One part of the maker is the academic community itself, which has undergone change increasingly since the 1960s. A resulting gender history has two broadly different aspects:
- Gender history is a perspective over all areas of history
- Gender history is about gender issues in society
The first involves a Kuhnian revolution. It should infect all methodologies and end the patriarchal structure of ordinary historical discourse. This was written from the stance of social and cultural anthropology:
This change of attitude, however, has to do with far more than the popularity of the topic of women, or the female perspective of things; for gender studies in anthropology, as with its sister disciplines, have played, along with the forces of post-modernism and post-colonialism, a salient role over the past two to three decades in a major critique of the grand narratives of the human sciences. This dawning recognition of the 'problem of women', not only in anthropology but its sister studies as well, served as one of the major impetuses for the redrawing of sacred academic boundaries, visions and concerns. (Rapport, Overing, 2000, 142)
That there is a section called gender history suggests that the revolution is not quite so thorough, or at least there is a special need to retain an additional sector of history of this kind. There is a need to analyse what areas gender history has impact:
- Gender history can seek out the place of women in history, or at least what women were doing - or having done to them - at the time men were making the dominant view of society (and history). This can be famous women or folk women (with different historiographies, from the empiricist to the anthropological). A key question is what was the experience of women during historical epochs and change. Knowing what women did helps towards pride and definition. (see Green, Troup, 1999, 253, 254)
- Related to this is tracking the history of feminism itself (Green, Troup, 1999, 254) as a movement.
- Some gender history will be about who the cultural makers were and when and how they were able to generate these definitions. This is heavily sociological in historiography. Achieving such self understanding is being on the road to self-liberation. Once something is understood as a construction, then it can be changed. (Green, Troup, 1999, 253-254)
- Gender history can certainly look at constructions of femaleness and also maleness in the context of historical events (and this relates to psychoanalysis).
Then feminism has its own varieties and perspectives, generally though not each exclusively under one of liberal (gaining equality of opportunity), Marxist-structural (revolutionise the system) or radical (overcome repression of reproduction) lines. These categories cannot remove the need for historical detail and change, where history, from the evidence, often does not fit neatly into them, nor should it:
- There is the feminism which intends to overcome typologies which confuse biology and gender, where women are seen as tending to the typologies of nature, family and the private, whereas men tend towards culture, work and the public. These ideal types were however part of comprehension in the past and can be demonstrated by historical research. (see 255-256)
- Gender and class can be an analytical marriage but difficult; that Marxist views can understate more basic and cultural dynamics towards patriarchy as in the radical view. This can be both theoretical in analysis and in historical events, such as the growth of trade unions and male to female attitudes in the Labour Movement and what feminism does to change the analyses (254)
- There is the analysis of sexuality and control from the stance of radical feminism. If it is said, however, that this subordination is from and within the biological family, then there is very little history involved, unless one studies the more public emergence of non-heterosexual groups and families. (255)
- There is black feminism looking at particularly that experience within slavery and after, within the black community and between it and the dominant white community (and relations with other ethnic groups). This is often from the United States. (255)
- There is authority deconstructed in language, although this is just as likely to deconstruct woman as a concept too. (257-258)
So one central issue for feminists is whether a structural analysis in terms of technology, economy and social organisation is sufficient in the oppression of women. Can the "sexual class" as such be reduced to this explanation. The answer may be no (see Firestone below). It is equally inadequate to reduce feminism to ahistorical psychoanalysis. This is where definition is all important, following on from Simone de Beauvoir, that femininity is a social construction about presentation in society. De Beauvoir wanted women to be more rational, but an alternative is to focus on the effect, as represented in society, on the biological functions. The division of labour, which has an historical basis, is organised around this reproductive role. It is this distinction which would have to be overcome and done, for example, by the full expansion of relationship and reproductive choices, including the use of reproductive technology as a means of liberation from that difference. (See Firestone, Rich; May, 1996, 162-165)
Such radical views of female oppression always look beyond the structural. Pyschoanalysis is an obviously important field for definitions, and for history to take a part somewhere a cultural (or other accompanying analysis) is required with it, because of the need for change. This is not to say that continuities are not important, especially in the experience of women, and yet history as a discipline abhors what is static to human nature (biology, universal patriarchy or psychoanalysis alone) as it falls outside its focus. Considerations of change include the development of the family, in definitions of relationships and proprieties, in the function of reproduction within society, and representations of biology over and above biology itself. (255-256)
Another question is that of language itself, applying the linguistic turn to feminism. In this case, historical documents are examined for their own constructions in the categorising of women. The difficulty here is that the text is analysed rather than any reality behind it. Texts, however, were produced in time, so attitudes are displayed in time. These attitudes can be those of women in any one time, unable to speak for themselves. Texts analysed also reveal the ambiguity of the concept of woman, no doubt frustrating to feminism again in terms of charting oppression and with an agenda of practical action as the concept of woman is decentred hardly after it has begun to be the subject of discrimination. (256-258)
History does also tend to undermine ready concepts, so from an inductive point of view there are many ways to categorise woman, in terms of many varieties of identity. So when feminism constructs woman, this has its own conceptual history.
All this engages with social theory, but it is more than blindingly obvious that most political and social document shout aloud witting and unwitting testimonies about their constructions of men, women, sexuality, assumptions and dominance, social attitudes and restrictions, in the public space and private spaces. It is then that analysis begins in order to illuminate. Often looking at gender in documents fills a historiographical gap (Hall in Green, Troup, 1999, 263-276), which takes the discussion back to where it began.
