Gender in History

Difference and Intersectionality

Historians of women were key voices in debates about the distinction between gender and sex and about categories of sexual and gender identity. They also put increasing emphasis on differences among women, noting that women’s experiences differed because of class, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other factors, and they varied over time. Because of these differences, some wondered, did it make sense to talk about “women” at all? If, for example, women were thought to be delicate guardians of the home, as was true in the nineteenth-century United States, then were Black women, who worked in fields alongside men, really “women”? If women were thought to be inferior and irrational (as they were in many cultures) then was Queen Elizabeth I of England a “woman”? Was “woman” a valid category, the meaning of which is self-evident and unchanging over time, or is arguing for any biological base for gender difference naïve “essentialism”? These historians noted that not only in the present is gender “performative,” that is, a role that can be taken on or changed at will, but it was so at many points in the past, as individuals “did gender” and conformed to or challenged gender roles. Thus it is misguided to think that we are studying women (or men, for that matter) as a sex, they argued, for the only thing that is in the historical record is gender. In the 2000s, some scholars and activists advocated using “woman-identified” or “female-identified” instead of “woman,” as these seemed to better include trans women. (“Woman-identified” had a different meaning in the 1970s, when early feminists used it to mean women who did not look to men for affirmation.) Patriarchy largely disappeared as an analytical framework as well, as it, too, seemed essentialist and falsely universalizing.

Recognizing difference was not enough, asserted some scholars, who stressed that these categories were not simply matters of identity, but also oppression. They noted that feminist scholarship had sometimes taken the experiences of heterosexual white women as normative, and argued that the experiences of women of color must be recognized as distinctive. The nature of oppression is multiplicative rather than additive, and no one identity – race, class, gender, religion, ability, sexual orientation, and so on – should be considered apart from other identities, but is always materialized in terms of and by means of them. The idea that multiple forms of oppression interact and combine was part of the thinking of feminist groups that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, which is not surprising, as so many founders of women’s liberation had been active in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the latter both anti-racist and anti-imperialist. Socialist feminists expanded Marxist analysis of labor exploitation in production to examine paid and unpaid household labor, through which working-class as well as wealthier men benefited from the unpaid work of their female family members. In addition, prosperous women benefited when they could hire poorer women – usually women of color and foreign born – for child care and housecleaning.

Even before the 1960s, Black left feminists such as Louise Thompson Patterson wrote about the “triple exploitation” of race, gender, and class. Feminists of color analyzed what Fran Beal of the Third World Women’s Alliance termed the “double jeopardy” of being both Black and female. In 1977, the Black lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective asserted in a statement mostly written by Barbara Smith: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based on the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.”[2] In 1989, the critical race theorist and feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw called this synthesis of oppression “intersectionality,” a concept and word that slowly spread into other academic fields.

Just as gender had earlier, intersectionality moved from academia and feminist activism into ordinary speech. By the 2010s it had itself become a category of identity, with people using “intersectional feminist” to describe themselves on their blogs, Facebook pages, protest signs, T-shirts, and Twitter or Tumblr posts. Many sport a quotation from Flavia Dzodan, a writer who lives and works in Amsterdam, taken from her 2011 blog post on Tiger Beatdown: “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.” “Patriarchy” has returned on some of those signs as well: On Wednesdays We Smash the Patriarchy; Destroy the Patriarchy, Not the Planet.

Along with moving from academia into popular culture, the concept of intersectionality has also become increasingly dynamic and global, analyzing (and critiquing) structures of power and oppression that arise from a variety of situations. Scholars have not simply used social groupings drawn from the Western past and present, but have elaborated social categories taken from local understandings as well. To Smith’s Big Four (race, class, gender, and sexuality), scholars have added religion, age grades, ethnicity, and other factors as key social structures operating in the societies they study, past and present. They have also subtracted one or more of the Big Four, arguing, for example, that gender as it is understood in the West was not an important category of analysis or oppression in many sub-Saharan African societies. Sometimes this analysis has been explicitly intersectional – that is, situating itself theoretically within the development of the concept – but more often it has been implicitly so, investigating the ways in which two or more of these social systems operate together in the shaping of individual and group experience, but not necessarily describing this as intersectional.

Theory in History

Debates within women’s, gender, and sexuality history in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century were both a reflection and cause of broader debates about the methods and function of history itself. Historians have long recognized that documents and other types of evidence are produced by individuals or groups with particular interests that consciously and unconsciously shape the content of such sources. During the 1980s, some historians began to assert that because historical sources always present a biased and partial picture, we can never fully determine what happened or why; to try to do so is foolish or misguided. What historians should do instead is to analyze the written and visual materials of the past – what is often termed “discourse” – to determine the way various things are “represented” in them and their possible meanings. This heightened interest in discourse among historians, usually labeled the “linguistic/cultural turn,” drew on the ideas of literary and linguistic theory – often loosely termed “deconstruction” or “poststructuralism” – about the power of language. Language is so powerful, argued some theorists, that it determines, rather than simply describes, our understanding of the world; knowledge is passed down through language, and knowledge is power.

