What is Gender History?

Sonya O. Rose

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745659091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

This book provides a short and accessible introduction to the field of gender history, one that has vastly expanded in scope and substance since the mid 1970s. Paying close attention to both classic texts in the field and the latest literature, the author examines the origins and development of the field and elucidates current debates and controversies. She highlights the significance of race, class and ethnicity for how gender affects society, culture and politics as well as delving into histories of masculinity. The author discusses in a clear and straightforward manner the various methods and approaches used by gender historians. Consideration is given to how the study of gender illuminates the histories of revolution, war and nationalism, industrialization and labor relations, politics and citizenship, colonialism and imperialism using as examples research dealing with the histories of a number of areas across the globe. Written by one of the leading scholars in this vibrant field, What is Gender History? will be the ideal introduction for students of all levels.

1

Why Gender History?

In answering the question posed by the title of this book, “what is gender history?” I hope to convince the reader that gender both has a history and is historically significant. To begin, we must first consider what might seem self-evident but is, in fact, complex – how to think about history itself.

History is comprised of knowledge about the past. This means that history is the product of scholarship concerning the past. At this point the reader might wonder, isn’t history the past? Common sense would tell us that if someone is interested in history, that person is interested in what has happened before the present day. But it is important to be clear that the past is reconstructed through historical scholarship – the knowledge produced by historians. This suggests that the process of reconstruction is all-important in the knowledge that is produced. What we know about the past is dependent upon the questions historians have asked and how they have answered them. What has been the focus of their interest? What have they deemed to be important to study about the past? How have they gone about studying it? How have they interpreted the evidence they have unearthed? To complicate matters, the answers to these questions themselves have changed over time. Historians are not outside of history, but are shaped by it and by the political, cultural, social, and economic climates in which they live and work. Thus, history itself has a history. This is important background to keep in mind as we begin to explore the topics of gender and gender history.

Although historians have differed and continue to differ in their approaches to their subject, they would all share the following assumption: the conditions within which people live their lives and the societies which shape those conditions change over time. These changes are many and varied, and the rates at which transformations occur also are variable. But the presumption of change or transformation is fundamental to historical scholarship. Not all historical scholarship, however, charts and accounts for changes. While some historians are concerned to show how events and certain processes were instrumental in transforming a society or an aspect of society, others are interested in exploring the processes producing continuities over time, and still others are involved in projects that describe aspects of life in a particular period or set of years in the past. But although such historians may not focus on change per se, they assume that the characteristics of the lives they unearth and write about are products of social and cultural processes that take place through time.

Gender history is based on the fundamental idea that what it means to be defined as man or woman has a history. Gender historians are concerned with the changes over time and the variations within a single society in a particular period in the past with regard to the perceived differences between women and men, the make-up of their relationships, and the nature of the relations among women and among men as gendered beings. They are concerned with how these differences and relationships are historically produced and how they are transformed. Importantly, they are also concerned with the impact of gender on a variety of historically important events and processes. In order to more fully explore the concerns of gender historians and how they “do” gender history, it is crucial to consider the meaning of the term “gender.”

Scholars use the concept of gender to denote the perceived differences between and ideas about women and men, male and female. Fundamental to the definition of the term “gender” is the idea that these differences are socially constructed. What it means to be man and what it means to be woman, the definitions or understandings of masculinity and femininity, the characteristics of male and female identities – all are the products of culture. Why use the term “gender” rather than the term “sex”? Why speak of the differences between men and women, or males and females, as gender differences rather than sex differences? In very recent years and as the next chapter will discuss in more detail, sex and gender have been considered synonyms and frequently are used interchangeably in popular discourse. But the term “gender” was originally used by feminist scholars to mean the cultural construction of sex difference, in contrast to the term “sex,” which was thought to mean “natural” or “biological” difference.

