On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to address a problem that seems to me increasingly evident and stubbornly resistant to easy solution. That problem is the one faced by femi nist historians in their attempts to bring women as a subject and gender as an ana lytic category into the practice of labor history. If women as subject have in creased in visibility, the questions raised by women's history remain awkwardly connected to the central concerns of the field. And gender has not been considered seriously for what it could provide in the way of a major reconceptualization of (labor) history. Some feminist historians (myself included) have therefore viewed with cautious optimism their colleagues' increasing interest in theories of lan guage. Those theories (contained in the writings of post-structuralists and cultural anthropologists) offer a way of thinking about how people construct meaning, about how difference (and therefore sexual difference) operates in the construc tion of meaning, and about how the complexities of the contextual usages of lan guage open the way for changes in meaning. These theories are potentially of great use for the conceptualization of gender and the reconceptualization of historical practice. And yet, for the most part, they have not been used that way. Instead they have been applied superficially, giving feminist historians some cause for frustration, if not pessimism about the kinds of changes we can expect from labor history. The recent spate of articles by labor his torians on language demonstrates my point, for they reduce this important concept to the study of words.1 Words taken at their face value as literal utter ances become one more datum to collect and the notion of how meaning is con structed?as a complex way of interpreting and understanding the world?is lost. With the loss of an understanding of meaning, the importance and usefulness of thinking about labor history in terms of gender also disappears. We are left with separate studies of women and of words, and those may add new material, but they will never alone transform the way in which we think about the history we write. Among labor historians, attention to language has become the order of the day. Words like discourse and rhetoric appear with increasing frequency in journals and books, and analyses of ideology have acquired renewed prominence. Even as historians resist the searing critique of their practice offered by post