Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History
Kessler-Harris, Alice
GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY, by Joan Wallach Scott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 242 pp. $29. One good reason to read this book is that it directly addresses the...
...As one of those two, I found myself in the peculiar position of watching deconstructionist theory applied to an event I had experienced as highly structured...
...But these unsolved issues do not vitiate Scott's central point...
...New York: Columbia University Press, 1988...
...the limits on the capacity of counsel to introduce one argument or another...
...Thus, for example, the introduction and the essay entitled "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" —perhaps the keystone of the book—each argue inspiringly that exposing the gendered understandings implicit in social thought can alter our conceptions of the past, enriching ideas about such processes as the formation of class...
...To begin with, it threatens to turn the past into an abstraction in which the choice of text is idiosyncratic, in which the surrounding historical circumstance is utilized to elucidate the meaning of the text rather than to explain historical change...
...A fully theorized notion of difference, she suggests, would have led me to refuse the dichotomy that Sears proposed...
...To combat this spreading disease, Stephen M. Balch, president and executive director of the National Association of Scholars, called for setting up "new educational centers" designed to compete 274 • DISSENT Books social process...
...For all Scott's defense of its capacity to illuminate politics, the technique provides little insight into how social systems are transformed or how the powerless alter their positions...
...The use of deconstruction poses troubling questions by placing the historian much closer to the center of the process than has previously been the case...
...Nor, she suggests, need the historian who uses post-structuralist techniques suspend other means of understanding...
...And deconstruction seems peculiarly ill-suited to help with this...
...Scott insists that the social historian is not confined to a single text, nor to the text alone...
...and in which the relative equality of all texts reduces political analysis to a mirage...
...One good reason to read this book is that it directly addresses the current right-wing attack on university attempts to modernize their course offerings...
...SPRING • 1989 • 277...
...This is an impressive feat, and one for which we can only be grateful...
...As the New York Times reported on November 22, 1988, that attack is spearheaded by complaints that "women and members of minority groups had contaminated . . . objectivity on decisions about curriculum, promotions and academic discourse...
...In the end, however, Scott's cautious use of deconstructive technique, more than her elaborate claims for it, serves to demystify the historical process, and helps us to see the value of deconstruction more clearly...
...And yet in this method, the historian's subjective judgment becomes the primary tool of investigation...
...Here Scott dissects arguments about female difference employed by the two historians who served as expert witnesses...
...In the end, then, Scott salvages deconstructive analysis for the historian by backing away from its 276 • DISSENT extreme application...
...For in dissecting the notion of male-female difference as it emerged in the courtroom debates, Scott neglected the rest of the text...
...the legal rules by which justice was bound and which it could and did bend...
...the nature of the adversarial system...
...When attempts to "challenge the natural status of seemingly dichotomous pairs" become the focus of discussion, as in the essay entitled "The Sears Case," their limits for historical analysis are quickly apparent...
...Perhaps so...
...But the essays that illustrate this grand design are more cautious...
...Confronted with an argument that emphasized the differences between women and men as a justification for statistical disparities in employment, I argued in court that differences among women with respect to their occupational expectations negated such an argument...
...Scott is undoubtedly right to notice the absence of such a fully theorized notion...
...Because the facts of poststructuralism exist only in relation to the text, the historian, following the literary critic, is led to argue that meaning is and can only be "constructed...
...Work Identities for Men and Women" explores the conflicting meaning of ideas about femininity and family among nineteenth-century French garment workers but it stops far short of the ambitious possibilities sketched in Scott's introduction...
...It assumes that suppressed meanings or "differences" are embedded in seemingly fixed categories, and attempts to uncover these hidden oppositions...
...This may seem to be simply another way of describing the historian's traditional role as mediator between facts and theories...
...Finally, the historian who uses these techniques has yet to resolve the problem of how to bridge the gap between an analysis of language in one form or another, and activity that leads to change...
...Historians who read Gender and the Politics of History may continue to be properly cautious about adopting a post-structuralist framework, but they can no longer avoid thinking about the issues raised by this new theory of knowledge...
...the persona of the judge...
...The essay reveals the kinds of questions deconstruction can raise, but it also suggests its limits for understanding historical process...
...the skill of the lawyers: all these constitute part of the web of understanding that requires analysis and lead us to ask whether the theoretical attractiveness of Scott's alternative framework is not vitiated by the historical context...
...The courtroom itself...
...GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY, by Joan Wallach Scott...
...But she raises a more complex set of questions than she allows...
...Indeed, while Scott defends her use of deconstruction by arguing for its capacity to expose suppressed meanings, the essays in which she illustrates the technique suggest the eclecticism of her own approach...
...Nor will they be easily persuaded by the arguments of political groups that believe their construction of the past is the only plausible one, and that their "facts" deserve recognition while others go begging...
...Scott argues that this search for oppositions makes it possible to "study systematically the conflictual processes that produce meanings...
...But it cannot account for human intention or motivation, two slippery historical problems that are crucial to understanding the way in which meanings come to be, and which influence how they are accepted and acted upon...
...Deconstruction, in practice, offers a way of reading that allows us to explore new kinds of evidence...
...Scott poses an alternative...
...Equally problematic, deconstruction exposes the discipline to the charge that it is able to say nothing permanent, and therefore nothing of value...
...In so far as those social identities are shaped by, and in turn shape the world of politics, we are led to glimpse the crucial importance of understanding how individuals and groups create and construe the world around them...
...These essays effectively demonstrate that knowledge is constructed, in part, out of the gendered social identities of individuals...
...Rather, the historian's analysis is rooted in the exploration of a variety of meanings that are implicit in a Foucaultian conception of political power at work in many different locations...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
