An oil painting of a high gilded hall: two dozen men in uniforms, sashes, frock coats and fezzes stand and sit around a long table under tall curtained windows, one shaking hands at the centre

Anton von Werner, Der Kongreß zu Berlin — the closing session, 13 July 1878; painted 1892 · Deutsches Historisches Museum · public domain

Berlin · 13 July 1878

Today’s claim is that this is a picture about gender

There is not a woman in the room. Where would you even start looking?

Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 6.2

Gender: A Useful Category

Background: Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History (1999), ch. 10: “Gender and History”, 253–260
Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075

Scott is cited by the page of the AHR printing. The Green and Troup pages are the editors’ own introduction to their chapter; where they quote someone else, the slide names both ends.

Today in context

What makes history happen?

Week 5 · Marx and Braudel

Structures. Class conflict over production; sea, soil and climate underneath everything.

Week 6.1 · Thompson, 1963

People — making themselves, out of what they experience and what they do about it.

Week 6.2 · Scott, 1986

Gender, as the system that makes any of those arrangements look natural.

Week 7.1 · Ginzburg, 1976

One miller’s cosmos, and what a single case can be made to carry.

Part one · the 1960s

Women’s liberation in the 1960s is when women set out to correct the record

“…it was during the 1960s’ women’s liberation movement that women began actively working to redress the absence of their lives and experience from most historical writing.”

Green and Troup, The Houses of History, p. 253

Part one · why it mattered

Without a history, the way things are looks like the way things must be

“[t]o be without history is to be trapped in a present where oppressive social relations appear natural and inevitable. Knowledge of history is knowledge that things have changed and do change.”

Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, Cultural Politics (1995), quoted in Green and Troup, p. 253

A black and white studio photograph of a woman in late middle age in a dark fur-collared coat, hair drawn back, looking past the camera — Alice Clark, c. 1922, and her book of 1919 The complaint is older than the movement: Clark wrote this as a research student at the London School of Economics. Green and Troup name her first among historians “researching women’s lives from early this century” (p. 253).
(Photograph: LSE Library, used for teaching. Title page: Internet Archive, public domain.)

A printed title page in wide-spaced capitals reading Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, by Alice Clark — Alice Clark, c. 1922, and her book of 1919 The complaint is older than the movement: Clark wrote this as a research student at the London School of Economics. Green and Troup name her first among historians “researching women’s lives from early this century” (p. 253).
(Photograph: LSE Library, used for teaching. Title page: Internet Archive, public domain.)

Part one · the distinction

Sex is biology. Gender is what a society makes of it.

Gerda Lerner, c. 1981

“Since sex is only rarely subject to change, it is not a useful concept for most historians.” Gender is “the cultural definitions of behaviour defined as appropriate to the sexes in a given society at a given time.”

Green and Troup, p. 253, the second phrase quoting Gerda Lerner (photographed c. 1981), The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)

Part one · the consequence

If gender is made, then gender has a history

“If gender is a social construction, then gender has a history and we can ask the questions: who makes gender and by what means, and how does it endure and change?”

Green and Troup, pp. 253–54

Part one · recovering women

Historians began by finding the women and writing them back in

“In the United States, activists lobbied for equal rights and historians tended to focus on examining women’s status and experience in the past, sometimes writing about famous women.”

Green and Troup, p. 254

Part one · Joan Kelly, 1928–1982

Adding women broke the periods historians already had

A Renaissance historian at City College, who came to women’s history through Gerda Lerner and then asked her own period whether it happened.

“there was no renaissance for women — at least, not during the Renaissance”

Joan Kelly, quoted in Green and Troup, p. 254

Part one · gender and class

Gender seemed to cut across class, and that is what broke the class analysis

“it seemed that some aspects of oppression and experience were common to women of all ranks despite the differences in their lives. And this oppression could be attributed to men, rather than to the specific economic system under which the women lived.”

