Gender and the Politics of History

¶ … politics, at least according to most college course catalogues, are separate disciplines. 'Women's Studies' also forms its own separate category, apart from these two disciplines. Yet in her work Gender and the Politics of History, Joan Wallach Scott makes it clear that for as long as women's studies has existed as a discipline, feminist historians have suggested that all three elements are intertwined in a proper analysis of history. Feminist historians have suggested that ways that gender has been viewed as a construct throughout history impacts the way history is viewed. The politics of how gender archetypes have been enshrined, both in law, in legislation, and in the political consciousness have all have an impact on the way that history is viewed retrospectively, and the way women live their lives today.

Scott writes her work both in response to these feminist historians, and as a part of the tradition of the rash of academic and popular women's writing about women in history in recent years. (15) Although it is impossible to reduce these writings on women's histories to a "particular political stance" she suggests a certain commonality between all of them in their lack of commonality. She pinpoints a problem that arises because of the lack of a tradition of historiography when writing about gender. Historians with political projects, such as Marxists, employ different historiographic techniques than those mainly interested in studying the construction of the feminine narrative of reproduction, and how women have attempted to control their bodies throughout history, for example. (16)

Scott suggests that it has been viewed as important for a certain interrelation between various historical studies of women in history to be constructed, and for these attempts at reconstructing a female history to have a valid and lasting political impact upon the intellectual consciousness of academia as well as the larger political sphere. (17) She acknowledges that all of these various analytic methods to some extent have "produce[d] a new knowledge about women" and produced a greater sense of the way women have impacted historical development. But a more consistent approach would necessary, Scott suggests, to justify the creation of a specifically 'women's history' apart from analysis of class, race, and particular historical periods. (17) Ultimately, such a separation will prove impossible, given the fluctuating nature of what constitutes gender across historical space and time, Scott suggests over the course of the essays that make up her book.

Scott suggests the project of her book is to show that to trace a more consistent, linear form of the development of women's history over time is a fruitless historical project in and of itself. She addresses the difficulty of chronology, of creating a sense of women's history as a whole, as the notion of 'woman' as unique and distinct historical actor is relatively recent. This is not to say that Scott discounts all of her feminist historical colleague's previous efforts. She notes that the conventional, accepted narrative of history as progress is profoundly challenged by the fact that women have often not benefited by the supposed advances in technology and scholarship the same way that men have. But a specifically feminist form of historiography cannot be created that transcends analysis of specific historical narratives tied to place and time. In the same way that broad-sweeping male histories of historical developments have failed and been challenged by feminists, so will broad-sweeping feminist analyses of history.

All feminist attempts at historiography have not been as illuminating as the ones cited above, after all. Scott cites past attempts in feminist historiography that have a similarly simplistic view of history as past, non-feminist readings of history. Domestic ideology of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century has often been read simply as "bad" and "oppressive" to women, without exploring the unique ways that women found liberation within these forms of discourse. Simply because women may have found liberation in the home does not automatically mean they were oppressed. A historian must consider the way that the valorization of underpaid work was often used as a tool of oppression to women and men of the lower classes during this era. Women's attempts at finding an alternative form of thinking about their lives in a non-monetary, anti-capitalistic form have taken on their own types of empowerment. (146-149) Class itself is one of the most neglected aspects of examining women's role in history, Scott suggests, by all except the most doctrinaire of Marxist feminists, who often give class such attention that gender takes a secondary role to their analysis. (49-51) Class and gender, Scott suggests, are intertwined, and one, specific historical conception of class impacts similar historically specific conceptions of gender.

Much of Scott's focus is on 19th century and early 20th century history, with a strong emphasis on European, specifically French history, however. French women played a far more critical role both in the revolution, the political developments of the mid-19th century period of that country, and the way that the industrial revolution did and did not impact the history of France. (101-102; 208-209) However, by drawing so much of her data and her own historiography from a very particular place in history and time, Scott raises questions about her own analysis that are only touched upon, or go unanswered altogether.

Is the sweeping analysis she brings about the futile nature of finding a feminist historiography itself rooted in the particularity of her own academic spheres of interest and study? Would a historian with a similar project, of creating a more coherent sense of feminist historiography, reach similar conclusions, if that historian focused on, perhaps, women in 19th century China or African-American slaves of the antebellum period in the American South?

Scott would respond that her point is that historiography is by its very nature a discipline of particularity. Every field of specialization pertaining to a particular country and to a particular era of history has its own particular lens and scope of bias, its own set of 'tools' that are often not used outside of that discipline. Although she does not accept their work and words uncritically, Scott is clearly very influenced by the deconstructionist school of history, the psychoanalytic views of Sigmund Freud, and the writings of Michel Foucalt. Even as she writes against such authors and attempts to inject a more gender-conscious approach to their works, she shows how their influence has permeated the particular historical school of academia she is located in. (38-39; 85-86)

How can the discipline of history, so particular in its nature, form a specific historically analytic method that encompasses women's histories from various languages, eras, races, geographies, and classes? Scott shows that one cannot write women as a category existing outside of these boundaries. For a historian to trace a linear narrative between women of different backgrounds from place to place is to deny the uniqueness of these various women's narratives. Scott suggests that the nature of history is to understand the specificity of every construction of women from era to era, for instance. By showing the ways these constructions differ, a historian may gain a sense of how the history of women has impacted the history of the world, and also of how women have not been included within all of the gains experienced by a relatively small proportion of the population, a population that is often of a specific race, class, and gender. But 'women' as a construct is not a preexisting category, but because it has been treated as such in so many ways, it forms a valid tool for historiography.