Joan Scott's Linguistic Turn

Joan Scott’s essay focused on answering the two questions from Meyerowitz’s article by making the case for gender as an independent category of analysis that includes women, race and class.  By broadening the definition to include men and women, as well as the social relations between the sexes, she shows why gender became an area of study of greater interest to historians.  But recognizing the use of gender in social systems did not explain, as Joan Scott says in her essay, “…it says nothing about why these relationships are constructed as they are, how they work, or how they change.”    In other words, to be able to answer these questions a new methodology for gender analysis must be created.

Joan Scott’s analysis of gender, and more specifically the language of gender, provides an excellent example of the linguistic turn – looking at representational or symbolism through language, as opposed to historical “reality”, to discern the impact of gender on history.  More importantly, since the influence or power of gender is felt through language, discourse and agency play a large role in the analysis – how is the language communicated, how did the public or social discussion create a gendered historical result, or how empowered did historical players feel to change the language or its meanings ( rhetorical flourish or hollow cliché?)  As Scott explains, as you begin to peel back or deconstruct historical events from the perspective of the language of gender, you see how attributes and hierarchies (or tension) between men and women have been used to instantiate and signify power.  This approach also takes the analysis out of traditional social areas – home, family and children – and into political power, where the language of gender has been often used to legitimize power positions of governments.

For many traditional historians and many feminist historians, Joan Scott’s poststructuralism approach to gender history was fractured and dangerous, flouting established historical paradigms.  But its use, as exemplified in Ditz’s article on the lexicon of 18^th century Philadelphia merchants and the mercantile business, is an excellent analysis of the language of gender.  This analysis provides a gender-based historical perspective on how gender terminology came to represent business attributes and outcomes, which then became legitimized through their use.