Three decades of women’s history in the United States

men and masculinity, that such work sometimes threatens to drown out historical attention to women altogether. When women’s activism is studied from a gender historical perspective, the emphasis is primarily on how categories of male and female are employed and manipulated so as to provide political leverage, rather than on how the political activism itself has come about, and what obstacles women faced in moving into public authority. I like such work very much but I do think that in some ways gender historians have narrowed rather than widened the field of what is considered an intellectually compelling subject. As an historian of feminism I am particularly concerned that those historical figures whose project has been to gain greater power for “women,” but who did not – to use the contemporary terminology -- “problematize” the category of their sex, appear increasingly quaint through such a lens.

The gender perspective has been important and successful in integrating concerns of women’s history into the larger picture of U.S. history. In a recent advanced survey of general U.S. scholarship on the nineteenth century, I found myself featuring a great deal of gender history.