The Genealogy of an Idea

The Genealogy of an Idea Lauren Jae Gutterman (bio) Lillian Faderman. Woman: The American History of an Idea. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. 571 pp. ISBN 9780300249903 (cl); 9780300271140 (pb.). Sandra Eder. How the Clinic Made Gender: A Medical History of a Transformative Idea. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 340 pp. ISBN 9780226573328 (cl); 9780226819938 (pb.); 9780226573465 (ebook). Anti-trans legislation is sweeping the nation, and much of the vitriol feeding this legislation portrays trans women and girls as a physical, sexual, and political danger to their cisgender peers. In short, who "counts" as a woman is a matter of urgent, national concern. Two recent and very different books on the construction of women and gender in the United States appear at a critical moment. Lillian Faderman's Woman is a more than 500-page synthetic history tracing the evolution of "woman" as an ideological concept from the seventeenth century to the present. Sandra Eder's How the Clinic Made Gender is a much slimmer, more focused study that uncovers the mid-twentieth-century emergence of "gender" as an idea and a term meant to distinguish between physical sex characteristics and socially and culturally constructed gender roles. While Woman does little to challenge a biologically-based understanding of womanhood, How the Clinic Made Gender reveals the labor that has worked to maintain the fiction of our binary gender system. Although published with an academic press, Woman is aimed at a broad public readership unfamiliar with the contours of American women's and gender history. Faderman begins by describing her own experiences in the 1950s, coming of age as the daughter of a single-mother immigrant in a largely Mexican American high school in Los Angeles. Branded as juvenile delinquents, she and her peers struggled to see themselves in the dominant popular images of American womanhood at this moment: perfectly quaffed and endlessly patient white middle-class mothers and homemakers. "How, when, and why had that ideal of woman been created?" Faderman asks. Woman, she explains, was borne of a "personal quest" to answer these questions (3). While Faderman portrays her project as one that seeks to understand "woman" in a broad and abstract sense, she is chiefly interested in how some (mostly white) women have been imagined and portrayed as domestic creatures destined to serve men and children as wives and mothers. End Page 147 Faderman's writing is as accessible and engaging as always, capturing her readers' attention and guiding them through four centuries of history at a swift pace. Over fifteen chapters, most of them focused on the twentieth century, she paints a battle between two dominant images of womanhood: one that ties women to the home and family and one that encourages and celebrates their intellectual, political, and economic achievements in the world beyond it. In Faderman's telling, this battle began with the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Puritan civil and religious leaders who instructed women to keep to the home, help "in the propagating of mankind," and subordinate themselves to their husbands' authority (13). The Puritans' hold on the idea of woman, she argues, has continued to the beginning of the twenty-first century. While Faderman acknowledges that the Puritan "helpmeet" is not synonymous with the post-World War II housewife or the contemporary "opt-out" mom who left her white-collar career to care for her kids, she is less concerned with the differences between these figures than their similarities. Faderman has attempted to craft a multi-ethnic, multi-racial history of American women, and Woman does include stories of many well-known women of color, including American Indian activist Zitkála-Šá, civil rights activist Ella Baker, labor organizer Dolores Huerta, and writer Alice Walker, among others. Faderman recognizes that women of color have often been excluded from the category "woman," but their struggles to be seen as women, and to gain access to the protections and power that status can carry, are not her chief concern. Faderman also downplays white women's investment in white supremacy and their complicity in a racially exclusive understanding of "woman." So, while Faderman concedes that "some white women" were slaveholders...