On the Importance of Naming: Gender, Race, and the Writing of Policy History

Twenty years ago, just as the study of policy was emerging out of the morass of political history,¹ historians of women rediscovered the state. What I will name the policy turn challenged a kind of intellectual separate sphere in which women's history addressed home, family, and intimate life and left to other historians everything else. The policy turn shifted attention from Carroll Smith Rosenberg's "Female World of Love and Ritual" without losing the self-activity and focus on female difference that investigations of women on their own terms had supplied.² It answered the "Politics and Culture" debate of 1980,³ which revolved around the efficacy of domesticity as an arena for power with a resounding move toward the public, political realm—namely, to social politics. The Reaganite assault on the New Deal order and accompanying New Right attack on women's rights⁴ intensified investigation into the origins and growth of a welfare state whose strength seemed precarious and whose history was up for grabs—a welfare state that blurred the separation of private and public and constructed, even as it reinforced, unequal social locations.⁵

The resulting narratives expanded policy history to include women as policymakers and policies directed toward women as wives, mothers, daughters, consumers, workers, and citizens.⁶ But this shift occurred amid changes in the theoretical underpinnings of women's history. The mid-1980s marked the ascendancy of difference as the central problematic within feminist thought. Scholars challenged conventional notions of gender, promoting social constructionist understandings of womanhood and manhood. Rejecting universal categories, the new scholarship emphasized differences among women on the basis of sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Gender, we learned, provided a language through which other social relations of power and authority became articulated.⁷

Joan Scott set the terms for research when she declared that "political [or, we might add, policy] history has . . . been enacted on the field of gender." In her classic essay, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," she asked, "What is the relationship between laws about women and the power of the state?" "What is the relationship between state politics and the discovery of the crime of homosexuality? How have social institutions incorporated gender into their assumptions and organizations?"⁸ Policies that on the surface were not about women, sexuality, or gender became subject to analysis of their gender silences and the gendered assumptions they expressed.⁹

Indeed, discourses, which policy presents and embodies, not merely express gender but also construct men and women through the very act of naming.¹⁰ Judith Butler's understanding of "performative power" particularly illuminated this process of categorization through discourse. "The heterosexualization of the social bond is the paradigmatic form for those speech acts which bring about what they name. 'I pronounce you' . . . puts into effect the relation that it names," she explained. That is, "forms of authoritative speech," which include laws and state documents like marriage certificates, occupational licenses, and applications for social assistance, turn discourse into action or expressions of power.¹¹ By classifying the homosexual by sex acts performed, for example, the state created an identity.¹² Similarly, exclusion from the labor law meant denying recognition as workers to the majority of men and women of color and white women who labored at home, in the fields, or without a wage.¹³

The substitution of gender for women, and gender relations for women's experiences, still privileged gender over other social identities and structures of power and authority. A second challenge in the 1980s came from scholars of race who introduced the idea of intersectionality (the notion that identity derives from multiple factors like race, gender, and class) and promoted the concept of racialized gender.¹⁴ As I have claimed elsewhere, despite attempts to disaggregate the workings of race from gender, individuals and groups embody both in ways that the mere addition of race to gender cannot signify. Manhood, womanhood, and sexualities probably never exist apart from race; not only is race gendered, but the policing of the boundaries of race significantly takes place through rules on...