Gender and the Politics of History.(Review)

Gender and the Politics of History, by Joan Wallach Scott. New York: Columbia University Press, Revised Edition, 1999, 283 pp., $17.50 paperback.

In the Spring 2000 issue of Academic Questions, David Kaiser concludes that the well-known feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott has "issued a declaration of disinterest in the past as such." He means by this that she, among other things, straightforwardly admits that she adopted the Foucaultian "theory" she recommends to the historical profession for "avowedly political" purposes. Since a historian who is not interested in the past would seem by definition not to be a historian at all, Kaiser would appear, with considerable cause, to be reading her out of the profession. Yet Scott's insouciance about the admission should give us pause. After all, we have been here before. We triumphantly make what we think is our clinching argument, and our target refuses to surrender, condescendingly noting our epistemological naivete as she walks off. After all, if truth is socially constructed, it is far more truthful to admit one is doing it than to pretend that no one should. The standoff is frustrating to us, since the belief in truth is connected with the belief at least in the possibility of coming to a common understanding. The postmodernists, by contrast, are not frustrated at all; they consider themselves too hip to believe either in truth or in common understanding.

Maybe there's a better way. The way to be interested in the past as such that made the most sense to me when I was training to be a historian was R.G. Collingwood's notion of "reliving," i.e., of trying to understand the historical subject from within, from its own point of view and its own questions. I think Collingwood is right in saying that that effort is required before any judgment of the subject can be made. It also might be the only basis for any plausible effort at persuasion and discussion. So I will try it on Scott. Fortunately, her book of essays, mostly from the 1980s, provides a fair degree of intellectual autobiography. Scott seems typical of a great many progressive scholars of her generation, so her case may be instructive.

For a reissue of "a classic text," Gender and the Politics of History starts oddly with a preface in which Scott tells us that "gender" no longer interests her much. While it had seemed a "useful category of analysis" in the 1980s, because it "seemed the best way to realize the goal" of bringing "women from the margins to the center of historical focus," in these days gender "is a term that has lost its critical edge" because everyone has gone back to thinking that it just means sex. Scott is currently more interested in psychoanalytic theory, she reports. Still, this is less frivolous than it may seem. She understands both "gender," and the underlying complex of Foucaultian ideas that govern her use of it, as instruments to accomplish a moral purpose, namely promoting feminism. Thus, in the beginning of the introduction she clearly states that she "was forced to take post-structuralist theory seriously," because "[i]t addressed many of the most pressing philosophical questions I had confronted as a feminist trying to write women's history."

Those questions are made acute by Scott's radicalism, her refusal to accept compromises. Thus, "the point of feminist inquiry--and for me its continuing appeal--has always been its refusal to accommodate the status quo." It should cause "consternation by pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies in societies claiming to provide equality and justice for all." That means that nothing short of perfection is good enough; any compromise means some inconsistency.

Yet how is perfection possible if the goals of feminism are contradictory? Since equality asserts that differences don't matter and consequently abstracts from them, how can one get complete equality without abstracting from those differences that become highly relevant to the particular situation of women? If one does that, as the Enlightenment at least promised to do, Scott is aware that you end up with a "universal man" who is always disconcertingly male. The postmodern critique of the Enlightenment, and particularly Foucault's dissolution of its intellectual categories, will, she thinks, do the requisite job by particularizing, historicizing, and relativizing the abstract categories and identities that are imposed on human beings (among them and especially "human being") so that the false antitheses that stand in the way of a consistent and thoroughgoing feminism can be overcome.

Before seeing what Scott makes of Foucaultian theory, it seems worth saying that, purely as history, some of what Foucault recommends in The Archaeology of Knowledge and elsewhere is useful and even refreshing. To the extent that he encourages us to question conventional categories and arrangements of phenomena, Foucault can spur new questions and new thinking about old ones. In this, of course, he is no more "postmodern" than were Collingwood and Carl Becker when they warned, over half a century ago, about trusting too much in the historical fact. Thus, when Scott repeatedly invokes "theory" against the rigidities of traditional polarities, she is not being particularly postmodern but she is, potentially at least, doing her job as a historian. What is genuinely postmodern, i.e., Nietzschean, in Foucault emerges at the very end of The Archaeology when he allows an interlocutor to ask him what legitimates and grounds his own critique. Foucault's answer is that he won't say; his discourse "is trying to operate a decentring that leaves no privilege to any centre."(1) Later, he insists that the issue is one of courage and politics. He charges the interlocutor with wanting to defend (out of fear) "the great historico-transcendental destiny of the Occident."(2) Thus in the end Foucault tells us that his method is not a scientific or scholarly one at all, but rather a way of shattering all certainties out of a love of equality. Foucault's answer, it seems to me, does not really answer the interlocutor very well. (If "decentering" has no compelling rules of its own, no legitimacy other than its political purpose, it would seem to become essentially a rhetorical device; and, recognized as such, it would lose precisely its power as rhetoric.) Still, at least it would seem to encourage lots of different "decenterings" and the assumption of as many perspectives as possible, in the belief that doing this will somehow bring about the hoped-for fall of the West. But even (or especially) if it did not, we might still learn something from it.