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Journal of Women's History, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1993, pp.
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Introduction to Dialogue:
Gender History/Women's History: Is Feminist Scholarship
Losing its Critical Edge?
Sonya O. Rose
There has never been a period when fentinists have been unified around
a single analytical frame. As a number of scholars have pointed out,
disunity has marked feminism throughout history.1 Major fault lines have
formed and reformed over the very subject matter of feminist analysisthe
category women.2 The four essays that follow assess the implications of
recent directions in feminist history, including the turn to gender history,
but especially the emphasis on difference in feminist analysis.
Asignificant achievement of feminist scholarship in the 1970s was the
development of the concept of gender signifying the social rather than the
biological construction of sexual difference. Another major accomplish-
ment was the revelation that the relations between women and men varied
historically and cross-culturally. As historians became increasingly inter-
ested in these relations and structures, many began to focus on the subject
of gender itself. They argued that to focus only on women instead of on
gender relations was to reinforce the idea that only women have gender,
which "ironically privileges the man as unproblematic or exempted from
determination by gender relations."3 Many feminist historians have shifted
their primary focus from examining women's lives to demonstrating the
centrality of gender to various arenas of social life.4
Not everyone has greeted this turn to gender with unqualified
approval. Some have worried that a focus on genderon men as well as
women and on the ways that gender is mtrinsic to all social relationshas
deflected historians from the feminist movement's primary political goals
of unmasking oppression and enhancing the potential for emancipatory
politics.5 Arguing that feminist history should be concerned with the issue
of women's oppression which has been sidestepped by the recent focus on
gender, Judith Bennett, for example, proposed that historians rethink the
concept of patriarchy in order to bring "moral and political commitment"
back into women's history.6
More problematic for women's history than the gender turn have been
the challenges that were implicit in feminist history as it developed and
that were quite explicit in the divisions among women themselves. These
1993 Journal of Wqmens History, Vol. s No. (Spring)_________________
The papers in this roundtable discussion were presented at the Social Science
History annual meeting in October 1991.
90 Journal of Women's History Spring
center on the issue of difference; not the differences between women and
men, but the differences that the term women obscures and mystifies.
Two quite distinct critiques of feminist analysis centering on the issue
of difference have led to vexing questions about the subject matter of
women's history and the methods of feminist analysis. One comes from
postmodernism, particularly in its French post-structuralist guise. In his-
tory this critique has been made most influentially by Joan Scott.7 The other
comes from various black and Third World theorists and critics.
Joan Scott, like other feminist theorists and historians who focus on
gender, maintains that "gender is a constitutive element of social relation-
ships based on perceived differences between the sexes."8 In addition she
states, "gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power,"
suggesting that the "gender question in feminism" is about discourse and
how it creates meaning.9 Scott argues that French post-structuralism, espe-
cially the method of deconstruction, is well suited for use by historians who
are concerned with examining the meanings generated through language,
and it is this focus she maintains that is necessary for ferninist historical
analysis to advance.10 Scott contends that post-structuralism offers femi-
nists a radical epistemology that relativizes "the status of all knowledge,
links knowledge and power, and theorizes these in terms of the operations
of difference."11
The appropriate objects of study, according to Scott, are epistemolg-
ica! categories. She writes, "The story is no longer about the things that
have happened to women and men and how they have reacted to them;
instead it is about how the subjective and collective meanings of women
and men as categories of identity have been constructed."12 For Scott and
other post-structuralists, identity or subjectivity itself, is radically de-
essentialized. Rather than sternming from one's being or experience, post-
structuralists conceptualize subjectivity as a position in a discursive field.
In her more recent writings, Scott has questioned historians' focus on
experience altogether, because she maintains that experience is not the
authentic source of human agency, but rather it is itself discursively pro-
duced. There is no experience outside of the ways that language constructs
it.13
Scotf s ideas have had an enormous impact on many feminist histori-
ans, and increasingly the terms discourse and text and a focus on language
and the production of meanings are appearing in their scholarship.
Although feminist historians before Scott examined discourses and
explored the social constructions of gender, she has stimulated substantial
debate by challenging scholars to become overtly analytical in their work,
to focus their studies on texts using the tools of deconstruction, and to
adopt a postmodernist epistemology.14 While some historians have wel-
1993 DIALOGUE: SONYA O. ROSE 91
comed this program, others have expressed their scepticism or out-and-out
hostility to it.15
A second major assault on the foundations of feminism has come from
the writings of women of color. In a continuing explosion of historical
scholarship and theoretical writings, they have critiqued ferninist scholar-
ship, expressing their experience of exclusionfrom the academy, from
circles of white ferninist scholars and activists, as well as from the versions
of women being reclaimed by white Western women's historians.16 Collec-
tively, the writings on and by women of color dispute the validity of many
of the analyses of women's experiences, showing them to have been
studies, not of American women, but of white and often middle-class
women in the United States. For instance, they challenge the notion that
women in the nineteenth century were enshrined in a "cult of
domesticity";17 they dispute feminist accounts of patriarchal family struc-
tures and their consequences for women; they bring into feminist historical
consciousness a new awareness and appreciation of the community bonds
among women; and contest the idea that all women have been deprived
of a public voice in their communities.18 By focusing on the differing
historical experiences of Third World women, the writings of women of
color have, in short, challenged the idea that there is something that can be
identified as "women's experience."
A pivotal idea running through the various strands of Black and Third
World ferninist thought is that race, gender, and class are interlocking and
interdependent formations of domination, and that these dimensions of
social life are experienced simultaneously.19 One is not a woman at one
moment in time, and an African American or white Canadian the next.
This scholarship joins postmodernist feminism in fracturing the uni-
tary historical subject of feminism. Much of the work by women of color,
however, challenges the very form of theorizing engaged in by self-con-
sciously postmodernist writers. A number of African-American theorists
have argued that narratives are central components of theory.20 Stories,
rather than abstract theoretical statements, are to be trusted as core belief .21
Like postmodernists, these feminist theorists maintain that there can be no
politically neutral and all-knowing standpoint from which to generate
objective knowledge. However, in contrast to deconsrructionist post-
modernism, they argue that their theories and analyses are grounded in
both experience and action.22 When compared with the writings of many
postmodernist feminists, the feminist analyses by women of color are often
deliberately political and are oriented to empowering the people of their
communities and to dismantling structures of domination.23
Although post-structuralist, postmodernist analyses and the theories
created by women of color differ substantially in their form and substance,
both challenge the enterprise of women's history by raising questions
about the subject of historical scholarship, its methods, and its purpose and
politics. The essays in this dialogue address this challenge.
Kathleen Canning, Anna Clark, and Marianna Valverde consider
issues raised by post-structuralism. Rather than rejecting the linguistic
turn, they respond to it in creative ways, and indicate how they apply their
understandings of language, meaning, and subjectivity or identity in their
own empirical work. Kathleen Canning explores the controversies among
German feminist historians over new directions in feminist inquiry. Her
discussion illuminates the markedly different trajectories of scholarship in
Germany as contrasted with the United Kingdom and North America. She
raises thought provoking questions about the implications of the post-
structuralist critique of subjectivity and experience for German historical
practice. In her discussion, Canning demonstrates the importance of com-
ing to terms, both theoretically and empirically, with the issue of historical
agency and rethinking the analytical categories of discourse and experi-
ence and their relationship. She formulates her own understanding of
identity as the location in which subjects link experience and discourse. In
doing so, she suggests subjects create their own meanings and sometimes
resist those that are dominant. It is in this way that they become historical
agents.
Anna Clark contends that gender analysis is a step forward in feminist
history, because it can make evident different forms of male power, and it
can incorporate sexual orientation as a historical dynamic. She situates her
own uneasiness with contemporary feminist history in particular aspects
of postmodernism, especially in those strands influenced by Foucault. She
is particularly concerned with the problem of linking the exercise of power
to the instability of meaning created by the play of difference in language
and the idea that subjects are created discursively. By turning to history
itself, Clark challenges some of the understandings about gender and
language in post-structuralism. She suggests, for example, that the idea of
gender as constituted by a binary opposition between the masculine and
the feminine was an historical construction rather than being a timeless
artifact of the operation of language. In order to conceptualize how lan-
guage is linked to power and political struggle, Clark prefers the term
rhetoric to the concept of discourse.24 Rhetoric, she suggests, implies a
dialogue between and among social actors who are attempting to persuade
one another.
Mariana Valverde parts company from Canning and Clark by more
fully embracing post-structuralism, especially its theory of subjectivity.
While Valverde faults Joan Scott for being overly enamored with
deconstruction, she applauds post-structuralism for conceptualizing both
discourses and subjectivities as fragmented and multiple. She suggests that
historical agency resides in how "the constant work of reproducing the
discursive structures subjectively, often subverts and fractures those very
structures." Furthermore, Valverde maintains that gender history can be
critical history if feminist historians take as their subject the analysis of
gender formations, by which she means studying how "the two genders
are formed and reformed, renegotiated, contested." Like Joan Scott,
Valverde insists that it is crucial that ferninist historians "remember the
need for a philosophical critique of the formation of the categories whose
history we study qua historians."
Each of these three essays suggest how ferninist history can move
forward by encompassing some if not all of the suppositions of post-struc-
turalism. Clark and Canning are both concerned with the problem of
agency, especially how subjects can "talk back" or can exercise power, and
they wish for a concept of subjectivity that is not fully determined in and
by discourses. Valverde, in contrast, is not at all troubled by the notion that
subjectivities are formed through discourse. She conceptualizes historical
agency as the process by which subjects, using multivalent language, both
reproduce and challenge dominant meanings. Each of them provides
imaginative ways of thinking about some of the problems for feminist
history posed by post-structuralism, but they omit direct consideration of
two issues. The first concerns how language and meaning are linked to
other social practices, and the topic of gender as a social as well as linguistic
relation. I believe that we need to incorporate some kind of sociological
vision along with post-structuralist literary theory in our historical analy-
sis. Possibilities for doing this include adapting some of the ideas inform-
ing British cultural studies,25 attending to the work of sociologists who
specifically attempt to deal with the problem of linking the concepts of
structure and agency,26 as well as to the writings of feminist sociologist
Dorothy Smith.27
Feminist politics is the second issue that is unexplored in the three
essays on post-structuralism and feminist history. To what extent does a
turn toward more consciously theoretical or analytical feminist history
deflect attention from concern with structures of domination and with
building solidarities among diverse individuals and groups of women?
This is the subject of Marcia Sawyer's essay. She asks how feminist theory
can be altered so that it contributes to ending the racist practices of white
women?