This emphasis on the relationship of knowledge to power, and on the power of language, made poststructuralism attractive to feminist scholars in many disciplines, who themselves already emphasized the ways language and other structures of knowledge excluded women. The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s insight that power comes from everywhere fit with feminist recognition that misogyny and other forces that limited women’s lives could be found in many places: in fashion magazines, fairy tales, and jokes told at work, as well as overt job discrimination and domestic violence. Historians of gender were thus prominent exponents of the linguistic turn, and many analyzed representations of women, men, the body, sexual actions, and related topics within different types of discourses.

The linguistic/cultural turn – which happened in other fields along with history – elicited harsh responses from other historians, however, including many who focused on women and gender. They asserted that it denied women the ability to shape their world – what is usually termed “agency” – in both past and present by positing unchangeable linguistic structures. Wasn’t it ironic, they noted, that just as women were learning they had a history and asserting they were part of history, “history” became just a text? They wondered whether the ideas that gender – and perhaps even “women” – were simply historical constructs denied the very real oppression that many women in the past (and present) experienced. Such doubts were extended to other groups as well. If gender, sexuality, race, and other categories are all simply unstable and changing historical or social constructs, how do we understand intersectional oppression, and use this knowledge as a basis for engaged scholarship or activism? Advocates of the linguistic turn argued that their work was politically engaged because it critically examined the dynamics and cultural practices of power. Disagreements were sharp and sometimes personal, but by the 2010s, that debate seemed to have run its course. As Lynn Hunt – a powerful force in the cultural turn – commented, “most historians have simply moved on, incorporating insights from postmodern positions but not feeling obliged to take a stand on its epistemological claims.”[3]

The linguistic/cultural turn was only one of many “turns” that have shaped historical scholarship on gender and influenced history as a whole over the past several decades. For example, the “spatial turn” has led scholars to more closely examine borders and their permeability, connections and interactions, frontiers, actual and imagined spatial crossings, migration and displacement, and the natural and built environment. They have argued that space is both a geopolitical formation and a way of perceiving, producing, and organizing knowledge, and as such is deeply gendered. The “emotional turn” has led historians to seek to understand the changing meanings and consequences of emotional concepts, expression, and regulation. They have studied norms and standards that societies and groups maintained toward emotions, investigated anger, sadness, jealousy, desire, and other specific emotions, and looked at the interplay between emotions and other aspects of society. The “material turn” has brought a greater emphasis on material culture along with written texts as sources of historical knowledge. Material culture studies, an interdisciplinary field with roots in art history, archaeology, anthropology, and history, is both a method by which one can evaluate and analyze objects and a theory able to assess the role of objects and the relationships between things and people in the creation and transformation of society and culture. It was originally mainly androcentric, and either oblivious or hostile to using gender as a category of analysis, but the critiques and research of feminist art historians, archaeologists, and historians have begun to change this.

New theoretical perspectives are adding additional complexity and bringing in still more questions. One of these is queer theory, which was developed in the early 1990s – a period of intense HIV-AIDS activism – by scholars in several different fields who combined elements of gay and lesbian studies with other concepts originating in literary and feminist analysis. Queer theorists argued that sexual notions were central to all aspects of culture, and called for greater attention to sexuality that was at odds with whatever was defined as “normal.” They asserted that the line between “normal” and “abnormal” was always socially constructed, however, and that, in fact, all gender and sexual categories were artificial and changing. Some theorists celebrated all efforts at blurring or bending categories, viewing any sort of identity as both false and oppressive and celebrating hybridity and performance. Others had doubts about this, wondering whether one can work to end discrimination against women, African Americans, gay people, or any other group, if one denies that the group has an essential identity, something that makes its members clearly women or African American or gay. In the past several decades, queer theory has been widely applied, as scholars have “queered” – that is, called into question the categories used to describe and analyze – the nation, race, religion, and other topics along with gender and sexuality. This broadening has led some – including a few of the founders of the field – to wonder whether queer theory loses its punch when everything is queer, but it continues to be an influential theoretical perspective.

Related questions about identity, subjectivity, and the cultural construction of difference have also emerged from postcolonial theory and critical race theory. Postcolonial history and theory were initially associated with South Asian scholars and the book series Subaltern Studies, and focused on people who have been subordinated (the meaning of subaltern) by virtue of their race, class, culture, or language as part of the process of colonization and imperialism in the modern world. Critical race theory developed in the 1980s as an outgrowth (and critique) of the civil rights movement combined with ideas derived from critical legal studies, a radical group of legal scholars who argued that supposedly neutral legal concepts such as the individual or meritocracy actually masked power relationships. Historians of Europe and the United States are increasingly applying insights from both of these theoretical schools to their own work, particularly as they investigate subordinate groups such as racial and ethnic minorities. World historians also now often use ideas developed by postcolonial theorists to analyze relationships of power in all chronological periods, not simply eras of imperialism.

