Gender

Gender. To paraphrase the historian Joan Scott, “gender” is most usefully understood as an analytical category of historical thought.Although usage in this way dates only from the mid‐1980s, it has largely displaced the analytical category from which it developed: the social history of women. The concept of “gender” brings together the many ways in which the distinctions between male and female operate in history. Put simply, it focuses on the history of concepts of “masculinity” and “femininity” rather than on the history of men and women. Together with the categories “race” and “social class,” “gender” forms the modern conceptual triad for analyzing the structures and workings of power and inequality in American society.

“Gender” has two long‐standing meanings: an element of grammar and a colloquial, polite equivalent for “sex.” With the revival of feminist thinking in the 1970s, “gender” became a term for distinguishing biological sexual differences from the historically variable and socially imposed meanings attached to those differences. This distinction underscored the fact that the biological differences between the sexes did not have inherent, inescapable meanings for people's lives. The proliferation of this usage in subsequent decades was a measure of the spread of the feminist claim that sex roles are socially imposed and largely arbitrary, and that they can and should be changed.

By the mid‐1980s, when the concept of “gender” became increasingly common among historians, the first wave of modern historical writings about women was almost two decades old. Inspired by the 1960s burgeoning of social history, this scholarship had focused on the lives of people long ignored by historians. The proliferation of scholarship on women's experience concentrated on those very activities with which women were identified and which therefore had long been considered historically insignificant: family, domesticity, kinship, emotion, private life. The dominant framework for women's social history initially reflected the nineteenth‐century ideology of “separate sexual spheres” and the monumental divide it created between men's and women's lives; the historian's job was to investigate the women's side of the divide.

By the mid‐1980s, however, historians began to realize that the social‐historical information they were gathering on women needed to be supplemented with answers to other kinds of questions: how and why distinctions between men and women developed, operated, and changed in history; how and where men (as well as women) were positioned on the sexual divide; how “experience” was shaped by the wide range of women's class and racial backgrounds; and how discoveries about women could be made to change understandings of the core of U.S. history, rather than remain in a scholarly ghetto. The neglect of the ideological sources and functions of the “separate spheres” model of women's history, historians concluded, had led to a superficial and too literal description of social life and sexual difference.

These concerns resulted in the replacement of the category of “women's history” with the history of gender. This new focus has been producing scholarship that addresses historical topics left relatively untouched by the women's social‐historical scholarship. Work, citizenship, even military service, all historical areas associated with men, are being examined for the ways they assumed and helped to shape the historic divide between the sexes. Historians are asking whether anything women workers did was ever really considered “skilled labor,” or if the meaning of the term shifted depending on where women were located in the wage‐labor force. Gender‐conscious studies on citizenship in the era of Revolution and Constitution examine how the exclusion of women shaped the self‐understanding of American republicans and their faith in their own civic virtue.

Scholarship organized around the concept of “gender” rather than that of “women” has also proved better able to address the relations of racial power. For example, historians of the South in the decades after Reconstruction, adopting an analytic approach informed by the new emphasis on gender, traced how postbellum upheavals in power relations between the races, as well as the efforts of former slaves to realize their freedom and to re‐create their communities, led to dramatic shifts in the relations between men and women and tremendous conflicts over sexuality, culminating in the lynching epidemic late in the nineteenth century.
See also Domestic Labor; Feminism; Historiography, American; Race, Concept of; Racism; Republicanism; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Social Science; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Gayle Rubin , The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter, 1975, pp. 157–210.
John Scott , Gender and the Politics of History, 1988.
Linda Kerber et al. , Beyond Roles: Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender in the Early Republic, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 46 (July 1989): 565–85.
Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, 1991.
Gail Bederman , Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, 1995.

Ellen C. DuBois