Sawyer focuses her attention on what she perceives to be white
Western feminists' continuing reluctance to deal with their own racism,
and the resulting moral bankruptcy of white, middle-class versions of
feminism. She reminds us of the racist legacy of nineteenth-century femi-
nism, and calls attention to the continuation of Enlightenment ideas among
feminists who maintain a mind/body/spirit split that she argues contrib-
utes to the difficulty of "coalition building among women of different
colors and nationalities." But before it is even possible to contemplate
coalition building, Sawyer argues, white academic women need to con-
front their own racism, as well as to better understand both how being
white has privileged them, and the incredible costs of racism born by
women of color. Difference to Sawyer means something distinct from the
fractured identities of post-structuralist thinking and from the idea that
language is structured through difference.
Writing about white academic women's new appreciation of differ-
ence Bell Hooks says:
The upshot of all this has been the unprecedented support among
scholars and intellectuals for the inclusion of the Otherin theory.
Yes! Everyone seems to be clamoring for "difference," only few seem
to want any difference that is about changing policy or that supports
active engagement and struggle___Too often, it seems, the point is
to promote the appearance of difference within intellectual discourse,
a "clbration" that fails to ask who is sponsoring the party and who
is extending the invitations. For who is controlling this new dis-
course? Who is getting hired to teach it, and where? Who is getting
paid to write about it?28
Can the new post-stmcturalist discourse of difference become a vehicle for
an inclusive ferninist politics?29 As Marcia Sawyer asks, "Can feminist
theory address any of this? Can white academic feminists create a theory
that helps them with self-recovery and self-awareness?"
Where do we begin? Marcia Sawyer suggests and Bell Hooks advo-
cates that white ferninist historians incorporate race into their analysis, and
that they do so by interrogating whiteness.30 Such studies would not only
reveal the historical consequences of race for whites, but by confronting
the ways that our own personal identities have been insidiously molded
by race, they might also stimulate our anger.31
To fully comprehend difference, including the different ways that
people experience oppression, we may need to develop a theoretical
analysis of embodiment. Elizabeth Speknan writes, "We cannot hope to
understand the meaning of a person's experiences, including her experi-
ences of oppression, without first thinking of her as embodied, and second
thinking about the particular meanings assigned to that embodiment."32
Without retreating into essentialism, we may have to rethink the concept
of experience for as Iris Marion Young argues,
Describing the processes of social life from the point of view of the
subject brings to language the hurts and harms of oppressive struc-
tures, and only such experiential description can do so Experience
names a moment of creative agency in social processes, which cannot
be finally totalized or categorized by the dominant oppressive struc-
tures. Describing kinds of oppression, the experience of oppression,
and the creative agency of the oppressed can help form resistance and
envision alternatives.33
Such a rethinking might begin by examining the acknowledged role of
experience and action in blade and Third World ferninist thought.34
Finally, the points at which black feminist thought and post-structur-
alist feminism meet suggest that difference can be the basis of community
rather than a source of devisiveness. Recently, Joan Scott has proposed that
to build community, it is necessary to recognize that differences "are what
we have most in common"; "community is a strategically organized set of
relationships"; and that "conflict and contest are therefore inherent in
communities of difference."35 As Audre Lorde has put it, "Certainly there
are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those
differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to
recognize those differences, and to examine the distortion which result
from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and
expectation."36 These and other writers suggest that solidarity is a fragile
accomplishment born of conflict, contest, and struggle.
NOTES
1 See for example, Teresa de Lauretis, "Upping the Anti (Sic) in Ferninist
Theory," in Conflicts in Feminism, Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New
York and London: Routledge, 1990), 255-270.
2 As Ann Snitow has eloquently and compellingly asserted, tension over
the problem of identitythe issue of needing to act as women while refusing to
be "woman"has been at the core of feminism itself. Ann Snitow, "A Gender
Diary," in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller OMew
York and London: Routledge, 1990), 9-43. For other vigorous analyses of this
problem see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York and London: Routledge, 1990); Mary Poovey, "Feminism and
Deconstruction," Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 51-65, who assesses the utility
of deconstruction as a theory and method for feminism, and Denise Riley, "Am I
That Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Black and Third World women have contin-
ually critiqued the vision of women created in white Western feminism. See, for
example, the essays in Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
(Boston: South End, 1981); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith,
eds., All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Old
Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist, 1981); Phyllis Marynick Palmer, "White Women/Black
Women: The Dualism of Female Identity and Experience in the United States,"
Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (1983): 152-155; Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Coalition
Politics: Turning the Century," in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed.
Barbara Smith (New York Kitchen Table: Women of Color, 1983), 360.
3 Jane Flax, 'Tostmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory/' in
Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge,
1990), 45. Joan Scott has made a very forceful argument about the neccesity for
gender analysis in history. Joan W. Scott, "Genden AUseful Category of Historical
Analysis," in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988), 28-50.
4 Examples include The essays in Work Engendered: Toward a New History
of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Mary H.
Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe
Industry, 1780-1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Kathleen Canning,
"Gender and the Politics of Class Formation: Rethinking German Labor History,"
American Historical Review 97, no. 3 (1992), 736-769; Leonore Davidoff and Cather-
ine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850
(London: Hutchinson, 1987); Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle:
Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Sonya O. Rose, Limited Liveli-
hoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1992).
5 See, for example, Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A
Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991), 145. For a discussion of differences between gender history and
women's history, see Louise M. Newman, "Critical Theory and the History of
Women: Whaf s At Stake in Deconstructing Women's History," Journal of Women's
History 2, no. 3 (1991): 58-68; and the comment by Lise Vogel, 'Telling Tales:
Historians of Our Own Lives," Journal of Women's History 2, no. 3 (1991): 89-101.
6 Judith Bennett, 'Teminism and History," Gender and History 1, no. 3
(1989): 251-272.
7 Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History.
8 Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History,42.
Ibid.
Ibid, 7-9.
11 Ibid., 4. What makes post-structuralism especially useful, Scott maintains,
is that it insists that meanings are always unstable, and so implies that it is politics,
or "the play of force" that gives meanings their appearance of solidity. However,
Scotf s theoretical emphasis appears to be on "the play of force" in language itself,
rather than on social relations of power and their consequences.
Ibid., 6
13 Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer
1991): 773-797.
1993 Dialogue: Sonya O. Rose 97
14 What postmodernist feminists share is a critique of Enlightenment
thought that assumes human beings to be autonmous, stable selves who are
capable of producing objective, rational analysis, and of discovering generalizable
truths, yielding knowledge that exhaustively and completely explains history.
Enlightenment ideas, and the knowledge generated with these ideas as a founda-
tion, imagine that it is possible to know the truth about the world from an
archimedian or God's eye view. Postmodernism eschews the idea that there is
timeless, context-free knowledge. Any attempt to theorize the foundations of
human existence and use them to explain history are acts of power that pretend
to be objective and politically neutral. Heterogeneity, multiplicity, difference are
the stuff of history. For discussions of feminist postmodernism from a variety of
points of view see Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York and
London: Routledge, 1990).
15 For critical reviews of Scotf s book, Gender and the Politics of History, see
the previously cited reviews by Linda Gordon and Catherine Hall, and Claudia
Koonz's critique in Women's Review of Books 6, no. 4 (1989): 19-20. Other critical
comments on Scotf s ideas include those by Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse:
The Reiflcation of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990), 172-185; Christine Stansell, "A Response to Joan Scott,"
International Labor and Working Class History 31 (Spring 1987): 28-30; and Louise A.
Tilly, "Gender, Women's History, and Social History," Social Science History 13, no.
4 (1989): 439-462. The use of literary analysis in history and the focus on represen-
tation more generally has stimulated lively debate and serious critique. See the
discussions by Judith Walkowitz, Myra Jehlen, and Bell Chevigny in "Patrolling
the Borders: Feminist Historiography and the New Historicism/'Raicai History
Review 43, no. 1 (1989): 23-43; Judith Lowder Newton, "History as Usual/Femi-
nism and the 'New Historicism'," in TTk NewHistoricism, ed. H. Aram Veeser GMew
York and London: Routledge, 1989), 152-169.
16 Historical works include Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The
Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, 1984); Evelyn
Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women
in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Darlene Clark
Hine, Black Women In White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession,
1890-1950 (BIoomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989); Debo-
rah G. White, ArVt M Woman? (New York W. W. Norton, 1985). Theoretical works
and collections include Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990); Angela
Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York Random House, 1981); Evelyn Brooks
Higgenborham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of
Race," Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251-274; Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to
Center (Boston: South End, 1984); Bell Hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural
Politics 03oston: South End, 1990); Aida Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege: Seduction
and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color," Signs
14, no. 4 (1989); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, Calif.:
Crossing Press, 1984); Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., 77iis Bridge Called
my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York Kitchen Table: Women of
Color, 1983); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, eds.,
77ifrd World Women and the Politics of Feminism (BIoomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1991); Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist
Anthology (New York Kitchen Table: Women of Color, 1983); Hortense Spillers,
"Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female
Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, reprinted
1989), 73-100. Their work and a concern about integrating race and gender is
reflected in the scholarship of several white Western feminists including: Christie
Farnham, "Sapphire? The Issue of Dominance in the Slave Family," in "To the
Livelong Day": America's Women at Work, 1780-1980, ed. Carol Groneman and Mary
Beth Norton (New York Cornell University Press, 1987): 68-83; Elizabeth Fox-Gen-
ovese, Within the Plantation Household (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1988); Jaqueline Dowd Hall, "The Mind that Bums in Each Body: Women,
Rape, and Racial Violence," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann
Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson OMew York Monthly Review,
1983), 329-349; Dolores E. Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender and Class in a
New South Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); Jacqueline
Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery
to the Present OVew York Basic Books, 1985); Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of
Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York W. W.
Norton, 1984); Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in
Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988).
17 For an overview of this and other findings, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black
Feminist Thought, esp. chapters 3,4,6, and 7. Also see the review essay by Elizabeth
Brooks Higgenbotham, "Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women's
History," Gender and History 1, no. 1 (1989): 50-67.
18 See, for example, the work of Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "Building in Many
Places: Multiple Commitments and Ideologies in Black Women's Community
Work," in Women and the Politics of Empowerment, eds. Ann Bookman and Sandra
Morgen (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Patricia Hill Collins, Black
Feminist Thought, chapter 7.
19 See for example, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 16. Bell
Hooks, Feminist Theory, chapter 1; Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham, "African-Amer-
ican Women's History"; Deborah K King, "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Con-
sciousness: The Context of a Black Ferninist Ideology," mFeminist Theory in Practice
and Process, ed. Micheline R. Maison, et aL, (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1989), 75-106; Audre Lorde, "An Open Letter to Mary Daly," in
Sister Outsider, 94-97; Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman.
20 See for example, Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory," in Gender and
Theory !Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford and New York
Basil Blackwell, 1989), 225-237.
