This landmark work from a renowned feminist historian is a foundational demonstration of the uses of gender as a conceptual tool for cultural and historical analysis. Joan Wallach Scott offers a trenchant critique of the compartmentalization of women’s history, arguing that political and social categories are always fundamentally shaped by gender and that questions of gender are essential to considerations of difference in history. Exploring topics ranging from language and class to the politics of work and family, Gender and the Politics of History is a vital contribution to feminist history and historical methodology that also speaks more broadly to the ongoing redefinition of gender in our political and cultural vocabularies.
Editorial Reviews
"A self critical intellectual autobiography, the nine essays (originally published between 1983 and 1988) in Gender and the Politics of history are a tour de force - they reveal historical imagination relentlessly moving forward...as sophisticated advocacy for the case of theory and illumination of the state of the art of women's history, there is nothing better than Gender and the politics of history." --Voice Literary Supplement
"Scott has given us an intelligent, sensitive reflection on the nature of events, of thought, of judgment, of history....The questions Scott asks deserve pursuit. They will enlarge the scope of historical understanding and spawn new questions to be asked in turn." ―The New Republic
"In this thoughtful and pioneering collection of essays, the feminist historian Joan Scott subjects her profession's untheoretical practices to sharp critique." --The Nation
"...a real tour de force." --The New York Times
About the Author
Joan Wallach Scott is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Previously she was founding director of Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She is author of The Glassworks of Carmaux for which she won the H.B. Adams Prize from the American Historical association and, with Louise Tilly, Women, Work and the Family.
