting wage- earning by mnothers, imposing female dress codes) that put women in their place.52 These actions and their timing make little sense in themselves; in most instances, the state had nothing immediate or material to gain from the control of women. The actions can only be made sense of as part of' an analysis of the construction aind consolidation of power. An assertion of control or strength was given form as a policy about women. In these examples, sexual difference was conceived in terims of' the domination or control of women. These examples provide some insight into the kinds of' power relationships being constructed in modern history, but this particular type of relationship is not a universal political theme. In dif'ferent ways, f'or example, the democratic regimes of the twentieth century have also constructed their political ideologies with gendered concepts and translated themn into policy; the welfare state, for example, demonstrated its protective paternalism ill laws directed at women and children.53 Historically, some socialist and anarchist movements have refused inetaphors of domination entirely, imaginatively presenting their critiques of particular regimes or social organiza- tions in termns of transformations of gender identities. Utopian socialists in France and England in the 1830s aind 1840s conceived their dreamns for a harmonious future in terms of' the comnplementary natures of individuals as exemplified in the union of' man and womnan, "the social individual."54 European anarchists were long known not only f'or ref'using the conventions of bourgeois marriage but also for their visions of' a worldl in which sexual dif'ference did not imply hierarchy. These examples are of explicit connections between gender and power, but they are only a part of my definition of gender as a primary way of signifying O2 On th-ie French ReVolution, see Darlene Gay Levy, Harriet Applewhite, and Mary Johnson, eds., Women itn Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795 (Urbana, Ill., 1979), 209-20; on Soviet legislation, see the docunmenits in Rudolph Schlesinger, 7'Te Family it the USSR: Documents and Readings (London, 1949), 62-71, 251-54; on Nazi policy, see Tim Masoni, "Wonmeni in Nazi Germany," History Workshop, 1 (Spring 1976): 74-113, and Tim Masoni, "Women in Germany, 1925-40: Family, Welfare and Work," History Workshop, 2 (Autumn 1976): 5-32. 5' Elizabeth Wilson, Wonmen oind the Welfare State (London, 1977); Jane Jenson, "Gen(der and Reproduction"; Jane Lewis, Thel Politics of'Motherhood: Child and Materntal Welfare in England 1900-1939 (Montreal, 1980); Mary Lynin McDougall, "Protecting Infants: The French Campaign for Maternity Leaves, 1890s-1913," French Historical Studies, 13 (1983): 79-105. ' On English utopians, see Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New jerusalem (New York, 1983); on France, Joan W. Scott, "Men and Women in the Parisian Garment Trades: Discussions of Family and Work in the 1830s and 40s," in Pat Thane, et al., eds., 7he Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (Camibridge, 1984), 67-94. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Gender 1073 relationships of' power. Attention to gender is often not explicit, but it is nonetheless a crucial part of the organization of equality or inequality. Hierarchical structures rely on generalized understandings of the so-called natural relationship between male and female. The concept of' class in the nineteenth century relied on gender for its articulation. When middle-class reformers in France, f'or example, depicted workers in terms coded as feminine (subordinated, weak, sexually exploited like prostitutes), labor and socialist leaders replied by insisting on the masculine position of' the working class (producers, strong, protectors of their women and children). The terms of this discourse were not explicitly about gender, but they relied on references to it, the gendered "coding" of certain terms, to establish their meanings. In the process, historically specific, normative definitions of gender (which were taken as givens) were reproduced and embedded in the culture of the French working class.") The subject of war, diplomacy, and high politics frequently comes up when traditional political historians question the utility of gender in their work. But here, too, we need to look beyond the actors and the literal import of' their words. Power relations among nations and the status of colonial subjects have been made comprehensible (and thus legitimate) in ternms of relations between male and female. The legitimizing of war-of expending young lives to protect the state-- has variously taken the forms of explicit appeals to manhood (to the need to defend otherwise vulnerable women and children), of implicit reliance on belief in the duty of sons to serve their leaders or their (father the) king, and of associations between masculinity and national strength.561 High politics itself is a gendered concept, for it establishes its crucial importance and public power, the reasons for and the fact of its highest authority, precisely in its exclusion of women from its work. Gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticized. It refers to but also establishes the meaning of'the male/female opposition. To vindicate political power, the reference must seem sure and fixed, outside human construction, part of the natural or divine order. In that way, the binary opposition and the social process of gender relationships both become part of the meaining of power itself'; to question or alter any aspect threatens the entire system. If significations of gender and power construct one another, how do things change? The answer in a general sense is that change may be initiated in many places. Massive political upheavals that throw old orders into chaos and bring new ones into being may revise the terms (anid so the organization) of gender in the search for new forms of legitinmation. But they may not; old notions of' gender have 5 Louis Devance, "Femnme, famille, travail et morale sexuelle dans l'ideologie de 1848," in Mythets et representations de la femme au XIXe si?cle (Paris, 1976); Jacques Ranciere ancl Pierre Vaudav, "ELn allant a l'expo: l'ouvrier, sa femme et les machinies," Les Rhioltes Loglqsies, 1 (Winter 1975): 5-22. 