The Impact of Racial and Sexual Politics on Women's History

Abstract

Cornelia H. Dayton and Lisa Levenstein have done a brilliant job corralling recent publications in U.S. women’s and gender history under a big tent. Focusing on scholarship published in the last ten years that “reconceives gender” and/or rewrites mainstream historical narratives, Dayton and Levenstein point to new directions and challenge readers to consider the future of U.S. women’s and gender history. They open their essay by contrasting the current generational splits among feminist activists with the relative unity among scholars of women’s and gender history and remind us of the field’s long and deep connections to feminist politics. Noting the dynamic relationship between women’s and gender history and feminist politics, they convincingly argue that the simultaneous explication of race and gender has produced radical questions about intersectionality, relational differences among and between women, overlapping constructions of sexuality and gender, and the unfixed relationship between gender identity and sex. Yet Dayton and Levenstein say very little about the racial and sexual politics of the late twentieth century that provoked radical changes in the field of women’s and gender history. Understanding the emergence of the new scholarship that Dayton and Levenstein highlight is difficult without serious consideration of the political crisis that provoked women’s and gender historians to rethink issues of “intersectionality”: the idea that “emphasiz[es] that race and gender were not experienced separately and thus could not be analyzed independently of each other.” Acknowledging the political origins of this new literature provides a fuller picture of how the field has evolved over the last five decades. Moreover, the scholarship of the last ten years reflects not only an engagement with the sexual and racial politics of the late twentieth century but also a radical shift in the field of women’s and gender history that began in the 1990s. For decades, women of color in various disciplines and women’s historians working in the fields of African American, southern, and labor history had been quietly insisting on the significance of examining race and gender together. The racialized gender politics of the Ronald Reagan–George H. W. Bush era finally forced feminist scholars to insist that