21 Patricia Hill Collins, BlackFeminist Thought, 210. For examples of autobio-
graphical narratives that are also consciously theoretical see the superb books by
Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass. and London:
Harvard University Press, 1991); and Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good
Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago Press, 1986).
22 Patricia Hill Collins, for example, maintains that Afrocentric feminist
epistemology is rooted in the everyday experiences of African-American women.
See Black Feminist Thought, 208-21Z Also see Bell Hooks who argues regarding the
critique of essentialism in postmodernist theories, "An adequate response to this
concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of 'the
authority of experience'." Yearning, 29.
23 A major criticism by several scholars about postmodernist feminism is
that it does not provide a basis for feminist politics. See, for example, Christine Di
Stefano, "Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism," in
Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson, 63-82; Susan Bordo, 'Teminism,
Postmodernism, and Gender-Scepticism," in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J.
Nicholson, 133-157. Several writers who either identify themselves with post-
modernism, or whose work falls under that loose umbrella term, are specifically
concerned with developing feminist theory and analysis that can address political
issues. See, for example, Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structur-
alism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," in Feminist Theory in Practice and
Process, ed. Micheline R. Maison, et aL, esp. 318-326; Nancy Fraser and Linda J.
Nicholson, "Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Femi-
nism and Postmodernism," inFeminism/Postmodernism ed. Linda J. Nicholson, esp.
34-35; Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary
Social Theory Ovlinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Regenia Gagnier,
'Teminist Postmodernism: The End of Feminism or the Ends of Theory?," in
Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference, ed. Deborah L. Rhode OMew Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1990), 21-30.
24 Regenia Gagnier also has suggested the utility of rhetorical analysis in
exarnining working-class autobiographies. See, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Rep-
resentation in Britain, 1832-1920 (New York Oxford University Press, 1991), 3-5;
40-42.
25 From the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
(New York International, 1971); and the work of Raymond Williams. See espe-
cially Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977). Also see Stuart Hall, "The Rediscovery of Ideology': Return of the
Repressed in Media Studies," in Culture, Society and the Media, ed. Michael
Gurevitch, et aL, (London: Methuen, 1982), 56-90; and "The Toad in the Garden:
Thatcherism among the Theorists," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds.
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1988), 58-74.
26 For example, Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (JBerkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Social Theory and Modern Soci-
ology (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987); and "Structuralism, Post-
structuralism and the Production of Culture," in Social Theory Today, ed. Anthony
Giddens and Jonathan Turner (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987),
195-223; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987); and the very helpful essay by William H. Sewell, Jr., "A
Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation," American Journal of
Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992): 1-29. Regenia Gagnier has found such theoristswhom
she calls "practice theorists"helpful in approaching the issue of subjectivity or
agency in her analysis of British working-class autobiographies. See, Subjectivities,
8-11. For a useful application of such "practice" theory to theorizing gender see R.
W. Connell, Gender and Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987).
27 See, especially, Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic (J3oston:
Northeastern University Press, 1987); and Dorothy Smith, 77ie Conceptual Practices
of Power (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1990).
Bell Hooks, Yearning, 54.
29 For a rigorous assessment of the political implications of deconstruction
that is sensitive to issues of race, see Mary Poovey, 'Teminism and Deconstruc-
tion," esp. 61-63.
30 Hooks, ibid., 54; 165-171. Anne Russo also makes this point See Ann
Russo, " 1We Cannot Live Without Our Lives': White Women, Antiracism, and
Feminism," in 77iird World Women, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and
Lourdes Torres (BIoomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 299-
301. Toni Morrison provides one model for understanding the centrality of race in
American consciousness in her Playing in the Dark Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Catherine Hall's new
work examines the importance of race for the construction of Englishness. See her
collection of essays, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and
History (Cambridge Polity, 1992), 25-30, and chapters 9 and 10. Also see Richard
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(London: Verso, 1991). The work of anthropologist Anne Stoler is focused on such
an analysis of gender, race, and national identity. See, for example, Anne L. Stoler,
"Making Empire Respectable The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twen-
tieth-Century Colonial Cultures," American Ethnologist 10, no. 4 (1989): 634-660;
and "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural
Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia," Comparative Studies in Society and
History 34, no. 3 (1992): 514-551. Also see, Antoinette Burton, "The Feminist Quest
for Identity: British Imperial Suffragism and 'Global Sisterhood/ 1900-1915,"
Journal of Women's History 3, no. 2 (1991): 46-81; Janaki Nair, "Uncovering the
Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen's Writings, 1813-1940,"
Journal of Women's History 2, no. 1 (1990): 8-34; Mariana Valverde, " 'When the
Mother of the Race Is Free': Race, Reproduction, and Sexuality in First-Wave
Feminism," in Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women's History, ed. Franca Iacovetta
and Mariana Valverde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 3-26.
31 For an important discussion of anger, see Audre Lorde, "The Uses of
Angen Women Responding to Racism," in Sister Outsider, 124-133. Also see Bell
Hooks, Feminist Theory, esp. 56-65.
32 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman, 129-130. Teresa de Lauretis
suggests that feminist theory is "a developing theory of the female-sexed or
female-embodied social subject, whose constitution and whose modes of social
and subjective existence include most obviously sex and gender, but also race,
class, and any other significant socioculturel divisions and representations; a
developing theory of the female-embodied social subject that is based on its
specific, emergent, and conflictuel history." Teresa de Lauretis, "Upping the Anti
(sic)," 267. Kathleen Canning also has suggested the importance of developing a
theory of identity based on the non-discursively constituted female body. Kathleen
Canning, "Contesting the Power of Categories: Discourse, Experience and Femi-
nist Resistance," paper presented to Comparative Study of Social Transformations
Conference, "Power !Thinking Through the Disciplines," University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, and forthcoming in Signs.
33 Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist
Philosophy and Social Theory (JBloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 13-14. Also see Donna J. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science
Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," in Cimians,
Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York Routledge, 1991),
183-202, and the conceptualization of "experience" by Teresa de Lauretis, Alice
Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (BIoomington: Indiana University Press,
1984), chapter 6.
34 See, for example, Bell Hooks, Yearning, 23-31; Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
"Cartographies of Struggle, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism/'
in Third World Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes
Torres, 32-39; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 22-23; 208-212. One
direction that such a rethinking may lead is suggested in Patricia Hill Collins'
"outsider-within" and "both-and" perspectives. Ibid., 11-13; 232-235; 225-226.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese suggests a similar approach borrowing the concept of
"twoness" from W. E. B. DuBois which she would make the basis for a new
common ground for feminism. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illu-
sions, 139-41.
35 Joan W. Scott, "The New University: Beyond Political Correctness,"
Perspectives 30,7 (1992): 18.
36 Audre Lorde, "Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,"
in Sister Outsider, 115. Also see Bell Hooks, "Sisterhood: Political Solidarity
Between Women," in Feminist Theory, esp. 62-65.
Comment
Kathleen Canning
German Particularities in Women's History/Gender History
I will seek to answer the question posed to this panel today from my
own perspective as a social historian of modern Germany, a field marked
by an "Atlantic divide," by a striking divergence in the ways in which
German history is conceptualized and practiced on either side of the
Atlantic.1 This Atlantic divide applies as well to feminist scholarship,
which is still working to establish its critical edge within the field, albeit in
different ways on each side of the Atlantic. Historians on both sides of the
Atlantic have seen the gradual displacement of Frauengeschichte (women's
history) by Geschlechtergeschichte (gender history) in recent years, but the
meanings of this shift and the controversies surrounding it are distinct in
Germany and the United States. My exploration of this Atlantic divide in
German gender history aims to relate the different meanings, methodolo-
gies and theories of gender history to the success or failure of ferninist
history in attaining a "critical edge."
Historical practice during the last decade in the United States and
Britain has been marked by a fruitful fracturing of disciplinary bound-
ariesby the interrogation, disassembly, and recasting of these paradigms
in light of new histories of women and gender, of race, ethnicity, and
sexuality. By contrast, the social science paradigms of modernization,
urbanization, of class and state formationestablished in Germany during
the 1960sremain safely in place while the history of women and gender
persists in its "Aussenseiterdasein" (outsider status).2 As a result of the
"mutual distancing" that marks the relationship between feminist history
and German historical social science, many of the most interesting histor-
ical monographs on women's work, everyday lives, and political move-
ments have been produced in relative isolation from the mainstream of
historical social science.3 Most social and labor historians, in turn, regard
women's history as too specialized to be relevant to their synthetic histories
of social transformations.
Acomparison of the various practices of gender history is complicated
first by the fact that the German term Geschlecht means both sex and gender.
Indeed, some of its most prominent practitioners emphatically reject the
division, implicit in the Anglo-Saxon term gender, between the biological
category, sex, and the social structures and ideology of gender.4 Further-
more, some feminist historians view gender history as a retreat from the
more radical claims of women's history. They contend that gender history
1993 Journal of Womews History, Vol. 5 No. (Spring)__________________
1993 DIALOGUE: KATHLEEN CANNING 103
is more palatable to mainstream male historians because it employs a more
compliant language and abandons the confrontational tone of much of
women's history.5 Historian Gisela Bock warns in a recent essay that
gender has the potential not only to produce a gender-neutral historical
discourse, but also to render women thoroughly invisible.6
Yet there are numerous proponents of the opposite view that
Geschlechtergeschichte has not gone far enough in breaking with the tradi-
tions of women's history. In recent articles surveying the current state of
Geschlechtergeschichte, Ute Frevert, Hanna Schissler, and Dorothe Wierling
suggest that the practice of German gender history Lags far behind its
theoretical aspirations.7 Frevert and Wierling lament the fact that the shift
from women's history to gender history has been mainly a semantic, rather
than a methodological or theoretical transition: Geschlecht, they point out,
is often merely a more fashionable term for women's history and talking
about gender continues to mean talking about women.8 Thus, this shift has
done little to change the perception among mainstream historians that
gender is something inherently female or to challenge the purported
gender-neutrality or universality of their narratives and paradigms.9
As a remedy for this impasse, feminist critics envision a new, expanded
version of Geschlechtergeschichte which disavows the "separatist" pursuit of
women's history in its incorporation of men and masculinity and in its
exploration of the relationships between the two sexes.10 While aiming to
widen the empirical scope of gender history to include men, this proposal
omits any reflection on the methodological-theoretical framework of
Geschlechtergeschichte, which is, in many respects, still embedded in social
science history." Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the Atlantic
divide in gender history is the way in which Geschlechtergeschichte has thus
far resisted an exploration of gender as a symbolic system or as a signifier
of relations of power. Like the mainstream social historians they critique,
German feminist historians have been reluctant to explore cultures, men-
talities, or ideologies, or to engage in debates about post-structuralist
literary or anthropological theory, which may be explained in part by the
absence of an mterdisciplinary framework for fruitful encounters between
the disciplines (such as women's studies programs in the United States).12
Instead, Frevert and Wierling express a kind of Utopian desire to
overcome the "mutual distance" between gender history and social history
by integrating the two fields and their two main concepts, gender and class.