56 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, " 'Draupadi' by Mahasveta Devi," Cr-itical Inquiire, 8 (Winter 1981): 381-402; Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October, 28 (Spring 1984): 125-33; Karin Hausen, "The Nation's Obligations to the Heroes' Widows of World War I," in Margaret R. tHIigolnnet, et al., eds., Women, War cind Iihstorn (New Haven, Conn., 1986). See also Ken Iniglis, "The Representationi of Gender on Austr-aliani War Memorials," unpublished paper presenited at the Bellagio Conference on Glender, Techniology ancl Education, October 1985. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  1074 Jo(al W. Scott also serve(c to validate new regimes.57 Demographic crises, occasioned by food shortages, plagues, or wars, may have called into question normative visions of' heterosexual n-mar-riage (as lhappened in somie circles, in some countries in the 1920s), but they have also spawned pro-viatalist policies that insist on the exclusive imuportance of' women's nmaternial and reproductive functions.58 Shifting patterns of' employment nmay lead to altered marital strategies and to dif'ferent possibilities tor the construction of'subjectivity, but they can also be experienced as new arenas of' activity t'or dutitf'l daughters and wives.59 The emergence of new kinds of cultural symbols may inake possible the reinterpreting or, indeed, rewriting of' the oedipal story, but it can also serve to reinscribe that terrible drama in even more telling term-s. Political processes will deternine which outcome prevails-political in the senise that diff'erent actors and diff'erent meanings are contending with onie atnotlher f'or control. The natur-e of that process, of the actors and their actions, can only be deternined specifically, in the context of' timiie and place. We can write the history of' that process onily if we recognize that "man" anid "woinan" are at once emipty anid overflowing categories. Enmpty because they have no ultimate, tran- scenclent mi-eanin-ig. Overflowing because even wlhen they appear to be fixed, they still contain within themn alternative, denied, or suppressed definiitions. Political history has, in a sense, been enacted on the field of gender. It is a field that seems fixed yet whose meaning is contested and in flux. If' we treat the oppositioin between male and f'emale as problematic rather than known, as somethinig contextually defined, repeatedly constructed, then we must constantly ask not only wlhat is at stake in proclamations or debates that invoke gender to explaini orjustif'v their positions but also how imnplicit understandings of' gender are being invoked and reinscribed. What is the relationship between laws about wonmeni and the power of' the state? Why (and since when) have women been inlvisible as historical subjects, when we know they participated in the great and small evenits of' human history? Has gender legitimated the emergence of professional careersP'() Is (to quote the title of a recent article by French f'eminist Luce Irigaray) the subject of'science sexed?l3' What is the relationiship between state On( the Fr-eich Revolution, see Levy, l'oossaeni inl Revolutioniary Paris; on the American Revolution, see Marv Beth Norton, Liberty'.s Danghtes :lie Revollotiary Expeience (of American Women (Boston, 1980); Lin(da Kerber, Womenl of the Repuiblic (Chapel H-lill, N.C., 1980); Joan Hoff-Wilson, "The Illusion of Change: W\omiien ani(i the American Revolution," in Alftrect Yoting, ed., T'lhe American Revollution: Exp)lorntion. in thlie litorv of Americani Radicali'sm (DeKall), Ill., 1976), 383-446. On the French Third Repuh)lje, see Steven Hause, Woineqn'.s SuftSfrage atnd Socail Politics in, the French Thlird Replublic (Princeton, N.J., 1984). An extremely interesting treatment of a recent case is Maxine Molyneux, "Mobilization without Emancipation? Womiien's Inter-ests, the State anctI Revolutioni in Nicaraguta," Femiuist Studies, 11 (Summller 19)8 ): 2927- 54. O()n pro natahs see Riley, War in the Nursev; antI jenson, "Gender- anti Reproduction." On the 1920s, see the essays in Strategies de.s Fenomes (Palris, 1984). For vtarious interplretations of the impact of niew work on women, see Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott. V nun, n VVoksli kaid FaiimilT (New York, 1 978); Thomiias Dub)lin, Wtonieti cit Work: D1le 7'ran.sf )rmcatian1 of lWok antid (ComwoviuntT in Lowell, Alassachu.setts, 1826-1860 (New York, 1979); and Edward Shorter, The.1Xakinig of thI Xlocdert Family (New York, 1975). See, for example, Margaret Rossiter, Womtietn Scien'tist.s itl America: Strutggles atcid Strategies to 1914 (B3altimore Md., 1982). ltuce trigaray, "Is the Suhject of Scieiice Sexed."' C ultutrlal Critique, I (Fall 1985): 73-88. This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Gender 1075 politics and the discovery of the crime of homosexuality?62 How have social institutions incorporated gender into their assumnptions and organizations? Have there ever been genuinely egalitarian concepts of gender in terms of which political systems were projected, if not built? Investigation of these issues will yield a history that will provide new perspectives on old questions (about how, for exarmple, political rule is imposed, or what the imnpact of war on society is), redefine the old questions in new terms (introducing considerations of family and sexuality, for example, in the study of economics or war), make womuen visible as active participants, and create analytic distance between the seemingly fixed language of the past and our own terminology. In addition, this new history will leave open possibilities for thinking about current feminist political strategies and the (utopian) future, for it suggests that gender must be redefined and restructured in conjunction with a vision of political and social equality that includes not only sex, but class and race. 2 Loulis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Niroeteenth-Centurv England (Berkeley, Calif., 1985). This question is touched on in Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (New York, 1983). This content downloaded from 106.219.156.176 on Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:34:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms