The Road to ‘Gender’ Gender history grew out of women’s history. In what follows, it may soem as if women’s and gendor history are not just different things altogether, but that one ~ gender ~ in flowing from the other ~ women ~ superseded it That's only because of the order I am going to impose on the material Remember in the Introduction, when I said that there isn’t any ‘past” out there for us to faithfully recover? Well, here’ a perfect example of that: my choices about what to include in this chapter will eeate a narrative ~ tell a story ~ that appears seamless and complete. Let me assure you that itis not Others would choose different characters and different turning pointsthey'd focus on different subjects;and as a result, they'd tell it differently. My version tres to be accurate in its representations, but itis made up of how I see the process unfolding, not necessarily how everyone sees if, and you need to know that up frat. ‘Women's and gender history do indeed have much in common with one another, Women’s historians study women as subjects, and have been doing so for a very long time, at least since the Renaissance.' Gender historians study the relationship of women to men in the context of various societies, paying particular attention to the interplay of male and female identities, Both of these sets of practitioners address subjects and use methods that overlap with one another, and women’s and gender histories inform one another as a matter of course, I'S not that gender history is better than women’s history, or vice versa, although, as you'll also see in the next chapter, the debates that grow up between them certainly suggested that that was So. Infact, neither women's nor gender historians could do what we do these days without the other, Not only are they historically linked, but without women’s history, no. gender history would have been possible Gender history depends heavily on women’s history for the material it analyzesand women’s history could only provide a partial view of women’slives if it did not take gender ~ the interrelationships of male and female — into account, ‘Hidden from history’: recuperating women for history The decade of the 1960s spawned the emergence of protests against and radical challenges to the status quo in the West. In western Europe and the English-speaking countries, New Left, civil rights, antiwar, and then, when women found themselves largely unwelcome in these groups, feminist movements sprang up, issuing calls for dramatic changes in virtually every realm across their societies. The demands for change found especial resonance within colleges and universities, formerly the repository of elite persons and of a pedagogy that perpetuated their values. The influx of non- elite white men and women and people of color into post-secondary educational institutions transformed the humanities and social science disciplines within a short period of time, and ultimately reached the natural and physical scienc well. History departments, the object of our concern, felt the impact immediately, as calls for a ‘new social history’ that would focus on the lives of ordinary people rather than on the exploits of an elite few led to the development of a vital and burgeoning new sub-field. Initially it seemed to many women that the new social history would provide just the place for the lives of women to be explored as well. That didn’t happen, In fact, many of the radical historians and the histories they wrote exhibited the same kinds of misogyny and discrimination against women that earlier generations of historians had practiced. The women’s liberation movements of the 1970s galvanized an entire generation of feminist historians across the western world. These brave souls — you have to imagine how hard it might have been for a lone woman in a department consisting otherwise entirely of men to challenge their practices — insisted not only that women should not have to deal with the often crippling discrimination against them but that the histories being written should include women in them. Some of the earliest works produced by these women carried titles like Hidden from History (1973) and Becoming Visible (1977), testimony to the overriding need to bring women in the past into the spotlight, to resurrect them from posterity so that they might serve as role models for the present and future. In Australia, for example, a number of biographies treating a variety of white womenappeared;in the United States, women who had participated in the abolitionist, feminist, and social welfare campaigns found their historians. In Britain, feminist historians influenced by Marxist historiography tended to focus on the lives of ‘ordinary’ rather than elite women;while in France, women’s histories drew upon the anthropological traditions of the Annales school and treated cultural themes that bore on women like sexuality or motherhood.? The search for women’s past rested in large part on two related assumptions: first, that if women were to be regarded as historical actors, historians would have to regard them as partaking of a collective identity; and secondly, a conviction that women shared a collective set of experiences on the basis of which they formed a collective identity. Women’s historians, feminists themselves in virtually every instance, shared the underlying belief in much of feminist thinking that women, as both subject and object of feminism’s program, share common natures, common needs, common wants, common desires, and a common oppression. Their histories sought to uncover these aspects of women’s lives, and their earliest efforts at theorizing tried to explain how that oppression operated. The outpouring of feminist histories of women stimulated the establishment of the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in the United States, the first meeting of which was held at Douglass College, Rutgers University, in 1973. Conveners expected maybe a hundred people, but 300 showed up;another conference was planned for the following year at Radcliffe College, where over 1000 women participated. Having grown so large, the conference could not be held every year, so members decided that it would meet every three years instead, and thus Berkshire conferences met at Bryn Mawr in 1976, Mount Holyoke in 1978, Vassar in 1981, Smith in 1984, Wellesley in 1987, Douglass again in 1990, and Vassar again in 1993. With participants from all over the world, men and women alike, now reaching into the many thousands, the small women’s colleges of the US east coast could no longer accommodate such crowds, and beginning in 1996, ‘the Berks,’ as it was called, was relocated to larger universities across the country (North Carolina, California, Connecticut, Minnesota, Massachusetts). The successes of the Berkshire Conferences spoke unmistakably of the immense energies unleashed by women’s historians. The conferences themselves, along with a number of historical journals dedicated to thestudy of women that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in Britain, Australia, and the United States, also served as the sites where some of the most contentious, exciting, and fruitful debates taking place within women’s history were aired. One of the earliest of those debates concerned the notion of ‘patriarchy’ — literally, ‘rule of the father’ — to explain the systems and means by which men dominate and exploit women. Depending upon their orientation, historians turned to the theories we laid out in the preceding chapter, incorporating analyses of kinship systems, capitalism, or psychoanalysis to advance their arguments. Much good work came out of these efforts, but patriarchy as a theory tended to become ahistorical — that is, it reduced to a single cause all of women’s oppression without allowing for alliances between men and women, change over time or place, or women’s resistance to it. It became a monolithic force, this power derived from biological difference, suggesting that men and women were forever and everywhere locked in antagonism to one another. Sheila Rowbotham made this argument in a 1979 forum in The New Statesman, in which she and responders Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor debated the relative merits of the concept. Alexander and Taylor countered that patriarchy need not be viewed as biologically based, and therefore as an unchanging entity. But more importantly, they insisted, the concept provided a theoretical framework within which women’s lives could be examined and analyzed. Patriarchy served as a vital tool for historians of women, they urged, for ‘history only answers questions which are put to it.’ Judith Bennett added both strength and nuance to the argument in favor of patriarchy as ‘feminism’s central theoretical problematic’ when she observed that the system that oppressed women was not exclusively that of ‘male oppressor/female victim.’ Men weren’t only oppressors, women only victims. Rather, she pointed out, ‘women ... have also colluded in, undermined and survived patriarchy.’> One aspect of western patriarchal systems, at least, took on enormous significance in the work of women’s historians over the next 30 years or so — that of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women. In one of its earliest iterations, Barbara Welter regarded the private sphere of home and family for American women as a veritable prison, locking them into a domestic role that demeaned and devalued them and even made them ill.4 In 1975, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg published one of her most famous essays, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual,’ in which she turned Welter’s position onits head by bringing the most cherished principles of the feminist movement — ‘the personal is political’ — to bear on her subjects. Rather than seeing the private sphere of home and family as an entirely negative space and place for women, Smith-Rosenberg posited it as the site where positive bonds between women were forged. Sharing the private, personal experiences of marriage, childbirth, child-rearing, religion, and family life, the women in the nineteenth-century American home developed a distinctly female culture from which men were absent. This shared, female-only culture fostered in women a sense of worth and a belief in themselves; it empowered them, in other words, rather than oppressed them, as Welter had claimed.> Subsequent historians expanded upon this new valorization of women’s distinct culture to explain how and why women ventured out from their private sphere to engage in social and political reform activities in the public realm. Nancy Cott’s 1977 The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’ Sphere in New England, 1780-1835, was followed by Blanche Wiesen Cook’s ‘Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman’ (1979), Estelle Freeman’s ‘Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism’ (1979); Nancy Sahli’s ‘Smashing: Women’s Relationships Before the Fall’ (1979), Mary Ryan’s ‘The Power of Women’s Networks’ (1983), and Kitty Sklar’s “Hull House in the 1980s: A Community of Women Reformers’ (1985). The strengths of this approach were many. First, it brought to light the activities of women in a wide array of both private and public activities that conventional histories simply ignored. It tied the personal to the political, showing how public, political activity arose from the experiences of private life. And it demonstrated just how historical entities like sex and gender were — that is, that they were not static categories, but changed over time. But although the models of separate spheres and of a distinct women’s culture proved long-lasting in women’s history, they were not without their critics. In the United States in 1980, Ellen DuBois decried the depoliticising of feminist history, as she saw it, that the emphasis on women’s culture brought about. Others pointed out that the separate sphere that produced a distinctly female culture could not be said to apply to the lives of working women or women of color, or of many groups outside of America. Another group of women’s historians turned to the practices developed within the ‘new social history’ to bring women into history. Because social history emphasized not great men as the movers and shakers of history, butfocused on large societal processes such as the development of capitalism; because it set its sights on such non-traditional subjects as family relationships, fertility, demography, and sexuality, and borrowed heavily from a number of disciplines in order to study them; and because it legitimated the study of groups not normally found in history books — peasants, slaves, workers, for example ~ the field looked to be a promising site for the entry of women onto its terrains. As indeed it was: the studies done by women’s historians resist counting at this point;suffice it to say that many, many hundreds of articles and books appeared in which the lives of women figured prominently. Gender But as Joan Scott pointed out in 1983, neither the women’s culture nor the social history approach had the effect its practitioners had sought — to rewrite conventional history as it had been practiced in the West for the past 100 years. The first, she argued, while replacing men with women as the subject of historical study, nonetheless continued to separate women out from history as traditionally written. The second — adding women to social history — didn’t change the story that social history told. Social history may well have rewritten conventional political history, but the addition of women to it had not made an appreciable difference. ‘Women are a department of social history,’ Scott pointed out, too integrated within it to offer productive insights or provocative questions. The solution, she suggested, for feminist historians who hoped to transform history as a practice was to incorporate ‘gender’ into their studies, an analytic category that derived from and expanded upon the abundance of studies already produced by historians of women.° Scott was certainly not the first to introduce the concept of gender. In the 1970s, two historians, Joan Kelly and Natalie Zemon Davis, began to call for a new approach to women’s history that implied, if they did not always explicitly utilize, the term. Rather than try to study women in isolation from men, they argued, women’s historians needed to study them in relation to men. At the 1975 Berkshire Conference, Davis told her audience that we should be i sd in the history of both women and men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex any more than an historian of class can focus exclusively on71 of 178 peasants. Our goal is to understand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past. Our goal is to discover the range in sex roles and in sexual symbolism in different societies and periods, to find out what meaning they had and how they functioned to maintain the social order or to promote its change.” She believed that such an approach, which we would identify as a gendered history, promised to compel whole new ways of thinking about many of the issues that concerned historians — power, social structure, property, symbols, and periodization. Davis’s call resonated with Joan Kelly, who had been thinking along the same lines already. Her 1976 Signs article, ‘The Social Relations of the Sexes’, echoed Davis in claiming that ‘the activity, power, and cultural evaluation of women simply cannot be assessed except in relational terms: by comparison and contrast with the activity, power, and cultural evaluation of men, and in relation to the institutions and social developments that shape the sexual order.’® Davis and Kelly asserted not only that placing women in relation to men enabled historians to understand women more comprehensively, but it placed gender — the relations of the sexes — smack in the center of any study of society. It would no longer be possible, they were confident, to study society and its many institutions and offshoots without incorporating gende By 1985, History Workshop, the British socialist journal established in 1976 as an outlet for scholarship carried out outside of Britain’s conservative history departments, had arrived at much the same conclusion. It noted that ‘while rediscovering the worlds that women have inhabited is important ... it can lead to a ghettoisation of women’s history and to its presentation in forms which historians working in different fields find easy to ignore.’ It urged feminists to continue to write women’s histories, but to include in their works the ‘reconstructing of men as social group and gender category [sic]’ so that a fuller reading of the historical record might be possible.” In one of the most influential treatments utilizing gender, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class (1987), Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall sought to demonstrate how gender stood at the very core of class identity, how it organized and structured middle-class society in Britain. At the core of their arguments stood the practice of separate spheres for men and women, which, they claimed, functioned to provide both an individual identity for men and women and a social identitySusan Kingsley. for the class they were a part of creating. An arrangement in which men went out to work while their wives remained at home to maintain a decent, moral, disciplined, and well-regulated domestic life — these, in the minds of evangelicals and political economists, provided the building blocks upon which a stable, hierarchical, deferential social order could be constructed and sustained in the midst of industrial transformation and political revolution. And the families that could afford to adopt this system, who would become the bourgeois middle class of industrial Britain, drew upon the qualities they saw as inherent in it to distinguish themselves from the aristocracy above them and the working people below them. Class identity, thus, was founded upon gender. ‘amily Fortunes took off in the Anglophone world, garnering a broad audience and deep appreciation for its detailed, comprehensive, and innovative effort to tie gender to class formation. But it also generated a fair bit of criticism. In Britain, Amanda Vickery noted that historians’ conflation of the prescriptions put forth by separate-sphere ideology with the actual behavior of men and women had grievously distorted the picture. Public and private realms never fully contained their putative inmates: men regularly and habitually acted and participated in the private sphere of home and family; women engaged in civic, political, and social activities that took them far outside the home. The book also tended to paint the relationships of men and women within the framework of separate spheres as harmonious and unproblematic, ignoring the inequalities of power that were inherent in it. These critiques ultimately took their toll on separate spheres as the dominant trope of women’s history, though they never fully dislodged it, especially in Italian and German scholarship, which continues to utilize it heavily to this day.!° In 1986, Joan Scott published the article that would inform virtually all scholarship on gender from that moment on, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.’ I was in the audience the night she gave her first presentation of the paper, in December 1985 at the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting. Not many of us could grasp fully what she laid out in her talk, but I would guess that nearly all of us knew that something powerful was taking place. As it turned out, Scott’s article aroused heated controversy among historians, generating fierce debate between those who found her use of postmodern theories exciting and fullSusan Kingsley of possibilities, and those who saw it as a threat to the very existence of feminist history and even feminism itself. Scott set out to find a useable theory for historians of gender. Current theories about gender, she argued, just couldn’t work for historians, for whether they posited a materialist analysis of patriarchy like Shulamith Firestone’s, a marrying of Marxism with feminism, an anthropological explanation like Gayle Rubin’s, or a psychoanalytic theory such as Jacques Lacan’s, Nancy Chodorow’s, or Carol Gilligan’s, they limited our capacity to incorporate differences based on race, class, or culture or to trace change over time. ‘The challenge,’ she pointed out, ‘was to reconcile theory, which was framed in general or universal terms, and history, which was committed to the study of contextual specificity and fundamental change.’!! Those who tried to find an explanation for patriarchy, Scott noted, had placed gender at the center of their analyses of all social organization, and in doing so had brought to our attention important inequalities between men and women. They had not, however, been able to show how inequalities of gender worked to organize social life or how gender made an impact on realms of our existence that seemed not to have any relationship with it, such as politics or war. Moreover, the reliance on physical sexual difference to put forward these explanations tended to imply a universality and naturalness of the body that gave it — and therefore gender — an unchanging, inherent meaning. Gender became inaccessible to history in the sense that it never changed across cultures or over time. Put another way, history could only describe the ways different cultures and different societies dealt with gender inequalities that were fixed by the physical differences of men and women. Boring. Within a Marxist tradition, gender, Scott argued, lost its ability to serve as any kind of analytic category, for it was always subsumed within the processes of dialectical materialism. That is, economic systems determined gender relationships and gender roles, and in this way of thinking, although economic systems change over time (in Marx’s formulation, from feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism), gender ends up being a result, a consequence, of those changes. In taking on psychoanalysis, Scott differentiated between the Anglo- American embrace of object-relations theory and the French preference for Lacanian analysis. Object-relations theorists, she cautioned, relied too literally on the small, concrete interactions of children with their parents to74 of 178 | produce their explanations for gender identity and to open up possibilities for change. Limited to the family within the household, object-relations theories offered no means of tying the concept of gender or the individual person to larger social, economic, or political structures in which power resided. In focusing on the asymmetries produced by parent-child interactions, these theories neglected to discuss the issue of inequalities between men and women. How, Scott asked, can we account for the ongoing, seemingly ever-present association of masculinity with power, and the greater value consistently placed on men than women? How do children learn that men are powerful and women weak;that men are worth more than women? We cannot understand these vital aspects of taking on gender identity, she asserted, unless we pay attention to the ways various cultures and societies represent gender; how they use gender to make evident the rules of social interaction; how they enable us to make meaning out of our experiences. Here she found Lacan’s interpretation of Freud helpful, though his thinking, too, was not without its problems for historians. Think back again to our treatment of Lacan — to his stress on the key role played by language in the creation of gender identity. Lacan argued that the unconscious is structured like a language; where Freud saw infants taking on gender identity through the oedipal conflict, Lacan regarded the process as occurring when the child left what he called the ‘imaginary’ realm (an unconscious space of bisexual impulses unmediated by the existence of language, laws, institutions, or social processes) to enter into the conscious ‘symbolic’ realm of society, structured by gender norms, laws, institutions, and processes. Lacan adopted poststructuralists’ ideas about language — by which they mean systems of meaning, symbolic orders, not merely words, speech, or writing — to assert that children learn a gender identity on the basis of their relationship to the phallus. The phallus stands as the metaphor for sexual difference, and the threat of castration serves as the symbol of the (father’s) law. The child imagines an identification with masculinity or femininity based upon his or her relationship to the phallus, and fantasizes a relationship to the law, or the rules of society, on the same basis. Because the male and female child have necessarily different relationships with the phallus, the rules of society are gendered from the start.This sounds like absolute, unchanging sexual difference, i 75 of 178 it? What is different in Lacan’s thinking is that although geuua sucuuy seems fixed and coherent, it is not. It’s very unstable, in fact, he argued, here again using poststructuralism to make his case. We need to back up a little bit in order to understand this, to explain the structuralism that then becomes poststructuralism, and then relate it to Lacan. Structuralism!? derives from semiotic analysis, that is, the linguistic practice of the analysis of signs. It is based on the idea that words in a language are arbitrary and relative, that there is no innate connection between a word and the thing to which it refers. The spoken sound ‘cat’ is simply a sound. We’ve assigned it to a furry, four-legged creature, but we could just as easily have called it something else — ‘gato,’ for instance. That’s the arbitrary part of it. The relative part posits that ‘cat’ gets its meaning relative to the other words in the closed system that is a language. That is, we assign meaning to ‘cat’ by understanding that it is not ‘bat’ or ‘rat’ or ‘mat.’ Nor is it ‘car’ or ‘cab’ or ‘cap.’ Nor is it ‘cut’ or ‘cot.’ ‘Cat’ takes on meaning only in a closed system, in this case, the English language, which (like all languages) is full of little segments of sound, able to be combined in a nearly infinite variety of patterns. Structural linguists asked themselves how words like ‘cat’ functioned in our communication. They split up a word like ‘cat’ into two functioning parts: a signifier and a signified. The spoken word ‘cat’ is the signifier. The idea that comes into your mind (furry, four-legged, not dog) when you hear the word is the thing that is signified. When you take these two functions and put them together, you have the communicative act we call a sign. Semiotics, then, deals with the meanings that come together in the form of signifiers and signifieds to form signs. Think of a sign not as a thing, but as an act or a near-instantaneous moment of process. Structuralists argue that the meaning of words in a language is purely arbitrary. That is to say, there is no reason why we call a large, green leafy thing a ‘tree’ rather than a ‘snarompf.’ Signs only get their meaning relative to other words in a finite language system, not because there is any direct correspondence between the word (the signifier) and the thing it stands for (the signified). The meaning of signs is not intrinsic, in other words, but relative; signs get their meaning on the basis of their difference from all the other signs in a language chain. This insight — that meaning is relative to that which surrounds it in a closed system — powered the semiotic analysesSusan Kingsley... of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the ideological analyses of the literary theorist Roland Barthes, and the narrative and social analyses of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others. Lévi-Strauss and Saussure, the two great figures in the history of structuralist analysis, would go much further. They would argue that language (in the case of Saussure) and narrative (in the case of Lévi-Strauss) do not represent meaning so much as they create it. That is, as humans, we only see the world through the structures we create, namely language and — in Lévi-Strauss’s adaptation — social behaviors, institutions, and stories, which he tried to see in linguistic terms. Here, Lévi-Strauss’s suggestion that ‘classificatory systems’ operate as ‘systems of meaning’ translates into the conviction that we literally create meaning as we categorize our world. Simple dualisms — good/bad; old/new; ours/theirs — function as categories that structure the ways we perceive and understand. Indeed, the simplest categories — like male and female — are often the most powerful. In the process of parsing and naming differences and similarities, we create the world — not as a physical thing, but as a thing capable of being known in certain ways and not in others. Language — meaning systems — not only represents the world; it creates it. Poststructuralists go further, claiming that the meaning created in a sign is never fixed. It always depends upon the historically particular discourse or text in which it is present, and, following the thought of Jacques Derrida, meaning is produced by differentiating the signifier (‘man’) from its binary opposite (‘woman’). ‘Woman’ is not present in the text necessarily, but it serves to provide the meaning, through difference, of ‘man.’ But how do we know what ‘woman’ signifies? That word itself is defined by reference to another term, that other term defined by yet another. What all this amounts to is the idea that meaning is fashioned not just by means of difference, but by means of constant deferral as well, a continual slipping down a chain of signifiers. Finally, the absent term that defines the signifier ‘man’ — ‘woman’ — is the negative of the signifier, and not of equal value to it. It is absent and lesser than the concept it defines. Now back to Lacan. Just as words gain their meaning through differentiation from their binary opposite, gender identity is formed on the basis of differentiation and distinction. But just as meaning is constantly being deferred in language, the appearance of a coherent, fixed gender identity requires that its opposite be repressed. The bisexual elementsee 77 of 178 existing in Lacan’s pre-symbolic child of the unconscious ‘imaginary’ constantly intrude upon the gendered subject, promising to interrupt the stability, unity, and coherence that he or she presumably enjoys. Repression of these unconscious impulses — the effort to present a coherent gender identity to oneself and to the world — sets up an antagonism between the masculine and feminine elements of the potentially bisexual subject. This battle implies that what we regard as masculine or feminine are no more than constructions we create; moreover, gender identity is constantly under construction, and therefore, presumably, subject to change. ‘Change,’ that holy grail of the historian’s task. But as Scott pointed out, the meanings of gender in Lacan’s psychoanalysis are tied to a single signifier, the phallus. And there are but two possibilities for one’s relationship to that signifier. In other words, sexual difference seems, once again, to be tied to one universal element. If that’s so, Scott lamented, the process of constructing the gendered subject is always the same. No change, after all: that binary opposition of male and female once again appeared eternal. There was nothing for it, Scott determined, but to insist