Before the last decades of the twentieth century and the growth and impact of scholarship on women and gender in numerous disciplines, including anthropology, history, and sociology, it was popularly assumed that the differences between men and women were based in nature and that these “natural differences” accounted for or explained the observed differences in women’s and men’s social positions and social relationships, their ways of being in the world, and the differences between them in various forms of power. Importantly, the hierarchical nature of the relations between men and women was assumed and not questioned. The presumption that the various differences between women and men were based in nature rather than being products of culture meant that it took particular historical circumstances to occur for scholars to begin to think that gender had a history or histories and that gender mattered to history.

Gender history developed in response to the scholarship on and debates about women’s history. As a field of study, women’s history began to flower only in the late 1960s and flourished in the 1970s, continuing to this day as a crucial component of gender history. But even before this, histories of women had been written, so that the development of the field from the 1960s may be considered a revival or renaissance, but in a new context that encouraged its formation as an academic field of study. Histories of women written before the twentieth century generally concerned such figures as queens and saints. For the most part the lives of ordinary women went unrecorded and unremarked upon except for the work of a few important predecessors to contemporary women’s history who wrote during the first half of the twentieth century. These important predecessors included Eileen Power, Alice Clark, and Ivy Pinchbeck in Britain and Julia Spruill and Mary Beard in the United States. Disregarding their work, professional historians considered the activities of women as mothers and wives, servants, workers, and consumers irrelevant to history. The histories of women written before the late 1960s and 1970s were generally not integrated into professional or popular histories of the time.

Why was it that women had been ignored by “mainstream historians”? A primary reason, one recognized early on in the development of the new women’s history, was that women had been neglected as historical subjects because historians viewed history to be almost singularly about the exercise and transmission of power in the realms of politics and economics, arenas in which the actors were men. The rise of women’s history and its development contributed to a rethinking of historical practice that was taking place among social historians who considered knowledge about the everyday lives of ordinary people as important to making sense of the past. But social historians, too, ignored women as historical actors because they mistakenly understood men, especially white, European, and North American men, as the universal agents of history. For example, “workers” were imagined as male figures, and so labor history neglected women’s work in the fields, workshops, and factories as well as in their homes.

Historians of women began to discover that women as well as men had been labor and community activists, social reformers, and political revolutionaries, and they demonstrated how women’s labor contributed to their households and to the economy more broadly. Importantly, women’s historians eventually challenged what had been a narrow definition of politics and power, broadening their scope to include arenas of life outside of governments and political parties, particularly in people’s “private lives.” These scholars delved into topics that had previously been considered “natural” rather than cultural or social, such as family violence, prostitution, and childbirth. These challenges to traditional historical practice came out of the very historical developments contributing to the rise and progress of women’s history.

Women’s history as a field of inquiry was a product of the women’s movement, or what has been called “second-wave feminism,” distinguishing it from the feminist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which sought to gain the vote for women as well as raising a number of other issues relating to women’s inequality. Feminism was central in stimulating interest in and generating analytical approaches to the history of women. While those who consider themselves to be feminists today may not be in total agreement about precisely what the project of feminism should be, most would agree that fundamental to feminism is the belief that women should have the same basic human rights as men. Feminists argue that generally women are disadvantaged relative to men. They suffer such disadvantages because of how gender has patterned their social worlds. The idea that women everywhere should have the same advantages as men led feminist scholars to want to recover the previously untold story of women’s lives in the past, to uncover the reasons for women’s subordinate status, and to wonder about the apparent omission or exclusion of women from the historical record. As two US-based European historians, Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, wrote in the introduction to their aptly entitled collection, Becoming Visible: Women in European History, published in 1977, “The essays written for this volume seek both to restore women to history and to explore the meaning of women’s unique historical experience.”¹

While the women’s movement generally stimulated interest in women’s history, the paths taken by feminist scholars varied depending upon the national context in which they worked. The place of women in the profession of history internationally differed with their institutional cultures – some were more open to women scholars than others. Women’s history developed relatively quickly in the United States, for example, as women scholars began gaining institutional support in some universities early in the 1970s. In Britain, institutional support developed later, and feminist-inspired historians there began to do women’s history from outside of the academy. But into the late 1980s women’s history still lacked academic respectability, and even today feminist historians are struggling to have women and gender incorporated into some areas of historical writing. In France and Germany, women’s history has been even slower to gain the acceptance of professional male historians.

