‘Gender has proved a problematic grand narrative for historians.’ Discuss.
When assessing gender as a grand narrative in history, it is impossible to avoid noting that, as Joan Scott argued in 1999, “women’s history is characterised by extraordinary tensions”[1]. It can of course be seen that there has tended to be a relative power imbalance between men and women across different cultures and time periods, and gender could therefore be viewed as a narrative theme in human history which is more easily generalised than race or class, for example. This essay, however, will argue that gender has nonetheless proved a problematic narrative for historians in three ways. Primarily, gender can be seen as a historiographical problem in that the question of gender was deemed unnecessary as a field of historical enquiry until shockingly recently – an oversight which means that much of the history written before the 20th century becomes questionable in terms of its scope. Secondly, the work of gender historians in the past few decades has shed light on the fact that it is indeed very difficult to establish a narrative which encompasses the multi-faceted experiences of women across history, without essentialising. The third, and perhaps more immediate way in which it can be seen as problematic in fact relates to its very role as a ‘grand narrative’: the rise of intersectionality as a historical approach has challenged the idea that a single narrative of gender should even be established, without taking into account the influences of other societal factors. It will be shown that gender has proved both a problematic narrative for historians in the past, and continues to present a difficult question to the modern historical community.
It can be established with little difficulty that the perspective of women, and therefore any kind of grand narrative concerning gender, has been conspicuously absent from historical enquiry until the 20th century. Many historians working before the 20th century operated under Thomas Carlyle’s dictum that history is “but the biography of great men”[2] – a theory whose exclusion of women is self-explanatory. Yet even those who criticised the ‘Great Man theory’ (most notably Herbert Spencer) continued to write history which was limited to an exploration of the actions and motivations of men. Despite earlier writings by women involved in the suffrage movement advocating investigation into women’s historical experience, it was not until the astonishingly recent period of the 1960s and 70s that “women’s history was first formulated” as a legitimate academic field.[3]Specifically in the context of historical grand narratives, it is also clear that that of gender emerged significantly later than more established examples, such as the Whig or Marxist interpretations of history.Debate over the necessity of gender history seems arcane to a modern sensibility – but the fact that this evenwas a debate demonstrates the first way in which the narrative of gender has been a problem for historians. If the ultimate aims of the historian are to reconstruct the events of the past and explain them to the furthest extent possible, then from a purely logical stance it seems implausible that they could attempt to do so without considering the perspective of a group that forms over half the world’s population. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg states, it can be seen that the exclusion of women from the history of a society serves “to misunderstand and distort the entire organisation of that society”. Furthermore, she argues that “women’s history challenges traditional history in [...] a basic way”[4]. Simply put, the initial problem that the rise of gender history presented to historians was that its very existence brought into question the validity of previous historical practice. Yet as Joan Scott acknowledges, the issue was not just that a consideration of gender contested traditional history; rather, it was that an attempt to establish a grand narrativeof gender contested other grand narratives. She highlights that narratives such as the idea of progress required an “assumption of unity and universality” which “subsumed” women – where “the feminine was but a particular instance”, the masculine “was a universal signifier”[5]. It can, therefore, be seen that gender caused problems both as a field of enquiry and, more specifically, as a grand narrative.
