Gender and the Politics of History: Scott's Feminist Historiography

Introduction: Connecting History, Politics, and Women's Studies

History, politics, and women's studies, at least according to most university course catalogues, are separate 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 argued that the ways gender has been viewed as a construct throughout history shape the way history itself is understood. The politics of how gender archetypes have been enshrined — in law, in legislation, and in the political consciousness — have all had an impact on the way history is viewed retrospectively, and on the way women live their lives today.

The Problem of Feminist Historiography

Scott writes her work both in response to feminist historians and as part of a broader tradition 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 very lack of commonality. She pinpoints a problem that arises from the absence of a unified 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 (16).

Scott suggests that it has been viewed as important for a certain interrelation between various historical studies of women 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 have, to some extent, "produce[d] a new knowledge about women" and fostered a greater understanding of the ways women have shaped historical development. But a more consistent approach would be necessary, Scott argues, 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 — a point Scott develops across the essays that make up her book.

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

Gender, Class, and the Limits of a Universal Women's History

Not all feminist attempts at historiography have been as illuminating as the strongest examples Scott cites. She points to past efforts in feminist historiography that share the same simplistic view of history found in non-feminist readings. Domestic ideology of the 19th and early 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 a degree of fulfillment in the home does not automatically mean they were oppressed. A historian must also consider the way that the valorization of underpaid work was often used as a tool of oppression against women and men of the lower classes during this era. Women's attempts at finding alternative, non-monetary, anti-capitalist ways of thinking about their lives have taken on their own forms of empowerment (146–149).

Class itself is one of the most neglected aspects of examining women's role in history, Scott argues — neglected by all except the most doctrinaire of Marxist feminists, who often give class such attention that gender is relegated to a secondary role (49–51). Class and gender, Scott contends, are intertwined: one historically specific conception of class shapes similarly specific conceptions of gender.

Conclusion: Academic Rigor and Feminist Political Goals

Scott's insistence upon a valid historiography places her analysis squarely within the historical discipline of study yet also within the literary and academic psychoanalytic theory popular in France. She wishes to have a political impact with her work as well as an academic influence. But above all, she wishes her work to have a sense of academic rigor that a popular author — with an eye on the often polarizing and more simplistic discourse of the purely political — might not achieve.

Because she writes within academia, and within a very particular academic tradition at that, a question remains: can drawing such broad connections be useful in the current political landscape when attempting to serve feminist political goals? How can the impact of race and national origin — so important in the United States today, for instance, in analyzing gender both politically and academically — be understood intelligently while still serving feminist political ends? Scott's book gives scant treatment to this subject; it is not part of her project. Yet the book is thought-provoking and wide-ranging in its scope. It does not provide answers about how to construct a valid form of far-reaching feminist historiography, but it remains an important feminist document nonetheless.

Works Cited

Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York, 1999.