As a relatively new concept, the category ‘gender’ has been the focus of ongoing debate. There is divisive material from historians in the question as to whether it should be explored as a category of experience or a linguistic construction. During the 1980s, debates began to disrupt the epistemological basis on which previous feminist scholarship had been founded, specifically the idea that experience offers us a direct portrayal of the past. The study of how ‘gender’ was formulated in different social contexts began to expand, with gender research moving away from women’s experiences and towards the roots of masculine and feminine identities. Experience as a category was thus dismissed by poststructuralist thought as outdated, instead replaced with the belief that the focus of historical research should be centred around the rhetoric which forms our experiences.
It is important to acknowledge the issues surrounding gender’s heavily westernised roots, especially as modern European and North American work dominates the field. The binary between men and women has not always had the same cultural resonance as it does today in Western society. This essay intends to show some of the issues surrounding the linguistic constructs of gender, whilst aiming to refute the suggestion that gender is either a linguistic construct or a category of experience. Lyndal Roper’s attempt to understand gender as both discursively constructed but also as a real lived experience shall be supported, as gender historians seem to be valuing experience as a category in post-post structuralism.
Laura Lee Downs confidently attributes gender to be a category of experience. She argues ‘the discursively constructed conceptions of masculine and feminine have exerted enormous force in shaping both lives and opportunities’, and only those who belong to the biologically and socially constructed group identity ‘can know what it means to be a woman’. Gender experience is highly politicised, and she considers it to be a defensive mechanism, ‘designed to protect fragile entities from the blustering incursions of white men’. Women’s emancipation groups have historically organised powerful movements, which, according to Joan W. Scott, counters the ‘relentless barrage of myth about democracy and equality in a land of opportunity with their own experiences, put forward as a valid base for political action’. Women’s experience in political oppression thus serves as a historical tool effective at ‘revealing the multiple oppressions endemic in a social and political structure which cannot acknowledge its own deeply entrenched hierarchies’. The process of documenting experience simultaneously serves to raise consciousness in order to help to implement change today and end the historically systematic oppression of women. Therefore, I would disagree with Denise Riley’s claims that ‘women’s experience’ can never be dismantled, as it constitutes the very basis of the feminist movement, which has evidently improved lives worldwide.
In the rise of post structuralist thought, gender historians have been divided on the usefulness of experience. However, it is important to remember gender history emerged from feminist groups’ telling of women’s experience. Joan Hoff expresses her concern with American poststructuralism’s impact on the roots of women’s history from its insistence that ‘there is no experience outside of the ways that language constructs it’. Betty Freidan’s classic, ‘The Feminine Mystique’, is a case in the point of the importance of experience. For her, domesticity was the main mode of gender oppression. She called upon women to find jobs outside the home and become economically liberated from their husbands. However, ‘women’ for her included white and middle class, falsely grouping all women into her category of gendered oppression. Whilst this experience was replicated for some, for single, working class or African American women, working outside of the home was already the norm to financially support their families. Even during the 1920s, figures suggest that 28% of married working-class women were active in the workforce. Thus, although this was her experience of societal oppression, by clumping ‘women’ together, other women’s issues had been marginalised. For example, African American women’s right to vote was not ratified until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, whereas for Betty Freidan this was not of particular concern, as white women had been granted this in 1920. She is not representative of the broad spectrum of American women, and her failure to recognise this accurately reflects the importance of personal experience, as it will sometimes give rise in individual consciousness to one social identity and not the other.
There is an issue of conflating the linguistic connotations of ‘gender’ to all women’s experiences. Joan Scott summarises the need to distinguish between our analytical vocabulary and the material we are analysing as ‘we need a refusal of the fixed and permanent quality of the binary opposition, a genuine historicisation and deconstruction of the terms of sexual difference.’ Women are disunified by their racial, cultural and class differences. Western gender realists have often assumed that women share similar characteristics which defines their gender, overlooking these divisions. By doing so, they have created a universal definition of ‘gender’ which is not universally applicable. White feminist theory reflects the cultural features which have conditioned gender specifically within western society. By doing so, Spelman claims they are imposing ‘the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud’. In the process they give voice and privilege to some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists have conflated ‘the condition of one group of women with the condition of all’.
