Gender: A Useful Category of Historical anal JOAN W. SCOTT To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine gende of the male or fer is either a jocularity(permissible or Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English n usage 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 ncaise have been entirely 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 I Through the ages, people have made figurative allusions by employing Imatical terms to evoke traits of character or sexuality. For example, the usa offered by the Dictionnaire de la langue francaise in 1876 was, "On ne sait de quel genre il est, s'il est male ou femelle, se dit d'un homme tres- cache, dont on ne connait pas les sentiments. "" And Gladstone made this distinction in 1878: Athene has nothing of sex except the gender, nothing of the woman except the form. "3 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 beg 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 This article is for Elizabeth Weed, who taught me how to think about and theory. It was first December 27. 1985. I am deeply grateful to Denise Riley, who showed historian and Harriet Whiten all members of the seminar on "Cultural Constructions of Gender"held at Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women during 1982-85. Suh, Research, especially estions and criticisms from members of the Historical Studies Workshop at the New School for So Ira katznelson. Charles Tilly, and Louise A. Tilly, forced me to clarify the argument Comments from othe lly those of Elisabetta (aleotti, Rayna Rapp, Christine Stansell, and Joan Vincent. Donald Scott, as always, was at once my most demanding anug6l edn ) vol 4 1 Oxford English de la langue fr (Paris, 1876) Raymond w Keyords(New York, 1983), 285