on the deconstruction of that binary opposition of male/female and the implication of antagonism that accompanied it. Here she turned to Derrida, appropriating his poststructuralist theories of language to call for placing these binaries in their historical context and analyzing how they operated instead of accepting them as the way things were. That analysis would involve reversing the binary opposition to reveal the hidden term that defined the signifier — in our instance ‘masculine’ — and exposing the hierarchical valuation placed on the two terms. Scott was quick to acknowledge that feminists had been doing something of the same thing for many years now; what was different was her embrace of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Postmodernism. Isn’t that something we should dread? And what is it, anyway? In this section, I hope to explain what postmodernism is, and in doing so, both put to rest the fears critics of it have raised and show how we can use it effectively to do gender history. Postmodernism refers to a lot of things, because all kinds and varieties of postmodernists exist — in art, architecture, literature, anthropology, politics, philosophy, psychology — you name it, they’re there, and they don’t necessarily embrace the same ideas.!? But what all practitioners ofes 78 of 1784 postmodernists have in common is a deep skepticism of the belief system by means of which westerners have ordered our thoughts and our practices since the time of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These two momentous movements ushered in the ‘modern’ against which ‘post’modernists position themselves. The ways of doing things we've inherited from the Enlightenment are so ingrained in us that we don’t even think about them — they provide, quite simply, the mental framework within which we walk around in the world. Chief among the principles of the Enlightenment is the conviction that man (and it’s important to understand that women were not included under this rubric until the last 50 years or so, as we've seen in the theories laid out in chapter 1, nor were men of color) possesses a stable, coherent self. This Enlightenment self enjoys the capacity to reason — he is rational — and by means of the exercise of his reason, he may know the ‘laws of nature’ that govern not simply the physical universe but the behavior of human beings in society as well. Through the process of the scientific methods advanced by men like Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton, he may arrive at truths that hold good for all people and phenomena, that are, in other words, objective and universal. The knowledge accumulated through the uncovering of these truths is self-evidently real; it is out there to be discovered by men using their reasoning faculties; and it can be expressed through a language that faithfully corresponds to the objects being articulated. Because man may know these things in this way, he can free himself from forces that have limited his activities or capacities; that is, he may become an autonomous actor in the world, free. The ‘laws of nature’ that Enlightenment philosophers appropriated from the scientific revolution to describe how human societies and polities came to be and explain how they work demonstrated to all rational thinkers that history has a purpose. That is, what unfolds over time is not merely the unstructured flow of random events;instead, history develops according to a driving principle which seeks the perfectibility of human beings. Because we can know, we will better ourselves. If we’re white, adult men, that is. Finally, the ways of thinking put forth by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment have, ever since, compelled philosophers, scientists, historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and political scientists to search for and produce theories thatee 79 of 178 purport to explain everything succinctly in a grand sweep: a ‘unified theory of the “whole,” ’ as one critic put it.'* Postmodernists challenge these fundamental tenets of Enlightenment thought. They see the worldview thrown up by the Enlightenment as a story westerners tell ourselves about the way the world works in order to justify a certain social, political, and economic ordering. They contend that there is no world out there just waiting for us to discover it, just as there is no independent human being who operates freely in and autonomously of that world. Those are fictions. Rather, human beings are always embedded in their surroundings, embedded by language, by history, by our social and economic relations. The knowledge we create cannot be set apart from conditions of life in which we create it: it is a product not of a pure discovery of what exists out there entirely independent of us, but of the kinds of questions we ask, which are themselves a reflection of the conditions of our lives. And because our lives are so different across time, geography, ethnicity, race, class, gender, and culture, there can be no universal truths, only partial ones. Let me say that again: there can be no universal truths. This is not to say that there is no truth; it is important to follow up that first scary assertion with the second — that there are partial truths. Truths that hold good for certain people or phenomena in certain places at certain times under certain conditions. Oh, you protest, but what about gravity? That’s got to be a universal truth. It was, until Einstein found that it wasn’t and put forth his general theory of relativity. Or when quantum mechanics showed that general relativity itself couldn’t account for all the forces in the universe. The discoveries of Newton, Einstein, and hundreds of thousands of other scientists, humanists, and social scientists have changed our lives in untold ways, there is no question about that. These specific or partial truths — this knowledge we possess — are wonderful in and of themselves, but somehow they are not enough for us. We persist in trying to bring everything and everybody under a universalizing ‘law’; we don’t seem to be able to tolerate contradiction, insufficiency, partiality, difference, conflict, ambiguity, or ambivalence. So we come up with these unified field theories as a way to compensate for the anxieties such anomalies create in us; we