Gender History

Gender history is a type of historical analysis that has developed out of women’s history. In the 1960s and 1970s, gender was often used as a synonym for women’s history. But from the 1980s the term developed as a separate interest among historians and critics in other disciplines. Joan Wallach Scott defined gender as “a social category imposed on a sexed body,” and stated that “gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power.” Gender can be defined as the study of the cultural (including the historical, social, class, intellectual, economic, political, psychological, literary, etc.) organisation, functioning, representation and meaning of sex/body difference. Gender distinction has been explored as a common and omnipresent characteristic of society.

Gender as a category of analysis, is a mechanism by which change over time can be interpreted and represented. Initially, it grew as a part of women’s history in the 1960s. It began in some ways as a branch of social history, and many of the essays include extensive discussions of issues that matter to social historians: the family, work and leisure experiences, marriage patterns, and class differences. It criticized patriarchy, and male dominance and explained why women were hidden from history. Then, Juliet Mitchell and Teresa Brennan, the feminine through their psychoanalysis explained the subjectivity of women through language. From the 1970s and into the 1980s, especially through the early efforts of Sally Alexander and Catherine Hall, women, class and sexual difference came under the scope of a variety of Marxist historians. In this phase of women's history, sex and class often figured as related forms of oppression: the female sex was viewed as a subordinate class, subjugated by a dominant class of men.

By the mid-1980s a gradual breakdown of the category "woman" had begun to propel the turn to gender. The critical questioning of women as organized historical subjects, objects, and political identities was one factor that necessitated the arrival of gender as a keyword of historical analysis. By the early 1990s gender had become a substantial topic among historians and those interested in an interdisciplinary approach to it. Two edited texts from that time, Julia Epstein’s and Kristina Straub’s collection Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (1991) and Sue Tolleson Rinehart’s Gender Consciousness and Politics (1992), indicate the final arrival of gender consciousness among historians as well as academics.

Gender also made inroads into philosophy in the early 1990s and the most important works are Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter’s edited Feminist Epistemologies (1993), Ann Garry’s and Marilyn Pearsall’s Women, Knowledge and Reality (1996), and Jean Curthoys’s Feminist Amnesia (1997). Most notably French feminist philosophers and critical theorists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, along with Judith Butler, Diane Elam, Teresa Brennan, Mary Poovey and Donna Haraway, have explored the process of cultural absorption into a dominant gendered discourse, raising questions about how gender historically defines sex.

Gender is now firmly fixed as a part of the historical construction. For example, explorations that link sexuality, gender, and nationalism are revealed in texts like George L. Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (1985) and the multiple-authored Nationalisms and Sexualities (1992). On gender, race, imperialism and colonialism see Anne McClintock et al., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nations, and Postcolonial Perspectives (1997) and Ida Bloom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall, Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (2000).

Like all the concepts that historians use, gender is a modelling device for organising and then representing the past. Gender history is a way of looking at the past that expands our vision.