Gender Analysis

Jeanne Boydston

Joan W. Scott set out to define gender in more nuanced terms and identified challenges of using gender and other categories of analysis under the umbrella of Marxist theory. According to Scott, “class, race, and gender suggests a parity for each term, but, in fact, that is not at all the case. While ‘class’ most often rests on Marx's elaborate (and since elaborated) theory of economic determination and historical change, ‘race’ and ‘gender’ carry no such associations.”¹ According to Scott and others the main problem of attempting to fit gender into a Marxist scheme of historical analysis was that unlike social class, gender could not be defined in terms of material wealth and social responsibilities.  Neither race nor gender could be strictly aligned with an underprivileged or oppressed class.  Gender and race both presented historical challenges that transcended the social class distinctions to which Marx referred.    Scott agreed with Poovey’s observation that a rigorous method for gender study needed to involve more than separating historical studies of the accomplishments of women from those of men, but traditional approaches to the study of the sexes were insufficient for the task.  Scott wrote, “These theories have been limited at best because they tend to contain reductive or overly simple generalizations that undercut not only history's disciplinary sense of the complexity of social causation but also feminist commitments to analyses that will lead to change.”²  Jeanne Boydston also wrestled with the fact that Marxist theory did not readily lend itself to incorporating gender as a category of analysis.  She further observed that while patriarchal theory essentially became a self-fulfilling prophecy of the gender inequality it set out to critique, “Marxist theories suffered from something of the opposite problem: they had trouble formulating any independent analytical status for gender at all. Everything was ‘the by-product of changing economic structures.’”³  Like Poovey and Scott, Boydston came up against the entrenchment of a binary construction of gender identity that needed to be deconstructed in order to conduct a more thorough social history analysis of gender.  She bemoaned the fact that Scott identified this issue but did nothing to resolve it, however, she acknowledged that Scott had offered a theory of gender variability.  Boydston claimed that although gender was different from social class, it was like class in that it was a way of signifying social relations of power.⁴
Poovey and Scott attempted to come up with a new way to define gender as a category of analysis, and Boydston concluded that their attempts had not been productive.  She suggested that effort should be given up in favor of researching social and cultural history at the local level in greater depth. “In large part because we have been so blinded by the rigidity of our category, we have yet to develop very nuanced ways to talk about systems that might include the male and the female but not in a fixed binary, or not in a primary way, or not in a differential relation of power.”⁵

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[1] Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, No. 5 (Dec. 1986): 1055.

[2] Joan W. Scott, Gender, 1055.

[3] Jeanne Boydston, “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis,” Gender and History 20, no. 3 (November 2008): 562.

[4] Jeanne Boydston, Gender, 562.

[5] Jeanne Boydston, Gender, 575.