Introduction: Gender, Power, and Difference

Abstract

In her recent book, History Matters, the medievalist Judith Bennett argued that the historiography of women’s and gender history is shaped around two key issues. The first, following Joan W. Scott’s essay in the 1986 issue of the American Historical Review, is the study of gender as a ‘primary way of signifying relationships of power’. For Scott, a perceived hierarchical relationship between male and female allowed other relationships to be coded masculine/feminine, in a way that established and naturalised the gendered coding and thus reaffirmed the hierarchical relationship. The second is the study of difference. Historians of women have long argued that ‘women’ cannot be treated as a unified category, anymore than ‘men’ can.1 People differ by class, ‘race’, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and any number of other categories.2 Both these issues—gender and difference and gender and power—run through this volume, although gender and difference, with a particular focus on religion and ethnicity, is the uniting thread. This introduction, though, will argue that we cannot ignore the power dynamic, given that the intersections of gender, religion, and ethnicity being studied here are all from Western, Christian, male-authored texts.