Gender and the Politics of History (Gender and Culture Series) - Softcover

Scott, Joan Wallach

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231188013 ISBN 13: 9780231188012

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2018

Synopsis

This landmark work from a renowned feminist historian is a foundational demonstration of the uses of gender as a conceptual tool for cultural and historical analysis. Joan Wallach Scott offers a trenchant critique of the compartmentalization of women’s history, arguing that political and social categories are always fundamentally shaped by gender and that questions of gender are essential to considerations of difference in history. Exploring topics ranging from language and class to the politics of work and family, Gender and the Politics of History is a vital contribution to feminist history and historical methodology that also speaks more broadly to the ongoing redefinition of gender in our political and cultural vocabularies.

This anniversary edition of a classic text in feminist theory and history shows the evergreen relevance of Scott’s work to the humanities and social sciences. In a new preface, Scott reflects on the book’s legacy and implications for contemporary politics as well as what she has reconsidered as a result of her engagement with psychoanalytic theory. The book also includes a previously unpublished essay, “The Conundrum of Equality,” which takes up the question of affirmative action.

About this title

About the Author:

Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her books include Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996); The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011); and Sex and Secularism (2017).

Review:

A real tour de force . . . evidence of the value of Scott’s project to rethink gender and history simultaneously. (New York Times)

Thoughtful and pioneering. (Nation)

Scott has given us an intelligent, sensitive reflection on the nature of events, of thought, of judgment, of history. (New Republic)

At once a ‘how-to’ manual . . . and a broad assessment of the state of women’s history in the 1980s. It will clearly become a classic volume for both feminist theory and women’s history. (Gender and Society)

Scott’s book makes a powerful case not only for a historical scholarship that recognizes the depth of gender difference in human experience but also for a renewed self-consciousness about the role of the historian in constructing the meanings of our past. (American Historical Review)

A radical book, provocative, exciting, and very satisfying. (Journal of Social History)

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0231188013
• ISBN 13: 9780231188012
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288