Although women’s historians all were motivated by feminism, the substance and direction of women’s history as a field developed somewhat differently in different national settings.² In the United States, the concept of “separate spheres” became highly influential. In search of the roots of women’s subjugation and to recover the texture of and influences on women’s lives in the past, scholars depicted them as living and acting in a distinct space and or realm of activities centered on their families and households. As Linda Kerber has noted, historians discovered the use of the term “women’s sphere” in their sources, and that discovery, in turn, “directed the choices made by twentieth-century historians about what to study and how to tell the stories that they reconstructed.”³ In an enormously influential 1966 essay about American women’s lives in the years 1820–60, Barbara Welter described what she called the “Cult of True Womanhood,” an ideology prescribing that women should live by and for the virtues of “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.”⁴ Welter focused her inquiry on white, Northern, middle-class women, using as sources such written material as advice books, sermons, and women’s magazines. Although as the field of women’s history changed and diversified it was to be criticized by scholars for being based only on prescriptive literature and for its attention to only one group of women, Welter’s analysis kick-started what was to be a dominant emphasis in the US field generally into the 1980s. While being descriptive, it also was critical of the patriarchal relations that confined women and defined their lives, and like other works of the women’s history revival, it emphasized women’s oppression. Importantly, Welter suggested that the cult inspired diverse responses, and coupled with larger societal changes, including the abolitionist movement and the Civil War, women expanded their activities beyond the narrowly domestic realm.

“Women’s sphere” in nineteenth-century US history was analyzed by some feminist scholars in the mid-1970s and into the early 1980s as the source of what became described as a “women’s culture.” Scholars developing the idea of “women’s culture” were not focused primarily on analyzing how and why women were victims of a patriarchal society. Rather, they were interested in exploring the centrality of the relationships among women in history. In an important essay, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, for example, argued on the basis of her analysis of numerous letters and diaries that in order to understand women’s lives in nineteenth-century America, it was crucial to examine their relationships with one another. Women, she argued, as relatives, neighbors, and friends, spent their everyday lives together. Women’s friendships were characterized by devotion and solidarity, and were emotionally central in their lives. She further suggested that some Victorian women’s relationships involved physical sensuality and possibly sexuality as well as emotional affection from adolescence into adulthood. For Smith-Rosenberg, women’s sphere was not just a separate one, it had “an essential integrity and dignity that grew out of women’s shared experiences and mutual affection.”⁵ Nancy Cott moved the idea of “women’s sphere” onto new ground in her analysis of the development of the ideology of domesticity and women’s sphere from 1780 to 1835. The title of her book, The Bonds of Womanhood, was meant to underscore the double meaning of the term “bonds” as both constraints and connections.⁶ Using diaries in addition to prescriptive literature, she revealed some of the oppressive consequences of the ideology of domesticity, but more importantly she showed that a sense of sisterhood was nurtured within women’s sphere, as a consequence of which some women became politically conscious as women and organized to promote their rights.

In Britain, feminist historical research was stimulated by both the women’s movement and socialist or Marxian-inspired social and labor history. In the 1970s and early 1980s, feminist historians were keen to understand how women’s lives and activities were simultaneously affected by sex-based and class-based divisions. Sheila Rowbotham’s significant publications in the 1970s were influenced both by Marxism and by feminism. In her 1973 Women’s Consciousness, Man’s World, she argued for the necessity of understanding the “precise relationship between the patriarchal dominance of men over women, and the property relations which come from this, to class exploitation and raci...