Laura Lee Downs has expressed her concern with the inadequate attention placed on the importance of context within gender history. The modern and culturally distinctive undertones which ‘gender’ possesses cannot always be applied to different time periods and societies. Since the mid-l970s, gender became a sociocultural concept, and therefore has historically different linguistic and cultural connotations African historian Oyèrónké Oyewùmí argues that ‘if gender is socially constructed, then gender cannot behave in the same way across time and space’. We must also acknowledge that ‘if gender is a social construction, then there was a specific time when it was ‘constructed’ and therefore a time before it was not’. Gisella Bock reinforces her claim and adds that ‘gender’ refers to a ‘complex set of relations and processes’, which needs to be considered in its context to understand it as being an ‘analytical category as well as a cultural reality’. Oyewùmí subsequently refutes the right of European and North American scholars to define the ‘gender’ for African women’s history. For her, a society in which ‘gender’ was never constructed means a society in which perceptions of gendered difference are ‘not always enlisted as the basis for social classification’. According to Oyewùmí, gender was not an established theme for the particular power structure within pre-Colonial Yoruba culture. She emphasises this was based on age and ‘did not denote gender’. This is clearly a very different issue to European and North American women, where political power structures historically excluded women entirely based on their gender. Emancipation groups including the Suffragettes specifically fought for power and representation within male-dominated politics. The crucial point I think Oyewùmí makes is that the western concept of ‘gender’ based on white women’s personal histories does not claim universal relevance. By doing so would be to undermine non-white women’s experience as of less importance, as it is not driven by the same gender constructs.
Gunlög Fur reinforces this importance in his work in Native American tribes. The Cherokee tribe, amongst others, is matriarchal, however he claims this means very little in Native American culture. Historians’ persistent search for a distinct dichotomy of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in Native societies often means they obscure the Native understanding of the relationships between humans and the spirit world. Although the male-female binary existed in Native American cultures, it was not any more culturally significant than other binaries such as young and old. Therefore, forcing the current definition of gender construction which is employed by many western historians onto Native American cultures can lead to inaccuracies, not revelation. Using gender as a critical construct therefore needs to be interrogated in the way in which it has been historically and socially constructed. I agree with Jeanne Boydston’s claim that this is not an issue specifically with the chosen terminology, but with historian’s absence of ‘critical deliberateness’
The manifestations of gender difference are not the same in all societies, and the statuses of women are just as broad as those of men. It has become clear that the gender relations of the scholar’s own culture and the widespread Eurocentrism inherent in current historiography have had a profound impact on gender as a category. Barry S. Hewlett’s argument focusses on these misunderstandings of the roles of males as a result of universalising western analytical categories. He claims that central African family structures contradict the gender expectations of Western theory. Opposing the ‘gendered’ family roles of western societies, fathers ‘spend 47 per cent of their day holding or within an arm’s reach of their infants’ and are ‘more likely than [the] mother to hug and kiss the infant’. Therefore, as well as grouping women together, by using gender as a category of linguistic construct, western gender specific roles also characterise all men as white and middle class, which is again an inaccurate generalisation.
Downs summarises knowledge to be ‘what we have gleaned from our highly localised experiences as particular kinds of humans’ bound by socially and linguistically constructed chains such as gender. Women’s and gender history cannot be said to have been completely shaped by one or two dominant approaches but is both a social category and lived experience which has shaped human history. Therefore, as a category, gender should focus on the combination of linguistic constructs and experience, which are clearly intertwined. Although it has the power to be a source of enlightenment in historical analysis and research, it has also been a weakness. This is especially true when ‘today’s ideals and values are simply projected back into the past, as an anachronism’. The primary issue with gender as a linguistic construct is its application by historians onto non-western societies. Particular emphasis needs to be placed on the cultural backgrounds to which the term ‘gender’ is being applied. Najmabadi reiterates this with her concern about the ‘largely Anglo‐American history of gender as a named category’, which subsequently leads to persistently trying to impose a gender binary ‘derived from Western psycho‐behavioural categories of gender‐role determination’, onto historical periods where it does not fit. The danger of this in historical analysis is that it can lead to continued exclusion of certain groups from the debate by assuming the universality of women’s experience. It thus achieves exactly the opposite of its objectives; continuing to tell the story of some but not all. Without some way of linking linguistic constructs to experience, historians cannot account for the changing meanings of masculine and feminine throughout history.
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