Thus, social history would integrate gender as a central category of social-
historical analysis, while gender history would locate itself in a social-his-
torical and class-specific context, a process which they imply has already
occurred in Britain and the U.S.13 This vision of reciprocity and integra-
tionbetween feminist history and mainstream social history and
between the categories of gender and classseems to assume that estab-
lished fields and categories will somehow emerge from this encounter
intact. It overlooks the dissension and disorientation, the acute sense of
"epistemolgica! crisis" that has accompanied the feminist interrogation
of established categories, narratives, and chronologies in Britain and the
United States.14
The Turn to Gender and the Challenge of Post-Structuralism
The turn from German women's history to gender history is no less
controversial in the United States, but the issues of contest differ signifi-
cantly on either side of the Atlantic. Since the late 1960s, when feminist
scholarship began to challenge the prevalent paradigms of social science,
feminist historians in the United States have upheld a "doubled vision" of
society, one that emphasized the simultaneity of sex and class in shaping
social identities.15 In dissolving the myth of natural divisions between
public and private, between women and men, and in emphasizing the
ways in which these divisions were "socially constructed and socially
imposed," this doubled vision prepared the way for the shift towards "the
self-conscious study of gender," which began in the mid-1970s.16 By the
mid-1980s, feminist social scientists began to assail the 'logical mistake of
equating women with gender," and to argue for a view of gender as "a
system of social, symbolic, and psychic relations, in which men and women
are differentially positioned."17
Even as feminists began to distinguish between women and gender,
most refrained from establishing a kind of binary opposition between
them, by which one was a valid topic of historical inquiry and the other
outmoded or superfluous. Rather, women's history remained vital as a
foundation for, and as a prerequisite of gender history. The discovery that
women's history broke up "the smooth narrative of progress . . . con-
found[ed] the analytical categories" and failed to "offer an easy alternative
or synthesis to replace what it has disrupted" opened the way for gender
as a theoretical and methodological intervention.18 Yet the shift to gender,
to a more theorized historical research and writing, did not mean losing
sight of female historical actors.
By the late 1980s however, new controversies and "a new skepticism
about the use of gender as an analytical category" had become evident, as
the once-unitary category, woman, began to fracture in new and complex
ways.19 As women of color challenged racism within feminist movements
and in the academy, feminist scholarship in the United States became
increasingly aware of the ways in which the "ferninist dream of a common
naming of experience," was a totalizing, imperialist, and racist one.20 In
Germany, by contrast, womanand in its peculiar affinity, genderremain
unitary categories, undifferentiated by race or ethnicity.21
At the same time, but in a somewhat different vein, historian Joan
Wallach Scoffs critique of the discipline of history from a post-structuralist
perspective also began to transform the debates about women and gender
during the late 1980s.22 Scott's recognition of the "difficulty of analyzing
gender inequality within the framework of social history" and her sense
of frustration at "the relatively limited impact women's history was having
on historical studies generally" prompted her interest in post-structural-
ism, in particular the theories of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.23
Scott illustrated the workings of this "more radical epistemology" in a
series of path-breaking theoretical and historical essays which posed
important challenges to categories that had long been integral to feminist
histories, such as experience, agency, subjectivity, identity, and class. Four
years after the publication of Gender and the Politics of History, Scott's turn
to post-structuralism continues to stimulate spirited debates within (and
beyond) the ranks of ferninist historians.24
Indeed, it is less the shift from women to gender than the uneasy
relationship between feminism and post-structuralism, the sense of iden-
tities and subjectivities fracturing, of categories and concepts dissolving in
a "new master-narrative" of multiplicity, fluidity, and mterdeterminancy,
that has prompted this panel to ask whether feminist inquiry is losing its
critical edge.25 While the decentering of the autonomous western white
male subject initially appeared to open up a space for the constitution of
female subjects, the emancipatory moments have been overshadowed by
the fragmenting effects of multiple and mdeterminate identities.26 Yet, it is
important for us to recognize that these controversies and crises (whether
of identity or epistemology) and, to some extent, the theory that has been
formulated to respond to them, originated in the very contradictions and
limitations of women's history, as Scott points out. Because most of the
debates about the so-called linguistic turn in history have centered on
Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, we have lost sight of the ways in which
ferninist history destabilized the historical canon of social history before
their works became widely known among historians. When it rejected
biological essentialism as an explanation of gender inequalities, feminist
history discovered in its own right the power of language, of discourses,
to socially construct these inequalities and to anchor them in social prac-
tices and institutions. Together, if not hand-in-hand, feminist and post-
structuralist critiques of history rendered "what was previously deemed
central" as fragmentedthe state, for exampleand sought to understand
that center in terms of its margins and peripheries.27
Feminist scholars have responded to the ongoing encounter with
post-structuralism in a variety of ways. Some continue to warn that "post-
modernism represents a dangerous approach for any marginalized group
to adopt," since it undermines the efforts of those "who have not been
allowed to make their own history" to name themselves, to "act as subjects
rather than objects of history."28 It is clear that attempts to decenter a subject
whose own subjectivity (in an historical sense) is still in the process of being
constitutedthe white western woman, women and men of color, the gay
or lesbian subjecthas been far more contested than the first wave of
deconstructive history aimed at the white male subject-individual-citizen
of western European history. This process of fragmenting, decentering,
dissolving narratives and paradigms has created a number of dilemmas
for feminist historians.
Perhaps the most important one at present is the ambiguity of the
terms experience and agency and the difficulty of disentangling the discur-
sive aspects from the moments of experience and agency in the shaping of
subjectivity or identity. Joan Scotf s portrayals of the "discursive
construction" of experiences and identities are convincing and compelling
in many respects, but they also appear to create their own binary opposi-
tions in which one of the pairin this case, discoursealways seems to
determine or construct the other (experience).29 In her essay on the dis-
course of political economy in nineteenth-century France, for example,
women workers are present only as objects of discursive construction: their
silence is juxtaposed with the loud and powerful voices of political econ-
omists holding forth on the perils of the industrial world as embodied in
the figure of the working woman.30 Scoffs recent essay, "The Evidence of
Experience," emphatically rejects the "appeal to experience as uncontest-
able evidence."31 In her view, the "evidence of experience" obscures "the
workings of the ideological system itself [and] its categories of representa-
tion (homosexual/heterosexual, man/woman, black/white as fixed
immutable identities)."32 Here Scott constructs as oppositional, rather than
as complementary historical tasks, the analysis of how differencefemi-
ninity, for examplewas constituted and the exploration of how that
difference was experienced by women in specific historical settings.
This kind of a critique will pose particular problems for German
women's history and Geschlechtergeschichte should it be widely circulated
there one day. Because German social history has focused mainly on
systems and abstract processes in which individual actors figure only
seldom, the act of constituting a subject has been an integral part of critical
alternative history, in particular women's history and Alltagsgeschichte (the
history of everyday life).33 Furthermore, the peculiarities and the horrors
of modern German history, the ways in which National Socialism and in
particular, the Holocaust, serve as "a limit case for testing difficult ques-
tions about historical practice," make discussions of discursive construc-
tions and representations, and of experience and agency more
complicated.34
Indeed, one of the most important disputes in recent German women's
history revolves around Claudia Koonz's analysis of the agency and com-
plicity of German women who "lived in/under/through the Third
Reich."35 Breaking apart the victim/perpetrator dichotomy by which
women in most historiography heretofore were viewed somewhat
unproblematically as victims of a virulently sexist and racist dictatorship,
Koonz argued in Mothers in the Fatherland that women comprised "half of
the Germans who made dictatorship, war and genocide possible-----Far
from remaining untouched by Nazi evil, women operated at its very
center."36 The publication of Koonz's book in 1987 unleashed a vitriolic and
defensive response from German historian Gisela Bock in which the Atlan-
tic divide in German history again became painfully evident. Bock, whose
own work on Nazi sterilization policies underscored the "profound anti-
natalism which potentially victimized all women by threatening their
(biological and social) maternal identity"37 accused Koonz of reducing "the
writing of women's history to an attack on 'separate spheres///38
Agency was also at the heart of this debate as it was taken up at a 1990
conference in Wrzburg on "Participation and Resistance: The Pro-
blematization of National Socialism in Recent Women's Studies" and
discussed in the subsequent volume, Tchter-Fragen, NS-Frauen-Geschichte
(Daughters Ask National Socialist Women's History).39 The conference opened
with a controversial call to ferninists to break with the "understandable
wish" to identify with the positive accomplishments of women in history,
to put an end to "the rituals of innocence in the women's movement and
in women's history regarding National Socialism."40 Instead, feminists
should claim the guilt and the responsibility for National Socialism, includ-
ing Auschwitz, as a negative legacy of German women's history.41 While
one side pointed to the connections between Fortpflanzungswahn (the drive
to reproduce) and Vernichtungswille (the drive to aruiihilate), recognizing
in the cult of the Aryan mothers a profound claim to power on the part of
women,42 the other side pointed out that women's guilt was proportional
to their "access to knowledge, to political power, and to social influence."43
Central to the controversies about this negative legacy was the task of
constituting the female subject and delineating the boundaries between
agency (responsibility) and victimization.
This controversy, a kind of life-and-death issue in German women's
history, makes clear the importance of contending with agency historically
and theoretically, of seeking to determine how subjects are "constituted
discursively" and the ways in which they are "subject to definite conditions
of existence, conditions of endowment of agents, and conditions of exer-
cise."44 It calls for "a weaving of theory into historical research,"45 for
exploring "empirical solutions" to theoretical problems.46 In illustrating
the historical specificity of our theoretical problems, this controversy also
suggests that the dilemmas of feminist history are mutable: we need to
think about not only how these dilemmas change over time but also about
how they differ according to the geographical, chronological contexts of
our own research projects; according to our own subject positions as
historians of modern Germany, urban America, colonial Africa, or ancient
Greece and Rome; as historians of labor, religion, or race; of class, state, or
identity formation; or of nation, empire, slavery, or war (or any combina-
tion thereof). Recognizing the historical specificity of the dilemmas dis-
cussed here also shows that there is no one answer to the question posed
by this panel, no singular response to post-structuralist feminism.
