Critical Theory and the History of Women: What's At Stake in Deconstructing Women's History

Dialogue From time to time, the "Dialogue" section of the JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY will feature complete sessions from historical conferences. Our first one appears below. These articles were originally presented at the session on History and Theory at the Eighth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Douglass CoUege on June 8, 1990. A future issue will cover protective legislation in various nations, with articles from both the "Eighth Berks" and the 1990 Social Science History Conference. Critical Theory and the History of Women: What's At Stake in Deconstructing Women's History Louise M. Newman The challenge for those of us who are convinced both that real historical women do exist and share certain experiences and that deconstruction ... makes theoretical sense is to work out some way to think both women and "woman." Mary Poovey, 19881 This paper explores a shift away from women's history to a new and different practice, gender history, and the tensions that arise as feminist scholars adapt methodologies from post-structuraUst theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In part, I hope to forge a bridge between the work of historians of women and historians of gender. I would Uke to see the field move beyond the impasse toward which it seems to be heading—an impasse sometimes characterized by academic name-calling, with historians of women accusing historians of gender of poUtical irrelevancy and historians of gender calling historians of women theoreticaUy naive. The fields of women's history and gender history are at a crucial juncture in their development. The conflict is partly over what categories of analysis should be used and how power or human agency should be conceptualized. Historians of women use the terms "experience," "identity ," and "woman" and invest individuals—women and men—with the power to alter material conditions of oppression. Historians of gender, on the other hand, offer as substitutes the terms "representation," "discourse ," and "gender." In place of experience, historians of gender speak of representations that are either present or absent in texts; in place of © 1991 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 2 No. 3 (Winter) 1991 DIALOGUE: LOUISE M. NEWMAN 59 identities, they speak of discourses constructing subjects; and in place of women's experiences, they speak of "gender" as that which gives meaning to sexual differences. For many theorists influenced by post-structuraUsm, oppression and power reside in the operations of language, although it is not always clear how subjects may resist the oppression produced by the operations of language. As Mary Poovey explains, for those who take post-structuralism to its logical conclusion, the term " 'woman' is only a social construct that has no basis in nature... a term whose definition depends upon the context in which it is bang discussed and not upon some set of sexual organs or social experiences."2 Historians of women reject this way of using the term "woman." They insist on retaining a focus on the coUective and individual experiences of flesh-and-blood women. Such historians are skeptical of the overdetermining role or power which some post-structuraUsts attribute to language. They remain committed to maintaining power for people to resist or escape from what oppresses them.3 Thus, for the purposes of this discussion, I wül speak of women's history as a practice concerned with why specific groups of women share certain experiences, while gender history provides analyses concerning how gender operates through specific cultural forms. I am using "gender" here to mean the set of meanings constructing sexual difference. When defined this way, gender may, at first glance, seem to have nothing to do with the experiences of men and women, but, as I argue throughout, understanding how gender works to construct the meanings associated with "male," "female," "masculine," "feminine," "womanly," "manly," etc., is instrumental to understanding how and why specific groups of women share certain experiences. Although I am distinguishing between these two practices, women's and gender history, ultimately I beUeve that the two practices do and should converge: writing meaningful accounts of women's (and men's) experiences, I shaU argue, cannot be accompUshed without also examining the ways in which cultural meanings...