However, it is possible to argue that such a narrative of gender is problematic for historians not only in its presence, but also in the content of the narrative itself. Superficially, it seems that some weight may be given to the idea of gender as a straightforward grand narrative for historians. Certainly, the position of women in the vast majority of cultures and time periods has not been one of power: whether we consider the Greco-Roman societies of antiquity,[6] the European renaissance,[7] or colonial India[8] (to take only three examples) we find a familiar story of restricted political agency and an emphasis on domesticity. Yet too often, the tendency has been to construct a simple narrative of gender relations wherein women were completely powerless and relegated wholly to the domestic sphere until the liberation movements of the 20th century – either by patriarchal historians or by feminist ones who sought to criticise the “controlling power of patriarchy and the corresponding victimhood of women”.[9]As John Tosh astutely notes, “the effect of [many studies of women’s role in history] was to demonstrate that women had a history, not only in a separate strand, but as an integral element of ‘mainstream’ history”.[10]
Women’s history could not, therefore, be limited to the confines of a single insular field when they were found to have played significant roles in historical events which had previously been believed to have been the domain of men. A prime example of this is Jutta Schwarzkopf’s study of women in the Chartist movement.[11] A tendency to study participation at a national rather than local level, alongside the fact that the movement’s power base was made up of industrial workers, has meant that the considerable involvement of women has been “virtually ignored”[12] by many historians. Yet what Schwarzkopf and others found was that particularly in the early years of the movement, working-class women had been key players not only in the sense of providing domestic support to their male counterparts, but also in setting up their own Chartist campaign groups – and that support for female suffrage was considerable enough, even at this early date, that William Lovett’s first draft of the People’s Charter made provisions for it.[13] While this in no way suggests that Chartist women were some kind of proto-feminists, it does disprove any grand narrative which paints women as feeble victims throughout history, as do several other examples. This above all serves to show the difficulty faced by historians in establishing a grand narrative with regards to gender: while a common power imbalance between genders can be assumed in most cultures and periods, essentialisation about women’s experiences begs evidence to the contrary.
Indeed, these issues with the inherently essentialising nature of grand narratives can, and has, led many to question their utilityin the first place. The term was in fact coined in a pejorative sense by post-modernist thinker Jean-François Lyotard, [14] as part of his assertion that post-modernism at its core involves incredulity of grand narratives, and an awareness of the almost infinite differences in human experience that render such narratives somewhat meaningless . It is true that Lyotard’s argument was more concerned with more established grand narratives, such as the idea of progress in history, or socio-economic narratives like Marxism. Yet it is entirely possible to apply his unwillingness to subscribe to grand narratives to the most recent phenomenon in what have been termed the fields of ‘minority history’: intersectionality. Both the political movements for these minorities, and the subsections of historical study that they engendered, have in recent years seen continuous debate on this topic, which Butler defines as “the ways in which [...] vectors of power require and deploy each other”[15] in complex modern society – essentially, it is an expression of the need to consider how the various societal power structures interplay and impact upon individual experience. It is evident that such an idea immediately problematises any grand narrative of gender for historians.
Given the almost kaleidoscopic possibilities of oppression, the question arises whether it is at all possible to construct a narrative of gender which encompasses the vastly different experiences of women, even those living in the same time period – for example, white upper-class women and enslaved black women in 19th century America. White women cannot have been argued to have been in a position of total power: they continued to be seen as homemakers above all else,[16] and Smith-Rosenberg has identified “tensions [...] between the two central roles that the [white] bourgeois matron was expected to assume – that of the True Woman and that of the Ideal Mother”[17]. Yet these problems are in stark contrast to those of their black contemporaries: the additional dimension of race (and therefore, for most, enslavement) meant that the expectation for many slave women was that they would be sexually submissive to their masters, or face brutal consequences. Of course, the difficulties this creates in forming a grand narrative on the basis of gender can also be seen in the case of race: Hilary Beckles notes that “analyses of social stratification among slaves which ignore the roles of gender [...] are not likely to reflect the realities of plantation life”.[18]Thus the problem posed by considerations of intersectionality is not so much specific to gender itself; rather it is that the legitimacy of any and all grand narratives is called into question once it has been accepted that combinations of oppressive structures have significant impact on the experiences of societal groups.
