Gender 1055 The litany of class, race, and gender suggests a parity for each term, but, in fact, that is not at all the case. While"class" most often rests on Marxs elaborate(and since elaborated) theory of economic determination and historical change, "race and"gender"carry no such associations. No unanimity exists among those whe employ concepts of class. Some scholars employ Weberian notions, others use class as a temporary heuristic device. Still, when we invoke class, we are working with or against a set of definitions that, in the case of Marxism, involve an idea of economic causality and a vision of the path along which history has moved dialectically. There is no such clarity or coherence for either race or gender. In the case of gender, the usage has involved a range of theoretical positions as well as simple descriptive references to the relationships between the sexes Feminist historians. trained as most historians are to be more comfortable with description than theory, have nonetheless increasingly looked for usable theoret ical formulations. They have done so for at least two reasons. First, the pro- liferation of case studies in womens history seems to call for some synthesizing perspective that can explain continuities and discontinuities and account for sisting inequalities as well as radically different social experiences. Second, the discrepancy between the high quality of recent work in women's history and its continuing marginal status in the field as a whole(as measured by textbooks do not address dominant disciplinary concepts, or at least that do not address these oncepts in terms that can shake their power and perhaps transform them. It has not been enough for historians of women to prove either that women had a histor or that women participated in the major political upheavals of Western civilization In the case of womens history, the response of most non-feminist historians has been acknowledgment and then separation or dismissal ("women had a history separate from mens, therefore let feminists do womens history, which need not concern us;or"womens history is about sex and the family and should be done separately from political and economic history"). In the case of women,s partic- ation, the response has been minimal interest at best("my understanding of the French Revolution is not changed by knowing that women participated in it). The challenge posed by these responses is, in the end, a theoretical one. It requires analysis not only of the relationship between male and female experience in the past but also of the connection between past history and current historical practice How does gender work in human social relationships: How does gender give meaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge? The answers depend on gender as an analytic category or the most part, the attempts of historians to mained within traditional social scientific frameworks, using longstanding formulations that provide universal causal explanations. These theories have been limited at best because they tend to contain reductive or overly simple generali- zations that undercut not only history's disciplinary sense of the complexity of social causation but also feminist commitments to analyses that will lead to change