An important concept in much postcolonial and critical race theory has been the notion of hegemony, initially developed by the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci. Today hegemony and domination are often used interchangeably, but in Gramsci’s view, they are not the same. Hegemony involves convincing dominated groups to acquiesce to the desires and systems of the dominators through cultural as well as military and political means. Generally this was accomplished by granting special powers and privileges to some individuals and groups from among the subordinated population, or by convincing them through education or other forms of socialization that the new system was beneficial or preferable. The notion of hegemony explains why small groups of people have been able to maintain control over much larger populations without constant rebellion and protest, though some scholars have argued that the emphasis on hegemony downplays the ability of subjugated peoples to recognize the power realities in which they are enmeshed and to shape their own history. Many historians have used the concept of hegemony to examine the role of high-status women, who gained power over subordinate men and women through their relationships with high-status men, and thus paid little attention to or chose not to protest their own subordination to men. The Australian sociologist R. W. Connell has also applied the idea of hegemony to studies of masculinity, noting that in every culture one form of masculinity is hegemonic, but men who are excluded from that particular form still benefit from male privilege, which they exploit rather than opposing the men who have power over them.

Both postcolonial and critical race theory point out that racial, ethnic, and other hierarchies are deeply rooted social and cultural principles, not simply aberrations that can be remedied by laws protecting individuals from discriminaton. They note that along with disenfranchising certain groups, such hierarchies privilege certain groups, a phenomenon that is analyzed under the rubric of critical white studies. (This is a pattern similar to the growth of men’s studies out of women’s studies, and there is a parallel development in the historical study of heterosexuality, which has grown out of LGBT history.) Unsurprisingly, such explorations of white privilege and structural racism have proven threatening to some, with conservative political and media figures, especially in the United States, stoking white rage with broad attacks on critical race theory, and state legislatures passing bans on anti-racism instruction or even any discussion of systemic racism in the schools.

Queer theory, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory have all been criticized from both inside and outside for falling into the pattern set by traditional history, that is, regarding the male experience as normative and paying insufficient attention to gender differences. These criticisms led to theoretical perspectives that attempt to recognize multiple lines of difference and their intersections, such as critical race feminism and Third World and transnational feminism. Both Third World feminism, which developed in the 1970s, and transnational feminism, which developed in the 1990s, critique the underpinnings of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism, including those that contributed to the rise of Western feminism in its various waves. Drawing on postcolonial history and theory, transnational feminist scholars have focused on processes of subordination, relations between gender and power across boundaries defined by nations, individual and institutional cross-border networks and dynamics, the impact of global migration on family life, gendered and sexualized nationality, affective and intimate relationships in imperial contexts, and many other topics. Such scholarship has begun to influence many areas of gender studies, even those that do not deal explicitly with race or colonialism. It appears that this cross-fertilization will continue, as issues of difference and identity are clearly key topics for historians in the ever more connected twenty-first-century world.

Gender History as a Field

This discussion of scholarly trends may make it appear as if using gender as a category of analysis has swept the discipline of history, with scholars simply choosing the approach or topic they prefer. This is far from the actual situation. There are still many historians who continue to view focusing on gender as a new-fangled fad, or, conversely, as an old-fashioned approach no longer needed in postfeminist world. As noted above, until very recently, books that explicitly take a world, global, or transnational perspective have focused largely on economic and political developments without examining their gendered nature. Other historians invoke “gender” without really thinking through its implications for their interpretations of the past. Though titles like “man the artist” have largely disappeared, as most authors – or their editors – have recognized their false universality, books still divide their subjects into “artists” and “women artists” or “rulers” and “women rulers.”

Studies of women and gender are also very unevenly distributed geographically and chronologically. Books on women’s experience or that use gender as a category of analysis in the twentieth-century United States or early modern England, for example, number in the hundreds, while those that focus on Kiribati or Kazakhstan may be counted on one hand. This unevenness is related, not surprisingly, to uneven growth in women’s and gender studies programs, which is in turn related to the structure of higher education around the world and the ability or willingness of institutions of higher education to include new perspectives and programs. By the late 1970s, hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada offered courses in women’s history, and many had separate programs in women’s history or women’s studies. Universities in Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries added courses and programs a bit more slowly, and other developed countries were slower still, though by the 1990s courses in women’s history were introduced in India, China, Korea, and elsewhere, especially at women’s universities. In Japan and elsewhere, much of the research on women has been done by people outside the universities involved with local history societies or women’s groups, so has not been regarded as scholarly.

Scholars and students in some countries in the early twenty-first century still report that investigating the history of women, gender, or sexuality can get them pegged as less than serious and be detrimental to their future careers as historians. Added to this is backlash against women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, and sometimes to the entire concept of gender, in countries headed by authoritarian men who advocate traditional gender roles. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, for example, elected in 2018, has attacked what he terms “gender ideology,” by which he means policies aimed at improving gender equality and lessening homophobia. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán offered tax benefits and subsidies to women who had at least four children and banned gender studies from Hungarian universities. In 2020 the Hungarian Parliament voted to stop transgender and intersex people from legally changing their gender. Gender- and sexuality-based violence has increased in Brazil and Hungary, as well as in other countries with right-wing populists in charge.