Yet it is crucial that we take the opportunities presented by dissolving
categories and fragmenting identities to rethink them, to respond cre-
atively to Joan Scotf s challenge rather than Viecoming enmeshed in dilem-
mas or paralyzed by epistemolgica! crisis. This might mean thinking
historically about concepts like discourse which too often seem fixed in time
and detached from processes of historical change, without historical ori-
gins or consequences; or seeking not only to expose the hidden meanings
of concepts and texts, but also, as Louise Tilly has argued, to construct new
meanings, to redefine our concepts, embedding them in the histories we
study and create.47 We might explore, for example, the conflictual mean-
ings of class or examine the meaning of (sexual, ethnic, racial, religious)
difference both as ideology and as experience in specific historical settings.
In my own work I attempt to break open the binary oppositions between
discourse and experience, to counter the silence of "discursively con-
structed subjects" by mquiring about the reception, the contestation, the
multiple meanings of the texts in question; about the complex ways in
which women workers, for example, might have interpreted, subverted,
or internalized these constructions. Thus, I attempt to read sources both
for the ways that discourses "position subjects"48 and for the ways subjects
"talked back,"49 while remaining fully aware of the discursive context in
which they talked and acted. I explore a notion of identity as a location in
which subjects are constituted as they encounter and interact with dis-
course, as they derive their own meanings and/or resist discourses.
The work of Judith Walkowitz, Mary Poovey, Leonore Davidoff, and
Catherine Hall offers diverse examples of feminists reading "the ways that
discursive meanings circulate throughout a culture."50 They point to dif-
ferent ways of exploring the "non-discursive"; of dissolving the opposi-
1993 Dialogue: Kathleen Canning 109
tions between discourse and experience or agency; of discerning the role
of human agency in the production of texts; and of analyzing texts as they
"resonatefd] differently in separate cultural and social settings."51 We also
have much to learn from feminists, mostly non-historians, who engage
post-structuralist theory in a critical and differentiated manner by propos-
ing, for example, to "rewrite deconstruction" or to conceive a feminist
variation of postmodernist social theory.52
Indeed, the richness and diversity of feminist history in the United
States today offers a compelling reason for us to regard these moments of
fragmentation, destabilization, and even deconstruction as fruitful. Even
if we do not agree with post-structuralist ferninist theories or histories,
these conflicts force us to sharpen our historical vision, to rethink our own
paradigms and categories. Even if it is not yet clear where we will go from
here, we should seriously consider the implications of turning back the
clock. The liberating effects of leaving behind the unitary category woman,
of breaking apart binary oppositions like public and private and "exposing
the artifice inherent in such categories as 'nature' and gender/'53 class and
citizen, should banish all nostalgia for old times.
NOTES
I would like to thank the Stanford Humanities Center for the fellowship
support and the intellectual climate that fostered discussion of these issues and
contributed to the completion of this essay.
1 Michael Geyer, "After the Atlantic Divide Toward Postmodern Histories
of Germany in the United States and the Federal Republic," paper presented to
the conference, "German History in mterdisciplinary Perspective: Postmodern
Challenges in Theory and Methodology," University of Chicago, October 1989.
See the revised version of this essay with Konrad Jarausch, 'The Future of the
German Past Transatlantic Reflections for the 1990s," Central European History 22,
nos. 3/4 (1989): 229-259.
2 Ute Frevert, "Klasse und Geschlechtein deutscher Sonderweg?" in
Nichts ah Unterdrckung? Geschlecht und Klasse in der englischen Sozialgeschichte, ed.
Logie Barrow, Dorothea Schmidt, Jutta Schwarzkopf (Mnster: Verlag
Westflisches Dampfboot, 1991), 262. See also her essay, "Mnnergeschichte oder
die Suche nach dem 'ersten' Geschlecht," in Was ist Gesellschaftsgeschichte? Posi-
tionen, Themen, Analysen, ed., Manfred Hettling, Claudia Huerkamp, Paul Nolte
and Hans-Walter Schmuhl (Munich: Beck Verlag, 1991), 31-43. See also Eve
Rosenhaffs interesting comments on the gulf between German women's history
and social history in her essays, "Women, Gender, and the Limits of Political
History in the Age of 7MaSs' Politics," in Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change
in Modern Germany: New Perspectives, ed. Larry E. Jones and James Retallack
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 150; and "Geschichten und ihre
Geschichte: Ein Nachwort," in Nichts als Unterdrckung, 248-250.
HO Journal of Women's History Spring
3 Frevert, "Klasse und Geschlecht," 262. See also: Isabel Hull, 'Teminist
and Gender History Through the Literary Looking Glass: German Historiography
in Postmodern Times," Central European History 22, nos. 3/4 (1989): 279-300;
Rosenhaft, "Geschichten und ihre Geschichte," 248-258; Dorothe Wierling,
"Alltagsgeschichte und Geschichte der Geschlechterbeziehungen," in Alltags-
geschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen, ed. Alf
Ldtke (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1989), 169-190; and Hanna Schissler,
"Geschlechtergeschichte Herausforderung und Chance fr die Sozialgeschichte,"
in Was ist Gesellschaftsgeschichte?, 22-30.
4 Gisela Bock, "Challenging Dichotomies: Perspectives on Women's His-
tory," in Writing Women's History, ed. Karen Offen, Ruth Pierson, and Jane Rendall
(BIoomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 7-9. See the interesting discussion
of Bock's standpoint in: Hull, 'Teminist and Gender History," 297-298, and Hanna
Schissler, "Einleitung: Soziale Ungleichheit und historisches Wissen. Der Beitrag
der Geschlechtergeschichte," in Geschlechterverhltnisse im historischen Wandel, ed.
Hanna Schissler, (Frankfurt Campus Verlag, forthcoming 1993), ms. 6-8.
5 Schissler, "Einleitung," 9.
6 Bock, "Challenging Dichotomies," 8.
7 Wierling, "Alltagsgeschichte," 173; Frevert, "Klasse und Geschlecht,"
261,266-267; Schissler, "Einleitung," 9-11.
8 Frevert, "Mnnergeschichte," 34.
9 Wierling, "Alltagsgeschichte," 173.
io Schissler, Einleitung," 9; Frevert, "Mnnergeschichte," 34; and "Klasse
und Geschlecht," 266.
Hull, 'Tc^minist and Gender History," 284-285.
12 PeterSchttler, "Historians and Discourse Analysis," History Workshop27
(Spring 1989): 48-52; Hull, 'Teminist and Gender History," 284-287; Frevert,
"Klasse und Geschlecht," 266.
13 This is spelled out in greatest detail in Wierling, "Alltagsgeschichte,"
172-175. Frevert, however, comes to a similar conclusion in her "Klasse und
Geschlecht," 262,266.
14 See, for example Geoff Eley, "Is All the World a Text? From Social History
to the History of Society Two Decades Later," in The Historic Turn in the Social
Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press,
forthcoming 1993), ms. 18-19; the special issue of Central European History, nos. 3/4
(1989), "German Histories: Challenges in Theory, Practice, Technique"; and Bryan
Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Raflcation of Language and the Writing of Social
History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), especially 172-183.
15 The term "double vision" is from Joan Kelly's important essay, "The
Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory," Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 51-64, which was first published in
Feminist Studies 5 (Spring 1979): 216-227. See also Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan,
and Judith R. Walkowitz, eds., Sex and Class in Women's History, (London: Kegan
Paul; Boston: Routledge, 1983), esp. "Editors' Introduction," 1-15.
16 Joan Kelly, "The Social Relations of the Sexes," refers to the social con-
struction of these divisions in Women, History, and Theory, 6. Judith Newton refers
to the "self-conscious study of gender" in the "Editors' Introduction" to Sex and
Class, 4. See also Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Tolitical
Economy' of Sex," in: Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New
York Monthly Review, 1975): 157-210.
17 Donna Haraway, " 'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics
of a Word," in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York Routledge, 1991), 143. Haraway refers here to the work of
Evelyn Fox Keller, in particular her Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985).
m Hull, 'Terninist and Gender History," 282-283.
19 Susan Bordo, 'Teminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism," in
Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York Routledge, 1990), 135.
On the fracturing of the category, "woman," see also Denise Riley, Am I That Name?
Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History Ovlinneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1988).
20 Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," 173. Some of the most provocative
readings on gender, race, and the category woman include Gloria Anzaldua,
Borderlands/La Frontrera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); Hazel Carby,
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
(New York Oxford University Press, 1987); Patricia HUl Collins, "The Social
Construction of Black Ferninist Thought," Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 745-773; Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalan-
guage of Race," Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251-274; BeU Hooks, Ain't I a Woman? Black
Women and Feminism (Boston: South End, 1981) and Yearning: Race, Gender, and
Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, 1990); Aida Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege:
Seduction and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of
Color," Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 833-855; Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes
Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (BIoomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991); Hortense Spillers, Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and
Literary Tradition 031oomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and Trinh T.
Minh-ha, "Not you/like you: post-colonial women and the interlocking questions
of identity and difference," Inscriptions 3/4 (1988): 71-76.
21 See also Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in
Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988). Donna J. Haraway notes that, "White
women, including socialist feminists discovered (that is, were forced kicking and
screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category 'woman.' " See her "A
Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Sodalist-Feminism in the Late Twen-
tieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 157. (This essay was first published
in 1985 in Socialist Review 80: 65-108.) On race in German women's history and
gender history, see the interesting collection, May Opitz, Katharina Oguntryut and
Dagmar Schultz, eds., Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out
(Amherst University of Massachusetts Press, 1991) with forward by Audre Lorde
22 Joan Scott, "Gender A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American
Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-1075; published also in Joan Scott,
Gender and the Politics of History (New York Columbia University Press, 1988),
28-50.1 should point out that Scott's essays also placed gender at the heart of the
ongoing discussions in history about post-structuralist theories (mainly those of
Michel Foucault).
23 Scott, "Introduction," in Gender and the Politics of History, 3-4.
24 See Claudia Koonz's critical review of Gender and the Politics of History,
Women's Review ofBooL 6, no. 4 0anuary 1989): 19-20; Jane Caplan's more mea-
sured and favorable review, "Gender is Everywhere," The Nation, (Jan 9-16,1989):
62-65; Bryan Palmer's chapter on gender, especially the section, 'The Scott Files,"
in Descent into Discourse, 172-183; the somewhat acrimonious debate between Scott
and Linda Gordon in Signs 15 (Summer 1990): 848-860; and Catherine Hall's
review of Gender and the Politics of History, "Politics, Post-Structuralism and
Feminist History," in: Gender and History 3, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 204-210.
