Women's History

Scott's discussion of women's history as an evolving phenomenon charts the development of patterns of ideas governing the practice of the discipline. Initiated by the feminist social critique that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement and shaped by the gradual refinement of perceptions of the place of women in history and of women as practitioners of historical commentary, women's history has been redefined and reconceptualized several times. The history of women's history, as Scott explains it, touches not only on events of the past in which women participated but also on the assumptions that historians can or should bring to studying them--and above all on the methods that historians who treat of women's experience can or should bring to the historicizing enterprise. Inevitably, because women's history as a discipline did not take shape in a social or cultural vacuum, the real-world sociopolitical and economic position, experience, and careers of the practitioners of women's history became relevant. Scott cites longstanding "prejudices against women in the learned professions" (45), which was mirrored by contempt for the rethinking of existing issue fronts or the creation of innovative ones in the content of history. Meanwhile, women's history did not evolve into a unitary lump but was fraught with ambiguity, "for it is at once an innocuous supplement to and a radical replacement for established history" (49). Scott insists that the "contradictory logic of the supplement" (

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of unassailable law or 'truth'" (52). Scott adds that such attitudes are an index of "unequal power relation within the discipline" and explains that, in consequence, she and other advocates of professionalizing and legitimating women's history as a discipline sought during the 1970s to disengage it from the ideological features of a feminist political agenda while collapsing it into what was being called social history. One effect was that women's history "confirmed the reality of the category 'women' . . . it inherent needs, interests and characteristics" (54). Another was to lump all women into one category without regard to their in-group differences. Scott's view of that dynamic is that the antagonism fostered by women's critique of the structural inequities of history as both past understood and as academic discipline helped the feminist political and critical standpoint develop and at the same time "implicitly affirmed the essential nature of the binary opposition male versus female" (54). While women's entry into the discipline of history forced reconceptualization of subject priorities, it also tended to highlight the war between the sexes as the eternal core of experience. However, reconceptualization was far from an

Category: History - W