Joan Scott’s, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” and Alice Kessler-Harris’s, “Just Price, Free Market, and the Value of Women” are two journal articles that were written in the 1980’s just as women’s studies became known as gender studies. Each author was influential to the study of gender in her own way. Gender analysis is essential to continue because it can provide us with a lens to evaluate cultural practices, social organizations, politics, and social behavior. Gender studies provides critical information for policy and lawmakers. According to Joan W. Scott the way society has been organized around sexual differences is what has resulted in inequality of power. She believes that the study of gender relations can help …show more content…
Alice Kessler-Harris argues that social norms have helped to shaped how the labor market operates. She writes, “Justice, equity, and fairness have not been its natural outcomes. Rather, market outcomes have been tempered by customary notions of justice or fairness.” (Kessler-Harris, 281) The study of gender became a useful category of historical analysis for historians because it provided a new perspective. It is important to look at gender studies when creating political systems and trying to develop social equality. According to Scott, “Politics is only one of the areas in which gender can be used for historical analysis. “ (Scott, 1070) Gender provides historians with a way to understand and make connections between the many different ways that humans interact. It has been debated by historians whether "gender history" is a synonym for “women's history.” Studying gender history is critical because we cannot understand the past without studying the systematic differences of womanhood and manhood. The initial goal to …show more content…
Feminist historians, at the time, fell into two categories, descriptive and causal. Scott write about three methods of how feminist historians have analyzed gender. They are patriarchy, economically (Marxist theory), and psychoanalysis. Scott criticized feminist historians who used theories of patriarchy because they ignored other forms of oppression and placed too much importance on physical differences. They failed to show how gender inequality structures all other inequalities. Scott felt Marxist feminists did not give gender "an independent analytical status of its own." Scott felt historians who relied on psychoanalytic theories had a limited focus on family dynamics, child development, or the conscious and unconscious construction of the gendered subject. This limited the historian to be able to apply the theories to other social systems like the economy, politics, or power. Kessler-Harris discussed how different historians viewed gender. She felt that historians who study the labor market and learn how segmentation worked during certain times contributed to the way in which gender roles constructed the
an image of the role of woman in the past, and how she contributed to
These sociologists reject the idea of a unified explanation of the experiences of all women. They accept multiple different viewpoints from multiple different sources. Postmodern feminists do not even believe that there is one definition of “woman.” There is a disagreement between radical feminists and postmodern feminists on the idea of the patriarchy. According to this branch, the patriarchy does not exist.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview. New York: The Feminist Press, 1981. book.
Gender history would not be possible without the rise of women and their headstrong goal of gaining a place in the history books. Early historians developed a more simple outlook, which simply classified every women be similar in class. As historian developed a more critical analysis, they included many social factors to explain women’s status change. Women created gender history, and now doors are open for other gender issues to be researched.
Stearns, Peter N. Gender In World History. New York: Routledge, 2000. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 22 Feb. 2014.
To begin with, there are many events in United States history that have shaped our general understanding of women’s involvement in economics, politics, the debates of gender and sexuality, and so forth. Women for many centuries have not been seen as a significant part of history, however under thorough analyzation of certain events, there are many women and woman-based events responsible for the progressiveness we experience in our daily lives as men, women, children, and individuals altogether. Many of these events aid people today to reflect on the treatment of current individuals today and to raise awareness to significant issues that were not resolved or acknowledged in the past.
For several decades, most American women occupied a supportive, home oriented role within society, outside of the workplace. However, as the mid-twentieth century approached a gender role paradigm occurred. The sequence of the departure of men for war, the need to fill employment for a growing economy, a handful of critical legal cases, the Black Civil Rights movement seen and heard around the nation, all greatly influenced and demanded social change for human and women’s rights. This momentous period began a social movement known as feminism and introduced a coin phrase known in and outside of the workplace as the “wage-gap.”
In this theory, women classify themselves as to what their status is in the society. “A woman’s conception of herself is a product of her social existence” as it was mentioned in the theory. The Marxist feminism is a rejection of individuality set by the liberal feminism since women are a distinct economic class rather than individuals.
