Gender and the Politics of History 9780231547611

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: TOWARD A FEMINIST HISTORY
PART II: GENDER AND CLASS
PART III: GENDER IN HISTORY
PART IV: EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE
Notes
Index

Citation preview

gender and the politics of history

gender and culture series

gender and culture A SERIES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nancy K. Miller and Victoria Rosner, Series Editors

Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926–2003) and Nancy K. Miller, Founding Editors

For a complete list of books in the series, see page 265.

30th Anniversary Edition

joan wallach scott

columbia university press new york

columbia university press publishers since 1893 new york chichester, west sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-231-18801-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-54761-1 (e-book)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns Cover image: Daumier, Honoré, Monsieur, pardon si je vous gêne un peu. . . . Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

for elizabeth

Contents

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xvii 1

PART I: TOWARD A FEMINIST HISTORY

1. Women’s History 2. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis

15 28

PART II: GENDER AND CLASS

3. On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History 4. Women in The Making of the English Working Class

53 68

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 93 6. A Statistical Representation of Work: La Statistique de l’industrie à Paris, 1847–1848 113 7. “L’ouvrière! Mot impie, sordide . . .”: Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840–1860 139 PART IV: EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE

8. The Sears Case 9. American Women Historians, 1884–1984 10. The Conundrum of Equality Notes Index

167 178 199 217 253

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

I

t’s been 30 years since this book was first published; its endurance is a testimony to the continuing importance of gender in our political and cultural vocabulary. It’s not as if the meaning of gender has been settled, far from it. There are more connotations of the term “gender” than can be listed in any single dictionary entry. Contested from the outset (in the 1970s), when feminists first appropriated Robert Stoller’s distinction between sex and gender, biology and culture, the term has acquired more visibility in ensuing years as well as more passionate advocates and critics. On the left, Judith Butler has counseled us to “undo” the male/female binary upon which gender has long rested. On the right, opponents of feminism and gay marriage have likened the “theory of gender” to a communist plot that would overturn the natural order of societies and nations.1 The question of translation also looms large: does importing “gender” into languages that do not have the term signal capitulation to AngloAmerican and post-modern philosophies or radical destabilization of the normative categories that construct the sexual order? There are plausible answers on both sides of this question.2 That the debates go on is symptomatic of the elusive nature of gender itself: there is no fixed meaning that can be attached to bodily differences and their relationships to social comportment and erotic desire. The historical record documents the mutability and variety of gender categories, anthropologists offer confirmation of their cultural diversity, and queer scholars provide evidence of the fact that even within societies and cultures where the boundaries of sexual difference are firmly policed, the rules don’t hold. Despite all efforts to settle the matter once and for all, our psyches refuse to be disciplined. “Am I that Name?,” Denise Riley reminds us, is the puzzled

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(and perhaps universal) response to being designated a woman or a man.3 Butler, voicing the child’s confusion at gender’s interpellation, suggests that “the question may well not be, ‘what gender am I?’ but rather, ‘what does gender want of me?’ or even, ‘whose desire is being carried through the assignment of gender that I have received and how can I possibly respond?’”4 Gender, from these perspectives, is a historically and culturally variable attempt to provide a grid of intelligibility for sex; as such it can never be pinned down to a settled definition. And it is precisely because of this indeterminacy that gender continues to be a useful category for historical analysis. My thinking about the indeterminacy of gender—its inability ever finally to nail down the meanings for differences of sex—was initially influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault. His insistence on the dispersion of power in modernity, its presence in ordinary relations which had never been thought of as exemplifying “power,” had an influential impact on social history and, later, cultural history. Foucault refused the definition of power as an object, that is as a transferable property associated only with rule, law, wealth, and monopolies of violence. Instead he took power to be relational, generative— understood in terms of its effects. It was productive not repressive, constituting subjects, “flowing along discourses, coursing through populations.”5 The question was not who held power, but what forms it took and what operations it performed. With Foucault, the study of power was no longer limited to the institutions and agents of the state, but expanded to a broad range of human activities, including those that were conventionally thought to lie outside the realm of the political: science, arts, literature, even sex and sexual desire. These were not separate spheres of activity and power, but mutually constitutive realms: for example, scientific studies legitimated economic policy, art and literature helped make normative ideals into “common sense” perceptions (and sometimes also challenged them), disciplinary associations established hierarchies of mastery and standards for the production of knowledge. The production of knowledge was at once riven with internal politics of its own, and could also no longer be thought apart from more conventional notions of the dynamics of power.6 For those of us working on the history of women and sexuality, Foucault’s formulations stretched the boundaries of our inquiries beyond the thematic, opening the way for thinking about gender as a set of questions not only about unequal relations between women and men and about transgressive sexualities, but also about the ways in which differences of sex mattered not literally and metaphorically, but constitutively for the construction of institutions that—on the

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face of it—had nothing to do with sex. For me this represented a way to get beyond the compartmentalization of women and gender studies as a separate subfield of history, a way to insist that attention to gender could bring new insight into old questions of difference, power, and politics. Gender, from this perspective, was not a matter of the simple presence or absence of women, but of the ways in which differences of sex were used to signify all manner of other differences (among them racial, religious, imperial, and civilizational differences) and to establish hierarchies within and among them.7 My thinking about gender’s indeterminacy has been sharpened in the years since I wrote this book by engagement with psychoanalytic theory. I was skeptical about psychoanalysis in the 1980s because it seemed ahistorical, but I have since revised my view in light of what Adam Phillips calls the “post-Freudian”—Freud, read through the lenses of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and theories of race and racism, with attention to language and the many associations it evokes.8 Jean Laplanche refers to “the contingent, perceptual and illusory character of anatomical sexual difference,” which cannot ground the gender assignment that precedes it.9 Alenka Zupančič points out that “the central point of Freud’s discovery was precisely that there is no ‘natural’ or pre-established place of human sexuality . . . the sexual is not a substance to be properly described and circumscribed, it is the very impossibility of its own circumscription or delimitation. . . . Sexual is not a separate domain of human activity or life, and this is why it can inhabit all the domains of human life.”10 This means that sex and sexual difference are not simply metaphors for other areas of human activity; they are always already imbricated in the conceptualization of those other domains. The post-Freudian Freud’s theorizing of sexual difference as a permanent enigma is the key for me to historicizing gender: the very categories of man and woman will take different forms in different political moments, and they will provide a way of understanding those moments as well. If the differences of sex that gender refers to are ultimately inexplicable, gender categories are for that reason malleable. They can be attached to other institutions as a way of making their meaning clear, but they can also be used to explain and legitimize those institutions—among them family, race, state, nation—and the hierarchical divisions within them. These meanings may be expressed in literal and rational ways, but they also are secured by appeals to the unconscious; they mobilize such things as erotic fantasies or fears of castration. In this way gender lends meaning to those institutions and is also given meaning by them. Or, as I put it in 1986, “when historians look for the ways in which the

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concept of gender legitimizes and constructs social relationships, they develop insight into the reciprocal nature of gender and society and into the particular and contextually specific ways in which politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics.” One of the ways that we should read this complex construction is with the help of psychoanalytic theory.11

The history of politics is opened in new ways by a psychoanalytic reading of the mutual constitution of gender and politics—in past centuries as well as in our present moment. An example from the past comes from Ancien Régime France in the work of the feminist historian Éliane Viennot, who has written several magnificent volumes on women and political power from the Renaissance to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Viennot documents the formidable political role of queens, regents, mothers, and mistresses during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The Valois kings, she shows, expressly relied on noblewomen, who moved freely in court circles and had a recognized public role to play. Their participation was not universally accepted—as demonstrated by the famous querelle des femmes and several centuries of misogynist writing by disaffected bourgeois, provincial spokesmen, and foreigners. But the criticism was not what we might call “pure” misogyny; rather it was a form of social protest whose motives went far beyond the activities of the women it denounced. Still, it wasn’t until the Bourbon monarchs that noblewomen were definitively barred from politics. In an effort to consolidate monarchial power, agents of the crown depicted noblewomen as capricious, hare-brained, and driven only by a desire for luxury and pleasure. For that reason, it was argued, they had no place in serious political deliberations. Interestingly, the characterization extended to noblemen, who were reduced by the architects of absolutism to frivolous appendages to court life, their influence achieved through liaisons dangereuses—sexual intrigue as a sign of their political impotence. Having lost the prerogatives that once defined their very being, the court nobility was represented as feminized—in effect they were castrated. The characterization of the aristocracy as feminized was not invented by the eighteenth-century revolutionaries—as I once thought was the case—it dated to the onset of absolutism. In the regime of absolutism, authority was to be the king’s alone; everyone else served to confirm his sovereignty. There was to be no confusion about who was in charge, who had the phallus—the signifier of power.12

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Confusion about possession of the phallus came with the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. The king was no longer the embodiment of political power, and no single figure took his place. Freud’s Totem and Taboo gets this precisely: having overthrown the primal father, the parricides become brothers and set up rules that preclude any one of them from taking his place. (Fratriarchy replaces patriarchy.) The rules replace the king’s body with disembodied abstractions—state, nation, citizen, representative, individual. Claude Lefort puts it this way: “the locus of power becomes an empty place  .  .  . it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it—and it cannot be represented.”13 The rivalry among the brothers continues, nonetheless. Wrote Freud, “Each of them would have wished, like his father, to have all the women to himself.”14 Lacan calls this fantasy “the phallic exception,” the notion that identification with the primal father (reduced to the shared possession of a penis) qualifies one of the brothers for the father’s role.15 There are any number of examples for the fantasy of the phallic exception that can be drawn from contemporary political contests, the most dramatic of which are Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump (surrounded by all those glittering women), although French president Emmanuel Macron’s preference for Versailles and the accoutrements of monarchy also comes to mind. After the 2016 election, the journalist Adam Shatz wrote of Donald Trump’s “animal magnetism,” the dreams of restored “virility,” and his supporters’ craving for the sanctity of law and order. Trump, he noted, came to embody a fantasy of absolute power.16 And this fantasy, I think, helps account for his success. Trump’s excesses (all those women, even his daughter; all that gold; the repeated insults to immigrants, Blacks, Latinos; all that ego) demonstrated his potency (his phallic force)—he was the primal father. His performance of oversized masculinity (despite the small size of his hands) made him seem to many capable of restoring a lost or threatened order. His very transgressions (bankruptcy, tax evasion, infidelity, profiteering) ironically confirmed his ability to impose and enforce law. He was the all-powerful father Freud theorized—the one who could make the law without having to follow it. Trump’s appeal to both men and women rested on his promise to restore a lost or threatened order of racial and gender hierarchies. The appeal was made not rationally or programmatically, but libidinally—it was the erotic call and response that won the day. If we deferred to him, Trump promised, he would provide all the security we needed. His exceptional masculinity was the cure for economic distress, social division, and the threat of terrorism. It has become clearer since the election that

