Week 9 - Gendering History

Week 9 - Gendering History I. Overall Thoughts ● ● Everyone:something you found interesting/new in less than ten words. What previous conceptions did you have of women or gender history—were these ideas confirmed or challenged in these readings? ● How does this finding or the readings more broadly fit into the context of conceptualized “Women’s History” and relate to our course work thus far? II. Excerpts from The Feminine Mystique (1963) and The Second Sex (1949) Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. Modern Classics. London, England: Penguin Classics. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. The Second Sex. London, England: Vintage Classicss ● Take a minute to research Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir, what are their backgrounds? ● ● What are some key takeaways or observations from the excerpts of these works? What is different about each of these works? How could this work present a change in the trajectory of the literature of history thus far? ● How does each of these works add to the broader progress of women’s history? ○ “Many pioneering women’s historians had been influenced by reading Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan…” (Popkin, 148) III. Popkins Jeremy D. Popkin, “Glorious Confusion: Historiography from the 1960s to the End of the Millennium,” in From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 142-149. ● “More than a reaction to the ideas of a few writers, however, the growth of women’s history was a collective process, carried out by participants in the feminist movement that began to develop in the radical atmosphere of the 1960s. The developing interest in the study of women in the past was directly linked to a concern about the status of women in the present, including demands that women be given great access to jobs in the academy and that women students be protected from harassment and sexua exploitation from professors. The rise of women’s history thus affected not only the content of historical studies, but also the substance of historians’ careers and the nature of interactions between students and teachers.” (148) ○ What were some of the reasons, according to Popkins, for this new focus? ○ What was different about this new focus for the field of history as a whole relating to what we’ve discussed in this class thus far? ● “Adopting the term popularized by Thomas Kuhn, Gerda Lerner wrote that, “Women’s history asks for a paradigm shift.” (151) 1 ● ○ What does this mean? What is a paradigm shift? ○ What can we apply to our knowledge of historical paradigms and historical paradigm shifts? Consider the ways in which the emergence of scholarship in women’s history spurred discussion of other long ignored histories. In what ways is the decision of which histories are “important” dictated by societal shifts? ○ “Women’s historians themselves critiqued the emphasis on an unchanging model of “patriarchy” that they often found in the work of feminist theorists from other disciplines. By making it seem that the situation of women was essentially the same in all times and places, the concept of patriarchy disregarded the notion of historical change and ignored the basic insight of history, they warned.” (151) ● Why is understanding “women’s history” important in understanding the intersectionality of other histories? ○ How does methodology and/or tactics used for conducting women’s history widen the ○ horizons and broader methodology for conducting the study of history? What are some of these tactics or practices developed in the study of women’s history which apply to other sub-fields in history? ■ “Even if the expansion of women’s history into the domains of gender, masculinity, and the study of sexual minorities means that scholarship had moved a long way from the original concerns of the pioneering women’s historians of the 1970s, however, there is no doubt that the new perspectives first generated by the interest in women’s history have profoundly changed the historical profession and the content of scholarship.” (151) IV. Scott Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, 5 (Dec. 1986 1053-1075. ● 2009 Interview Clip Defining “Gender”: ● Why do definitions of “women” and “gender” matter for Scott’s argument and history more broadly? ● What definition for ‘gender’ does Jones ultimately land on? What are the implications of this definition for gender as a category of analysis throughout the remainder of this work? ○ “In its simplest recent usage, ‘gender’ is a synonym for ‘women’ … In these instances [those within the historical discipline], the use of ‘gender’ is meant to denote the scholarly seriousness of a work, for ‘gender’ has a more neutral and objective sound than does ‘women.’ … thus dissociates itself from the (supposedly strident) politics of feminism … Whereas the term ‘women’s history’ proclaims its politics by asserting (contrary to customary practice_ that women are valid historical subjects, ‘gender’ includes but does not name women and so seems 2 to pose no critical threat. This use of ‘gender’ is one facet of what might be called the quest of feminist scholarship for academic legitimacy in the 1980s.” (1056) ● What does Scott say about gender and social/cultural differences between sexes? ○ ‘Gender’ as a substitute for ‘women’ is also used to suggest that information about women is necessarily information about men, that one implies the study of the other. This usage insists that the world of women is part of the world of men, created in and by it.” (1056) ○ “Although gender in its usage asserts that relationships between the sexes are social, it says nothing about why these relationships are constructed as they are, how they work, or how they change.” (1057) ● What definition does Scott use in the second portion of this work? What are the four “aspects” Scott identifies as part of this final definition? (1067-1069) ○ “My definition of gender has two parts and several subsets. They are interrelated but must be analytically distinct. The core of the definitions rests on an integral connection between two propositions: gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships to power.” (1067) ● What does Jones say about sex and sexuality in defining gender? ○ “The use of gender emphasizes an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but is not directly determined by sex or directly determining of sexuality.” (1056-1057) ○ “For MacKinnon, sexuality thus stood outside ideology, discoverable as unmediated, experienced fact. Although sexual relations are defined in MacKinnon’s analysis as social, there is nothing except the inherent inequality of the