Some Personalities:
§ Sally Alexander (in 1970s; and 1980s and 1990s): Conflated class and feminism in a Marxist view of what women contibuted to the class struggle through an understanding of the sexual division of labour. This may do the organising, but a linguistic and psychoanalytical approach demonstrates how subjectivity (self understanding) showed differences of available language between men and women to prevent women expressing a radical viewpoint within the nineteenth century working class. Psychoanalysis analyses this subjectivity and also it relates to feminist history. (Green, Troup, 1999, 257)
§ Ava Baron (in 1990s): If only women are studied in a feminist context then men remain a universal measure by which women are compared. There are power differences between men too. (Green, Troup, 1999, 259)
§ Judith Bennett (in 1980s; in 1990s): Is the historian's focus on change misleading? Women's experience in relationship with men has stayed comparatively the same: change yes but transformation no, whilst transformation is the goal. Ahistorical patriarchy (because it is rooted in the family, seen as continuous) over sexuality should be included in any analysis as it is a politically relevant aspect of women's oppression in history. (Green, Troup, 1999, 258; 255/ 259)
§ Gisela Bock (in 1990s): she analysed history using binary opposite ideal types like nature/ culture, work/ family and public/ private illustrating division of labour and found this understanding in the past, so much so that something deemed minor (family, not public) by a King such as domestic household management could still leve a Carolingian Queen with much power. (Green, Troup, 1999, 255)
§ Kathleen Canning (in 1990s): She became concerned that the linguistic turn decentred women just as they became recognised. Power hierarchy and real experience and real material processes should be retained. Texts have their material and ideological outcomes which can raise profiles not decentre. (Green, Troup, 1999, 258)
§ Natalie Zemon Davis (in 1970s): The nurture/ nature dichotomy is not analytical from the hstorian but was how society understood itself. Rioting and seditious men disguised themselves as females in early modern France because women's disorderly conduct was excused on account of nature whereas better was expected of me whose behaviour was based on choice in nurture. (Green, Troup, 1999, 256)
§ Shulasmith Firestone (in 1980s): A social theorist who claimed class analysis is limited because women's oppression cannot be reduced to the economic sphere. Engels, who saw the original division of labour as childrearing, yet correctly saw it located in history not biology. It cannot be ahistorical, as in universal psychoanalytical categories. She has instead a materialist view of history based on sex. Men absolutise their own description of the world, whilst at the same time in history they conquered women's reproductive life, a division of labour around child rearing. It is reproduction not production that needs liberating, using technology, to remove the sexual distinction itself. (May, 1996, 162-164)
§ Catherine Hall (in 1980s): Hers became a broad approach of female and male gender definitions (and ethnicity too) set within class, political economy and society, and the ideology, as in nineteenth century Birmingham. The middle class shared ideas of gender division and such propriety in an ideology of separate spheres for men and women (meaning women's economic dependence after marriage and were sources of capital for men) united the middle class across its varieties in its own cultural identity. (Hall in Green, Troup, 1999, 263-276)
§ Bell Hooks (in 1980s): Race and class cut across female common identity. (Green, Troup, 1999, 255)
§ Jacqueline Jones (in 1980s): Women preserved black culture through the times of black slavery in North America. (Green, Troup, 1999, 255)
§ Joan Kelly (in 1980s): women did not have a renaissance during the Renaissance. Liberation effects on men may not happen or be the opposite for women. (Green, Troup, 1999, 254)
§ Mary Maynard (in 1990s): She argued against positioning and using liberalism, Marxism (and socialism) and radical in feminist approaches because they constrain and stereotype and exclude other approaches. Rather the evidence should drive theory and its slow changes. (Green, Troup, 1999, 256)
§ Juliet Mitchell (in 1970s): A social theorist who stated the concept of woman is historically and objectively located. This came about with ideology (Marxism) into the subjective individual (psychoanalysis), linking her to oppressive culture through production (Marxism), reproduction, sexuality (ideology and patriarchy) and socialising children (the family being part of the ideological superstructure under the economic base, locked into capitalist contradictions with a property based passive dependent possessiveness). Each of these four elements can compensate in the oppression when one or more weaken trapping the subject and her self-definitions into her oppression. This gender is a social construction thus linked directly to capitalism, more objective and hard-historical than male patriarchy. (May, 1996, 164-166)
§ Karen Offen (in 1990s): Continuity might have predominated before industrialisation but not since; it is atheme tackled by feminist historians. (Green, Troup, 1999, 258-259)
§ Adrienne Rich (in 1980s): A social theorist for whom lesbian existence and lesbian continuum widen the opportunities for women beyond the compulsory heterosexuality which defines women's history, culture and values. (May, 1996, 164)
§ Joan Scott (in 1980s): She discussed the discourses of French political economists in the nineteenth century writing about women. The writing is the various changing product of the authors with no clear authorial voice, and this means the women's lives so constructed become decentred. (Green, Troup, 1999, 257-258)
§ Lena Sommerstad (in 1990s): Gender identities change through time, with multiple means of analysis, as happened with the Swedish dairy industry in the one hundred years from 1850 in that as it mechanised it became more male in labour authority from a defined natural state of milkmaids. (Green, Troup, 1999, 259-260)
§ John Tosh (in 1990s): by studying men as a particular gender, it undermines common universalist assumptions. History's assumptions in its usual themes are challenged. (Green, Troup, 1999, 259)
See:
Green, A., Troup, K. (eds) (1999), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 253-262.
Hall, C. (1981), 'Gender Divisions and Class Formation in the Birmingham Middle Class, 1780-1850, in Samuel, R. (ed.) (1981), People's History and Socialist Theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 164-75, in Green, Troup, 1999, 263-276.
May, T. (1996), Situating Social Theory, Buckingham: Open University Press, 158-175.
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