Trade unionists and some social reformers in the 19 th century argued that wages should allow for the family responsibilities of the worker. Others argued that this claim perpetuated female dependency. The influential study by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes , looked at the family as the site of reproduction of fundamental social attitudes and argued that the newly emergent urban middle class helped to transform social relationships at the beginning of the 19 th century.
Amanda Vickery challenged this narrative on two grounds. First she argued that the rhetoric of a domestic ideology did not reflect the lived reality of a social life in which men and women did not inhabit separate spheres. Secondly she argued that women were not oppressed by social exclusion but on the contrary developed influence in many social activities despite a lack of formal political rights. In some respects the discussion of separate spheres reflects the richness and diversity that taking gender formation seriously creates.
Both parties agree that attitudes to gender roles and activities are varied and change over time even if they disagree about inequality and timing. There was a detailed and extensive narrative of the language of the politics of the suffrage agitation but the historiography since has moved on here quite substantially.
Histories of feminism have investigated the processes of organization and agitation. Sandra Stanley Holton noted the significance of a common language of democracy and common practices of agitation away from the metropolitan spotlight in a history which showed a more fluid and contingent politics on the ground. Others have criticised the idea of a unity of feminism arguing for a variety of voices and contested notions of identities, for example, Lucy Delap, who wrote recently about the feminist avant-garde, some of whom were critical of the vote as a distraction from the real task of psychological emancipation, especially those around the journal Freewoman.
She wanted to call into question the ideas of experience itself, recognizing that gender is a discursive category and, as Judith Butler was to add, a performative art. This deconstructive approach led to some valuable insights in political theory and political history.
It was also much criticised by those who wished to argue that the historian can rediscover factual material about the lives of the past, that past actors do not just articulate hegemonic discourse but their lives can be interrogated as Woolf had argued. Joan Scott in Feminism and history extended this challenge to the concept of identity as always enabling or ennobling in writing about women and, by implication, about men.
She has continued to write about the development of a history which examines contested notions of difference rather than an assumption that gender is ever fixed and clear. In her recent work on French universalism she has repeated the challenge to argue that gender is always a political construction:. But I would also insist that France is a particular example of a more general proposition: histories that focus on sexual difference cannot be written apart from the histories of politics within which they take shape and to which they in turn give form, whereas histories of politics are often illuminated by feminist critiques that, at their best, uncover contradiction and exacerbate it in an effort to transform the status quo.
The contrast with other areas of social history is visible and stark. Courses in economic history and labour history are folding while cultural and political histories of gender multiply. However areas of new work remain patchy and partial. She insists that the body and sex itself need to be reinstated in the history of demography and that the contraceptive pill was emancipatory because it made sex without anxiety possible. Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter in their accounts of married sexual practices reinstate the married couple as taking joint decisions about whether or when to use forms of birth control when coitus interruptus was the only easy contraceptive option.
The inter-war period saw a pessimism about the future because of economic decline, declining birth rates and delayed marriage while post war saw a short lived reversal of these trends as well as an increase in the education and professional employment of women. Women could talk about motherhood, health and pregnancy as well as about prostitution and sex trafficking as social evils but they could not, in British cultures, offer much description of sexual feelings or desires. Here the mothers who left their children used the discourse of shame and repentance to describe their actions but asserted the value and significance of love as an explanation for their fall.
The social control discourses of earlier accounts of these narratives have been replaced by a more nuanced anthropological account of the ideas of marriage or courtship and a consequent expansion in the historical research that looks at poor mothers as more actors and agents than victims and sufferers.
The reductive social history of bastardy is given a valuable corrective here in recording the attitudes to sexuality of the women themselves albeit within a discourse framed by the paramount need to benefit their infants.
Selina Todd, for example, studied the young women of the interwar and postwar period. She tracked the key choices of everyday life: when and where to work, whether and when to marry and who to choose as companions in social life. This exemplary mapping of young women making their own history in circumstances not of their choosing demonstrates the complexity and richness of a history in which the process of living with a gendered identity changes over time.
These women began the period which she describes as domestic servants and end it as office workers. Other studies have looked at domestic service itself, at household labour, at factory workers and at rural women — all demonstrating an acute understanding of the processes of historical change. Men looked more fragile, less certain of their power or their identity as husbands, lovers or fathers.
While this poses a valuable question about a history which ignores masculinity these works come quite close to suggesting that men have more difficulties in history than women.
The old understanding that came out of attempts to understand early 20 th century feminism seems to have become hidden in the resurrection of a new, gendered history of the emotions.
Michael Roper has argued that masculinity is better understood as a process of navigating cultural scripts, an approach that helps in understanding gender processes in both sexes and at all ages. Roper continued with a plea for more careful consideration of men as victims as seen in the war literature about shell shock:. Pregender conceptualizations of masculinity certainly lacked an adequate account of power and of the social and cultural contexts within which gender identities are formed, being, as it were, rather narrowly focused on individual emotional processes.
They also tended to equate the masculine with the universal. The two appear to be stable classifications only because they both are there, relative to one another. One doesn't exist without the other. And they are rarely on a par; rather, like up and down, right and wrong, big and small, the masculine is superior or dominant, the feminine inferior or subordinate though the relation may be reversed.
Gender is directly referential in an important sense, describing how sexual division is understood in the social order. But gender references, metaphors, and rhetoric go far beyond descriptions of, or relations between, men and women. Because the gender divide is so basic and has been understood as a ranking, as a hierarchy—a relation not simply of difference but of domination—gender becomes, in Joan Scott's words, "a primary way of signifying relationships of power.
