gender history

gender definition

Socially constructed ideas of what it is to be a man or woman, our understanding of theorised male or female identities, are products of culture and socialisation.

Since is a social construct, differs between various cultures and periods of time, liable to change. Since liable to change, study of gender is rich with content.

Studying gender allows us to see history through a different perspective.

joan scott 1986 definition of gender

Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes’. (Joan Wallach Scott, 1986)

'Gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power’.

gender history meaning

study of gender, relations between the sexes, seeing history through the perspective of gender and how gender influenced power structures, social behaviours.
Deconstructs the idea of 'woman' and 'man', opens debate to include other aspects of human experience and identity.

womens history

study of women's role in and contributions to history.

womens history 1960s and 1970s boom

Boom because of educational expansion with more women in higher education, rise of social history as a sub-field which created space for women's history, second wave feminism post-1968

• Rise in feminism due to discontent with limitations on women's opportunities.

• Sexism inhibited rise of women's history as an academic discipline. Created frustration among women in being silenced and side-lined, caused a push back from women in the form of writing.

• Eg History Workshop event in 1969 when Sheila Rowbotham suggested need for womens history and some of the men present laughed.

womens history 70s and 80s change

From the 70s and 80s womens history focused on inserting women into existing histories eg Becoming Visible published in 1977.
Preface asked questions about why are women treated differently from men, why should that inequality continue and answers by saying part of solution is an understanding of history (Becoming Visible, 1977).
Issues:

• Feminist discontent with empirical and descriptive nature of women's history so far. Eg Joan Wallach Scott.

• Womens history dismissed as narrow, over-specialised and immaterial to truly important matter of history ie politics, war etc

issue with gender history replacing womens history

Gender history looked at men and masculinity as part of a gender history that did not focus solely on women, shifting away from womens history.

• To replace “women's history” with “gender history” and to include men and masculinity seemed to some at the time like a conservative retrenchment, a quest for respectability, or an abandonment of the study of marginalized and oppressed groups. (Meyerowitz, 2008)

• The history of gender could inhabit more of the historical turf than could the history of women. (Meyerowitz, 2008)

• Scott promised to reinvigorate feminist history by expanding its realm of influence, helped historians of women to approve (and other historians to discern) an emerging shift in historiography.

joan scott main args

Concerned womens history remained 'marginal', argued it was not enough to make women visible but that usable theoretical formulations were needed. So wanted to offer a ‘useable theoretical formulation’ of gender as a category of historical analysis.

• One of her main args is that 'gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes and ender as a primary way of signifying relationships power'.

• Goal is for us to write histories which are no longer 'about the things that have happened to women and men...instead it is about how the subjective and collective meanings of women and men as categories of identity have been constructed'.

main issue with scott

Non-western historians argue that not all societies have been organised on basis of gender. Category 'gender' as understood by western feminist historians on the basis of their own local histories cannot claim universal relevance.

oyewumi issue with scott 1997

Oyewumi argues western valorisation of the body is not universal and concludes ‘it is logical to assume that in some societies, gender construction need not have existed at all’ (1997). Other systems of distinction separate to male/female were important, Oyewumi says primary principle of social classification in Turabian social discourse was seniority ie age.

• Did not mean Yoruba speakers were unaware of differences between male and female bodies or their culture did not embrace certain gendered tropes, but perceptions and representations of sexual oppositions were not a primary field for the articulation of that particular power.

laura lee downs issue with scott 1993

Laura Lee Downs arguing Scotts focus on gender and theoretical frameworks disappeared womens experiences in history. Even if 'woman' is not a coherent category, bodies considered female are exposed to material, patterned forms of domination. Even socially constructed categories have real social effects eg gendered violence (femicide). Threat of violence means identity cannot be avoided.

example of gender history

Interest in computing grows out of a strand in the history of technology which is particularly concerned in using gender as an analytical framework.

• Started around the late 90s, aimed to broaden histories of technology and incorporate womens experiences and deconstruct structures which fostered gendered power dynamics.

• Eg 'The common identification of technology as a masculine pursuit – “technology is what women don’t do” – must therefore come under scrutiny' (Nina E. Lerman, 1997). Can see history of computing through gendered perspective.

janet abbate 2012 eg of gender history

Janet Abbate 'recoding gender' 2012, central research question is that women played key roles in computer science and programming in the early years of the field but now are a minority in the community, her central argument is that gender has played an unacknowledged role in the history of computing, shaping beliefs and practices on issues ranging from the nature of expertise to the organization of work to the purpose of computer science’.

• She argues 'Gender is a cultural framework that defines masculinity and femininity as different and unequal.' and 'Gender categories are not fixed; they must be constantly maintained through the actions and interactions of individual people, and in the process they may be modified, strengthened, or challenged'.

• Abbate combines gender and womens history, noting connections between academic history and gender history. Does not equate study of gender with study of women. Wants to show that ‘It is possible and desirable to have studies of gender and computing that do not focus on women, but women’s stories, by their very lack of fit with expected norms, can bring into sharp relief the gendered nature of science and technology'.

• Women were missing from archives because of their lower-profile positions and early histories tended to focus on hardware rather than software, Abbate argues that notions of skills and expertise are socially constructed

roper on subjectivity in gender history 2005

Interest in subjectivity - emotional experiences of men as public actors, qualities and character of their relationships with others, unconscious motivations in social action.
Concept of masculinity complex because was 'the product both of lived experienced and fantasy', need to 'explore how cultural representations become part of subjective identity'.
Masculinity still viewed as a matter of social or cultural construction rather than as an aspect of personality:

• Such an emphasis leaves open, and untheorized, the question of what the relationship of the codes of masculinity is to actual men.

shepard on vagueness of masculinity

Alex Shepard comments on vagueness of current definitions of masculinity. Argues ‘different things ranging from a set of cultural attributes associated with normative notions of maleness to the subjective experience of male identity’. Concept is felt to be impoverished by a fundamental tension between external/collective and more internal/individual directions of study.

• Scott's want to seek out and reveal the assertions of sexual difference present within discourses of government, the nation state, war, business etc. ignores the place of subjectivity within this; the question of how individual men and women understood and appropriated such gendered significations, and with what consequences, was not developed.

• 'The study of gender discourses within the public sphere has largely displaced the study of subjectivity understood in terms of emotional states and experience'.