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the fantasy of the restored primal father was associated with the restoration of the privilege that so many white Americans felt they were losing or had lost. In contrast, there was Hillary Clinton who tried to counter Trump with logic and reason. It wasn’t only what she stood for (the depth of her associations with Wall Street, a certain elitist cosmopolitanism) or her flip-flopping on issues of economic and racial justice, but the very nature of her appeal that led to her defeat. She offered factual corrections to his lies, practical policies to address concrete issues—but nothing in her words or her manner called forth the kind of libidinal energy he did. To be sure, millions voted for her—indeed she won the popular vote—but her words and her demeanor offered little comfort to the angry, white, working and middle-class men and women, urban as well as rural, who opted for Trump. And, of course, the fact that she was a woman limited the scope of the appeal she could offer. Even had she not been the kind of wonky personality she is, a woman candidate with “animal magnetism” could never have been seen as an avatar of absolute power. While Trump’s excesses demonstrated his potency (his phallic force), any such excess on a woman’s part would only confirm her unsuitability for public office. Indeed, even without excess of that kind, Clinton’s candidacy elicited virulent misogynist reactions.17 The Trump phenomenon raises important questions for historians and for contemporary politics. They are questions to which our research on gender should be directed. What kind of political response is possible in the face of the call to phallic power? Does democracy— historically the alternative to absolutism—have an equally potent, but different libidinal appeal? What has been the nature of that appeal? What unconscious processes does it evoke?

If the meanings of gender are uncertain, often volatile, if they are changeable instruments of political regulation and resistance, then we can only bring questions to the study of gender. We don’t know in advance what the meanings of sex difference will be, or how and in what terms they will be defended, challenged, and transgressed. How is gender being defined is what we are asking; what work is it doing and for whom? The uncertainties and indeterminacies of the categories guarantee that the answers will vary depending on context: historical, political, cultural, temporal. In this way, psychoanalytic theory enables us to think of gender categories as products of history and to study them in their different articulations.

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To do this there are some general questions to keep in mind; they start with a different object (gender in the first case, political systems in the second), but they assume a necessary interconnection of those objects: politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics. 1. If there is great consternation about gender, what political ideas and institutions are seeking legitimation in the enduring “truth” of the difference of sex? The more dire the warnings, the more there are sure signs of trouble. Examples of this are to be found in the anguished prophecy of end times from opponents of feminist and queer theories, who argue that historicizing established norms about women and men is an assault against the very foundations of civilized life. To take only two examples: during the debates that led to the creation of the International Criminal Court in 1999, one commentator noted that if the word “gender” were allowed to refer to anything beyond biologically defined male and female, the Court would be in the position of “drastically restructuring societies throughout the world.” This same concern about the radical potential of gender to challenge the established meanings of sex difference was expressed by the opponents of a French curriculum that aimed at gender equity in 2011 and of France’s law on gay marriage in 2013. The “theory of gender,” they argued, “by denying sexual difference, [would] overturn the organization of our society and call into question its very foundations.”18 How do challenges to gender norms threaten established political systems? Which systems? In what ways? How does the language used reveal something of the psychic investments of the protagonists? 2. If political systems are in crisis, how is gender invoked to promote or resolve the crisis? This is the kind of connection historian Mary Louise Roberts noted in the wake of WWI: “the blurring of the boundary between ‘male’ and ‘female’—a civilization without sexes—served as a primary referent for the ruin of civilization itself.”19 How have normative categories of gender served as weapons in the defense of established hierarchical structures? How has the attempt to shore up those structures in turn secured the “truth” of normative gender categories? What do appeals to gender tell us about how war is justified or about the motives and ambitions of political leaders? What are the implicit erotic messages of electoral campaigns? Which ones succeed? Which fail? What are the conditions of success or failure? There are many more questions to be posed, but one thing is sure: the study of history is enriched immeasurably when gender and politics are understood to be mutually constitutive. We may have to

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probe deeply and read with attention to expressions and ideas we hadn’t before considered—expressions and ideas that reveal deeply felt unconscious investments—but the insights are there to be found. Those insights will inevitably lead us to unresolvable contradictions and ambiguities, the psychic instabilities and anxieties inherent in the categories of both politics and gender—instabilities that insistently demand resolution but—because resolution is ultimately impossible—also identify possibilities and openings for change. Joan Wallach Scott Deer Isle, Maine September 2017

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Acknowledgments

—— 10 ——

The Conundrum of Equality

O

lympe de Gouges was an early feminist who wrote a great number and variety of remarkable things during the French Revolution. She is most famous for her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen of 1791, which argued that all the rights of men enumerated by the revolutionaries in 1789 also belonged to women. But for me, her most memorable lines are to be found in a long treatise she wrote in 1788. It was her version of the Social Contract, which she unapologetically deemed the equal if not the better of Rousseau’s. In it she offered dozens of proposals for social and political reform as well as long critiques of her contemporaries’ attitudes and practices. At one point, she interrupted a lengthy diatribe with an unusually astute observation. “If I go any further in this matter,” she commented, “I will go too far and attract the enmity of [those] who, without reflecting on my good ideas or appreciating my good intentions, will condemn me pitilessly as a woman who has only paradoxes to offer and not problems easy to resolve.”1 In this essay, I risk “pitiless condemnation,” “as a woman who has only paradoxes to offer and not problems easy to resolve.” In fact, my argument will be that there are no simple solutions to the hotly debated questions of equality and difference, of individual rights and group identities. To pose them as opposites misses the point of their interconnection. It is, rather, in recognizing and maintaining a necessary tension between equality and difference, between individual rights and group identities that we achieve the best and most democratic results.

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Debates about equality and difference as well as individual rights and group identities usually take polarized form. For example, affirmative action has been attacked as a form of group preference that discriminates against individuals; gay antidiscrimination laws have been repealed on the grounds that they confer special rights that individuals don’t need and don’t enjoy; the push to make university, law, or medical school faculties more diverse has been resisted on the grounds that attention to group identity will undermine evaluations of the objective merit of any individual candidate; and proponents of multiculturalism insist that identity groups be represented in all their diversity in the educational curriculum while opponents worry that separate histories of racial and ethnic groups will promote what one scholar has referred to as the virus of tribalism and another the disuniting of America. Pressure to hire representatives of minority groups to teach about minorities has been resisted on the grounds that there is no necessary correlation between one’s ethnicity, race, or gender and one’s scholarly expertise. Must one be a woman to teach women’s history? Black to teach African-American literature? Jewish to head a Jewish Studies program? There has been bitter dispute, as well, about the question of whether separate schools are warranted for men and women, boys and girls. Does equality demand the same conditions for everyone regardless of sex? When are separate facilities— the Citadel or Virginia Military Institute—detrimental, and when are they advantageous, as the supporters of prestigious women’s colleges or the founders of the all-girl school in Harlem argue their institutions are? The question of when, whether, and how to recognize identity groups and when to ignore them extends to economic and political realms too. Does calling pregnancy a disability for health insurance purposes put women on an equal footing with men in the workplace, or does it devalue an experience (and social function) that is unique to women? Redrawing the boundaries of electoral districts to increase the number of minority representatives elected to office has been rejected not only for its “race consciousness” but because it undermines the principle that any individual can—and should be able to—represent the diverse interests of his or her constituency. Representative democracy, it is argued, is not about the proportional representation of groups. These questions about groups and their representatives have extended to the theater—the realm of illusion and imagination where literal issues are supposed to be transcended. Should blacks be cast in white roles or vice versa? Can Caucasians play Eurasians? Controversy about that last question nearly caused the canceling of the Broadway production of the musical Miss Saigon in 1990.2

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Groups or individuals? The question is posed as a clear choice. If you pick one, you rule out the other. Some argue that groups preclude treating someone as an individual. Individuals must be evaluated for themselves, not for the characteristics attributed to them as members of groups. Equality can only be implemented when individuals are judged as individuals. That’s one position, most often legitimized by strict interpretations of the Constitution and Bill of Rights which take equality to mean simply the presumed equality of individuals before the law. The other side says that individuals won’t be treated fairly (in law and in society at large) until the groups they are identified with are given equal value. As long as bias, prejudice, and discrimination exist, this position argues, individuals will not all be evaluated according to the same criteria; to eliminate discrimination requires attention to the economic, political, and social status of groups. But which groups? Is African-American large enough, or too large a category to address the specific needs and experiences of biracial Americans? Under which category should gay and lesbian people of Irish descent march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade? Is any category large enough to hold all the different kinds of people it contains? It is in these terms that philosopher Anthony Appiah worries about the politics of group identity: Demanding respect for people as blacks and as gays requires that there are some scripts that go with being an African-American or having same-sex desires. There will be proper ways of being black and gay, there will be expectations to be met, demands will be made. It is at this point that someone who takes autonomy seriously will ask whether we have not replaced one kind of tyranny with another.3 Appiah poses the problem in terms of groups versus individuals, but he does not, or cannot, choose one position or the other. The possibility of individual autonomy for a black, gay man, he says, depends on securing respect for those groups. At the same time, individual autonomy is curtailed by the scripts the groups provide. Appiah’s comment lays bare what in another context the legal theorist Martha Minow has called “the dilemma of difference” and what I want to think about in terms of paradox. There are several definitions of “paradox.” In logic, a paradox is an unresolvable proposition that is true and false at the same time. The classic example is the liar’s statement: I am lying. In rhetorical and aesthetic theory, paradox is a sign of the capacity to balance complexly contrary thoughts and feelings, and thus of poetic creativity.

