Three decades of women’s history in the United States

gender than of women. The manifesto for this shift is of course Joan Scott’s 1988 article “Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” Because it is so theoretically explicit, Scott’s article has had tremendous influence. Scott anchored her argument in both Freud and Foucault, which gave it an intellectual stature that previous work in women’s history lacked. My own judgment is that her call for standing back from women’s history so as to focus on the process by which gender categories have been constructed understates the work that many others have done on this problem. Nonetheless her clear statement of the need to subject the concepts of “womanhood” and “manhood” to historical investigation, and to link them, has been – useful -- in making the positioning of womanhood within a gender binary explicit and putting this problematic in the forefront.

The gender historical perspective especially differs from its women’s history predecessor by regularly situating women vis a vis men. Indeed, so successfully have gender historical perspectives been at drawing scholars into the study of