1054 Joan w. Scott rules that follow from the masculine or feminine designation; full of unexamined possibilities because in many Indo-European languages there is a third category In its most recent usage, gender" seems to have first appeared among American feminists who wanted to insist on the fundamentally social quality of distinction based on sex. The word denoted a rejection of the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as " sex"or"sexual difference. " "Gender"also stressed the relational aspect of normative definitions of femininity. Those who worried that womens studies scholarship focused too narrowly and separately on women used the term"gender"to introduce a relational notion into our analytic vocabulary According to this view, women and men were defined in terms of one another, and no understanding of either could be achieved by entirely separate study. Thus Natalie Davis suggested in 1975, It seems to me that we should be interested the history of both women and men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex any more than an historian of class can focus entirely on peasants Our goal is to understand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past. Our goal is to discover the range in sex roles and in sexual mbolism in different societies and periods, to find out what meaning they had and how they functioned to maintain the social order or to promote its change." 4 In addition, and perhaps most important, "gender"was a term offered by those ho claimed that womens scholarship would fundamentally transform discipli- nary paradigms. Feminist scholars pointed out early on that the study of women would not only add new subject matter but would also force a critical reexam- nation of the premises and standards of existing scholarly work. We are learning, wrote three feminist historians, "that the writing of women into history necessarily involves redefining and enlarging traditional notions of historical significance, to encompass personal, subjective experience as well as public and political activities It is not too much to suggest that however hesitant the actual beginnings, such a methodology implies not only a new history of women, but also a new histor The way in which this new history would both include and account for women experience rested on the extent to which gender could be developed as a category of analysis. Here the analogies to class(and race)were explicit; indeed, the most politically inclusive of scholars of women's studies regularly invoked all three categories as crucial to the writing of a new history. 6 An interest in class,race,and gender signaled first, a scholar's commitment to a history that included stories of the oppressed and an analysis of the meaning and nature of their oppression and second, scholarly understanding that inequalities of power are organized along at least three axes Natalie Zemon Davis, "Womens History in Transition: The European Case, "Feminist Studies, 3 Vinter197576:90, Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Shrom Dye, "The Problem of Women's History, "in Berenice Carroll, ed, Liberating Women's History(Urbana The best and most subtle example is from Joan Kelly, "The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theor in her Women, History and Theory( Chicago, 1984), 51-64, especially 6l