What, then, does this indicate about the usefulness for historians of gender as a grand narrative? As SeylaBenhabib has argued, an intersectional approach to writing history would render the use of grand narratives in the traditional sense undesirable, given that the homogeneity of such narratives has had the consequence that “the varying pace of differing temporalities as experienced by different groups [has] been obliterated”[19]. Nevertheless, it does not follow that gender historians should dismiss the possibility of a broad view altogether and simply move towards empiricism, as the “‘nominalist’ tendency in Lyotard’s work”[20] perhaps suggests. Certainly, the goal of the historian cannot be only to investigate specific historical examples – they must also use these case studies to support an understanding of wider historical trends and developments. While the case may be made to do away with grand narratives, it is essential that an alternative method is found of approaching history on a global scale. One such alternative is suggested by Benhabib: a consideration of history in light of the “moral-political imperative [...] of the future interest in emancipation”[21]. Indeed, this seems particularly apt in a context where the emergence of gender history as a field is indebted to such an interest in emancipation on the part of feminists. The key difference from a traditional grand narrative is the difference between ‘one truth’ and ‘many truths’. Where a grand narrative of gender would suggest this emancipation as the driving force upon historical events, Benhabib’s approach instead uses it as a tool to view history on a wider scale, while acknowledging its interaction with other struggles for power.
In conclusion, it can be seen that gender as a grand narrative has proved problematic for historians in its emergence, which challenged the validity of traditional history, and in its contents, which became disputable when over-essentialised. In current historical debate, the problem now lies in the intersectional challenge to the existence of grand narratives in the first place. Yet in the midst of all this contention and debate, one must not lose sight of the fact that gender remains a fundamentally important lens through which the past can be viewed – in Joan Scott’s famous terms, it is truly a “useful category of historical analysis”[22]. The rejection of the grand narrative approach cannot result in the return of gender history to negligibility. Instead, as in Benhabib’s argument, we should work towards an approach which both encompasses and accounts for differing human experiences across time and place – only then can we hope to write history which is justly comprehensive.
Bibliography
Benhabib, Seyla (1995) Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge.
Brown, Meg and Kari McBride (2005) Women’s Roles in the Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies That Matter.New York: Routledge.
Carlyle, Thomas (1841) On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. London: James Fraser.
Frader, Laura and Sonya Rose (1996) Gender and Class in Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gaspar, David and Darlene Hine (eds) (1996) More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Meade, Teresa and Merry Wiesner (eds) (2004) A Companion to Gender History. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Raman, SitaAnantha (2009) Women in India: a Social and Cultural History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Schwartzkopf, Jutta (1991) Women in the Chartist Movement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Scott, Joan (1999) Gender and the Politics of History: Revised Edition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll (1987) Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tosh, John (2015) The Pursuit of History, 6thedn. New York: Routledge.
Wayne, Tiffany (2007) Women’s Roles in Nineteenth-Century America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
“Female chartists”.Online. Accessed at
[1] Scott, J. (1999)Gender and the Politics of History, p. 17
[2]Carlyle, T. (1841) On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
[3] Tosh, J. (2015) The Pursuit of History, 6thedn, p. 229
[4] Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1987) Disorderly Conduct, p. 19
[5] Scott, J. (1999) Gender and the Politics of History, p. 183
[6] Meade, T. and Wiesner, M. (2004) A Companion to Gender History, p. 14
[7] Brown, M. and McBride, K. (2005) Women’s Roles in the Renaissance, p. 1
[8] Raman, S. A. (2009) Women in India, p. 8
[9] Tosh, J. (2015) The Pursuit of History, p. 231
[10] Ibid, p. 230
[11]Schwartzkopf, J. (1991) Women in the Chartist Movement
[12]Frader, L. and Rose, S. (1996) Gender and Class in Modern Europe, p. 30
[13]
[14]Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition
[15] Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter, p. 18
[16] Wayne, T. (2007) Women’s roles in nineteenth-century America, pp. 1-2
[17] Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1985) Disorderly Conduct, p. 198
[18] Gaspar, D. and Hine, D. (1996) More Than Chattel, p. 111
[19]Benhabib, S. (1995) Feminist Contentions, p. 19
[20] Ibid, p. 23
[21] Ibid
[22] Scott, J. (1999) Gender and the Politics of History