Gender as a useful category of historical analysis

Abstract

Those who would codify the meanings of words fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history. Neither Oxford dons nor the Académie Française has been entirely able to stem the tide, to capture and fix meanings free of the play of human invention and imagination. Mary Wortley Montagu added bite to her witty denunciation ‘of the fair sex’ (‘my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance of never being married to any one among them’) by deliberately misusing the grammatical reference.1 Through the ages, people have made figurative allusions by employing grammatical terms to evoke traits of character or sexuality. For example, the usage offered by the Dictionnaire de la Langue Française in 1876 was: ‘On ne sait de quel genre il est, s’il est mâle ou femelle, se dit d’un homme très-caché, dont on ne connait pas les sentiments’ (Littré, 1876). And Gladstone made this distinction in 1878: ‘Athene has nothing of sex except the gender, nothing of the woman except the form’ (Williams, 1983, p. 285). Most recently - too recently to find its way into dictionaries or the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences - feminists have in a more literal and serious vein begun to use ‘gender’ as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes. The connection to grammar is both explicit and full of unexamined possibilities. Explicit because the grammatical usage involves formal rules that follow from the masculine or feminine designation; full of unexamined possibilities because in many Indo-European languages there is a third category - unsexed or neuter. In grammar, gender is understood to be a way of classifying phenomena, a socially agreed upon system of distinctions rather than an objective description of inherent traits. In addition, classifications suggest a relationship among categories that makes distinctions or separate groupings possible.