gender 1057 Although scholars acknowledge the connection between sex and (what the sociologists of the family called)"sex roles, "these scholars do not assume a simple or direct linkage. The use of gender emphasizes an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but is not directly determined by sex or directly determining These descriptive usages of gender have been employed by historians most ofter to map out a new terrain. As social historians turned to new objects of study, gende was relevant for such topics as women, children, families, and gender ideologies This usage of gender, in other words, refers only to those areas--both structural and ideological-involving relations between the sexes. Because, on the face of it, war, diplomacy, and high politics have not been explicitly about those relation- ships, gender seems not to apply and so continues to be irrelevant to the thinking f historians concerned with issues of politics and power. The effect is to endorse a certain functionalist view ultimately rooted in biology and to perpetuate the idea separate spheres(sex or politics, family or nation, women or men)in th of history. Although gender in this usage asserts that relationships between the sexes are social, it says nothing about why these relationships are constructed as they are, how they work, or how they change. In its descriptive usage, then, gender is a concept associated with the study of things related to women. Gender is a new topic, a new department of historical investigation, but it does not have the analytic ower to address(and change) existing historical paradigms Some historians were, of course, aware of this problem, hence the efforts to employ theories that might explain the concept of gender and account for historical change. Indeed, the challenge was to reconcile theory, which was framed n general or universal terms, and history, which was committed to the study of contextual specificity and fundamental change. The result has been extremely eclectic: partial borrowings that vitiate the analytic power of a particular theory or, worse, employ its precepts without awareness of their implications: or accounts of change that, because they embed universal theories, only illustrate unchanging themes; or wonderfully imaginative studies in which theory is nonetheless so hidden that these studies cannot serve as models for other investigations. Because the theories on which historians have drawn are often not spelled out in all their plications, it seems worthwhile to spend some time doing that. Only through such an exercise can we evaluate the usefulness of these theories and, perhaps articulate a more powerful theoretical approach Feminist historians have employed a variety of approaches to the analysis of gender, but they come down to a choice between three theoretical positions. g The first, an entirely feminist effort, attempts to explain the origins of patriarchy. The econd locates itself within a marxian tradition and seeks there an accommodation with feminist critiques. The third, fundamentally divided between French post-structuralist and Anglo-American object-relations theorists, draws on these For a somewhat different approach to feminist analysis, see Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family(New York, 1986)