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Ordinary usage employs “paradox” to mean an opinion that challenges prevailing orthodoxy, that is contrary to received opinion. In a sense, my paradoxes partake of all of these meanings, for they challenge what seems to me to be a widespread tendency to polarize debate by insisting on either/or choices. I will argue, instead, that individuals and groups, equality and difference, are not opposite but rather interdependent concepts which are necessarily in tension. The tensions play out in historically specific ways and need to be analyzed in their specific political embodiments, not as timeless moral or ethical choices. Here is my list of paradoxes, which I will consider in turn: 1. Equality is an absolute principle and a historically contingent practice. 2. Group identities define individuals and deny the full expression or realization of their individuality. 3. Claims for equality involve the acceptance and rejection of the group identity attributed by discrimination. Or, to put it another way, the terms of exclusion on which discrimination is premised are at once refused and reproduced in demands for inclusion. ONLY PARADOXES 1. Equality is an absolute principle and a historically contingent practice. It is not the absence or the elimination of difference, but the recognition of difference and the decision to ignore it or take it into account. R. R. Palmer, writing in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, puts it this way: Equality requires an act of choice, by which some differences are minimized or ignored, while others are maximized and allowed to develop.4 At the time of the French Revolution, equality was announced as a general principle, a promise that all individuals would be considered the same for purposes of political participation and legal representation. But citizenship was conferred initially only on those who held a certain amount of property; it was denied to those who were too poor or too dependent to exercise the autonomy thought to be required of citizens. Citizenship was also denied (until 1794) to slaves because they were the property of others and (until 1944) to women because

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their domestic and childbearing duties were said to preclude political participation. “Since when is it permitted to give up one’s sex?” thundered the Jacobin Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, when confronted by women’s demands to participate in political clubs. “Since when is it decent to see women abandoning the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places, to harangues in the galleries, at the bar of the Senate? Is it to men that nature confided domestic cares? Has she given us breasts to feed our children?”5 Differences of birth, rank, and social status among men were considered at that moment not to matter; differences of wealth, color, and gender did matter. The Marquis de Condorcet (whose death in 1792 deprived women of a forceful advocate) wondered at the grounds for excluding women from citizenship when, he said, they shared the moral and rational capacities of men. “It would be difficult to prove that women are incapable of exercising the rights of citizenship. Why should individuals exposed to pregnancies and other passing indispositions be unable to exercise rights which no one has dreamed of withholding from persons who have the gout all winter or catch cold quickly?”6 While Condorcet was certain that women should enjoy citizenship, he was less sure about whether blacks should—the question for him, as for other revolutionaries, was which differences mattered and which did not for purposes of granting equal political rights. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in mathematics equality means identical amounts of things, exact correspondences, but equality as a social concept is less precise. Although it suggests mathematical identity, in practice it means “possessing a like degree of a specified or implied quality or attribute; being on the same level in rank, dignity, power, ability, achievement, or excellence; having the same rights or privileges.”7 The relationship among qualities, social positions, and rights has varied over time. Since the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, equality in the West has most often referred to rights that were deemed the universal possession of individuals regardless of their different social characteristics. In fact, the abstract notion of the individual was not as universally inclusionary as it sounded. The individual was usually thought to possess, in Stephen Lukes’ description, “a certain set of invariant psychological characteristics and tendencies” and these functioned to exclude those who did not measure up to the standard.8 In the late eighteenth century there were psychologists, doctors, and philosophers who argued that physical differences of skin or bodily organs qualified some as individuals and others not. The anatomist Jacques-Louis Moreau offered as his own Rousseau’s comment that the location of the genital organs, inside in women, outside in men, determined the extent

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of their influence: “the internal influence continually recalls women to their sex .  .  . the male is male only at certain moments, but the female is female throughout her life.”9 Men were individuals because they were capable of transcending sex; women could not cease to be women, and thus could never attain the status of individual. Lacking this likeness to men, they could not be considered men’s equals, and thus not citizens. It is interesting to note here (and important for what I will discuss later) that in these arguments equality pertains to individuals and exclusion to groups; it was because they were thought to belong to a category of persons with specific characteristics that women were not considered men’s equals. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso put it this way at the end of the nineteenth century: “All women fall into the same category, whereas each man is an individual unto himself; the physiognomy of the former conforms to a generalized standard; that of the latter is in each case unique”10 The specified or implied attributes that set the standard for equality have changed in the more than two hundred years since the announcement that “all men are created equal and endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.” There are few places—if any—in the world now that prevent people from voting on the grounds of race or sex, although there are still differences that matter when it comes to access to education, jobs, or other social resources. And these differences are the subject of great political contestation—political contestation that is enabled both by the universal promise of equality—an equality that will know no difference—and by the historically specific standards that at different times take different differences into account. To make this point another way: the idea that all individuals could be treated equally has inspired those who found themselves excluded from access to something they and their societies considered a right (education, work, subsistence wages, property, citizenship) to claim inclusion by challenging the standards upon which equality was granted to some and denied to others. Democratic-socialist workers demanding universal manhood suffrage in France in 1848 insisted that “there will not be a citizen who can say to another‚ you are more sovereign than I.”11 But—and this leads to the next set of paradoxes—it was as workers and not as individuals that these men demanded recognition of their individual rights. 2. Group identities are an inevitable aspect of social and political life, and the two are interconnected because group differences become visible, salient, and troubling in specific political contexts. It is at these moments—when exclusions are legitimated by group differences, when economic and social hierarchies advantage some groups at the expense of others, when one set of biological or religious or

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ethnic or cultural characteristics is valued over another—that the tension between individuals and groups emerges. Individuals for whom group identities were simply dimensions of a multifaceted individuality find themselves fully determined by a single element: religious or ethnic or racial or gender identity. The political process is described in an article on “Minorities” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences: Groups are not ‘naturally’ or ‘inevitably’ differentiated. Cultures must define them as differentiated before they are so. People of different races, nationalities, religions, or languages can live among one another for generations, amalgamating and assimilating or not, without differentiating themselves. Like everything else that is social, minority groups must be socially defined as minority groups, which entails a set of attitudes and behaviors. (And is not necessarily a question of numerical representation in the population.) [. . .] A minority need not be a traditional group with long-standing group identification. It can arise as a result of changing social definitions in a process of economic or political differentiation. Language or religious variation can be considered unimportant for thousands of years, but a series of political events can so sharpen the religious or linguistic distinctions that the followers of one variation without power [ . . . ] become a minority.12 I would add that it is because of differentials of power between men and women that feminists have referred to women as a minority, even though women make up more than half of the population. I would also add—and this is a key point—that the events that establish minorities as minorities attribute minority status to some inherent qualities in the minority group, as if those qualities were the reason rather than the rationalization for unequal treatment. For example, maternity was often given as the explanation for the exclusion of women from politics, race as the reason for the enslavement and/or subjugation of blacks, when in fact the causality runs the other way: processes of social differentiation produce the exclusions and enslavements that are then justified in terms of biology or race. The heightened sense of identification that comes with the reduction of an individual to a category is both demeaning and exhilarating. As the object of discrimination, one is subsumed in a stereotype; as a member of an embattled movement, one finds sustenance and solidarity. Yet even the rewards of fellowship have their limits. Long before the notion of political correctness was available—early in the nineteenth century—French workers sought ways to escape the confining terms of

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class identity, whether these were offered by their social superiors or by their comrades in the labor movement. In response to the characterization by employers and politicians of workers as dangerous and undisciplined, rootless and improvident, labor leaders insisted that workers loved their trades and found personal fulfillment in them, they wanted nothing more than the right to work and to be paid a wage that recognized the social and personal value of their work. If workers endorsed this vision as a matter of political expediency, however—making the right to work the triumphant slogan of the Revolution of 1848—they did not always feel it adequately expressed their aspirations or the fullness of their lives. The historian Jacques Rancière has documented the activities of some remarkable men who earned wages but did not love their work, who defined themselves as “workers” even as they chafed at the reductive effects of the category. These men gathered after work in cafés or garrets reading novels and writing poetry. It was literary labor, not manual work, that was their preferred métier—a métier that did not fit easily under the rubric of the “working class.” You ask me what my life is like right now. It’s pretty much the same as always. At the moment I look at myself and weep. Forgive me this bout of puerile vanity. It seems to me that I have not found my vocation in hammering iron.13 So wrote Jérôme-Pierre Gilland, who nonetheless identified himself as a “worker locksmith” when he signed the piece. I offer this example not to damn collective identities, but to suggest that they are inescapable forms of social organization, that they are inevitably politicized as a way both of discriminating and of protesting discrimination, and that they are a means through and against which individual identities are articulated. Gilland, who became one of the first worker-representatives in the legislature in 1848, takes all this into account as he continues his musing: It seems to me that I have not found my vocation in hammering iron, although there certainly is nothing ignoble about that calling. Far from it! From the anvil comes the warrior’s sword that defends the liberty of peoples and the plowshare that feeds them. Great artists have caught the ample, manly poetry of our bronzed faces and our robust limbs, sometimes rendering it with great felicity and energy: our illustrious Charlet, above all, when he sets the leather apron alongside the grenadier’s uniform and tells us: “the common people are the army.” As you can see, I know how to appreciate my craft [. . .]14

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But for Gilland, craft identity was a necessary and insufficient form of self-identification. Another example of the necessity and inadequacy of group identifications comes from feminism, which poses different kinds of problems and yet follows the same logic. When asked at the turn of the century for her definition of what feminism would achieve, the French psychiatrist Madeleine Pelletier answered that it would allow her “not to be a woman in the way society expects.” And yet, of course, it was as a woman, and in the name of the group—women—that Madeleine Pelletier and other feminists fought their battles for equal rights.15 3. Which brings me to my final paradox: the terms of protest against discrimination both refuse and accept the group identities upon which discrimination has been based. Put another way, we might say that demands for equality necessarily invoke and repudiate the differences that have denied equality in the first place. Pelletier insisted that women, like men, could be individuals if only the law recognized them as such. (“Give to a woman, even an inferior one, the right to vote, and she will cease to think of herself exclusively as a female and feel herself instead to be an individual.”)16 But Pelletier nonetheless argued that in order for this to happen women as a group had to be given the right to vote. Her feminism, and that of her predecessors and successors, was caught in the problem of the difference of sex. When the exclusion of women from citizenship was legitimated by reference to the different biologies of women and men, the difference of sex was established not only as a natural fact but as an ontological basis for social and political differentiation. In the age of democratic revolutions, women were marked as political outsiders because of their sex. Feminism was a protest against women’s political exclusion; its goal was to eliminate sex as a reason for women’s exclusion. But it had to make its claims on behalf of women. To the extent that it acted for women, feminism produced the difference it sought to eliminate—drawing attention to exactly the issue of sex that it wanted to banish. Listen to Olympe de Gouges, valiantly balancing the two positions. She designates herself a man of state, Rousseau’s imitator and his better. She points to her femininity: “Oh people, unhappy citizens, listen to the voice of a just and feeling woman.” She concludes the preamble to her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen with the stunning assertion that “the sex superior in beauty as in courage during childbirth recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of woman and citizen.” One of her pamphlets was titled, The Cry of a Wise Man; by a Woman. When she

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put herself forward to defend Louis XVI during his trial, she suggested both that sex ought not to be a consideration (“leave aside my sex”) and that it should be (“heroism and generosity are also women’s portion, and the Revolution offers more than one example of it.”) In a pamphlet denouncing the crimes of Robespierre, she signed herself with the anagram Polyme, described as “an amphibious animal.” “I am a unique animal; I am neither man nor woman. I have all the courage of the one and, sometimes, the weaknesses of the other.” She was neither a man nor a woman, but also both a woman and a man. “I am a woman and I have served my country as a great man.”17 The point was to argue that women qualified for citizenship, that the difference of their sex made no difference. But it was precisely as a woman—that is as someone marked by her difference—that de Gouges had to make the case. Of course, one can hear overtones of irony in de Gouges’ invocation of womanhood, just as one could hear it in Dick Gregory’s book Nigger or in the appropriation of epithets as terms of endearment by members of minority groups: blacks, witches, bitches, queers.18 But that serves more to illustrate my point than to deny it—for the irony is a comment on the futility of cleanly separating negative and positive, defamation and affirmation. Irony is a way of dealing with the fact that the group one is relegated to becomes for purposes of social differentiation and political contestation the group of one’s affirmative identification. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION My argument has been that the tension between group and individual identity cannot be resolved; it is a consequence of the ways in which difference is used to organize social life. It follows from this observation that attempts to enforce policies that choose one position or another—groups or individuals—are not only ill-advised, but impossible to implement. This brings me to current debates about affirmative action. Although there are criticisms to be made about the ways affirmative action has been implemented in its long and contentious history and questions to be raised about how categories of identity were determined—like any policy, affirmative action was not perfect— I want to argue that the assumptions underlying it took the problem I have been analyzing into account in a way that critics of the policy, who insist that merit (an elusive concept at best) be the only ground for including or excluding individuals from jobs or schools or politics,

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do not. In the rest of this essay I want to analyze the presumptions upon which supporters and opponents of affirmative action have built their respective cases. From its inception in the early 1960s as an executive order prohibiting discrimination to its articulation as “affirmative action” in the early 1970s, affirmative action offered not only a set of policy mandates, but a theory about the relationship between individuals and groups, political rights and social responsibilities. This was a theory based on liberalism’s notion that the individual (conceived of as a singular, disembodied abstraction) was the universal category of the human. Affirmative action addressed the fact that social practices had prevented some people from being included in this universal category, and it sought to remove the obstacles to the realization of their individual rights. These obstacles took the form of group identities, the characteristics of which—over some course of history—have been defined as antithetical to individuality. The point of affirmative action was to make it possible for individuals to be treated as individuals, and so as equals. But in order to do this, they had to be treated as members of groups. This posed the question of the relationship between group membership and individual, personal identity in deeply difficult ways. To what extent was the ascription of group identity to an individual the effect of discrimination, erasable by the force of law? To what extent were such identities the essential properties of individuals, at the very center of their physical, cultural, and social being? Could a policy aimed at ending discrimination avoid reifying the social existence of groups, stripping them of their historically contingent political determinations? Once identified as a member of a fixed group, could an individual be perceived apart from it? And at what costs? These were the questions opened by affirmative action policy, and they could not be definitively resolved. Nor can they be resolved by dismantling the policy. It is only by accepting the fact that the relationship between groups and individuals is a matter of a constant process of negotiation in changing historical contexts that we can come to terms with these questions. Affirmative action was from its first articulation a paradoxical policy. In order to end discrimination, it not only called attention to difference, but embraced it. In order to make group identity irrelevant in the treatment of individuals, it reified group identity. There was no other choice. The terms of the liberal contract refer to individuals. The fiction of the disembodied, abstract individual is the great virtue of liberal democratic theory; it is supposed to guarantee formal equality before the law. In society, however, individuals are not equal; their inequality rests on presumed differences among them,

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differences that are not uniquely individualized, but taken to be categorical. Group identity is the result of these attributed categorical distinctions (of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, . . . the list has varied according to time and place, and proliferated in the political climate of the 1990s). Ascriptions of group identity have made it difficult for some individuals to receive equal treatment, even before the law, because their presumed membership in a group precluded perception of them as individuals. (For evidence, we need only look at the discussions in this country of why women could not vote or serve on juries and of why black people could not qualify as citizens or serve in integrated units of the armed forces.) The problem has been that “the individual,” for all its inclusionary possibilities, has been conceived in singular terms and typically figured as a white man. In order to qualify as an individual, a person has had to demonstrate some sameness to that singular figure. (The history of civil rights and women’s rights has involved arguing about what this sameness might mean.) The difficulty here has been that the abstraction of the concept of the individual has masked the particularity of its figuration. Only those unlike the normative individual have been considered different. The relational dimension of difference—that it is established in contrast to a norm—has been masked as well. Instead, difference has been represented as a fundamental or natural group trait while the standardized norm (the white male individual) is considered to have no collective traits at all. Affirmative action took as its premise the abstract individual and the fiction of its universality. It attempted to bridge the gulf between the legal and the social, the rights of individuals and the limits placed upon them because of their presumed membership in a group. But in order to end the problem of exclusion, inclusion had to be aimed at individuals as members of these groups—a tricky proposition. The word “affirmative” was meant to acknowledge and correct the problem: to recognize individuals, one had to identify them as members of groups; to reverse discrimination, one had to practice it (but with a different—a positive—end in view). An exchange, which took place at one of the founding moments of federal affirmative action policy, illustrates the tremendous conceptual difficulty involved in this reversal of discriminatory practice. In 1969 Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Labor George Schultz defended the Philadelphia Plan (which established targets for hiring minorities in the building trades) in reply to hostile questioning from North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin: Sen. Ervin: And your affirmative step is [.  .  . ] not to hire people without regard to race, but to hire them on the basis of race.

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Sec. Schultz: Not to hire them on the basis of race but to take affirmative steps to see to it that you expose yourself to people of various races, and you give them an equal chance at employment, and if you have a system that does not provide you with that kind of choice, and it is possible through recruiting and other methods in the community to give yourself a wider range, you must take affirmative steps to do so, and as I said earlier, I quite agree with you that this means that you pay attention to race. Sen. Ervin: In other words, an affirmative action program within the purview of the Philadelphia Plan is that in order to achieve hiring without regard to matters of race, a contractor must take into consideration matters of race in hiring.19 If Senator Ervin was objecting to the substitution of blacks for whites in construction jobs, he did not consider the exclusive hiring of whites to be a “matter of race.” And Secretary Schultz never actually said that the federal government was intervening because employers (backed by unions in the building trades) had long used racial preferences for whites. Hiring whites was not seen by these men to involve racial preference, but hiring blacks was; not hiring blacks constituted discrimination against them, but it seemed to have nothing to do with racial preferences for whites. Whites were hired as individuals; only blacks were taken to be members of a racial group (and their membership, not their skills and training, disqualified them). Affirmative action understood that blacks would never be hired as individuals (because they weren’t white), so it took up their cause as a group. Still the stated goal was to detach group identity from the consideration of an individual’s qualifications for a job. In order to make race not an issue, however, race had to be named as the problem; in order to be sure that race wasn’t an issue, the racial composition of the labor force (in this case) had to be monitored. As a result, in the application of affirmative action policies, race remained an issue of blackness, not whiteness (just as gender was a question of women, not men). But there was another, contradictory dimension to this as well: although affirmative action advocates did not directly attack the association of universality and individuality with white men, their policies had the effect of particularizing the norm. White men became visible as a statistical category and a social group, and in the different climate of the 1990s began to claim that they, too, were victims of discrimination! This claim could only be made by disregarding the power relationships that affirmative action sought to modify. It is important to note that affirmative action had built into it an analysis of power.

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It addressed the power to discriminate as a structural issue—not as a conscious individual motivation, but as the unconscious effect of these structures. It analyzed power as the result of a long history of discrimination that had produced institutions and actors who took inequality for granted. Affirmative action used the force of the federal government to rectify social inequalities and to guarantee individuals access (to jobs and education) that previously had been denied them on the basis of their gender, as well as their race. While it sought to improve opportunities for individuals, affirmative action was also premised on a vision of social justice. This vision preferred inclusiveness to discrimination, even if that meant the loss of traditional privileges for some individuals. It endorsed equality of opportunity and had real leveling implications, seeking to create communities that were more heterogeneous and less hierarchically organized along the lines of gender and race. I don’t mean to be naively idealistic here and to deny the sheer opportunism that could be involved in some of these programs. Sociologist John David Skrentny shows quite clearly that Richard Nixon cynically endorsed the Philadelphia Plan as a way of undermining the Democratic Party’s constituencies, aiming to split black and white workers and to pit civil rights groups against the organized labor movement, race against class. But I do think that despite calculations of this kind (and I’m sure there were many), notions of fairness, justice, and collective responsibility were appealed to, evoked, and implemented. From this perspective, the paradoxical aspects of affirmative action could be taken positively as an effort to hold in balance competing interests: of rights and needs; of individuals, groups, and the collective good of the nation. Almost thirty years later—in another political climate (characterized by economic constraint and heightened individualism)—this positive reading was called into question, but the paradoxes that affirmative action exposed are still very much in evidence. When the regents of the University of California abolished affirmative action in admissions, hiring, and contracting in 1995, they claimed to be acting in the name of fairness. Governor Pete Wilson called affirmative action a shameful policy: “Racial preferences,” he said, wiping out all considerations of power and history, “are by definition racial discrimination.”20 And the Federal Appeals Court majority in the Hopwood case (which declared unconstitutional the University of Texas Law School’s affirmative action admissions policy) used similar language. The justices found that there was no compelling state interest in achieving racial or ethnic diversity in a student body and that race was a trivial consideration (“the use of race . . . to choose students simply achieves a student body that looks different. Such a criterion is