insist on ordering them in such a way — in linear, binary, hierarchical, holistic, or teleological fashion — as to compel them to fit.But they don’t. Because they can’t, given that we are creatures who live not in an abstract world devoid of power, meaning systems, or material inequalities. We live in specific relations of power with one another, in the context of meaning systems — culture — and material systems that are incomplete, messy, and particular. Postmodernists ask us to acknowledge these specificities;to appreciate that we do not possess a coherent, stable, ever-reliable ‘self? that operates above the fray of that messy world;to recognize that the Enlightenment narrative is a fiction that helps us to organize that messy world, from whose ensnarements we can never be sprung, however much we insist otherwise. They ask us to ‘deconstruct’ these fictions in order to show them for what they are and what they are not. This is the context within which Joan Scott offered her new theory of gender. She did not accept the position of some postmodernists that the discipline of history was just one more of those fictional narratives that came out of the Enlightenment. But she did argue that we ought to take a good look at the way we practice history and to be upfront about the assumptions we make in doing it. She shared the conviction that the search for a single origin of things — in this case the inequalities between men and women — was not merely futile but misleading. Rather, she insisted, ‘we have to conceive of processes so interconnected that they cannot be disentangled.”!5 And we had to understand how those processes worked if we were to understand what they produced. The object of history should no longer be the search for universal, general causation but an explanation of the meanings attached to any variety of activities, events, identities, experiences. Explaining meaning should take place at the level of both the individual and society, and it must incorporate the relationship of one to the other if an understanding of how gender worked and how change took place were to be achieved. Lastly, she urged historians to approach the notion of power in new ways, singling out Michel Foucault’s treatment of it as a promising possibility. Foucault argued that power in modern society (by which he meant the West since the end of the eighteenth century) inheres in a variety of practices and institutions though which the human subject is constituted.!° He suggested that the human subject was made through a proliferation of practices and institutions and techniques that together constitute what he calls ‘discourse.’ Discourse is a sophisticated term for something as| 81 of 178 seemingly simple as conversation, discussion, and communication. It often connotes serious speech, writing, or conversation, distinguishing it from the casual speech of everyday language. In particular, Foucault used the term to refer to technical speech used by ‘experts’ in the fields of the social and human sciences — physicians, scientists, prison administrators, educators, psychiatrists, and the like. But Foucault used the term ‘discourse’ to mean more than simply speech. It incorporated the institutions inhabited by such experts and all the things that they did there. Discourses about crime, madness, or sexuality, for instance, involved the ways prisons, asylums, and hospitals were conceptualized and operated. For Foucault, discourses enabled the exercise of power through the creation and mobilization of expert knowledge. When a medical doctor at an asylum created knowledge, that doctor also created power. When a school headmaster figured out ways to gather statistics about the school’s students, that headmaster was creating knowledge — and creating a kind of power that could be put to work upon the students. Surely, you have experienced such things yourself: automated grading systems, standardized texts, online paper submission systems, and surveillance cameras in the American high school, for example. Scientists, educators, physicians, psychologists, and the institutions within which they worked created knowledge and used it to ‘normalize’ and thereby police behavior. In doing so, they created and wielded power. In this sense, power did not emanate from some central location. Indeed, Foucault made his argument by drawing a distinction between the old days, when people thought that power was centralized. It came from God, passed through the figure of the king, and then spread through a hierarchy of officials across the land. The ‘new’ kind of power that Foucault hoped to explain was not like that at all. It was made over and over again, in small ways, and differently, in every school, prison, hospital, military training ground, and asylum. Foucault conceived of power not simply as decentralized; he also saw it as diffuse. Power in pre-modern western regimes derived from the king’s authority — that is, the authority of the state — to punish by taking human life. Power in the modern world operates at the farthest reaches of society and it does not rely on such a threat as death. Using the metaphor of the human heart and circulatory system, Foucault described this new power asel 82 of 178 ‘capillary’ power, a working of power at the farthest remove from the heart and the center. Capillary power affects people in the living of their everyday lives, in the practices they participate in as they go about the business of living. Moreover, this kind of power operates continuously and in this it is also different from the pre-modern power of the king. The king’s power was imposed through an agent of the state, who was usually not around. Rather than being continuous, then, the king’s power was occasional and intermittent, exercised when one of his lords or sheriffs dropped by for the annual visit. This modern power, you will have observed, is both a lot more difficult to grasp and to understand — and a lot more effective than that of the poor king. The king’s power was, in essence, a negative force, denying or censoring the expressions, needs, wishes, and desires of people. This new modern kind of power actually produces those expressions, needs, wishes, and desires. It is a productive power, in other words, rather than repressive or prohibiting power. Because it operates at so local a level — so diffuse, so decentralized, so omnipresent and everyday — Foucault’s power can be thought of as being both broad and intimate. It is as large as the world itself, and as small as a gesture made by a particular individual on a particular second of a particular day. It is everywhere in what he referred to as ‘micro- practices’; that is, the social practices that make up peoples’ everyday lives. And it is this kind of power — micro, capillary, everyday, working through discourses — that produces you and me as subjects. Gendered subjects, which brings us back to Joan Scott. She laid out what she meant by gender in two separate but interrelated parts. First, she explained, gender is ‘a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes.’ Secondly, she continued, ‘gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.’ Both these assertions need to be unpacked, which she proceeded to do. The first part of her definition comes down to this: we organize our societies and the relationships we have in them on the basis of what we believe are the differences between men and women and the valuations we place on them. We arrive at those beliefs — we create knowledge about sexual difference in a number of ways. First, our cultures create and utilize symbols in a variety of often contradictory representations. Scott’s example is the prevalence of the Eve/Mary symbol in the Christian West to represent woman. So, is woman Eve or Mary? When, why, how, and in what contextsee 83 of 178 is she one or the other? That’s what historians should ask about the use of this symbolic representation, Scott contended. Secondly, these symbols carry with them ‘norms’ for particular kinds of behavior, and those norms are usually articulated through the establishment of binary oppositions that insist upon a single meaning for male and female, masculine and feminine. These norms appear natural and unproblematic in our cultures when, in fact, as poststructuralists would argue, they depend upon the repression or negation of other possibilities. How those other possibilities became obscured, Scott urged, should be the object of historical inquiry. So, in her example, we shouldn’t accept uncritically the assumption in a lot of women’s or gender history that separate sphere ideology appeared in whole cloth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather, we should uncover the contests and conflicts that it aroused as it came into being. In other words, we should not let those apparently fixed gender binaries stand without interrogating them — what was the nature of the debates over ‘ate-sphere ideology? Who engaged in them? Where did they take place? The third aspect of Scott’s definition insisted that as we go about deconstructing those fixed binaries, we must include the political in our sights. We can’t simply look at the family or the houschold to sce how gender has worked; we have to broaden our scope to take in such arenas as the labor market, education, and the polity or state. Yes, indeed, the home and family still serve as important areas in which gender relationships are produced, but if we are ever to understand gender in all its depth and breadth, we must give up the outmoded belief that what takes place in kinship systems to construct gender is enough. It’s not. What goes on in the economy and in the state has enormous impact on the fashioning of gender. And finally, we have to come back to the gendered identity of the individual subject. As we've seen, psychoanalysis offers important concepts about how we become gendered subjects, but, Scott observed, ‘if gender identity is based only and universally on fear of castration, the point of historical inquiry is denied.’!” Not only that, but many men and women in real life don’t live up to the gendered and sexual norms prescribed for them, or don’t always, at any rate, We've got to ask how gender identities are constructed in particular historical contexts — to place the individuals and even larger collectivities within the framework of the social, political, and cultural milieus in which they came up.The four elements traced above offer a way to see how gender relationships are built, and all of them are necessary to understand that process. The second part of Scott’s formulation — that ‘gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power’ — lets us watch gender operating in arenas where women themselves are absent. She was quick to admit that gender is not the only field on which or through which power is represented and articulated — class and race are obvious others — but in the West at any rate and in the religious traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity it has played a vital role. Concepts about and symbols of gender, regarded as objective, natural, and fixed, structure power;they legitimate differential distributions of power such as material or cultural resources by providing a way to represent those differentials as if they were natural and fixed. Gender becomes an intrinsic part of both the conception and the establishment of power relationships. Gender and power, in other words, if we take the two aspects of Scott’s proposition, construct each other. They do so in many different ways, depending upon the historical context in which they are operating. Back to that sine qua non of history, change. How does change take place within this framework of gender and power? In lots of ways. Wars, revolutions, famines, economic depressions, epidemics — all of these may cause such great upheaval in the lives of people and states that the concepts and representations that cultures have used to depict gender have to be altered to make sense under a new order. But it’s important to note that gender representations in these instances may not change — they might be rendered even more inflexible in order to legitimate a new regime. Whether they change or not will be determined by a contest over power — over access to material and other resources — and that’s what historians should investigate. By bringing gender and power in all its manifestations under their microscopes, to ask questions about how each works to inform and establish the other, Scott contended, historians can’t help but transform the discipline of history, as the practitioners of women’s history had hoped all along.