Gender And The Politics Of History

An interrogation of the uses of gender as a tool for cultural and historical analysis. The revised edition reassesses the book's fundamental topic: the category of gender. In arguing that gender no longer serves to destabilize our understanding of sexual difference, the new preface and new chapter open a critical dialogue with the original book. From publisher description.

Joan Scott's work has influenced several generations of historians and helped make the topic of gender central to the way in which the discipline is taught and studied today. At root a new way of conceptualizing capitalist societies, Scott's theories suggest that gender is better understood as a social construct than as a biological fact. Scott’s original contribution to the debate, however, stems in her use of the critical thinking skill of analysis to understand how the arguments of earlier generations of historians were built in order to fully grasp both their structure and the assumptions that underpinned them. From there, Scott was able to use problem-solving to resolve the issues that emerged from her analysis, asking productive questions focused on better ways to build a model capable of explaining the historical phenomenon of gender difference. Scott answered these questions by introducing models created by deconstructionist scholars – notably Jacques Derrida, who challenged the idea that any term or concept has a stable or dependable meaning rooted in material reality. She was able, in consequence, to refute that idea that gender inequality is the natural (hence justifiable) consequence of biological sexual differences, and issue a fundamental challenge to the capitalist system itself.

In Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, Julie Des Jardins explores American women's participation in the practice of history from the late nineteenth century through the end of World War II, a period in which history became professionalized as an increasingly masculine field of scientific inquiry. Des Jardins shows how women nevertheless transformed the profession during these years in their roles as writers, preservationists, educators, archivists, government workers, and social activists. Des Jardins explores the work of a wide variety of women historians, both professional and amateur, popular and scholarly, conservative and radical, white and nonwhite. Although their ability to earn professional credentials and gain research access to official documents was limited by their gender (and often by their race), these historians addressed important new questions and represented social groups traditionally omitted from the historical record, such as workers, African Americans, Native Americans, and religious minorities. Assessing the historical contributions of Mary Beard, Zora Neale Hurston, Angie Debo, Mari Sandoz, Lucy Salmon, Mary McLeod Bethune, Dorothy Porter, Nellie Neilson, and many others, Des Jardins argues that women working within the broadest confines of the historical enterprise collectively brought the new perspectives of social and cultural history to the study of a multifaceted American past. In the process, they not only developed the field of women's history but also influenced the creation of our national memory in the twentieth century.

In the face of conflict and despair, we often console ourselves by saying that history will be the judge. Today’s oppressors may escape being held responsible for their crimes, but the future will condemn them. Those who stand up for progressive values are on the right side of history. As ideas once condemned to the dustbin of history—white supremacy, hypernationalism, even fascism—return to the world, threatening democratic institutions and values, can we still hold out hope that history will render its verdict? Joan Wallach Scott critically examines the belief that history will redeem us, revealing the implicit politics of appeals to the judgment of history. She argues that the notion of a linear, ever-improving direction of history hides the persistence of power structures and hinders the pursuit of alternative futures. This vision of necessary progress perpetuates the assumption that the nation-state is the culmination of history and the ultimate source for rectifying injustice. Scott considers the Nuremberg Tribunal and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which claimed to carry out history’s judgment on Nazism and apartheid, and contrasts them with the movement for reparations for slavery in the United States. Advocates for reparations call into question a national history that has long ignored enslavement and its racist legacies. Only by this kind of critical questioning of the place of the nation-state as the final source of history’s judgment, this book shows, can we open up room for radically different conceptions of justice.

"Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term "secularism" when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women's subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism"-- Publisher's description

Traditional analyses of nineteenth-century politics have assigned women a peripheral role. By adopting a broader interpretation of political participation, the author identifies how middle-class women were able to contribute to political affairs in the nineteenth century. Examining the contribution that women made to British political life in the period 1800-1870 stimulates debates about gender and politics, the nature of authority and the definition of political culture. This volume examines female engagement in both traditional and unconventional political arenas, including female sociability, salons, child-rearing and education, health, consumption, religious reform and nationalism. Richardson focuses on middle-class women’s social, cultural, intellectual and political authority, as implemented by a range of public figures and lesser-known campaigners. The activists discussed and their varying political, economic and religious backgrounds will demonstrate the significance of female interventions in shaping the political culture of the period and beyond.

Joan Scott's work has influenced several generations of historians and helped make the topic of gender central to the way in which the discipline is taught and studied today. At root a new way of conceptualizing capitalist societies, Scott's theories suggest that gender is better understood as a social construct than as a biological fact. Scott’s original contribution to the debate, however, stems in her use of the critical thinking skill of analysis to understand how the arguments of earlier generations of historians were built in order to fully grasp both their structure and the assumptions that underpinned them. From there, Scott was able to use problem-solving to resolve the issues that emerged from her analysis, asking productive questions focused on better ways to build a model capable of explaining the historical phenomenon of gender difference. Scott answered these questions by introducing models created by deconstructionist scholars – notably Jacques Derrida, who challenged the idea that any term or concept has a stable or dependable meaning rooted in material reality. She was able, in consequence, to refute that idea that gender inequality is the natural (hence justifiable) consequence of biological sexual differences, and issue a fundamental challenge to the capitalist system itself.