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no more rational on its own terms than would be choices based upon the physical size or blood type of applicants”). They found further that no clear case of past discrimination (equivalent, for example, to the Japanese internment during World War II) existed at the Texas Law School to justify the policy; that individual rights were violated when minorities were treated “as a group”; and that there was no difference between “benign” and “invidious” racial classification. Most tellingly, the judges rejected the Supreme Court’s acknowledgment, in its 1978 Bakke decision, that redressing the effects of discrimination required balancing opposites. While Justice Blackmun [in Bakke] recognized the tension inherent in using race-conscious remedies to achieve a race-neutral society, he nevertheless accepted it as necessary. Several Justices who, unlike Justices Powell and Blackmun, are still on the Court, have now renounced toleration of this tension.21 Aside from the stunning notion that the judiciary has the power to renounce toleration of a structural tension, this passage is striking for its knowing abandonment of the project of race-neutrality. The tension is left standing in the Court’s discussion. It cannot be resolved because a tension between race-consciousness and race-neutrality (groups and individuals) is integral to the remedy. For achieving equity (genuinely ignoring difference according to the tenets of liberalism) requires naming the groups that have been excluded (recognizing difference) and treating them differently in the future. By refusing to tolerate the tension then, the Court declared its lack of interest in a remedy and, by extension, its lack of belief in the existence of discrimination. Another aspect of the Hopwood case deserves mention. That is the fact that Cheryl Hopwood, a white woman, brought the case to claim her rights as an individual. Here was a member of another of those groups whose interests had been advanced by affirmative action and she was refusing the protection of that policy. Gender, her complaint suggested, was irrelevant; she stood not as a woman but as an individual. Cheryl Hopwood was taken to represent all individuals injured by a policy of group preference, thus demonstrating the capaciousness (and neutrality) of the category of “individual”—but also its whiteness (whiteness as the absence not only of color but of gender). In the university envisioned by Hopwood, there are only individuals. The heterogeneity of the community follows inevitably from the uniqueness of its individual members. The Supreme Court’s opinion

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recognizes that choices among applicants must be made and that diversity of some kinds is permissible: A university may properly favor one applicant over another because of his ability to play the cello, make a down field tackle, or understand chaos theory. An admissions process may also consider an applicant’s home state or relationship to school alumni. Law schools specifically may look at things such as unusual or substantial extracurricular activities in college, which may be atypical factors affecting undergraduate grades. Schools may even consider factors such as whether an applicant’s parents attended college or the applicant’s economic and social background.22 These are taken to be profound differences because they are individualized (and not readily visible), in contrast to the superficial qualities of race which would “simply achieve a student body that looks different.” The notion that the experience of different treatment based on race might affect an individual’s thinking or behavior was explicitly rejected by the Court in these terms: Social scientists may debate how people’s thoughts and behavior reflect their background, but the Constitution provides that the government may not allocate benefits or burdens among individuals based on the assumption that race or ethnicity determines how they act or think.23 By insisting that assessments of individuals be “color-blind,” the Court allows discrimination to continue since it explicitly rules out the possibility that racial preferences for whites might inform admission decisions. In the Court’s version of color-blindness, white is the absence of color, and a student body that looks all the same is not evidence of unfairness. A cartoon by Mike Peters in the Dayton Daily News conveys the point really well. In a sea of white faces, one student comments to another, “Gosh, it works! Since we ended affirmative action here on campus, I never notice anyone’s skin color anymore.”24 The Hopwood decision (and laws like Proposition 209 in California) set the stage for protests against the admission of any black students by whites who believe that blacks by definition lack the “merit” to get into universities or law schools. The appearance of students who “look different” becomes—perversely—a sign of discrimination.

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CONCLUSION If group identities are a fact of social existence and if the possibilities for individual identities rest on them in both a positive and negative sense, then it makes no sense to try to do away with groups or to willfully ignore their existence in the name of the rights of individuals. It makes more sense to ask how processes of social differentiation operate and to develop analyses of equality and discrimination that treat identities not as eternal entities, but as the effects of these social and political processes. In what circumstances did the difference of their sex come to matter in the treatment of women in politics? How did race come to justify forced labor? In what contexts has ethnicity become a primary form of identity? How have laws and other institutional structures produced or transformed boundaries among social groups? What have been the individual and collective forms of resistance to group identities? These questions presume that identity is a complex and contingent process susceptible to change. They also imply that politics is the negotiation of identities and of the terms of difference among them. Indeed, I would argue—inconclusively and enigmatically, some of you might think—that it is precisely where problems are most intractable, least susceptible to clear resolution, that politics matter most. Politics has been described as the art of the possible; I would rather call it the negotiation of the impossible, the attempt to arrive at solutions that— in democratic societies—approximate principles of justice and equality, but that can always only fall short, thus leaving open the opportunity for new formulations, new social arrangements, new negotiations. The best political solutions these days will recognize the dangers of insisting on a final, totalizing solution (either groups or individuals, either equality or difference). In a way, I’m saying that paradoxes of the sort I’ve been describing are the very material out of which politics are constructed and history is made.

Notes Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition 1. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). For a summary of some of the debate on the “theory of gender” in France, see Lucie Delaporte, “Circulaires, manuels, livres: les ministères censurent le mot ‘genre,” Mediapart, February 6, 2014, http://www.mediapart.fr/print/383662. See also, Fassin, Eric, Dans le genre gênant. Politiques d’un concept, in Isabelle Collet and Caroline Dayer, eds, Former envers et contre le genre, pp. 27–43 (Brussels: de Boeck, 2014). On the political uses of gender by the right in Europe, see Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte, eds., Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). 2. Scott, “Gender Studies and Translation Studies: ‘Entre Braguette,’” in Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, eds. Border Crossings: Translation Studies and Other Disciplines (Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2016). 3. Denise Riley, “Am I that Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (London: Macmillan, 1988). 4. Butler, “Gender and Gender Trouble,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Barbara Cassin, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 162. 5. Wendy Brown, “Power After Foucault,” in Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, eds. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb /9780199548439.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199548439-e-3 6. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980); Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994). 7. I have included in this new edition of Gender and the Politics of History a previously unpublished essay, “The Conundrum of Equality,” that I wrote in 1999 about affirmative action. In substance it is still relevant to today’s debates, and it also illustrates the ways in which thinking about gender enables us to think more broadly about the question of difference in history, its uses, enunciations, implementations, justifications, and transformations in the construction of social and political life. 8. Adam Phillips, Terror and Experts (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), cited in Peter Coviello, “Intimacy and Affliction: DuBois, Race, and Psychoanalysis,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 64(1) (March 2003), p. 24. 9. Jean Laplanche, “Gender, Sex and the Sexual,” in Freud and the Sexual (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011), pp. 159–202. 10. Alenka Zupančič, Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Copenhagen: NSU Press, 2013), p. 19. 11. For a fuller discussion, see Joan W. Scott, “Introduction: ‘Flyers into the Unknown,’” in The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 12. Éliane Viennot, La France, les femmes et le pouvoir. L’invention de la loi salique (Ve–XVIe siècle), t.I (Paris: Perrin, 2006); Viennot, La France, les femmes et le pouvoir. Les résistances de la société (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle), t. II (Paris: Perrin, 2008).

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13. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 17. 14. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, vol. 13 in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1995), p. 144. 15. Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” trans. Alan Sheridan, in Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977). See also Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1995; and Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 16. Adam Shatz, “The Nightmare Begins,” London Review of Books Blog, November 10, 2016, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/11/10/adam-shatz/the -nightmare-begins/. 17. Joan W. Scott, comment on Shatz in London Review of Books Blog, ibid. 18. On the Criminal Court, see Valerie Oosterveld, “The Definition of ‘Gender’ in the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court: A Step Forward or Back for International Criminal Justice?” Harvard Human Rights Journal 18 Spring 2005, pp. 55-84; Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, July 17, 1998. On French anti-gender see “La Théoricienne du gender honoré par l’université Bordeaux  3,” a  protest circulated by the Association pour la Fondation de Service politique, a Catholic organization, protesting the award to Butler, www.libertepolitique.com (consulted November 23, 2011). See also Mary Ann Case, “After Gender The Destruction of Man? The Vatican’s Nightmare Vision of the ‘Gender Agenda’ for Law,” Pace Law Review, 31:3 (2011), p. 805. 19. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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10. The Conundrum of Equality 1. All references to de Gouges can be found in Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 2. I have based the examples in this paragraph on Martha Minow, Not Only for Myself: Identity, Politics, and the Law (New York: The New Press, 1997). 3. Cited in ibid, p. 56 4. See R. R. Palmer, “Equality,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner, 1973–74), p. 139. 5. Cited in Darlene Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite and Mary Durham Johnson, eds. Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–95 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 219. 6. Marquis de Condorcet, “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship” (1790), in Selected Writings, edited by Ed. Keith Baker (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), p. 98. 7. Oxford English Dictionary, vol. III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 253. 8. Stephen Lukes, Individualism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 146. 9. Yvonne Knibiehler, “Les Médecins et la ‘Nature féminine’ au temps du Code civil,” Annales E.S.C. 31 (1976), p. 835. 10. Elissa Gelfand, Imagination in Confinement: Women’s Writings from French Prisons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Gelfand cites Cesare Lombroso and G. Ferrero, La Femme criminelle et la prostituée, trans. Louise Meille (Paris: 1896). 11. Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire de la revolution de 1848, vol. II (Paris: 1948), p. 139. 12. Arnold M. Rose, “Minorities,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by David L. Sills, vol. 10 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1972), pp. 365–71. 13. Cited in Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 3. 14. Ibid, pp. 3–4.

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15. References to Pelletier can be found in Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 125–60. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Dick Gregory, Nigger (New York: Dutton, 1964). 19. John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 200. 20. Sarah Kershaw, “Regents, at Unruly Meeting, Vote to Retain Policy on Bias,” New York Times, January 19, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/19/us /regents-at-unruly-meeting-vote-to-retain-policy-on-bias.html. 21. Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F. 3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996). 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Mike Peters, Cartoon, Dayton Daily News, 1999.