Since the inception of second-wave feminism in the West, scholars have been concerned with apparent boundaries that separate private and public domains, a concern which was underpinned by a larger ambition to fundamentally rewrite of all History. Scholarship born out of the second wave feminist movement was propelled by a reaction against the androcentric nature of history, and that which had typically been considered historically 'worthy'. In order to combat androcentrism, both women’s historians and gender historians appropriated the ‘separate spheres’ framework, though each in different ways, and to different ends. Those writing women’s history used the separate spheres as an organizing structure, through which to recover and re-interpret the stories of women, incorporating them into a distinctive female past. Contrastingly, gender historians used the separate spheres as structure of binary classification in which to compare male and female, using these definitions to contribute to (what they felt would be) a broader more inclusive understanding of history. Whether their respective accounts were characterized by an acceptance of or a challenge of the separate spheres framework, the appropriation of such a model in both cases is problematic. In their struggle to create a more balanced, comprehensive history, women’s and gender historians adopted a framework which was limited, perfunctory and essentially as androcentric as the types of history which they were compelled to react against originally.
Feminist theory, which occurred from feminist doings, marks to twig the kind of masculinity disproportion by scrutinizing women's mutual roles and lived participation; it has industrialized patterns in a range of self-controls in mandate to answer to problems such as the mutual making of femininity and masculinity. Some of the past whereabouts of feminism have been scorned for fascinating into report only antediluvian, conventional, experienced evaluations. This operated to the contraption of genealogically limited or multiculturalist treatments of feminism.
French, Katherine L., and Allyson M. Poska. Women and Gender in the Western past. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.
While historians and scholars use a variety of lenses to analyze American history, the examination of the role that gender has played in society provides a view of history broader than the typical patriarchal tunnel vision taught in most history classes today. Men’s roles in society have been molded and crafted by the changes occurring throughout these societies, but women’s roles both in the home and in the workforce have arguably undergone many more radical transformations since the inception of the United States. Specifically, the transformation of womanhood in the first half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the market revolution, permanently changed how women are viewed in society, by both men and other women, and how women relate
Society has long since considered women the lessor gender and one of the most highly debated topics in society through the years has been that of women’s equality. The debates began over the meaning between a man and woman’s morality and a woman’s rights and obligations in society. After the 19th Amendment was sanctioned around 1920, the ball started rolling on women’s suffrage. Modern times have brought about the union of these causes, but due to the differences between the genetic makeup and socio demographics, the battle over women’s equality issue still continues to exist. While men have always held the covenant role of the dominant sex, it was only since the end of the 19th century that the movement for women’s equality and the entitlement of women have become more prevalent. “The general consensus at the time was that men were more capable of dealing with the competitive work world they now found themselves thrust into. Women, it was assumed, were unable to handle the pressures outside of the home. They couldn’t vote, were discourages from working, and were excluded from politics. Their duty to society was raising moral children, passing on the values that were unjustly thrust upon them as society began to modernize” (America’s Job Exchange, 2013). Although there have been many improvements in the changes of women’s equality towards the lives of women’s freedom and rights in society, some liberals believe that women have a journey to go before they receive total equality. After WWII, women continued to progress in there crusade towards receiving equality in many areas such as pay and education, discrimination in employment, reproductive rights and later was followed by not only white women but women from other nationalities ...
There are nearly as many women as there are men working, yet, as it was discovered in 2011, on average, a woman will only earn seventy-seven cents for every dollar that a man earns. Women owned businesses make up for over a quarter of all national businesses and earn more than one point two trillion dollars (“Assessing the Past, Taking Stock of the Future” 6). Since many women are now becoming are the primary sources of income in the household, making less that a man does not only negatively affect families, but also the overall economy suffers as well. These women, among many others, are the ones who end up purchasing the supplies that go toward improving communities and stimulating the economy. There is no reason that the general public should stand for this. Women should be treated equally to men in today’s American society based on their biological compositions, psychological profiles and contributions to history.
In her essay, entitled “Women’s History,” American historian Joan W. Scott wrote, “it need hardly be said that feminists’ attempts to expose ‘male biases’ or ‘masculine ideology’ embedded in historical writing have often met with ridicule or rebuttal of as expressions of ‘ideology.’” Scott’s essay discusses the efforts of female historians to both integrate themselves into the history disciples and their struggle to add and assimilate female perspectives, influences, and undertakings into the overall story of history. She also talks about the obstacles and potentially biased criticism that female historians have received and faced upon establishing themselves as accredited members of the historical academic community. One of these historians is Natalie