Gender idioms can be called upon to characterize a divide between any one group and another—and seem especially appealing to employ if the relation between the two is competitive or conflictual, as between political parties, between metropole and colony, between enemies on a battlefield.
The political arena, being the field of power wielding and power relations, is especially rife with gender symbology and rhetoric. California Governor Schwarzenegger's reviling of his legislative opponents as "girlie-men" in the fall of provides a typical example. Current trends in scholarship, the extent of research, and new findings have now made it possible—I would say necessary—to keep gender visible in all of U. Women's history is often credited with bringing the "private" sphere of human lives into the limelight of history—and moreover with challenging the very notion of a clear boundary between "public" and "private" in the forces that make for historical change.
Gender history continues this mandate by taking the whole of the past as its canvas. The use of gender as an analytic category has had a great deal to do with the revivification, since the s, of political history. The study of core "public" concerns—such as war, diplomacy, presidential administrations, partisan alignments—has been enlivened by asking new questions about men and masculinity, as well as by asking how and where were women involved.
When Drew Faust and I were invited, two years ago, by the staff of the Magazine of History —a magazine published by the Organization of American Historians and geared toward high school teachers—to edit a special issue, we decided to focus the issue on these recent political directions in gender history. We found it easy—and important—to commission articles that employed a gender perspective to deal with quite "mainstream" topics in U.
Certain well-known political figures seem to beg for an analysis highlighting gender concerns; Theodore Roosevelt, for example, the Rough Rider and defender of the strenuous life, has become "a poster boy for the utility of gender in foreign policy history," in the words of Kristin Hoganson. More surprising, the same discourse of manly courage was used by both sides. The prowar factions claimed to be men of real backbone who would lead the nation in a course of honor.
They spoke of the United States as if the nation were a male citizen-husband-father writ large, who should exercise paternal or husbandlike protectiveness in taking over Spain's former colonies. The anti-imperialists riposted by also emphasizing manly honor, but reasoning that restraint was far more honorable and manly than belligerence. If I were asked to name what are the areas in U. The history of the industrial revolution: here, the integration of women's history entirely reoriented questions about industrialization and class formation.
It mattered that the first industrial labor supply in the United States was made up of farm daughters, not sons. A history of industrialization that would encompass the workers—as well as the entrepreneurs, the engineers, the technology, and the sources of power for machinery—had to think about the division of labor in families, between women and men, and relate that to the kinds of paid work that was assigned or made available to each. A history of labor movements had to consider the gender and family status of those being organized and to look at how these variables took different shapes through the changing circumstances of the nineteenth century, as industrialization advanced over more areas of production and drew in increasingly diverse immigrant populations.
Where was consciousness of working-class identity formed and nurtured? Not only on the shop floor, but in working-class homes and communities. Moreover, how did middle-class respectability distinguish itself? Wouldn't one have to look at the construction of gender, in order to understand the construction of class values? That is to ask, what were the attributes of middle-class gentlemen as compared to male workers? What were the attributes of middle-class "ladies," so called, that made them think of themselves as models for others and made the social identity of wage-earning women problematic?
Questions like these gave labor history new energy in the s and s, and are now a mainstay of the field. A second area I'd point to is the history of public provision for social welfare. This is a central question in political development—how did the United States, as a polity, manage to part with its aversion to federal regulation and public provision?
How did the influential part of the populace change from embracing "rugged individualism" in the nineteenth century to accepting a federal income tax, an interstate commerce commission, a Food and Drug Agency, and eventually the Social Security Act, Homeowners Loan Corporation, federal housing, Agricultural Adjustment Act, and so on by the early twentieth?
Tremendous advances in understanding this long-term political evolution have been accomplished by including women and gender in the picture. With the New Deal, the United States began to join other industrialized nations in placing social and economic welfare alongside political participation in definitions of citizenship.
To understand how the New Deal became possible, one has to understand preceding efforts led by women outside of government. The women's club movement and settlement houses pioneered innovations in social science and social work. Actually, most historians in this field do a little bit of both. Still, whereas a women's historian would focus on, for example, women's labor force participation during World War II, a gender historian would examine how gender ideologies shaped the organization of labor on the battlefield and the home front, and how the war remapped the meanings of masculinity, femininity, and labor.
Put another way, women's historians foreground women as historical actors, while gender historians foreground ideological systems as agents of history. Certainly, those who do women's history engage the question of how gender norms shape women's experiences and struggles, but they tend to focus on women, as such, more than they examine historical ideological shifts in the meanings of masculine and feminine.
At the same time, gender historians do not ignore women altogether; rather they interrogate the very meaning of the term "woman," highlighting historical changes in the construction of masculinity and femininity, manhood and womanhood.
Again, many historians do some combination of both, combing the documents for clues about how men and women have both shaped and been shaped by gendered beliefs, practices, and institutions. The theories and methodologies of gender history have been adapted to many fields, but the integration of gender into the study of American foreign relations has been slow and uneven. Part of the reason for this is that the "high" politics of diplomacy seem far removed from the politics of everyday life that have long been the concern of gender and women's history.
Until the late twentieth century, both diplomatic and women's historians were themselves inattentive to the connections between their fields and thus very few conversations took place across the disciplinary divide. Scholarly work in various disciplines since the s, however, has revealed important links between American diplomacy and American culture, and the most recent scholarship reflects a more self-conscious attempt by historians to identify a dynamic interrelationship between the creation of foreign policy and the construction of gender.
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