Green and Troup, pp. 254–55

Part one · the criticism

Women of colour showed that the shared experience was white and middle class

bell hooks speaking into a microphone

“[t]here is much evidence substantiating the reality that race and class identity creates differences in quality of life, social status, and lifestyle that take precedence over the common experience women share — differences which are rarely transcended”

bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), quoted in Green and Troup, p. 255, who call the premise she attacks "manifestly incorrect"

Part one · where it ended up

Follow gender far enough and it turns up where no women are

“gender is present even when women are not”

Ava Baron, quoted in Green and Troup, p. 259

A colour photograph of an older woman with short white hair and red-framed glasses, smiling, standing in front of crowded white bookshelves; one shelf carries a label reading GENDER — Joan Wallach Scott · b. 1941 A historian of French labour, who had already written on women and work with Louise A. Tilly. She gave this paper to the American Historical Association in December 1985; the *AHR* printed it a year later.Why she matters: she argues that gender is not a subject to add to history but a category that changes what any history can ask.(Photograph by B. Sutherton, 2013, cropped. CC BY-SA 3.0.)

Part two · why “gender”

The word “denoted a rejection of the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as ‘sex’ or ‘sexual difference.’”

Scott, p. 1054

Part two · what happened to it

Within ten years it had become a quieter way of saying women

“In its simplest recent usage, ‘gender’ is a synonym for ‘women.’”

Scott, p. 1056

Part two · the charge

That makes gender a topic, and a topic changes nothing

“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.”

Scott, p. 1057

Part two · the definition, first half

Her definition turns on one word: perceived

“gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes”

Scott, p. 1067 — also quoted in Green and Troup, p. 253. Emphasis added

Part two · the definition, second half

Her theory of gender is in the second half

“gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power”

Scott, p. 1067

Part two · where to look

Four places a historian can actually go looking for it

01

Symbols

Eve and Mary, light and dark, purification and pollution.

02

Norms

Doctrines that fix one meaning of male and female and state it “as the only possible one.”

03

Institutions

Kinship, the labour market, education, and the vote.

04

Identity

How particular people were made into gendered subjects.

Scott, pp. 1067–68.

A hand-coloured etching: a man in a blue coat kneels on one knee before a radiant floating vision of a crowned woman, while a winged cherub above touches his head with a flaming torch; engraved text runs beneath — *Frontispiece to Reflections on the French Revolution* · 1790 Burke kneels to a vision of Marie-Antoinette while a cherub sets his head alight. Published 2 November 1790 — the day after Burke’s book — with his own sentences about the queen engraved underneath.
(Library of Congress, British Cartoon Prints Collection. Public domain.)

Part two · Burke, 1790

Burke argues against a revolution using two kinds of women

He sets “the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women” against Marie-Antoinette, who fled the crowd to “seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband.”

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, summarised and quoted in Scott, p. 1071

Part two · high politics

A room with no women in it is the gendered one

“High politics itself is a gendered concept, for it establishes its crucial importance and public power … precisely in its exclusion of women from its work.”

Scott, p. 1073

Part two · discussion

Gender without women

The Congress of Berlin, reduced: two dozen men in uniform around a table in a gilded hall

Scott says gender is at work in that room. What evidence would you need to show it, and where would you go looking?

Not the delegates’ sex but what the room claims for itself: strength and weakness in the despatches, protection in the treaties, the laws each power took home about its own women.

The lecture · looking back

Getting women in, fixing the word, and a room full of men

01 · Green and Troup

Getting women in

Recover the women, then break the periods, then set gender beside class — and each of those made the category “women” harder to hold.

02 · Scott, 1986

Fixing the word

“Gender” had gone quiet, meaning “women” and threatening nothing. Her definition puts power back into it.

03 · The payoff

Where it reaches

Burke’s two kinds of women, and a treaty room whose authority runs on who is not in it.

The take home

Gender is not the history of women

It is the reason so much history could be written as though women were beside the point.