Index

Abelove, Henry, 81–82 Académie des sciences morales et politiques, 117, 118, 141, 149 Access, questions of, 178–79; and difference, 197–98 Adam, Juliette Lamber, 140 Adams, Herbert Baxter, 180, 182, 183–84 Affirmative action programs, 172, 185, 200, 207–214 Albert (19th-century French worker), 120 Alexander, Sally, 39–40, 64, 85, 87 American Historical Association (AHA), 180–90, 192; women in, 192, 244n2, 245n15, 246n24, 246n28 American Marxist-feminists, 36 American women: historians, 178–98; ideology of, 20 Ames, Jessie Daniel, 44 Analytic category, gender as, 41–50 Anarchists, and gender relationships, 23, 48 Anarchists of Andalusia (Kaplan), 23 Anglo-American school of psychoanalytic theory, 37 Antagonism, sexual, 39–40, 64 Antifeminism, 230n2; among historians, 55

Apocalyptic movements, 76, 77 Appiah, Anthony, 201 Appièceures, 97–100, 127–28, 234n12 Applewhite, Harriet, 23 Artisans, 68, 73–75, 93, 130–31 Artistic creation, gender coding, 82–83 Associationalism, 93 Association Fraternelle des Ouvrières Lingères, 105 Atelier, L’, 114, 145, 238n29 Auden, W. H., 82 Audiences for feminist history, 17 Audiganne, Armand, 149 Authoritarian regimes, and gender relationships, 47 Barrett, Michèle, 36 Beale, Howard K., 184, 247n24 Beard, Mary, 189, 192 Beecher, Catharine, 44 Benefit societies, female, 74 Benjamin, Jessica, 36 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, 185, 190–91 Blake, William, 80, 82 Blanc, Louis, 96, 104–5, 119, 120 Bodily differences, 45; meanings for, 2 Bodin, Jean, 35 Bonald, Louis de, 47 Bourdieu, Pierre, 45

254 Bourgeoisie: feminism and, 79–80; 19th-century French views, 110–11 Building trades, 19th-century France, 95, 131, 132 Buret, Eugène, The Poverty of the Working Classes, 146 Burke, Edmund, 46 Butler, Josephine, 23 Butler, Judith, ix–x Bynum, Caroline, 45 Cabet, Étienne, 94, 95, 108, 109 Canonical texts, analysis of, 69, 89 Capitalism, 86; feminist theories, 35; imagery of, 77; Marxist views, 73; 19th-century French views on, 108–11, 119, 126–27; and workingclass politics, 76, 93; and working women, 74 Carlile, Richard, followers of, 78 Case studies in women’s history, 16, 30 Caucuses, of women professionals, 193 Causality, 4, 5, 10, 31, 42; in labor history, 45, 94; in theories of moral development, 40 Cavaignac, Louis Eugène, 117 CCWHP (Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession), 193 Change: processes of, 42, 49; theories of, 66, 69–70 Chartism, 56–67 Chefs d’industrie, 126–27 Cheney, Edward, 189 Childbirth, 144; and subordination of women, 33 Child development, and gender identity, 37 Child labor laws, 19th-century France, 118 Chodorow, Nancy, 37–38, 227n24 Cities, 19th-century France, 141–42, 147; morality in, 150–51 Citizenship, French, 107–8, 202–203, 207 Class, 30, 56–66; Chartist concept, 61; feminist histories, 19; formation, questions of, 88–90; and gender, 66, 79; Marxist concepts, 68, 69–70;

Index masculine representation, 62–64, 72; 19th-century concepts, 48; and sexuality, 136; as sociological category, 84; Thompson’s idea, 71–72, 88; universal category, 60 Class conflict, 19th-century France, 121 Class consciousness, 56, 70, 79, 88; of Chartism, 62; and domesticity, 74; Marxist concept, 68; questions of, 85; Thompson’s view, 76; of women, 64, 79 Clinton, Hillary, xiv Coding, gender-related, 63; of politics, 83, 86; of social terminology, 48 Collective identity, 5, 6, 25, 60, 61, 87; of women historians, 193 Collective political action of female artisans, 73–75, 104–7 Committee of Women Historians (CWH), 185, 193 Competition from women, in labor movement, 64; male fears of, 149 Confection, 98–99, 103–4 Conflict: analysis of, 9; in history, 191; sexual, 85–86 Consciousness: of class, 56–57, 70–72, 76; post-structuralist views, 6; questions of, 87–88 Consciousness-raising, 34 Constituent Assembly, 19th-century France, 120 Consumption, and female sexuality, 143 Conundrum of Equality, 199–214 Cooperative producer’s associations, 95, 103; female, 105–6 Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession (CCWHP), 193 Cottage religion, 77 Couturières, 103 Cross-collaboration of gender differences, 25, 32, 49, 94 Cry of a Wise Man; by a Woman, The (pamphlet), 207–208 Cults, religious, 76–77 Cultural determination of gender differences, 25, 32, 49, 94

Index Culture, female, 16, 195; feminist histories, 20 Curti, Merle, 185 Daubié, Julie-Victoire, 140, 154; La Femme Pauvre au XIXe Siècle, 152–54, 159–62 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 23, 29, 45, 247n28 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen of 1791 (de Gouges), 199, 207 de Condorcet, Marquis, 203 Deconstruction, 7–9, 41; of class formation process, 89–90; as a political strategy, 9, 176 Definitions, and differentiation, 59–60 Degler, Carl, 20, 195 de Gouges, Olympe, 199, 207–208 de Lauretis, Teresa, 5–6, 25, 39 Democracy, 47 Democratic centralism, 81 Democratic revolution, feminist histories, 19 Demographic crises, and gender relationships, 49 Dependency of women, 19th-century French views, 129, 134, 143–48, 162 Deroin, Jeanne, 109 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 7, 41 Descriptive approach to history, 31 Descriptive usage of gender, 33 Difference: in American society, 225n34; inequality and, 50, 172, 176–77, 179; sexual, 2, 25, 95, 195–98 Differentiation: in conceptual languages, 45; and construction of meaning, 59–60; by gender, 60 “Dilemma of difference,” 168, 196–98 Disciplines, 8; politics of, 10, 179, 198 Discourse: of Chartism, 66; of class formation, 88; of French labor history, 94–95; political, 56, 57; of political economy, 140–41, 153, 162–63; socialist-feminist, 71; theory of, 54, 67, 88 Discrimination, 4; in employment, 244–45n12; in history profession,

255 184–85, 192, 193–96; protest against, 207–208 Division of labor, 6, 74; Marxist theories, 35; in 19th century, 65, 102, 148 Divorce, political theory, 47 Documents, assessment of, 8, 137–38 Domesticity, 79; ideology of, 20, 43, 157–58; women and, 73–74; and work identity, 104 Domestic service, study of, 246n11 Dual systems analysis, 35, 86–87 DuBois, W. E. B., 185 du Camp, Maxime, 140 Dussard, Hippolyte, 139 Economic conditions: 19th-century France, 119, 122–24; and morality, 147; and prostitution, 142; regulation of, 128 Economic history, feminist questions, 21–22 Economic policies, 19th-century France, 149 Economic relationships, causality, 21, 35, 69–70, 94 Economic systems: and class, 30; and gender relationships, 35 Education, and gender identity, 43 Egalitarianism, 172–73, 187; and sexual differences, 83 Eighteenth-century political theories, 76 Employers, 19th-century France, 127 Employment: in factories, 148–52; gender relationships, 49; 19thcentury France, 131; sexual differences in, 169; social history, 21–22 Engels, Friedrich, Origins of the Family, 35 English Marxist-feminists, 36, 83–87 English women’s movement, feminist studies, 23 Enquête industrielle (1848; France), 119, 120–21 Entrepreneurs: 19th-century France, 123, 126–27; female, 134 Epistemological theories, 4, 9–11, 53, 55

256 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Sears case, 167–77 Equality: as absolute principle, 202– 204; and difference, 196–98; during French Revolution, 202; of labor, 19th-century France, 100; and social history, 75 Equality, of women, 3, 187–88; 19thcentury French views, 106–7, 161–62; political aspects, 167–68, 173; questions of, 169–77. See also Inequality Ervin, Sam, 210–211 Experience, 4, 5; historical significance, 20, 29; and identity, 5, 34, 56; moral development theories, 40; of social class, 56, 61, 69–70, 89, 231n7; of women, 18, 20 Expressivity: and class, 79; and politics, 82 Factory workers, 19th-century French views, 131–32, 148–52 Family: Chartist organization, 65; as utopian theme, 93–94; workingclass roles, 65 Family, and labor conflict, 96–98; 19th-century France, 101–2, 104, 105 Family, 19th-century France, 108–11, 129–33, 146, 147, 154, 155, 158, 160; and moral conduct, 134 Family, relationships, 47; and gender identity, 38 Fathers, 38; economic value, 145 Female Reform Societies, 73 Feminine identity, 38; 19th-century work-identity, 104, 107 Feminine imagery, and social movements, 77 Femininity, 19th-century French views, 109, 111, 156, 158 Feminism: categorization of women and, and group identifications, 207; and history, 3, 10–11; 19thcentury views, 79–80, 104–8; and post-structuralism, 4; and socialist politics, 84–85

Index Feminist historians, 9, 18, 25, 29, 30, 33, 41, 53, 84–87; theoretical formulations, 30–41 Feminist history, 10–11, 26–27 Feminist politics, 6; in 1970s, 194 Feminist Review, 219n2 Feminization of labor, male fears of, 149 Femme Pauvre au XIXe Siècle, La (Daubié), 152–54, 159–62 Femmes isolées, 142–43, 146–48 Filmer, Robert, 46 Firestone, Shulamith, 33–34 Fix, Theodore, 150 Foucault, Michel, x, 2, 4, 36, 59, 113; The History of Sexuality, 23, 26 Fourier, Charles, 93–94 France, 19th-century: statistical survey of labor, 113–38; views of women workers, 139–63; working-class movement, 93–112 France, Revolutionary, sexual discrimination, 23 France, suffrage movement, 19 Fraternité, 93 Freeman, Alice, 189 Free trade treaties, 152 Frégier, Louis, 113–14 French Revolution, xii French school of psychoanalytic theory, 37 Freud, Sigmund, theories of, 85–86 Fundamentalist religious groups, 43 Garment industry, 19th-century France, 95–112, 128–29 Gay, Desirée, 105, 106–7 Geertz, Clifford, 41 Gender, ix–x, 2, 6, 25, 33; Chartism and, 63; and class, 50, 60, 66, 134; definitions, 42–45, 55; ideology of, 86–87; indeterminacy of, x, xi; International Criminal Court on, xv; French labor movement, 111–12; 19th-century distinctions, 102; relationships, questions of, 49–50; sex differences and , xi; use of term, 28–33 Gender, and history, 6–7, 9–10, 20; of labor, 53–56; social, 4, 22; of women, 22–23

