Gender History/Women's History: Is Feminist Scholarship Losing its Critical Edge?

Introduction to Dialogue: Gender History/Women's History: Is Feminist Scholarship Losing its Critical Edge? Sonya O. Rose There has never been a period when fentinists have been unified around a single analytical frame. As a number of scholars have pointed out, disunity has marked feminism throughout history.1 Major fault lines have formed and reformed over the very subject matter of feminist analysis—the category women.2 The four essays that follow assess the implications of recent directions in feminist history, including the turn to gender history, but especially the emphasis on difference in feminist analysis. Asignificant achievement of feminist scholarship in the 1970s was the development of the concept of gender signifying the social rather than the biological construction of sexual difference. Another major accomplishment was the revelation that the relations between women and men varied historically and cross-culturally. As historians became increasingly interested in these relations and structures, many began to focus on the subject of gender itself. They argued that to focus only on women instead of on gender relations was to reinforce the idea that only women have gender, which "ironically privileges the man as unproblematic or exempted from determination by gender relations."3 Many feminist historians have shifted their primary focus from examining women's lives to demonstrating the centrality of gender to various arenas of social life.4 Not everyone has greeted this turn to gender with unqualified approval. Some have worried that a focus on gender—on men as well as women and on the ways that gender is mtrinsic to all social relations—has deflected historians from the feminist movement's primary political goals of unmasking oppression and enhancing the potential for emancipatory politics.5 Arguing that feminist history should be concerned with the issue of women's oppression which has been sidestepped by the recent focus on gender, Judith Bennett, for example, proposed that historians rethink the concept of patriarchy in order to bring "moral and political commitment" back into women's history.6 More problematic for women's history than the gender turn have been the challenges that were implicit in feminist history as it developed and that were quite explicit in the divisions among women themselves. These ©1993 Journal of Wqmens History, Vol. s No. ι (Spring)_________________ The papers in this roundtable discussion were presented at the Social Science History annual meeting in October 1991. 90 Journal of Women's History Spring center on the issue of difference; not the differences between women and men, but the differences that the term women obscures and mystifies. Two quite distinct critiques of feminist analysis centering on the issue of difference have led to vexing questions about the subject matter of women's history and the methods of feminist analysis. One comes from postmodernism, particularly in its French post-structuralist guise. In history this critique has been made most influentially by Joan Scott.7 The other comes from various black and Third World theorists and critics. Joan Scott, like other feminist theorists and historians who focus on gender, maintains that "gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes."8 In addition she states, "gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power," suggesting that the "gender question in feminism" is about discourse and how it creates meaning.9 Scott argues that French post-structuralism, especially the method of deconstruction, is well suited for use by historians who are concerned with examining the meanings generated through language, and it is this focus she maintains that is necessary for ferninist historical analysis to advance.10 Scott contends that post-structuralism offers feminists a radical epistemology that relativizes "the status of all knowledge, links knowledge and power, and theorizes these in terms of the operations of difference."11 The appropriate objects of study, according to Scott, are epistemológica ! categories. She writes, "The story is no longer about the things that have happened to women and men and how they have reacted to them; instead it is about how the subjective and collective meanings of women and men as categories of identity have been constructed."12 For Scott and other post-structuralists, identity or subjectivity...