Only Questions to Offer

Review Essays Only Questions to Offer Kathleen Canning. Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. 343 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8014-3123-9 (cl). Gay L. Gullickson. Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. 283 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8014-3228-6 (cl); 0-8014-8318-2 (pb). Cecilia Morgan. Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791-1850. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. 304 pp. ISBN 0-8020-0725-2 (cl); 0-8020-7671-8 (pb). Joan Wallach Scott. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. 229 pp. ISBN 0-674-63930-8 (cl). Mary Louise Roberts It is hard to believe that only ten years ago, "gender" was largely a term of grammar. The creation of gender as a category of historical analysis, the study of knowledge concerning sexual difference as a historical entity, and the emphasis on language as a site for the production of such knowledge have both revolutionized and polarized feminist scholarship in the last decade. Pioneered by Joan Wallach Scott in her seminal book Gender and the Politics of History, these developments have generated an extraordinary body of historical Uterature both in quantity and quatity.1 Inevitably , they also have sparked widespread and often acrimonious debate about the nature of history in general and our goals as feminist scholars in particular. As we cross the threshold of a new millennium, the clear and present danger is that we will move from the white heat of theoretical dispute, painful but productive, to the stagnant air of pluralist complacency , with each side smiling blankly at the other from her own corner of the ring. Keeping that danger in mind, let us examine these four books, all stimulating examples of the new gender history and including Scott's much-awaited recent book. Together they quell certain fears about the project of gender liistory and awaken still others. But most important, they serve as a tonic against apathy or empty posturing by helping us to define the most promising challenges ahead. © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 3 (Autumn) 172 Journal of Women's History Autumn Cecilia Morgan's Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791-1850 is a happy tribute to the impact of Joan Scott's formulation of gender history on feminist scholars worldwide. Using Scott's double definition of gender—both as "'a constitutive element of social relationships'" and a '"primary way of signifying power'" (5), Morgan traces the cultural formation of a white, colonial, middle class in early-nineteenth-century Ontario. Gender relations were shaped and reshaped, she argues, in various forms of public discourse, primarily in the press, but also through sermons, published reports of missionary work, political pamphlets, and travel Uterature. As her title suggests, Morgan is interested mostly in religious and political texts, where, she argues, the stock characters in the drama of the domestic ideal—the "virtuous woman" and the "public man"—emerged on the stage of the nineteenth century. She dismisses as "monocausal" the argument that domesticity was a sorry by-product of industrialization, and instead turns her attention to discourse. Morgan skillfully shows that these gender notions also played a key "signifying" role in how Canadians debated the political future of the province. From the War of 1812 onward, a host of political figures used images of gender to establish legitimacy and authority and to dispute oppositional claims to power. Morgan takes seriously Scott's challenge to "'make visible the assignment of subject positions/" that is, to make as an object of historical study the way in which gender identities are ascribed, embraced, and resisted. She is aware that many have viewed such an approach as jeopardizing the political thrust of historical work by subverting humanist notions of individual agency and communal identity. Still, "approaches that focus on women," Morgan contends, "frequently fail to ask questions about the very constitution and configuration of the categories of 'woman...