25 On the "new master narrative," see Fernando CoronU's final comments
to the conference, "The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences," held by the Program
in the Comparative Study of Social Transformation at the University of Michigan
in October 1990, in The Historic Turn in theHuman Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald
(Ann Arbon University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 1993). On sorting out the
terms postmodernism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, see Jane Caplan,
'Tostmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction: Notes for Historians,"
Central European History 22, nos. 3/4 (1989): 260-278. On the uneasy relationship
between feminism and postmodernism, see HuU, 'Teminist and Gender History,"
288; and Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson, "Social Criticism without PhUoso-
phy. An Encounter between Fc^minism and Postmodernism," in Feminism/Post-
modernism, 19-38.
26 See Bordo, "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism," 135-
136 and Mary Poovey, 'Teminism and Deconstruction," Feminist Studies, 14, no. 1
(Spring 1988): 51-65.
27 HuU, 'Teminist and Gender History," 288-289.
28 Nancy Hartsock, 'Toucault on Power A Theory for Women?," in Nich-
olson, Feminism/Postmodernism, 163.
29 Joan Scott, "Work Identities for Men and Women: The Pontics of Work
and FamUy in the Parisian Garment Trades in 1848," and " T'ouvrire! Mot impie,
sordide...': Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840-
1860," in Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 93-112,139-163.
30 Scott, "L'ouvrire"
31 Joan Scott, "The Evidence of Exprience," Critical Inquiry 17, no. 3 (Sum-
mer 1991): 777.
*Ibid.,77S.
33 See Wierling, "AUtagsgeschichte" on the relationship between women's
history/ gender history and the history of everyday Ufe, 171-173. Wierling defines
Alltag as the "realm in which people can, through their own actions, have a direct
influence on their situation."
34 See Caplan, 'Tostmodernism, PoststructuraUsm, and Deconstruction,"
274. See also the interesting volume Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of
Representation: Nazism and the 'Final Solution' (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1992).
35 Atina Grossmann, 'Teminist Debates about Women and National Social-
ism," Gender and History 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 350.
36 Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi
Politics (New York St Martin's, 1987), 1,5.
37 Grossmann, 'Teminist Debates," 351.
38 Gisela Bock, review of Mothers in the Fatherland, Bulletin of the German
Historical Institute London (February 1989): 22. This debate has continued into 1992;
see Gisela Bock, "Ein Historikerinnenstreit?" and Claudia Koonz's reply:
"Erwiderung auf Gisela Bocks Rezension von "Mothers in the Fatherland,"
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18 (1992): 394-404.
39 This is Atina Grossmann's translation of the conference and volume title.
Grossmann, 'Teminist Debates," 351. She points out that the title could also be
read as "Daughters' Questions." Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat,
eds., Tochterfragen, NS-Frauen-Geschichte (Freiburg LB.: Kre Verlag, 1990).
40 Lerke Gravenhorst, "Nehmen wir Nationalsozialismus und Auschwitz
ausreichend als unser negatives Eigentum in Anspruch? Zu Problemen im
feminisn^ch-sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskurs in der Bundesrepublik Deutsch-
land," in Tochter-Fragen, 37; and Karin Windaus-Walser, "Frauen im
Nationalsozialismus, Eine Herausforderung fr feministische Theoriebdung," in
Tochter-Fragen, 67.
41 Gravenhorst, "Nationalsozialmus und Auschwitz," 21-28,36-37.
42 Windaus-Walser, 'Trauen im Nationalsozialismus," 69-70.
43 Dagmar Reese and Carola Sachse, "Frauenforschung und
Nationalsozialismus: Eine Bilanz," in Tchter-Fragen, 105.
44 Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," p. 793. Here Scott cites Parveen
Adams's and Jeff Minson's discussion of agency and subjectivity: "The 'Subjecf
of Feminism," Parveen Adams and Elisabeth Cowie, eds., The Woman in Question
(Boston, Press, 1990), 91.
45 Kathleen Canning, "Gender and the PoUtics of Class Formation: Rethink-
ing German Labor History," American Historical Review 97 (June 1992): 767.
46 Wierling, "AUtagsgeschichte," 177.
47 Louise TiUy, "Gender, Women's History, and Social History," Social Sci-
ence History 13 (Winter 1989): 452.
48 Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," 779.
49 This is Sherry Ortner's term. See her forthcoming article, "Who Shapes
the Text? Sherpas and Sahibs on Mt Everest," in McDonald, The Historic Tum, ms.
3.
50 Judith Lowder Newton, "History as Usual? Feminism and the 'New
Historicism/ " in 77ie Neu; Historicism ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York Routledge,
1989), 165. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine HaU, Family Fortunes: Men and
Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987); Judith WaUcowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992); Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in
Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). The pubUca-
tion of Family Fortunes generated interesting and fruitful discussions of feminist
historical methodologies. See Judith Newton's review, "Family Fortunes: Tvfew
History' and 'New Historicism,' " and the roundtable discussion with Judith
WaUcowitz, Myra Jehlen, and BeU Chevigny, "Patrolling the Borders: Feminist
Historiography and the New Historicism," both in Radical History Review 43
(January 1989): 5-43.
51 WaUcowitz in 'Tatrolling the Borders," 24. See also her recent dry of
Dreadful Delight and Newton, "History as Usual?," 165.
52 Poovey, "Feminism and Deconstruction," 51; Nicholson and Fraser,
"Social Criticism without PhUosophy;" Weedon, Feminist Practice and Post-
structuralist Theory (Oxford and New York BasU BlackweU, 1987); and Jana
Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body QMew York Routledge,
1991).
53 Poovey, 'Teminism and Deconstruction," 58.
Comment
Anna Clark
One of the questions this panel has been asked to address is whether
the postmodern or post-structuralist turn to gender and language
away from our more traditional focus on women's lives has distracted from
the central question of feminist history, in Judith Bennett's words: "Why
and how has the subordination of women endured for so long?"
Postmodernists hold that meaning is determined through binary dif-
ferences and gender is a prime example of this phenomenon. Masculinity
and femininity are not fixed essences, but empty categories determined in
opposition to each other. The meaning of masoilinity, for instance, is
constructed by what it is not: the Other, femininity. Furthermore, these
binary diffrences are very unstable; their meanings are constantly shifting.
In fact, postmodernists "deconstrucf ' any fixed meaning or essence.1
For those of us concerned with gender and class, however, the problem
remains of how to link the elegant postmodernist play with language to
the grubby historical questions of power. Postmodernists influenced by
Foucault have an answer here, too: they reject notions of overarching
systems of power, such as class or patriarchy, and instead assert that power
is exercised through dispersed networks and nodes, in which subjects are
constructed through discourses.2 The passive voice here is deliberate; they
rarely answer the question of who exercises this power. Postmodernists
have done us a service in moving us away from a rigid Marxist determin-
ism or a bleak vision of unchanging patriarchy, but I'm not ready to
abandon the big questions of how gender structures class. Relations of
power were always shifting, but they shifted because real political actors,
including women, negotiated and contested them. Today my remarks will
focus on these issues in the context of my work on gender and the making
of the British working class.3
The notion of gender as defined by binary opposites is a historical
construction, of course, rather than a fact of human nature or culture.
Before the Victorian era, masculinity and fernininiry were thought of less
as binary opposites than as a fragile hierarchy, which also served as a
metaphor for other political relationships.4 Political caricatures and songs
used the image of a woman wearing the breeches to undermine the
patriarchal authority or the political potency of her husband.5 The
breeches, of course, resembled the phaUus as a symbol of male power, but
unlike the phallus they were easily removable and worn by a woman.6 This
"struggle for the breeches" can also be understood as a symbolic represen-
1993 Journal of Women? History, Vol. 5 No. !(Spring)_________________
tation of a material conflict between women's economic contribution and
a patriarchal ideology that mandated their submission.7
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Davidoff
and Hall have delineated, the middle class developed a new, contrasting
ideology of separate spheres, in which men were to be rational and self-
controlled in the public sphere of work and politics, while women were to
be passive and nurturing in the private sphere of the home.8
Here I would like to demonstrate how a gender analysis can both
address different forms of male power9 and incorporate sexual orientation
as a historical dynamic, an issue which Bennett rightly fears is often
ignored. Including sexual orientation means not just adding lesbians and
gay men to history, but also challenging the assumptions of heterosexual-
ity. As Judith Butler writes, "heterosexuality is always in the process of
imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself
and failing."10 For instance, the new middle-class notion of self-controlled
masculinity was not suddenly accepted in 1800instead, for a long time
it competed with an older aristocratic and plebeian manhood of physical
prowess and pleasure-seeking.11 The discovery of an effeminate sodomit-
ical subculture in early nineteenth century London exposed anxieties about
changing definitions of manhood: Was the bachelor journeyman really so
manly if he didn't have a wife? Was the pleasure-seeking aristocrat engag-
ing in the suspect effeminacy of corruption? Or, was the middle-class man's
prim virtue a cover for womanly emotion?12
Moreover, during the early nineteenth century, the idea of separate
spheres was not a universal notion of gender but was based on class
privilege. Only middle-class men could afford to keep their wives at home.
Furthermore, middle-class men justified their claim to political power on
a Lockean basis of their status as individual property owners and heads of
household whose pure, sheltered wives proved their public, manly vir-
tue.13 This notion of citizenship was enshrined in the 1832 Reform Act,
which gave middle-class men the vote, but excluded the working class.
This era therefore also saw the "making" of the working class, in E.P.
Thompson's terms.14 Feminist historians have challenged Thompson's
heroic narrative to point out that the working class was made in a mascu-
line form.15 Joan Scott argues that working-class radicals defined citizen-
ship in particularly masculine terms; for her, it doesn't matter that real
women participated in the Chartist movement for the working-class vote
in the 1830s and 1840s, for when they did, they accepted this masculine
definition.16 However, I would suggest that while there is no doubt radicis
eventually defined the working class as masculine, this was not a given,
but was the outcome of struggles and negotiations between working-class
men and women and between working-class men and the state. For this
1993 DIALOGUE: ANNA CLARK 117
reason, I prefer to use the term rhetoric rather than discourse when discuss-
ing the radical language of class. Discourse evokes the image of profession-
als scientifically constructing the identity of passive subjects, while rhetoric
implies a poHtical dialogue that intends to persuade its audience and
pressure its opponents.17 And women were part of the audience who
needed to be persuaded.
