The Historiography of Gendered Political Cultures

Abstract

Students often arrive in undergraduate classrooms knowing very little women's political history. Maybe they will know that women won the right to vote in 1920 or that there was once a debate about a constitutional amendment for equal rights (1). Rarely have they been introduced to historians' conceptual frameworks for studying women and politics. My comments here concentrate on one of these frameworks—gendered political cultures—that has been used both explicitly and implicitly in women's history scholarship and has influenced how political historians think about the nineteenth century. Historians began using the concept of political culture in the 1960s. Political culture involves the values and beliefs, as well as symbols and ideologies, that underlie and inspire political action. By uncovering patterns of attitudes and symbolic representations, historians can see how policies come into being and why political conflicts appear and new initiatives seem necessary (2). In...