The assignment here was to argue that gender is/is not a useful category of analysis for understanding phenomena like imperialism and class.
The tour of Don Chombo’s hillside hortaliza had been impressive. Everywhere, his slashed-and-burned land yielded maize, red beans, tomatoes, chiles, and green squash. Toward the end of our visit, my agricultural development friend Lorenzo offered to loan Don Chombo some fertilizer. “I don’t know much about working with fertilizer,” Don Chombo replied curtly, and turned toward the next field.
Why did Don Chombo refuse what seemed to be in his interest? Was his refusal based in racial prejudice, since Lorenzo was a white North American? In class, since Lorenzo seemed wealthier? In gender, since Lorenzo was unmarried and known for compassion and gentleness? Perhaps the answer is all or none of the above. But the questions illustrate the principle categories historians use to analyze and explain the past. As academic history narrows its focus to the story of oppression, categories of race, class, and gender have become increasingly prominent.
But gender was not always an equal member of this historian’s trinity. It took Joan Scott’s 1986 article “Gender as a Category of Analysis” to establish gender’s place at the table. She argued, first, that social relationships cannot be understood apart from gendered analysis, which involves examining “culturally available symbols” (such as Eve or Mary), “normative concepts” (how “ought-to-be” has been defined in gender relations), “social institutions” (not just the household but government and the workplace), and “subjective identity” (how gender has been defined differently from time to time and place to place). Second, she insisted, gender is used to articulate power – as much, if not more, than race and class, since gender differences are perceived to be “natural.” With Scott’s article, gender could no longer be relegated to women’s studies. It has subsequently proven its utility as a category of analysis, considerably broadening our understandings of class, imperialism, and – most importantly – people.
One of gender analysis’ most important functions is, as Alice Kessler-Harris puts it, “to rescue class from its currently vestigial position.” Wage-labor is no longer the primary “locus of identity” for the working-class, as a longer view of history centers on the household rather than the factory. This helps to answer the question that has tormented labor historians for decades: why is the working class so fragmented? As it turns out, workers found their identity more in ethnicity, region, and gender than in income level. A perfect example of the new freedom gender analysis grants to labor historians is Shane Hamilton’s forthcoming Trucking Country, in which rural white truckers acted against their economic interests, rejecting the assistance of government and unions and demanding deregulation of the industry. These “neo-populists” found identity in their whiteness, rural origins, and masculinity that transcended class consciousness. As Kessler-Harris predicted, gender helps explain the unpredictability of class conflict.
Greater sensitivity to gendered language has also clarified the cultural context of imperialism, as Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood illustrates. With the close of the frontier, the aging of the Civil War generation, and the increasing number of men working white-collar jobs, the masculinity of American men seemed to be in crisis in the 1890s. In Hoganson’s account, the U.S. entered the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars because of jingoes’ success pitching the wars as opportunities to prove and redeem American masculinity. Even if Hoganson fails to establish gender as the primary provocation of war, it is impossible to ignore the power of gendered rhetoric in the 1890s. More pointed than Hoganson, Laura Brigg’s remarkable Reproducing Empire has demonstrated that imperial policymakers often made gender issues the very center of their programs, as the U.S. did in Puerto Rico. Prostitution laws, birth control experiments, and sociological studies represented a few of the ways that gender informed U.S. policy.
Gender analysis, then, has broadened our view of economics and politics. Ultimately, however, its utility is humanistic: gender provides a more holistic understanding of historical actors as humans. Yet most gender historians would claim that “humanism” is not enough – as Joan Scott insisted in 1986, gender must be understood as a means of articulating power. This focus is important. But it is just as important that our subjects retain their humanity. In one splendid example of this function of gender analysis, Bethany Moreton shows that many women who worked low-paid jobs at Wal-Mart did so cheerfully, because the store was “like a family.” Wal-Mart workers did not unionize in large part because labor organizations failed to appreciate this familial model and “wound up arguing for the lonely, isolated, self-interested individual.” Attentiveness to gender, in this case, allows Moreton to treat her subjects as human beings, not mere objects of a power game.
Gender analysis is most useful, then, as a cohort of race and class, and the picture improves even more when the historian also considers religious beliefs and regional culture. All of these elements together can illuminate how historical actors have understood their worlds, providing what Rhys Isaac called “a means of access to the alien mentalities of a past people.” Gender, as historians like Moreton, Briggs, Hoganson, and Hamilton demonstrate, can bring delightful complications into our histories.
The historian examining the conversation between Lorenzo and Don Chombo could use it as an example of class conflict, race relations, or gender norms in rural Honduras. But the historian should take care not to reduce them to something less than human. After all, Don Chombo kept his reasons to himself.
Leave a comment