When Gender Makes a Difference: Three Approaches
- When Gender Makes a Difference: Three Approaches
Elisabeth Israels Perry is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (1987). Currently she is working on women and oral reform in the Progressive era.
Notes
1. Some theorists call this the “same-difference” question. See e.g., Nancy Cott, “Feminist Theory and Feminist Movements: The Past Before Us,” in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley, eds., What is Feminism (New York, 1986), 49–60.
2. See Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York, 1965).
3. See my review in The Canadian Review of American Studies of books that also came out ın 1986 on the failure of the ERA, “Scholars Confront the ERA,” 18 (Fall 1987), 393–398. See also Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of American Feminism (New Haven, 1987).
4. In this regard, might not powerful women behave exactly like powerful men? The authors of this book spend only three pages discussing the impact of success in the workplace on women, and never follow up on the implications of the potential problems they outline.
5. See Joan Wallach Scott’s recent discussion, “Gender as a Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91 (December, 1986), 1053–1075.
6. See Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, 1982), who emphasizes women’s tendency to make a decision on the basis not of abstract moral principles but of its impact on others; also Sylvia Hewlett, A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America (New York, 1986), who in emphasizing women’s differences from men demands that society offer them special protections.
7. See the scholarly forums on Gilligan’s work, e.g. Linda Kerber, et al., Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 11 (Winter 1986), 304–333, and Judy Auerbach, et al.,Feminist Studies 11 (Spring 1988), 149–160.