Radicals used rhetoric to develop new meanings for community,
citizenship, and manhood and womanhood. Chartists began to organize
the working class on an inclusive community basis, rather than the artisan
tradition of organizing just skilled men in the workplace. In response,
Chartist women organized alongside men. Chartist rhetoric began to
define citizenship as an inherent human right to political representation,
rather than a privilege o- property. Again, some women pointed out that
therefore they also deserved the franchise. Chartists also needed to move
away from the old notion of gender as a struggle for the breeches to more
harmonious notions of relations between the sexes which would enable
working-class men and women to unite. So they developed a rhetoric of
domesticity, promising sober, responsible husbands to women and a
breadwinner wage to men.18
But Chartist political rhetoric also had to contend with its other
tasknot only unifying its supporters but pressuring its opponents in
Parliament. And they had to overcome the fact that the working class had
been negatively defined by gendered notions of virtue, such as separate
spheres, Malthusianism, and political economy, which demarcated the
working class as different and inferior to the middle class. Working-class
men were depicted as drunken louts unwilling to support their families
and therefore undeserving of political and familial rights. These discourses
took a material form in working-class exclusion from the privileges of
participation in the state, the imposition of the New Poor Law, and the
failure of factory reform.
In response, Chartists challenged the notion that the public manhood
of participation in politics and the private womanhood of domestic virtue
were middle-class privileges. They demanded that these class-based notions
of gender become universally available. However, in exploiting the issue
of domesticity, Chartists allowed their notion of citizenship to mutate.
Moving away from a Painite concept of inherent human rights, they argued
that working men needed the vote to protect women and cltildren from the
contaminating effects of factories and mines. Parliament conceded the
principle of domesticity for women and children, legislatively limiting
their work in factories and mines in the 1840s, but it refused to give working
men the vote and therefore refused to admit them to the public sphere.
Ultimately, this gendered struggle produced a conservative, mascu-
line version of the working class. Joan Scott ascribes this to a working-class
adoption of Enlightenment correlations between masculine/feminine,
public/private, rational/expressive, individual/community. However, I
would tike to take Scoffs postmodernism to its logical extreme and under-
cut the stability of these binary oppositions. There was no fixed correlation
between rnascxme/feminine, public/private, and individual/commu-
nity. The Chartists could have defined citizenship in gender neutral terms
but chose to restrict its meaning to masculine forms, both in order to
manipulate middle-class opinion but also because they refused to relin-
quish an older misogynist artisanal form of male power. These gendered
dichotomies were therefore historically constructed, yet repeatedly con-
tested, on the basis of class and gender. We may no longer consider class
and gender as tightly constructed systems, but they still resonate as fun-
damental dynamics of power. I suggest we borrow postmodernism's insis-
tence on the always unstable character of gender relations, yet refuse its
apolitical notion of dispersed power. By iUurninating different forms of
male power, we can thus come closer to, rather than evading, the funda-
mental question as to why women's subordination has lasted so long.
NOTES
1 For an excellent introduction, see Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Post-
modernism (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). For the best-known historical
introduction to these ideas as related to gender, see Joan Scott, "Gender a Useful
Category of Historical Analysis," in Gender and the Politics of History (New York
Columbia University Press, 1988).
2 Nancy Hartsock, 'Toucault on Power: a Theory for Women?" in Nichol-
son, Feminism/Postmodernism, 169.
3 This wiU be a forthcoming book entitled "The Struggle for the Breeches:
Gender and the Making of the British Working Class."
4 Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasms, Generation and the Pontics of Reproductive
Biology," Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 2; and Genevieve Lloyd, "Reason,
Gender and MoraUty in the History of Philosophy," Social Research 50 (Autumn
1983): 509.
5 Anna Clark, "Queen Caroline and the Sexual PoUtics of Popular Culture
in London, 1820," Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 47-68.
6 See Laure Beaumont-MaiUet, La guerre des sexes XVe-XTVe sicles (Paris:
Albin Michel, 1984), 14, for fifteenth- to nineteenth-century versions of caricatures
of the struggle for the breeches and other examples of the "sex wars." Thanks to
Sarah Hartley for this reference.
7 "Rough music," or nocturnal community humiliations, could be another
way of expressing this conflict See David Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold:
1993 DIALOGUE: ANNA CLARK 119
The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modem England," in Order and
Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Hetcher and John Stevenson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
8 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine HaU, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of
the English Middle Class (London: Hutchinson, 1987). Despite the apparent
"naturalness" of separate spheres, there were hidden contradictions and tensions
within this system, as Davidoff and HaU have pointed out Mary Pooovey, Uneven
Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), 4.
9 Jane Flax, "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Ferninist Theory," in
Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism, 54.
10 Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/Out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York Routledge, 1991), 21.
11 Davidoff and HaU, Family Fortunes, 110, for aristocratic manhood.
12 For this subculture, see Randolph Trumbach, "London's Sodomites:
Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of
Social History 11 (FaU 1977): 9-11; Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homopho-
bia in Nineteenth-century Engfond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
163-169; Anna Clark "Womanhood and Manhood in the Transition from Plebeian
to Working-class Culture, London, 1780-1845," (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University,
1987), 186-196.
t3 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine HaU, Family Fortunes, 449.
14 E. P. Thompson, 77ie Making of the British Working Class (New York-
Vintage, 1963), 11.
15 SaUy Alexander, "Women, Class and Sexual Difference in the 1830s and
1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History," History WorMiop
Journal 17 (Spring 1984): 125-149; Joan Scott, "On Language, Gender and Working-
Class History," in Gender and the Politics of History (New York Columbia University
Press, 1988), 53; Ruth L. Smith and Deborah M. Valenze, "Mutuality and Margin-
aUty: Liberal Moral Theory and Working-Class Women in Nineteenth Century
England," Signs 13, no. 2 (1988): 288. My analysis owes a great deal to SaUy
Alexander for her recognition of sexual antagonism in the working class.
16 Scott, On Language, 65.
17 For rhetoric, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 206; MikhaU Bakhtin, The Dialogic
Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342,
353; V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav
Matejka and I. R. rauruk, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986) is thought to be in part by Bakhtin and
presents a more social interpretation of language in context. Also John D. Schaeffer,
"The Use and Misuse of Giambattista Vico: Rhetoric, Orality, and Theories of
Discourse," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London:
Routledge, 1989), 97; and Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice
HaU, 1950), 43,45,86.
18 For a further elucidation of this argument, see Anna Clark, "The Rhetoric
of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s,"
Journal of British Studies 31 (January 1992): 62-88.
Comment
Mariana Valverde
I have some prepared remarks on the issue of whether gender history is
more or less politically trenchant, as a banner for ferninist historians,
than women's history. But before offering these, I feel obliged to quickly
respond to some of the comments made by other panelists on the vexing
question of discourse analysis. For the sake of convenience I will confine
myself here to differentiating my methodological position from that of Joan
Scott, whose name has dominated many of these discussions in the United
States, and to a lesser extent in English Canada.
As a feminist historian sometimes engaging in discourse analysis and
poststructuralist social theory, I am not aware that Joan Scott has been
elected to represent us; I am not even aware that there is anything like an
us, as against the empiricist them. My view is that Scott vastly overrates
what philosophers such as Derrida can offer history, and that both support-
ers and detractors of Scotf s work overrate her role in the debate. Skeptical
social historians would do far better to read the work of careful cultural
historians such as Mary Poovey or Patrick Brantlinger rather than listen to
the exaggerations of recent converts. Scott presents an impoverished view
of the possibilities of "philosophical" history, often using only one tech-
nique in her recent "culturalisf ' workDerridean deconstruction. Useful
as this souped-up Hegelian trick is, there are a wealth of other techniques
devised by narratology, philosophy, and literary studies, and many of the
techniques neglected by Scott are, in my view, extremely useful in the
interpretation of historical systems of signs.1
In any case, poststructuralism is useful to social history not only
because of its theorization of sign systems as ongoing struggles over and
through meaning, but also because of its theorization of social subjectivity.
Taking from structuralism the fundamental insight that subjectivity is
constituted rather than originary, more recent theorists have argued that
neither discourses nor subjectivities are monolithic (as was thought in the
days of high structuralism). Discourses produce a plurality of subject
positions in tension with one another. Subjectivity is thereby fragmented
and, most importantly for those interested in agency, it fragments mean-
ings and discourses; the constant work of reproducing the discursive
structures subjectively often subverts and fractures those very structures.
This I find quite relevant to the theorization of gender: gender power
and gender meanings constitute each of us as men and women, but they
never do so finally or completely. Not finally because even in times of
relative gender peace there are alternative meanings of masoilinity and
1993 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 5 No. (Spring)_________________
femininity available in the nooks and crannies of dominant cultures, and
not completely because, as Third World feminists are tired of repeating,
nobody is just a man or a woman.
It may now appear that after having waved the flag of poststructural-
ism (somewhat ambiguously given my quick disassodation from Joan
Scott) I am about to wave another perhaps fashionable flag, that of gender
studies. As is the case with poststructuralism, however, there are many
different positions, theoretical and political, all staking their claim on the
new terrain: gender studies is not a single thing with a single meaning.
Depending on the context, gender studies can be a liberal humanist appro-
priationa cooptationof ferninist radicalism. Some people (mostly men,
but some women too) prefer "gender" because it can include men and is
thus more polite than other ferninist terms. Used in this way the term can
shift attention away from male power and male privilege. The liberal usage
of gender studies reduces contradiction and oppression to mere difference,
acting in a way similar to the way in which race relations depoliticizes and
coopts antiracist work.
But gender history can be deployed so as to constitute a more radically
critical enterprise than women's historywith the term critical used here
in the strict philosophical sense, not in the popular sense of criticism. It was
Kant who first theorized critique as the investigation into the conditions
for the possibility of something (knowledge, in his case). This critical
method has been taken up by Foucault: Madness and Civilization is a book
not on the history of mad people but is rather an mquiry into the conditions,
social and intellectual, of the emergence of the very category of madness.
Before mad people can be treated badly, or well for that matter, there has
to be a process of category constructionmadness has to be recognized as
a social fact.
This neo-Kantian method has been applied by Denise Riley to the
category of woman, in her much misunderstood study of how and when
the category appears in history.2 As Riley shows, women's history tends to
presuppose the existence of the social object, women, whose history can
then be documented. Just as the history of psychiatry takes madness and
reason for granted, so women's history takes its own object, women, for
granted, even if it is very criticalin the sense of disapprovingof the way
in which women have been positioned. The history of asylums also often
criticizes the authorities managing mad people, without thereby becoming
truly critical.
Having said that, it needs to be added that the documentation of the
status of women and the experiences of women is by no means superseded.
It is still necessary. But as we continue doing women's history it is, I think,
advisable to remember the need for a philosophical critique of the forma-
1993 Dialogue: Mariana Valverde 123
tion of the categories whose history we study qua historians. There is a
need for what I would call "a historical critique of gender formation." Let
me explain this phrase word by word.
