Gender and the Politics of History (Preface and Introduction)

AND THE OF 3 0 t h a n n i v e r s a ry e d i t i o n

30th Anniversary Edition

joan wallach scott

columbia university press new york

Contents

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition Acknowledgments Introduction

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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

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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