"Aging": A Problematic Concept for Women

Devoting a special issue of the Journal of Women's History to age as a concept of analysis for women's past is problematic for a number of reasons. Descriptions of aging as a process--maturing through various stages of life from birth to death--have not traditionally occurred in histories of women. Nor have historians delineated how the process applies to women's lives in histories of childhood or old age. Scholars of women's history have overcome such voids by establishing new sets of categories or definitions that relate explicitly to women's experiences. Those analyzing women's contributions to the history of art have emphasized such alternative media and skills as quilting or the use of multiple and unorthodox materials; those focusing on women in science have stressed women's private experimentation at home, the role of chemistry in cooking, and the duty of housewives in earlier periods to provide medical treatment for families and neighbors; and those focusing on politics have examined women's "gossip circles" and neighborhood organizing. These have been studied even when men's informal and family connections were most important to their success and when a female monarch and female advisors existed as clear examples of women's political standing. In short, scholars have studied a range of topics in a framework of gender stereotypes (both for women and men) outside the contributions women have made to mainstream "male" institutions.

But these efforts have often left us in a situation where men stand for the species norm while women represent a specialized form of human be-ing. To avoid such a problem we must treat age as a significant marker, but one that has taken its meaning from the distinct lived experiences of women and men. Can we, therefore, redefine categories as broad and as central to the nature of being human as aging to make them conform to women's distinct history? Or must we treat them as problematic and inappropriate to use without clarifying how gender is embedded within them?

To make this theoretical point more clearly, I link it to the concerns I have with feminist attempts to extirpate sexist language from everyday and academic use. While I understand the motivation behind such efforts, I still believe that it often does more harm than good simply to add "she" or "women" to an account when the reality, or author's intent, clearly excludes them. If an author used "people" or "person" to mean men or man, then it is more effective to reveal such usage by placing "man" in brackets, or a masculine pronoun following the falsely inclusive term. This makes clear the author's intent, rather than inserting "he or she" or "men and women" when a historical phenomenon (or commentary on that phenomenon) clearly excluded women. One must first acknowledge exclusion to change it, not simply alter language or definitions to create new categories or narratives that place women within existing frameworks.

My own research is on how the false universal operated in England from 1640 to 1832, but I believe my findings affect our understanding of gender definitions well beyond the early modern period or English national boundaries. My main argument is that women have been most effectively excluded from the nation (and central qualities of being human) not so much through explicit exclusion, and certainly not based on the characteristics attached to femininity and masculinity, but more so through language that has assumed inclusion while being encased in exemplary material and historical context that reveals they were never included at all. The use of such words as "all" (which was consistently used to mean "all men") to exclude women has been much more effective than employing explicit phraseology. At the heart of this falsely universal inclusion has been the concept of a process of aging that was implicitly based on a male maturation process which claimed to...