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| Joan W. Scott |
Belief in divine
involvement in human history persists despite the secularization of history, and women make up the majority of those
who claim affiliation with the religious denominations that adhere to that
belief. Therefore, if a theistic
historical methodology for our time is to be developed, a female historian might lead the way. The most prominent female historians of the past century built on Marxist theory and wrote about the oppression
of women in a patriarchal society. They addressed
women’s struggle for equality within the labor movement and domestic life, and the
historic oppression of particular sectors of the female population. Now feminist theorists are competing to
demonstrate that “the record of the past shows immense variety in the extent of
oppression, resistance, accommodation, and convergence in relations between men
and women, and the task of the historian is to explain this variation rather
than subsume it under a universal principle of sexual oppression.” 1 Joan W. Scott recommended
moving beyond the binary approaches that had turned women’s history into a subcategory
separated from, and treated as academically inferior to, political and economic
history which continue to focus on the role of men in history and dominate
academic publications. She identified three
basic approaches employed by feminist historians in the past: criticism
of the patriarchal hegemony from its beginnings, criticism of socialism for
failing to adequately address the problem of women’s oppression throughout
history, and the use of object relations theory and post-structuralism to explore
gender identity and relations between and among people of different genders
over time. 2 Scott rejected the first two approaches claiming
they only resulted in the perpetual victimization of women. Scott also rejected the
assumption of object-relations theorists, like Nancy Chodorow, who claimed that
the psychic formation of the female ego was completely dependent on a woman’s childhood
negotiation of the Oedipal Complex, as well as psychological theories that focused
on women’s identification and orientation with male objects in later life as the
most significant factors in the development of the female psyche. Scott claimed what was needed instead was “a refusal
of the fixed and permanent quality of the binary opposition, a genuine
historicization and deconstruction of the terms of sexual difference.”3
1 John
Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 231.
2 Joan W.
Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American
Historical Review 91, No. 5 (1986): 1057-1058.3 Joan W. Scott, “Gender,” 1065