sexual relation itself to explain why the system of power operates as it does. The source of unequal relations between the sexes is, in the end, unequal relations between the sexes.” (1058) ■ ● How does the work of Foucault impact this? What does Jones say about Marxist’s perspectives on gender? (1059-1061) ○ “Early discussion among Marxist feminists circled around the same set of problems: a rejection of the essentialism of those who would argue that the “exigencies of biological reproduction” determine the sexual division of labor under capitalism … ” (1059) ○ “If ‘gender ideology’ is sometimes said to ‘reflect’ economic and social structure, there is also a crucial recognition to understand the complex ‘link between society and enduring psychic structure.’” (1060) ■ ● How does the work of Foucault impact this? Does Scott view gender/women’s studies as well as “gender as an analytic category” as theoretical or historical or both? What are the implications of Jones’ view to her broader argument? 3 ○ “It has not been enough for historians of women to prove either that women had a history or that women participated in the major political upheavels of Western civilization … The challenge posed by these responses is, in the end, a theoretical one. It requires analysis not only of the relationship between male and female experience in the past but also of the connection between past history and current historical practice. How does gender work in human social relationships? How does gender give meaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge? The answers depend on gender as an analytic category.” (1055) ● What does Scott identity as the “feminist historians” three theoretical positions? (1057-1058) ○ What are the implications of these three theoretical positions? ■ “Feminist historians have employed a variety of approaches to the analysis of gender, but they come down to a choice between three theoretical positions. The first, an entirely feminist effort, attempts to explain the origins of the patriarchy. The second locates itself within a Marxian tradition and seeks there an accommodation with feminist critiques. The third, fundamentally divided between French poststrucutralist and Anglo-American object-relations theorists, draws on these different schools of psychoanalysis to explain the production and reproduction of the subject’s gendered identity.” (1057-1058) ● What is Scott’s “reservation” about object-relations theory? What is object relations theory? What are the limits of this theory according to Scott? (1062-1063) ○ “This interpretation [object relations theory] limits the concept of gender to family and household experience and, for the historian, leaves no way to connect the concept (or the individual) to other social systems of economy, politics or power … How can we account within this theory for persistent associations of masculinity with power …?” (1063) ● When does Scott determine gender as an analytic category emerge? What does she believe are the drawbacks of this for the historical field? Do you agree/disagree? ○ “Concern with gender as an analytic category has emerged only in the late twentieth century. It is absent from the major bodies of social theory articulated from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries … This neglect may in part explain the difficulty that contemporary feminists have had incorporating the term gender into existing bodies of theory…” (1066) ● Scott closes with a series of questions analyzing gender and its relation to state authority, social institutions, and more broadly history. What are your thoughts on these questions and the conclusion of the piece as well as more broadly how it propels the field of women/gender history? (1074-1075) ○ “What is the relationship between laws about women and the power of the state?” ○ “Why (and since when) have women been invisible as historical subjects, when we know they anticipated in the great and small events of human history?” 4 ○ “How have social institutions incorporated gender into their assumptions and organizations?” ○ Have there ever been genuinely egalitarian concepts of gender in terms of which political systems were projected, if not built?” V. Myod Michelle R. Moyd, “Visualizing Women’s War Work: Photographs and Labor in a German Colonial War Memoir,” in After the Imperialist Imagination, 91-116. ● In what ways do photographs, such as “Kuria Women on Safari,” shed further light on marginalized, under researched groups? How can these photos in turn be utilized to solidify cultural and racial stereotypes instead of prompting further analysis? ○ “But as an African American woman, I am also aware of how such images and their wide, untethered circulation detached them from the historical contexts that produced them, and erasing African women’s work from histories of colonial warfare.” (93) ● ● How does the lack of a significant number of photographs of African women in Ludwig Deppe’s book demonstrate the larger historical trend of female erasure? Why can photographs be such a powerful tool in telling a curated story about the subject? ○ “Colonial memoirs like Deppe’s exposed a wider colonial visuality that embodied classificatory practices characteristic of colonial ethnographies.” (99) ● Why, could we assume, was it important for Deppe, and colonialists as a whole, to largely exclude African women from the wartime narrative? ○ “Recent scholarship by Tina Campt invites historians to “attune our attention to the undercurrent of images.” (95) ● Moyd provides her in-depth analysis of the photograph as guided by Tina Campt’s work with “quiet photos.” What type of nuances can be revealed by “listening” to photos, according to Moyd and Campt? VI. Concluding Thoughts ● “What should be done by historians who, after all, have seen their discipline dismissed by some recent theorists as a relic of humanist thought? I do not think we should quit the archives or abandon the study of the past, but we do have to change some of the ways we have gone about working, some of th questions we have asked. We need to scrutinize our methods of analysis, clarify our operative assumptions, and explain how we think change occurs.” (Scott, 1066-1067) ○ What is the importance of understanding the field of women and gender history as a whole? ○ What does this category, when not viewed as a subset to “history” itself, offer historians? How does this relate to the historiographical analysis of the field we’ve conducted thus far this semester? ○ How can we as, “graduating undergraduate historians”, better incorporate elements of gender and women’s history into our own capstone projects to present a well-rounded history? 5