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The reading on Scott’s “Gender; a Useful Category of Historical Analysis” reading gives the audience some information when dealing with the theory of gender. The reading starts off with introducing the textbook definition of gender from Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage of 1940. But Scott goes even further by giving various usages the term “gender” was used throughout history.

What I found interesting was unlike the theory of class, which happens to be associated the most with the ideology proposed by Karl Marx, the theory concerning gender does not happen to have any sort of association that stands out. Different historians have attempted to from some kind of theoretical formula for gender.

Feminist historians employed various approaches to analyze gender to the point where they were able to narrow it down to 3 theoretical positions: the first attempting to explain the origins of patriarchy, the second lies within the Marxist tradition, and the third bringing in the concepts proposed by the object-relation theorists (pg. 1058). Feminist historians tried to analyze the theory of gender through various accounts of inequality as social experience as one of their theoretical formulations. Object-relation theorists such as Carol Gilligan have placed their focus on the influence of experience, in their case how the child sees, hears and relates to the ones they care for.

With the Marxist approach in defining the theory on gender, they try to look at gender through a more historical perspective. CLUNA3 mentions how Marxist’s states that “gender has had no independent analytical status of its own,” and follows with stating how class may have some active role in the topic of gender.

Gender itself can be view through these types of perspectives that previous historians have mentioned. As mentioned before, there is no ideology that closely associates with gender like how Marxism does to class, so there is not just one way to look at this concept that is gender and say their way is right.