A Paradigm of Our Own: Joan Scott in Latin American History

Abstract

defensive. Area studies still invokes hierarchies suggesting that feminist paradigms, in particular, begin in European and U.S. American studies and trickle down to the rest of us. Such notions are bolstered by intellectual genealogies exactly like my own. Trained as a historian in the 1980s and early 1990s, I first encountered women's history in undergraduate classes with Europeanist Natalie Zemon Davis and U.S. historian Christine Stansell. The bulk of my feminist history courses in graduate school-including Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History as required reading-were seminars with Nancy Cott, likewise a U.S. Americanist. Feminist scholarship on Latin America also profoundly shaped me, but most of it was not historical. By the mid-1980s, debates on third world development and socialist revolution had inspired a vibrant anthropological and political science literature on Latin American women's work and political participation.' I first discovered this scholarship in college anthropology courses with Kay Warren, a scholar of Guatemala who directed Princeton's first women's studies program and co-taught its introductory survey with Natalie Davis. Such a partnership between an anthropologist of Central America and a historian of France was indicative of a broader academic