Index Gender, categories, 49; analysis of, 175; analytic, 31, 41–50, 53, 54–55; social, 32 Gendered coding of social terminology, 48 Genealogy, Foucaultian perspective of, 85 Gilligan, Carol, 37, 40 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 44 Glaize, Auguste-Barthélemy, 139–40 Godelier, Maurice, 45 Government investigations of labor, 19th-century France, 119, 122, 142 Gregory, Dick, 208 Group identity, 204–207, 210; feminism and, 207; politics of, 201 Hall, Jacqueline, 44 Hardy, Thomas, 72–73 Hartmann, Heidi, 35 Hause, Steven, 19 Hericourt, Jenny d’, 140 “Her-story,” 18–21 Hickman, Emily, 190 Hierarchies, 4, 7, 48, 179, 198 Higham, John, History, 189, 191, 194 Hill, Mary, 44 Hiring places, 19th-century France, 131 Hiring process, 244n5 Historians, 7; American women, 178–98 History, 2–3, 8, 178–79; feminist rewritings, 17–18; “from below,” 69; and gender, 6–7; and identity, 83–84; new approach, 29–30; organization of knowledge, 9–10; scholarship, 244n2; study of, 8, 42, 182–83; teaching of, 181–83; of women, 15–27, 175, 192, 194–95 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 23, 25–26 History Workshop, 219n2 Hobsbawm, Eric, 77 Home-based work: and labor conflict, 96–102; women and, 103 Hufton, Olwen, 241n12 Human agency, 42; in class formation, 70; Marxist concept, 68 Human capital, 144–45 Humanist politics, English, 68

257 Hunt, Lynn, 24 Hyslop, Beatrice, 186, 192 Icarian movement, 95 Idealizations of women, 109, 156, 158 Identity, 6, 25; categories of, 4, 62, 86; construction of, role of history, 83–84; and difference, 7; and experience, 5, 34, 56; female, as workers, 104, 106, 107, 108; 19th-century workers, 95, 96, 97; occupational, 179; political, 88; psychoanalytic theories, 37–39; of women historians, 193; of working class, 56, 69–70, 88 Ideology: of domesticity, 157–58; of gender, 86–87 Independence of women, in labor movement, 73. See also Dependency of women Industrial cities, morality in, 150–51 Industrial growth, 152 Industrialization: and morality, 153–62; and sexual difference, 159 Industrie, 126 Industry, 19th-century France, 119; views of, 126–27 Inequality: Chartist ideas, 61; end of, 67; historical treatment, 225n32. See also Equality Interdisciplinary work, 8–9 Interest groups, 5, 193; New Deal, 191–92 International Criminal Court, xv Irigaray, Luce, 50 Islamic political theory, 46 Itinerant workers, 19th-century France, 132 Jameson, Fredric, 68 Jameson, J. Franklin, 180, 181 Jewelry workers, 19th-century France, 130–31 Johnson, Barbara, 7 Jones, Gareth Stedman. See Stedman Jones, Gareth Journal des Economistes, Le, 141, 143 Journal des Tailleurs, Le, 100 Journals, feminist, 219n2 Journeymen, in 19th century, 97–98 July Monarchy, 125; overthrow of, 120

258 Kaplan, Temma, Anarchists of Andalusia, 23 Keeney, Barnaby, 246n20 Kellogg, Louise Phelps, 191, 248n42 Kelly, Joan, 22; “The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory,” 35 Kennedy, John F., 193 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 169–75 Kinship systems, and gender identity, 43–44 Knowledge, 2; and political identity, 6; production of, x, 7, 8–11; of sexual difference, 6; about women, 16 Labor, 19th-century France, 119–20, 126–27; organization of, and family, 96–102 Labor historians, politics of, 67 Labor history, feminist questions, 21–22, 53–54, 71, 83 Labor market: female, 19th-century French views, 129; and gender identity, 43 Labor movements: English, 62; French, 111–12, 113, 117; and masculine representation of class, 64–65; view of feminism, 79–80 Lacan, Jacques, 37, 38; theories of, 85–86, 249n4 Language: conceptual, differentiation in, 45; and gender identity, 37, 38–39, 42, and reality, 57; theories of, 53–56, 59 Languages of Class (Stedman Jones), 56–67 Language theories, 53–60; and class, 66–67; and labor history, 53–56; radicals and, 230n1 Laplanche, Jean, xi Lefort, Claude, xiii Legitimizing function of gender, 45 Levy, Darlene, 23 Lewis, Jane, 87 Liaisons dangereuses, xii Liddington, Jill, 19 Lingères, 103 Link, Arthur, 184 Literature, and study of history, 8 Living conditions of 19th-century French workers, 132, 135, 240n77. See also Family

Index Location of work, 96–103 Locke, John, 46; theory of property, 62–63 Lombroso, Cesare, 204 Loomis, Louise, 190 Love, 19th-century French views, 109, 156 Luddite movement, 77, 81 Lukes, Stephen, 203 Luxembourg Commission, 120 Luxury, taste for, 135; and prostitution, 142–43 Machinery, women and, 148–52 MacKinnon, Catharine, 34 Making of the English Working Class, The (Thompson), 62, 68–90 Male domination, theories of, 33–34 Marginalization of women, 163; in American Historical Association, 184 Marriage: 19th-century French views, 110; political analogies, 46–47 Martin, Biddy, 44 Marx, Karl, and prostitution, 242n22 Marxism: class theories, 30; feminism and, 16, 33, 34–37; social history, 68; Thompson and, 69–70; and working-class history, 85 Masculine identity, 38 Masculine representation of class, 62–64, 72, 76 Masculinity, psychoanalytic theories, 38–39 Mason, Tim, 23 Masons, 19th-century France, 132 Maternity, and morality, 153–54 Meaning, 7, 66; for bodily difference, 2; and class formation, 89; history and, 9, 42; post-structuralist views, 4–5; theories of construction, 53, 55, 59–60 Mechanization, 19th-century France, 148–52; and women’s employment, 154–55 Medical science, feminist views, 19 Medievalists, 248–49n43 Medieval spirituality, study of, 45 Methodism, orthodox, 76, 77 Michelet, Jules, 140

Index Middle class, 240n82; feminism as, 79–80 Milkman, Ruth, 167–68, 172 Milliners, 19th-century France, 134 Ministry of labor, demand for, 120 Minority groups, 205 Minow, Martha, 168, 201 Moniteur Industriel, Le, 117 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 28 Moral development, theories of, 37, 40; 19th-century French, 129–30, 132–33 Morality, 19th-century France, 133–37; and economics, 147; and industrialization, 153–62; and mechanization, 149–50; of men, 160–61; of working women, 143, 162 Moralization of working classes, 152 Moreau, Jacques-Louis, 203 Morris, William, 80–82 Motherhood, views of, 153–62 National Organization of Women, 163 National workshops, 19th-century France, 104–5, 120; protests at closing, 117 Natural laws, economic, 148 Natural rights, Chartism and, 62 Nazi Germany, gender studies, 23 Neilson, Nellie, 181, 185–86, 189, 191, 248–49n43 Nevins, Allan, 186 New Left, 79; and feminism, 80; scholarship of, 69 New Left Review, 36 Nigger (Gregory), 208 Nineteenth century: female culture, 20; socialists, 47–48; union movements, 62; working-class politics, 76, 93–112. See also France, 19th-century Norris, Jill, 19 Nuclear family, feminist views, 19 Objectification, sexual, of women, 34 Object-relations theory, 37–38, 227n24 O’Brien, Mary, 33 Occupational identities, 93–108, 179

259 Organisation du Travail, 119 Origins of the Family (Engels), 35 Orthodox Methodism, 76, 77 “Outside the Whale” (Thompson), 75, 82 Ouvrière, L’ (Simon), 140, 152–58 Owen, Robert, 76–77 Paine, Tom, 78 Palmer, George Herbert, 189 Paradox, 202–208; definition, 201–202 Parent-Duchâlet, Alexandre, 114, 142 Paris, 19th-century garment trades, 95–112 Paris chamber of commerce, 116–18, 137; statistical survey, 122–38 Participatory democracy, 70; in Luddite movement, 81 Particularity of women, 24–25, 183, 187 Paternal responsibility, 161–62 Patriarchy, 19, 86; theories of, 33–35 Pelletier, Madeleine, 207 Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, 1 Pénélope, 219n2 Perlman, Selig, 185 Phallus, and gender identification, 38–39 Philadelphia Plan, 210 Phillips, Adam, xi Physical difference, historical theories, 34 Piecework, 19th-century France, 96, 99, 103–4, 128–29, 131 Pinchbeck, Ivy, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 74 Pluralism: feminists and, 3; and power, 176, 196 Poetry, and politics, 81–82 Political action of women, 73; artisans, 75, 104–7; feminist strategies, 175–77, 187–93 Political aspects of feminist history, 3, 27, 175–77, 197 Political behavior of women, 75–76, 79 Political economy, science of, 124–37, 140–41; and poverty, 242n24; and wages, 241n19; and women’s issues, 141–63

260 Political history, 46; and gender difference, 25–26; questions of, 49–50 Politics, 5, 7, 87, 183; and deconstruction, 9; discourse of, 94–95; and domesticity, 74; feminist, 6, 10–11, 16; feminist studies, 23–24; and gender, 46–47, 48–49, 83; group identity, 201; Marxist concept, 68; and poetry, 81–82; post-structuralist, 9–10; of power relationships, 25–26; Thompson’s view, 76 Population statistics, 115 Positivism, feminists and, 3 Post-structuralism, 1, 4–5, 7–9, 37, 228n46; historians and, 54; and working-class history, 85 Poverty, 19th-century France, 139–40, 242n24; and morality, 150–51; and prostitution, 142–43; of women, 146–47, 160–61 Poverty of the Working Classes, The (Buret), 146 Power: and feminist politics, 6; and gender, 42–49; inequalities, 30; and knowledge, 2; political, 46–49, 57, 182, 183; statistical reports and, 115; studies of, 23–26; subjection of women, 34 Powers of Desire, 36 Pressure group of women historians, 190 Procacci, Giovanna, 147 Producers, Statistique definition, 126–27 Production: masculine representation, 78; political economy and, 144–45; and sexual relationships, 35; and socioeconomic systems, 86 Productive activity, Statistique definition, 126 Productive relations: 19th-century France, 93; and class, 69–70 Progress, 182, 191; of history, 188 Progressive history, 191 Property, of labor, Chartists’ idea, 62–63 Prostitution: Marx and, 242n22; 19thcentury views, 109–10, 135, 136, 142–43, 146–47, 150, 159–60

