International Review of Social History Supplement 1999:

"Complicating the Categories: Gender, Class, Race, and Ethnicity in Western and Non-Western Societies"

Introduction

The International Review of Social History long has focused on the issue of labor. For the 1999 Supplement the International Review has planned a special issue on the interrelationships between class, gender, race, and ethnicity. We invite authors to submit proposals for articles that address any of the related issues mentioned below in the description of the content, or any other aspect they believe is of relevance to the main theme. Articles should consider gender, race and /or ethnicity as integrated analytical and explanatory categories. We explicitly invite proposals on non-Western societies and countries. This special issue favors long-term perspectives and, in terms of Western Europe, the early modern period. Finally, we will give special preference to articles of a comparative nature and to those that consider together the workings of class, gender, race and/or ethnicity.

The Theme

The 1999 Review Supplement focuses on the interrelationships between central concepts in the analysis of economic and social history: social class, gender, race and/or ethnicity. Until recently, labor and working-class history tended to ignore the influence of gender and gender relations; certainly the field studied gender apart from race and ethnicity. However, feminist scholarship has demonstrated the analytical power of gendered categories in the study of a wide range of topics. This has served as one of the influences to undermine seriously the class paradigm in the study of labor and working-class history. Questions of explanatory primacy between class and gender no longer are the dominant theme. More recently, scholarship on 'race' and ethnicity as sometimes related and sometimes distinct categories of analysis (depending on time and place) has complicated our understanding of class and gender formation. These developments have led scholars and activists to question the precise relationship between all of these analytical concepts and the possibilities or impossibilities to unite and/or integrate them. What would this process of integration look like? What kinds of historical insights and histories would emerge from such a process of integration? This supplement aims to show how class, gender, race and/or ethnicity intersect across a wide range of economic and social historical questions and problems. In addition, this call for papers indicates a few specific issues connected to class, gender, race and/or ethnicity for which we invite elaboration.

In particular we call for proposals on the following issues. For each of the issues indicated below papers may focus either on empirical research or on more theoretical expositions.

1. What are the theoretical and analytical consequences of feminist research and the new research on race and ethnicity in the past two decades for the history of labor and the working classes in general, and the class paradigm in particular? In what ways can class, gender, and race and/or ethnicity be usefully integrated in historical research of some analytical scope and depth? To what extent are class, gender, race, and ethnicity similar or different concepts? Is it at all possible to distinguish empirically and analytically between the effects of class, gender, race and/or ethnicity? Or does this depend on a redefinition of the concept of social class? Is it possible that class is a more central concept for some problems, while for other problems gender or race or ethnicity (or some combination) provide the central explanatory concept? And if that is so, what are the ramifications of this conclusion for mainstream history?
2. What are the interactions between class, gender, race and/or ethnicity as analytical categories? Is interaction the most useful way to conceive of these relations? To some extent class, gender, race and/or ethnicity are distinct and autonomous categories, but they also can and often are interdependent. One obvious aspect of the interdependency between class and gender is the way in which gender functions as an allocation mechanism of class. Typically, the unequal division of labor within the household seriously impedes the social mobility of women in their own right. Does this pattern hold for all racial and/or ethnic groups in a society? Some forms of social inequality, however, cannot exit without prior gender inequalities, such as the areas of domestic and maid service and childcare-areas in some societies that are racialized as well. In addition, gender rules concerning property owernship and rules of inheritance may determine the subsequent development of specific gendered patterns of wage labor. Does race and/or ethnicity function similar in conjunction with gender or apart in some societies?
3. Class, gender, race, and ethnicity are socially constructed categories, the content of which varies by time and by place. The ways in which they interrelate also varies according to time and place. Where should we locate the major discontinuities and what are the determinants behind this variation? What happens to the explanatory or organizing power of concepts such as class, gender, race and/or ethnicity when applied to historiography besides Europe, the United States, and other Western formations? To colonial and post-colonial societies? Are the concepts of class and gender overruled by ethnicity or race? What are the implications of this for 'Western' historiography?
4. Historians often view women as not having a social class status in their own right but rather one derived from their husbands or fathers. That is, women do not appear to have their own direct link to structures of social inequality or to social relations of production. To what extent does empirical research show this derivative status? For which women? What are the consequences for female class related interests and behavior? Does history offer us examples where the separate social class status of women gave rise to different behavioral or normative patterns? If marriage is the prime class allocation mechanism for women, to what extent did women succeed in exploiting this mechanism to their own benefit? In other words, what did intergenerational mobility patterns of women look like compared to those of males, and what were their major determinants? How does race and/or ethnicity complicate these patterns and processes?
5. Location in a specific social class also contributes to the formation of gender relations, gender identities, race /ethnic relations and racial/ethnic identities. Sometimes it is assumed that social class affects gendered patterns of labor within the home. Stereotypes include the egalitarian middle-class husband helping out in the kitchen as opposed to working-class inegalitarianism based on male toughness and collective drinking in bars. To what extent does social class contribute to the construction of diverging male-female relations and identities, and what implications does this have for the balance of power between the sexes? How does race and/or ethnicity shape these constructions of divergence?
6. In some societies, the family (in others, the lineage) may be one of the most important mediators of social class, gender, race, and ethnicity. In modern Western societies, for example, the family unit acts as an active agent transmitting gender inequalities by affording unequal access for boys and girls to the labor market and to the supply of welfare that arises from labor market involvement. To what extent did for instance gendered family decision making contribute to unequal access to training and education schemes resulting in different job careers and wage prospects for young men and women? Other gendered inequalities within the family, such as unequal access to consumption or health care, also may have contributed to diverging class experiences for boys and girls that come from the same family. How does the family function in transmitting race, ethnic, and class identity? Are there specific differences in these transmissions to girls and boys? Does family constructions of race and ethnicity occur more between families than within the family?
7. Racial or ethnic identity brings people of different social classes together in a common struggle, often with elites benefiting more than lower class members of the racial or ethnic group. How does racial or ethnic solidarity function compared to and along with class solidarity? What difference does gender make to these processes?
8. Sexuality is a closely related category to gender that historians also have discovered as constructed rather than natural. To what extent does class, ethnicity, race, and gender itself shape sexuality and its symbolic as well as material presence in various social formations in non-Western as well as Western societies?

Submission of abstracts and articles

Abstracts for proposed articles should be submitted at the latest by May 1, 1998. Abstracts should be around 800 words, stating clearly, amongst other things, the questions that will be examined, the type of empirical material that will be used, and an outline of the main argument that will be developed in the paper. Please state explicitly in what way the paper is related to any of the issues listed above. A first version of the article should be ready for the editorial committee of the Review by 1 October 1998; the final version should be completed by 1 December 1998. Please state clearly name, address, fax number, and email address when submitting your proposal. Proposals should be sent to both:

and

Eileen Boris
Professor of History
Howard University
Washington, DC 20059
eboris@fac.howard.edu
202-806-6815, 7029
FAX: 202-806-4471
(During breaks try me at: ecb4d@faraday.clas.virginia.edu)

Quelle = Email <H-Soz-u-Kult>

From: Dietmar Wulff <dietmar=wulff@geschichte.hu-berlin.de>
Subject: CFP: INT. REV. OF SOCIAL HIST: GENDER, CLASS, RACE
Date: Thursday, February 12, 1998 8:31:47 MET

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