Gender and the Politics of History

by Joan Wallach Scott

Overview

This landmark work from a renowned feminist historian is a foundational demonstration of the uses of gender as a conceptual tool for cultural and historical analysis. Joan Wallach Scott offers a trenchant critique of the compartmentalization of women’s history, arguing that political and social categories are always fundamentally shaped by gender and that questions of gender are essential to considerations of difference in history. Exploring topics ranging from language and class to the politics of work and family, Gender and the Politics of History is a vital contribution to feminist history and historical methodology that also speaks more broadly to the ongoing redefinition of gender in our political and cultural vocabularies.

This anniversary edition of a classic text in feminist theory and history shows the evergreen relevance of Scott’s work to the humanities and social sciences. In a new preface, Scott reflects on the book’s legacy and implications for contemporary politics as well as what she has reconsidered as a result of her engagement with psychoanalytic theory. The book also includes a previously unpublished essay, “The Conundrum of Equality,” which takes up the question of affirmative action.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231547611
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/23/2018
Series:	Gender and Culture Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her books include Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996); The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011); and Sex and Secularism (2017).

Table of Contents

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Toward a Feminist History
1. Women’s History
2. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis
Part II: Gender and Class
3. On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History
4. Women in The Making of the English Working Class
Part III: Gender in History
5. Work Identities for Men and Women: The Politics of Work and Family in the Parisian Garment Trades in 1848
6. A Statistical Representation of Work: La Statistique de l’industrie à Paris, 1847–1848
7. “L’ouvriere! Mot impie, sordide . . .”: Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840–1860
Part IV: Equality and Difference
8. The Sears Case
9. American Women Historians, 1884–1984
10. The Conundrum of Equality
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

A tour de force -[the essays] reveal historical imagination relentlessly moving forward...as sophisticated advocacy for the case of theory, and illumination of the state of the art of women's history, there is nothing better than Gender and the Politics of History.

Voice Literary Supplement

Scott has given us an intelligent, sensitive reflection on the nature of events, of thought, of judgement, of history....The questions Scott asks deserve pursuit. They will enlarge the scope of historical understanding and spawn new questions to be asked in turn.

New Republic

A real tour de force.

New York Times

At once a ‘how-to’ manual . . . and a broad assessment of the state of women’s history in the 1980s. It will clearly become a classic volume for both feminist theory and women’s history.

Gender and Society

Scott’s book makes a powerful case not only for a historical scholarship that recognizes the depth of gender difference in human experience but also for a renewed self-consciousness about the role of the historian in constructing the meanings of our past.

American Historical Review

Thoughtful and pioneering.

Nation

A radical book, provocative, exciting, and very satisfying.

Journal of Social History

Thoughtful and pioneering.

Nation Daryl

Scott has given us an intelligent, sensitive reflection on the nature of events, of thought, of judgement, of history....The questions Scott asks deserve pursuit. They will enlarge the scope of historical understanding and spawn new questions to be asked in turn.

The New Republic

A real tour de force.

The New York Times