1) historical: by this I mean not merely a theoretical or philosophical
critique, but one studying the material as well as the intellectual
preconditions for the existence of certain social categories;
2) critique: I want to reclaim the Kantian meaning of term, as outlined
above;
3) o- gender rather than women: because the term gender allows us to study
structures as well as individual experience, and hence points to the
structuralist dimension retained in poststrucruralist critique; and
4) gender formation rather than gender structure: because the concept of
structure is too static and too divorced from historical agency. Just as
poststrucruralist historians talk about class formation rather than class
structure, which gives class a more dynamic conceptualization, so too
I prefer naming our project as the critical study of gender formation.
We want to analyze how the two genders are formed and reformed,
renegotiated, contested.
But having named what I think is the object of study in the more
philosophical dimension of our historical work, how is this done? Difficul-
ties arise immediately because gender formation, though analytically dis-
tinct from other processes such as class and racial formation, is only
analytically distinct, not ontologically separate. Inddentally, many of our
incondusive discussions about whether race is more important than gen-
der would never happen if we remembered that race and gender are
analytical, not ontological, categories. The boundaries of gender formation
are constantly being drawn and redrawn and shifted by the very processes
that regulate masculinity and fernininity.
This means that historical analysis cannot assume a priori knowledge
of what is and is not a gender issue. Sodal regulation does not proceed
along already formed natural channelsrace, class, gender, nationality,
sexual identity, and so on. Rather, the terrain of the social is constantly
being mapped in conflicting ways at the same time that the identities
produced by the mapping are regulated. An issue regulated via racial
categories can shift and be later regulated through gender categories, and
vice versa, without losing its original meaning or emotional impact. Incest,
for example, was considered in the 1890s a class issue, an issue of urban
slum overcrowding; now it is considered a gender issue, and yet it has not
totally lost its link to sodal reformers' views of the vices of the poor.
Similarly, lynching was a race issue for some and a gender issue for others;
the two dimensions of the problem were never as separate as certain groups
claimed when they tried to define and take possession of the issue.
That is the current focus of my work, theoretically speakingwhat I
call fractures in social regulation. The process I am fascinated by is the
shifting of social problems from one category to another, a shift which often
conceals the previous or alternative meanings of "the issue", but never
wholly successfully. The different currents of power and meaning flowing
across social signifiers should not be regarded as mere layers whose
cumulative impact is obtained by addition, but rather as processes inter-
acting in unpredictable ways (possibly best approximated by Freud's
analysis of primary processes).
Let me give an example from my current work, an artide entitled
"Representing Childhood: The Multiple Fathers Of The Dionne
Quintuplets" .3 These five baby girls, taken over by the Ontario government
soon after their birth in 1934, were not, it turns out, regulated as children:
the then embryonic but nevertheless powerful child welfare apparatus was
not used even once. Rather, the children were regulated as a natural
resource or tourist attraction, as the government-father displayed them tike
zoo animals and even got a special trademark law copyrighting the noun
quintuplets. These girls were socially construded not as neglected children
but as that typically Canadian economic entity, the crown corporation,
administered by a Board of Guardians that was in practice nothing but a
board of directors. Therefore the quintuplets were, for the paternal state,
not children to be regulated through family policy, but rather an economic
entity. The public debate was about the merits of privatization versus
nationalization of this resource. Not all human beings under twelve are
necessarily governed as children, it would seem. We cannot assume from
the start that a government takeover of children is part of that
governmenf s family policy. The boundaries between economic policy and
sodal/family policy, so dear in the apparently fixed division of responsi-
bilities among ministries, turn out to be extremely fluid in governmental
practice.
While the women's history aspect of our work documents the changes
in the situation of those individuals and groups regulated via categories of
gender, the critical philosophical dimension of our work looks at the prior
process by which the social terrain was mapped, the process by which the
boundaries defining children, women, or even gender, are drawn and
redrawn.
Ferninist history needs both dimensions. Women's history is not self-
suffident, because it can fall into the trap of presupposing the object of its
mquiry; but the critique of the constitution of gender at the level of
discourse is not sufficient either, since philosophy's general statements can
be methodologically useful but do not, at this late point in the history of
western philosophy, provide any ontological certainties that are true
1993 Dialogue: Mariana Valverde 125
underneath or beside history. Contemporary philosophers recognize that,
if "there is nothing outside the texf', there is also nothing outside history.
A post-ontological philosophy and a critical history can thus, in my opin-
ion, work together fruitfully for feminist purposes in the study of how
particular categories of sodal regulation are formed, stretched, and
reformed.
Notes
1 For a more extended discussion, see Mariana Valverde, "As If Subjects
Existed: Analyzing Sodal Discourses", Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropol-
ogy 28 (May 1991 ): 173-187.1 have given a more positive evaluation of Scotf s work
in my review essay 'Toststructuralist Gender Historians: Are We Those Names?"
Labour/ Ie travail 25 (Spring 1990): 227-236.
2 Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of "Woman" in
History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
3 Mariana Valverde, "Representing Childhood: The Multiple Fathers of the
Dionne Quintuplets" in Carol Smart, ed., Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays
on Motherhood and Sexuality (London, Routledge, 1992).
Comment
Marda R. Sawyer
Is there a way to revamp feminist theory so that it can be used to persuade
white women in Louisiana not to vote for David Dukes? Are there any
self-consdous white women who can help other white women with their
own radal biases?
I was asked to address the growing estrangement between women of
color and white women in the women's movement, especially in academia.
It has seemed to me for some time now that women of color who are
concerned with feminist issues have had less and less to say to white
women, and I have a few ideas about why that is.1
Unfortunately, feminist theory has never had a critical edge concern-
ing the issues of white supremacy or institutional racism. And, in order for
it to become a creative part of the many possible linkages between women
of color and white women, the premises and priorities that guide feminist
theory must be checked and correrted.
The women's movement and feminist theories that guide it have had
a difficult time leaving its history regarding race behind. A highly detri-
mental direction was set in 1867 when Elizabeth Stanton and Susan
Anthony joined forces with George Train, a dearly racist Southern Demo-
crat, whose slogan was "woman first and the Negro last." They accepted
this man's help, over the advice of others in the movement, because they
were anxious for support and Train was willing to assist them. That alliance
and subsequent alliances with hundreds of radst white American women
brings us to a movement today that still reverberates with the conse-
quences of that decision.
The breadi that was created in the nineteenth century was not only a
physical and mental separation, but also a spiritual one. White academic
women are heirs to a movement that is spiritually empty; that emptiness
is now reflected in the theories created by individual white feminists. It
seems to me that the mind/body/spirit split that infects many in academia
also cripples the women's movement. It hinders coalition building among
women of different colors and nationalities; serious political issues, there-
fore, cannot be effectivdy addressed.
I have a suggestion for healing that breach.
I was fortunate enough to be supported by a Ford Foundation disser-
tation year fellowship in 1988 and during that year I attended the confer-
ence in Washington, D-C, that Ford sponsors for Chicano, Native
American, and African-American scholars. The opening address was given
by a Native American woman who was trained as a psychologist. She led
1993 Journal of Womens History, Vol s No. (Spring)_________________
1993 DIALOGUE: MARCIA R. SAWYER 127
the group of about 120 in a meditation. She asked us to dose our eyes and
to think about our family who were living or dead, old or young, who were
with us or separated from us. We refleded on those who were depending
on us, on those who helped us with our struggles on the way, on those who
had loved and supported us.
When she finished we were bonded as a group. The meditation (a
traditional one from her Native American community) had encouraged us
to move past ourselves and into an awareness of the community that we
were a part of. Further, we had moved beyond our own lives and became
aware of how much all of us had in common in surviving similar oppres-
sions. We felt linked together as a group because of that awareness.
After that opening session we all actually wanted to get to know each
other. Everyone talked about what an important spiritual experience the
opening meditation had been. With the exception of seeing my nephew,
Ayende Sawyer, born in New Orleans, that experience in Washington, D.C.
has remained the most meaningful spiritual experience of my adult life.
I think something like that needs to happen for groups of women who
want to coalesce for political reasons. Perhaps then we can deal less with
appearances and more with the substance of our Uves.
However, before that can happen, white academic women need to
become more self-aware. They must analyze the racism within the move-
ment that they inherited, or else be manipulated by it. They need to see
themselves for who they are and they need to understand in a dearer way
the damage done to women of color.
I did not look forward to this presentation. Talking and writing about
this issue is sure to give me the blues. I get the blues because talking to or
writing for groups of white academics, male and female, typically ends up
the samein insults. As soon I complete a public speech one of the bright,
progressive, academic women in the audience invariably compliments me
for being so articulate. (My, can't she talk well?) That comment is never
made to the white speakers on the panel. The assumption is that they can,
of course, talk well. I am a preacher's kid, who has always talked well.
Implied in that compliment is the assumption that I am somehow different
from those "other black people."
I read scripture at opening Mass on my campus last year and I got the
characteristic comments from white academic women. They all expressed
surprise and amazement that I did so well. To ask a minister's daughter to
read the Bible in church is like asking her to stand and walk. Further, those
comments only increased my feelings of isolation as the only black woman
faculty member on tenure track (out of a faculty of 800). That status evoked
sympathy, but mostly curiosity. I was a freak of nature. Very few were
willing to take the risks necessary to help corred the imbalances present
among the faculty.
Tragically, there is no sense that these white academic women hold
each other accountable for their insensitivity or racist behavior. In fad, it
seems to me that they let each other off the hook about these issues. Like
men who do not corred each other's sexist attitudes and conversations in
locker rooms, they get behind dosed doors, away from women of color,
and allow each other to make mistake after mistake.
A recently hired colleague made dearly racist comments during her
job interview luncheon. Predictably, they went over my white male
colleagues' heads. When I approached the senior women faculty members
of her department about my perceptions they looked sheepish and dis-
missed them. I decided to warn students of color away from her and then
sit tight until the complaints began. I knew that she would not be correded
by anyone but me, and that those conversations would not occur until after
she did damage.
Can feminist theory address any of this? Can white academic feminists
create a theory that helps them with self-recovery and self-awareness? Can
they help each other?
Can they convince other white women from different educational and
dass backgrounds that to vote for David Dukes or George Bush guarantees
their own subjugation as women and puts them at a great distance from
women of color, the same women who are necessary for effective political
coalitions?
Until a new awareness can be demonstrated, many women of color
will not trust white women (inside or outside the academy) to ad in
anybody's interest except their own. In addition, we will continue to exped
white academic feminist women to be full of insults and condescension
toward us. We also exped them to be perfectly surprised and a little angry
when somebody points out the damage and then asks them to, please, stop.
NOTE
1 My reading for this paper induded Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class
QNew York Vintage Books, 1983); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without
Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapd HiU: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991); beU hooks. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End
Press, 1984); beU hooks, Talking Back Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston:
South End Press, 1989); beU hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics
(Boston: South End Press, 1990).

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