Prompt for week 10

Below are some questions to consider in writing your blog post this week.  And of course, you can just touch on one or a few, rather than answer them all.

1) What did you make of Ditz’s interpretation of primary sources?  Furthermore, how do you think his sources fit into Scott’s following questions, which were posed in Meyerowitz’s article:

“When (and how)…did the language of gender crucially structure experience and actually influence behavior and decision-making, and when did it simply add a convenient rhetorical flourish or embellish with a hollow cliché? When…did the language of gender constitute other relations of power, and when was it just a minor paragraph of a supplemental example within the narratives of social and political order?”  (1351)

2) Especially having read some works from Marxist historians now, did Scott’s reference to the relationship between Marxist historiography and gender history reshape your thinking on the latter?  What did you make of Scott’s critique of the relationship?  What is Scott’s definition of gender, and how does she use it to formulate her conceptions of gender history?