History and the challenge of gender history∗

This essay provides a critical assessment of debates within and about gender history. The fruitfulness of the field is absolutely and unquestionably great. Women's history, now mutating into gender history, is notably broadening and enriching historical studies. That is incontestable. But success has also posed challenges. Despite the initial ‘hype’, women's history has not subverted the discipline by producing a new general interpretation or, more ambitiously, a new epistemology. Instead, historians of gender share the same range of theoretical problems faced by other historians. The chronology and the very nature of long‐term changes and/or continuities remain unclear. In addition, gender historians have their own debates about the historical construction of gender identities. Although a timeless and a historical ‘Woman’ has been abandoned, it is far from clear how and how far social roles are learnt, transmitted and changed. Certainly, it is much too simplistic to assume that a prescriptive conduct literature constitutes a single controlling ‘discourse’ that imposes gender roles upon a passive population. Both people and the role of language are more complex than that. Indeed, references to a unitary ‘discourse’ ought to be avoided unless a specific case is made for its relevance. Similarly, debates between historians have relied too much upon assumed dichotomies (such as a division between the ‘public’ and the ‘private') and are now rightly being rendered more complex and pluralistic. Finally, it is not necessary for gender history to claim a seismic shift to a new feminist epistemology or to endorse a sceptical postmodernist onslaught upon a dying ‘male’ rationality. That implies an appeal to a warm, female intuition in lieu of a cold, masculine logic, which returns to a crude stereotyping that research has done much to overthrow. The challenge is one of inclusion. Holistic history, as a route to knowledge, must incorporate a pluralistic and critical history of gender.