Index Protectionism, 19th-century France, 133 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 140 Psychoanalytical theory, 33, 37–39, 44, 227n24; and sociological theory, 85–87 Radicalism, 78, 230n1 Rancière, Jacques, 206 Rationalism, 76, 79–80; and romanticism, 80, 82; women and, 86; of working class, 81 Ratté, Lou, 44 Ready-made garment industry, 19thcentury France, 95, 98–100, 103–4, 128–29 Reagan administration, and affirmative action, 172 Reality: and language, 57–58; 19thcentury French, 136–37 Reform, social, 19th-century France, 118–19, 121 Reform Bill of 1832, 62 Regulation, 19th-century French views: of economy, 128; of workers, 132 Religious sects, 43, 76–77 Renaissance, feminist histories, 19 Representation: political, 115; systems of, 88 Repression, 7; 19th-century France, 132; and gender identity, 38–39 Reproduction: histories of, 16; as Marxist production, 35–36; and patriarchy, 33–34; political economy and, 144–45 Revolution, 70; and gender relationships, 49 Revolutionary politics, poetry and, 81 Reybaud, Louis, 149 Rights of Man (Paine), 78 Right to work, 19th-century France, 105–6, 107, 120 Riley, Denise, ix–x, 40, 87, 141 Roberts, Mary Louise, xv Robinson, Florence Porter, 189–90 Roles: gender, 19th-century France, 157–58; of women, 43, 65 Rondot, Natalis, 238–39n31 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 14 Rosaldo, Michelle, 42 Rose, Willie Lee, 185

Index Rosenberg, Rosalind, 168–74 Rose Report, 185, 193 Rubin, Gayle, 44 Rûche Populaire, La, 114 Saint-Simonians: garment workers, 95; and marriage, 110; representations of women, 109 Salmon, Lucy Maynard, 181–84, 187–89, 246n11, 246n15 Salomé, Lou Andreas, 44 Satan, masculine imagery, 77 Say, Horace Emile, 124–25, 132 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 124–25, 126, 135, 143–44; Traité d’économie politique, 126, 128, 129 Say, Jean-Baptiste Léon, 125 Schor, Naomi, 171 Schultz, George, 210–211 Scientific socialism, 85 Seamstresses, 19th-century France, 102–8, 127, 129, 135–36 Sears, Roebuck & Company, sexdiscrimination case, 167–77 Second Republic, France, 120, 125 Sects, religious, 76–77 Self, sense of (in object-relations theory), 38 Separate sphere, female, 20–21, 157– 58, 195; 19th-century French views, 160; and women’s studies, 32 Servants, and prostitution, 241n12 Sex-discrimination case, 167–77 Sex roles, x, 32 Sexual antagonism, 39–40, 85–86 Sexual difference, x–xi, 4, 25; among historians, 179–98; and class, 60, 66, 88–89; and industrialization, 159; knowledge of, 2, 6; and meaning, 55; 19th-century French views, 154; political aspects, 167–68; questions of, 75, 169–77; social organization of, 2, 6, 10; in wages, 143–48 Sexual imagery, and social movements, 76–77 Sexuality, female, 146–47; 19thcentury French views, 134–36, 143, 152, 153–62; feminist histories, 23; political theories, 34, 36

261 Shatz, Adam, xiii Simon, Jules, L’Ouvrière, 140, 152–58 Single working women, 19th-century French views, 135–36 Sinha, Mrinalina, 44 Sklar, Kathryn, 44 Small businesses, 19th-century France, 127 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 20 Social class. See Class Social Contract (de Gouges), 199 Social disorders, and factory work, 149–50 Social experience. See Experience Social history, 6, 8; and gender inequality, 4; of labor, feminist, 19; and women’s history, 21–22 Social investigators, 19th-century France, 118–19 Socialism, 47–48, 81, 83, 126; and Chartism, 62; and family, 108; and feminism, 78–80, 84–85; and prostitution, 146 Socialist feminism, 34–37, 71, 83–85, 104 Socialist humanism, 70 Socialization, and sexual difference, 173–74 Social organization, theories of, 94 Social reality: and gender relationships, 35, 39, 83; and language, 56–58 Social reform, 19th-century France, 113–14, 118–19, 121; women’s demands, 105–7 Social relationships, and gender, 2, 42–43, 46 Social republic, 19th-century French ideas, 107 Social revolution, 117 Social value of women, 156–57, 160 Society of Political Economy, France, 125, 141 Southcott, Joanna, 72, 76, 78; male followers, 86 Spirituality, medieval, study of, 45 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 45 State: radical views, 58; regulation of economy, 128 Statistical reports, 113–15, 237n6

262 Statistique de l’industrie à Paris (1847–1848), 116–18, 122–38, 142 Stedman Jones, Gareth, Languages of Class, 56–67 Stoller, Robert, ix Strategies, feminist, 175–77, 187–93, 246–47n29 Subject, historical, 183; Universal Man as, 189; women as, 9, 17, 18–22, 25, 38, 44, 194–95 Subordination of women: and economic systems, 35; patriarchal theories, 33; and political dominance, 47; sexual objectification, 34 Sue, Eugène, 114 Suffrage, universal, for men, 63, 120; exclusion of women, 106, 108 Suffrage movement, feminist histories, 19 Symbols and gender, 43, 49, 77 Tailors, 19th-century France, 97–102, 107, 127 Taylor, Barbara, 77, 84–85, 87 Taylor, James, 181–82 Teaching of history, 181–83; discrimination in, 246n17, 246n20; endowed chairs for women, 189–90 Textile industry, 19th-century France, 148 Textile workers, English women, 73 Theory: analysis of gender, 33; debates about, 41–42; epistemological, 4, 9–11, 53–55; feminist, 30–41; in history study, 3, 7–9; of language, 53–60; Marxist, 16, 30, 34–37, 69–70, 85; of patriarchy, 33–35; political, 34, 36, 62–63, 76, 128–29; poststructuralist, 1, 4–5, 7–9, 37, 44, 54, 85; psychoanalytic, 37–40, 85–86; utopian, 47–48, 65, 76–77, 80–81, 81, 84–85, 93, 110–11 Third Republic, France, 137 Thistlewood, Arthur, 78 Thistlewood, Susan, 78–79 Thompson, E. P.: The Making of the English Working Class, 62, 68–90; “Outside the Whale,” 75, 82

Index Thompson, Mildred, 185 Totem and Taboo (Freud), xiii Trades, sexual discrimination, 242n35 Trade unions, female, 73 Traité d’économie politique (J.-B. Say), 126, 128, 129 Tribune des Femmes, La, 95 Tristan, Flora, 119 Trump, Donald, xiii–xiv Unconscious, 37, 85; and gender identity, 39 Union movements, in 19th century, 62; women in, 64–65 Union ouvrière, 119 Unions, female, 73 United States, women’s history, 18 Universality: of class, 60; of sexual difference, 40–41 Universal Man, 72, 183, 189; fiction of, 197; and particularity of women, 18; particularization of, 179, 196; women and, 24–25, 186–87, 192 Universal manhood suffrage, 63, 120; exclusion of women, 106, 108 University of California, 212 University of Michigan, 189 University of Wisconsin, 190 Urbanization, 19th-century France, 147 Utopianism, 47–48, 65, 76–77, 80–81, 82; and feminism, 84–85; French, 93, 110–11; use of gender, 63 Valenze, Deborah, 77 Values, social, women and, 156–57, 160 Victorian ideology of domesticity, 43, 157 Viennot, Eliane, xii Villermé, Louis, 118, 149–50, 153 Voix des Femmes, La, 107 Wages, and equality of women, 106–7 Wages, political theories, 128–29, 241n19 Wages, and prostitution, 142 Wages, and sexual difference, 64, 169; 19th-century French views, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160

Index Wages, unequal, 175; 19th-century France, 103–5, 129, 148, 161, 162; political economy and, 143–48 Walkowitz, Judith, 23 Walzer, Michael, 172 War, gender relationships, 48 Washerwomen, 19th-century France, 131 Welfare state, gender relationships, 47 Wheeler, Anna, 72 Williams, Mary, 191 Wilson, Pete, 212 Wilson, Woodrow, 188 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 72, 78 Women: ahistorical notion, 40; as category, 87–88; Chartism and, 65; class representations, 63–64; exclusion from citizenship, 202–203, 207; historians, 178–98, 245n2, 248n37, 248n38, 248n42, 248–49n43; historical invisibility, 179; historical representation, 183; history of, 3, 15–27, 30–31, 196; and labor movement, 63; in The Making of the English Working Class, 72–79; 19th-century French views, 134–35, 144–48, 155; in protest movements, 95–96; representation, 72; as subject of history, 9, 17, 18–22, 25, 53, 84, 194–95; as wage earners, 21–22, 73, 104 Women’s caucuses, 193 Women’s colleges, 181 Women’s movement, 19 Women’s suffrage, 187–88 Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (Pinchbeck), 74

263 Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own, 14 Words, and meaning construction, 54. See also Language theories Work, and class consciousness, 79, 94 Workers, history of, 21–22, 175; labor movement and, 64. See also Working women Workers, female, 19th-century France, 106, 140–63; in factories, 148–52; and morality, 162; protests, 117; representation of family, 109–10; single, 135–36; views of, 126–28, 130, 132, 134, 155–57; wages of, 143–46; work identity, 108, 123 Working class, 55, 60, 206, 240n82; Chartism and, 61, 66; coding of terms, 48; English, women in, 68–90; French, 19th century, 93– 112, 118–19, 136; identity of, 88; masculine representation, 63–65, 72, 76; morality of, 150–52; politics of, 76, 81; questions of formation, 89–90; theories of, 56–67; women, political history, 19 Working women, political economists and, 141–63. See also Workers, female Workplace: 19th-century French views, 131–32; division of labor, 74 Workshops, national, for women, 104–5 Wright, Susannah, 78 Writings on women’s issues, 19thcentury France, 140 Yeo, Eileen, 65 Zupančič, Alenka, xi

gender and culture A SERIES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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