The Turn to Gender: Transcending the Limitations of Women's History

By the mid-1980s, historians of women confronted significant theoretical limitations within their field. They lacked robust explanatory models and struggled to make women’s history relevant to scholars in other disciplines. As one historian noted in History Workshop in 1985, while rediscovering women’s worlds was vital, it risked ghettoisation, rendering the subject easy for others to ignore. This sense of being hamstrung propelled a pivotal transformation in feminist historiography, moving from a focus on women to an analysis of gender.

Historian Kathleen Canning identified this crossroads, noting the gradual breakdown of ‘woman’ as a monolithic category. The intellectual forces driving this shift were multiple. Nearly two decades of scholarship had achieved significant recovery but left core historical chronologies and conceptual frameworks unshaken. Feminist historians had critiqued the public-private dualism and the sex/gender distinction, yet binaries like home/factory and production/reproduction remained entrenched. Seeking to overcome these, they began challenging established chronologies and theories of historical transformation more fundamentally.

Concurrently, feminists in the sciences critiqued biological essentialism, emphasizing instead the power of languages and discourses to define and anchor hierarchies of sex and gender within social practices and institutions. There was no single moment declaring the replacement of ‘women’s history’ with ‘gender history’—both continue coexisting—but an urgent need emerged to theorize rather than merely describe experience. Analysis now required seeing women in relation to men and other women, and decoding symbolic representations.

The seminal essay ushering in this ‘age of gender’ for English-speaking historians was Joan Wallach Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (1986). Scott grappled with gender’s theoretical applications and the breadth of historical questions it could address. Her goal was dual: to equip feminist historians with new tools and to urge all historians to contend with gender’s analytic power. What distinguished gender from woman was its capacity for relational analysis and its applicability to discourses, institutions, and abstractions, independent of biological sex.

Joan Kelly had foreseen these ramifications, understanding that a relational history would redefine accepted chronologies and master narratives. Scott similarly called on scholars in all fields to use gender to challenge entrenched paradigms and epistemologies. While initially denoting social relations between the sexes, interdisciplinary perspectives expanded its meaning to include the entire symbolic system governing men and women. This scholarly dedication culminated in the founding of the journal Gender and History in 1989.

Scott’s framework involved assessing existing feminist approaches. The concept of patriarchy was too universalizing to explain change across time and context. Marxist theory, while useful, was circumscribed; it could not explain women’s subordination prior to capitalism or within socialist regimes, often subsuming gender oppression under class. Psychoanalytic theory delved into the representational and subconscious, exploring gender identity through language—a promising avenue—but often relied on essentialist concepts like inherent sexual antagonism.

Scott found the postmodernist focus on deconstructing meaning through language most compelling. It allowed historians to conceive gender as fluid and to contest universal categories. Thinkers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida had exploded notions of the transparent text, enabling analysis of gender’s variability, volatility, and politically constructed nature. This cultural turn facilitated seeing the ‘human-madeness’ and thus mutability of gender norms.

Many historians, trained in positivist traditions, were reluctant converts. Treating historical sources as literary texts full of ambiguous signification seemed sacrilegious. Scott challenged this, arguing that neither ‘man’ nor ‘woman’ were fixed historical facts. Institutions, conventions, and knowledge production itself were gendered. Historians, she contended, must contemplate how their own genderedness shapes their work. History is not merely a record of change but a participant in producing knowledge about sexual difference.

This struck a nerve, especially among scholars clinging to ideals of omniscience and objectivity. Over time, however, more historians have become reflective of their cultural biases. For gender historians, cultural theory expanded their analytic arsenal, enabling them to trace the gendering of meaning in history itself. Scholars like Nina Baym and Bonnie Smith revealed how historical practice became masculinized, associating professionalism with traits discursively coded as masculine—scienticity, disinterestedness, and empiricism—while devaluing the anecdotal and subjective.

By uncovering the gender of history, the field moved beyond compensatory herstory. It began offering alternatives to the masculinist content and procedures of historical practice, finally seeing women collectively as both historians and historical actors who had always been present, though often operating under another name. This theoretical evolution secured gender’s enduring role as a fundamental category of historical analysis.