Scott, Joan Wallach.

“Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and

the Politics of History. Revised Edition. New York: Columbia University Press,
1999. Pages: 28-50.

Subject: Analyzing concepts of gender & proposing how a new understanding of gender affects
our understanding of history.

Summary & Main Arguments: Scott starts out by dispelling the notion that gender is
a natural distinction of the biological sexes. Instead, gender is a socially agreed upon system of
distinctions, a way of classifying phenomena. In other words, Scott approaches concepts such
as race, gender, and class from a social constructionist standpoint, arguing that meanings are
political: they are agreed upon, or disputed – they are made and do not occur naturally (even
though they may seem natural). More specifically, Scott is influenced by the post structuralist
school of thought, and as such conflict rests at the center of her understanding of
meanings. “This [post structuralist] approach rests on the assumption that meaning is
conveyed through implicit or explicit contrast, through internal differentiation” (7). In other
words, the meaning behind what something is, is always based on what it is not (even if this
negation is absent or invisible from the actual discourse that is producing the meaning). In this
understanding, “gender history” is not simply synonymous with “women’s history,” because
one cannot study women without studying men. “Women and men [are] defined in terms of
one another, and no understanding of either [can] be achieved by entirely separate study”
(29).

So the first of this chapter’s contributions is to historicize gender: Her approach “insists on the
need to examine gender concretely and in context and to consider it a historical phenomenon,
produced, reproduced, and transformed in different situations and over time” (6). This can be
problematic for historians (as their job is traditionally understood – or at least was at the time
Scott was writing) because doing “gender history” does not mean simply going back and
inserting women into the history books. It is stopping to completely reanalyze situations,
asking how society was organized around sexual difference and the resulting power
inequalities.

Power is central to Scott’s analysis, for she is interested in inequality, and she argues that by
studying gender relations, one can gain an understanding of (in)equality in general. For this,
she calls for us to change our understanding of power: “We need to replace the notion that
social power is unified, coherent, and centralized with something like Michel Foucault’s
concept of power as dispersed constellations of unequal relationships, discursively constituted
in social “fields of force.” So, power is not something that exists outside the social
organization and is then wielded by persons. Instead, the power lies in (and through the
existence of) unequal relationships and organizations. These inequalities are created by
knowledge (understandings of the world).

Scott’s definition of gender is multifaceted and is broken down as such:

1. Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived

differences between the sexes. This involves four interrelated elements:
 2. Culturally available symbols that evoke multiple (and often contradictory)
representations (Eve and Mary as symbols of woman for example)

3. Normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meanings of the symbols, that
attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric possibilities. These concepts are
expressed in religious, educational, scientific, legal, and political doctrines and typically
the the form of a fixed binary opposition, categorically and unequivocally asserting the
meaning of male and female, masculine and feminine.

4. Gender is not restricted to just the household, kinship systems, or a “separate,

private” sphere. Gender organizations affect kinship, labor markets, education, and
the polity. Gender is constructed through kinship, but not exclusively; it is constructed
as well in the economy and the polity, which in our society at least, now operate
largely independently of kinship.

5. Identity is subjective. Gendered identities are substantively constructed and relate

their findings to a range of activities, social organizations, and historically specific
cultural representations.

2. Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. In other words, gender is a

primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated.

1. Concepts of power, though they may build on gender, are not always literally about
gender itself.

2. Established as an objective set of references, concepts of gender structure perception

and the concrete and symbolic organization of all social life. To the extent that these
references establish distributions of power (differential control over or access to
material and symbolic resources), gender becomes implicated in the conception and
construction of power itself. In this sense, gender has a legitimizing function for
society’s structure and for power.

3. An example of this: Emergent rulers (in a variety of places) have legitimized

domination, strength, central authority, and ruling power as masculine (enemies,
outsiders, subversives, weakness as feminine) and made that code literal in laws
(forbidding women’s political participation, outlawing abortion, prohibiting wage-
earning by mothers, imposing female dress codes) that put women in their place.

But, Scott’s understanding of gender also affects the discipline of history altogether. Her
theory revolves around knowledge and meanings and truths that are made, not
discovered. Knowledge, then, “is a way of ordering the world; as such it is not prior to social
organization, it is inseparable from social organization.” In other words, knowledge
is how social organization functions, and indeed, creates the organization of society (as society
in turn creates knowledge). That is why the discipline of history “produces (rather than gathers
or reflects) knowledge about the past generally” (9). “Feminist history then becomes not just
an attempt to correct or supplement an incomplete record of the past but a way of critically
understanding how history operates as a site of the production of gender knowledge,” and
knowledge in general (10). Moreover, she states that after historians acknowledge the
multivalent & constructed nature of society and knowledge, they will be forced to abandon
single-cause explanations for historical change. “We have to conceive of processes so
interconnected that they cannot be disentangled” (42). The result would be histories that are
“messier,” and perhaps “less grand” in that they do not offer a narrative that ties everything
together as “the story” moves forward in time. Too often people (including scholars) do not
understand how the mechanics of power & knowledge work, so they misunderstand the
products. For example, the “normative concepts” that interpret and set the boundaries for the
cultural symbols, and thus create meaning (see point 1c above): these doctrines that often
come in the form of fixed binaries, depend on the refusal or repression of alternative
possibilities, resulting in conflict over meaning. “The position that emerges as dominant is
stated as the only possible one. Subsequent history is written as if these normative positions
were the product of social consensus rather than conflict” (43). It is then the job of historians
to dispel this notion of coherence and reveal the conflict that created this particular meaning
or understanding. Or, as she puts it more elegantly, “The point of new historical
investigation,” Scott writes,” is to disrupt the notion of fixity, to discover the nature of the
debate or repression that leads to the appearance of timeless permanence” (43). In this view,
attention should not be given solely to people’s actions, but instead to the meaning that
people (and their actions) acquire through social interaction.