1990.Gender

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Gender Author(s): Emily S. Rosenberg Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Jun., 1990), pp. 116-124Published by: Organization of American HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2078643Accessed: 01-05-2015 18:07 UTC

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Gender

Emily S. Rosenberg

During the past fifteen years, there has been a surge of scholarship related to women's and gender studies. This work has significantly transformed many dis- ciplines, including most subspecialties within history. But how are histories of women's roles and gender patterns becoming relevant to studies of United States foreign relations? Do women's and gender studies represent merely peripheral add- ons to the core of the field? Or might those bodies of scholarship prompt some conceptual changes of central importance? To clarify those questions, it may be helpful to sketch several different conceptual approaches and to consider some of the works that exemplify each.

One way of integrating women's history into the study of foreign relations would be to locate those exceptional, often slighted, women who influenced foreign policy. This approach emerges in biographical work on such well-known women as Jean- nette Rankin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Clare Boothe Luce. Edward P. Crapol's edited collection, Women and American Fore'gn Policy, makes a major contribution by highlighting a number of neglected figures: Lydia Maria Child, an antiexpansionist abolitionist; Jane M. Cazneau, an avid mid-nineteenth-century imperialist; Lucia True Ames Mead, a turn-of-the-century pacifist; and others.' Women andAmerican Fore'gn Policy fulfills its avowed purpose of showing that individual women, like individual men, have helped shape historical movements.

The effort to identify and include significant women, however, cannot lead very far. Despite the new material presented in his collection, Crapol concludes that "American diplomacy remains male-dominated and male-oriented." Other studies of women in the United States State Department, such as those by Joan Hoff- Wilson, Homer Calkin, and Lawrence Gelfand, also underscore how marginal women have been to foreign policy formulation.2 Given those conclusions about

Emily S. Rosenberg is professor of history at Macalester College. The author wishes to thank those who read this essay in advance and contributed valuable suggestions: George Herring, Amy Kaplan, Linda Kerber, Thomas Paterson, Norman Rosenberg, Elizabeth Schmidt, and David Thelen.

I Joan Hoff-Wilson, "'Peace Is a Woman's Job . . . 'Jeannette Rankin and Foreign Policy: The Origins of Her Pacifism," Montana, 30 (Jan. 1980), 28-41; Joan Hoff-Wilson, "'Peace Is a Woman's Job . . . 'Jeannette Rankin and Foreign Policy: Her Life Work as a Pacifist," ibid. (April 1980), 38-53; Lois Scharf, Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of American Liberalism (Boston, 1987); Wilfrid Sheed, Clare Boothe Luce (New York, 1982); Edward P. Crapol, ed., Women and American Foreign Policy: Lobbyists, Critics, and Insiders (New York, 1987).

2 On women's work patterns in the State Department, seeJoan Hoff-Wilson, "Conclusion: Of Mice and Men'" in Women and American Foreign Policy, ed. Crapol, 173-86; and Homer Calkin, Women in the Department of State: Their Role in American Foreign Affairs (Washington, 1978). On the exclusion of women, blacks, and Jews

116 The Journal of American History June 1990



Gender 117

women's marginality, the effort to integrate women and to consider them equally with men may lead into a theoretical cul-de-sac. The inclusive approach may turn back upon itself and, by reinforcing women's roles as outsiders, actually perpetuate exclusion.

The "exceptional women" approach can have an even graver disadvantage. Crapol, for example, implicitly praises those women he labels atypical of their sex, those who somehow made it across the gender barrier that delineated the "man's world" of foreign affairs. Yet if women come into histories of foreign relations only when they are atypical, while "typical" women seem ineffectual outsiders or power- less victims of a male system, the analysis may implicitly suggest that the problem with women lies in their being women and not men, though Crapol and others certainly would not endorse such a corollary. In the absence of some larger and historically nuanced analytical framework, the exceptional women approach may convey the impression that biology (being born a woman) rather than culture (gender systems constructed to contain and limit women's social roles) sufficiently explains women's marginality.

The flip side to highlighting atypical women would be a second approach: the study of women doing "women's work," at home and abroad. Studies of sex segregation in the labor market indicate that the boundaries between men's work and women's work shift in remarkable ways, belying the notion that somehow those boundaries reflect natural differences. Still, sex segregation-no matter what its boundaries and justifications -has been a consistent pattern in the workplace of in- dustrial America.3 Has there been women's work in foreign relations? Hoff-Wilson and Crapol amply demonstrate that it has not existed in the higher circles of the diplomatic corps. Neither has it developed in the policy-making elites of corporate and government bureaucracies nor in the military. If the concept of foreign relations is enlarged beyond governmental diplomacy and war, however, are there international tasks in which, for historical and cultural reasons, women tended to specialize?

Studies of missionaries, nurses, and peace movements interweave most easily with women's history. Jane Hunter's The Gospel of Gentility, for example, examines the women who constituted 60 percent of the American missionary movement in turn- of-the-century China. Hunter analyzes the cultural impact and explores the am- biguity in the lives of these single career women who nonetheless held very Victorian notions of natural gender roles. Patricia Hill's The World Their Household elabo- rates on the importance of the women's foreign mission movement and traces the cultural reasons for its decline after World War I. These studies have substantially revised earlier views of a male-dominated missionary movement and accentuated connections between American women's domestic and international efforts on be-

in the "merit system," see Lawrence E. Gelfand, "Towards a Merit System for the American Diplomatic Service, 1900-1930," Irish Studies in International Affairs, 2 (Fall 1988), 49-63.

3Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics ofJob Segregation by Sex during World War HI (Urbana, 1987), 1-11; Alice Kessler-Harris, "The Just Price, the Free Market, and the Value of Women," Feminist Studies, 14 (Summer 1988), 235-50.




half of social uplift, Christianity, and civilization. Indeed, the late nineteenth- century missionary impulse must be considered within the broader cultural context that assigned women special responsibilities for upgrading the moral condition of society.4

Women also figure prominently as peace activists, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1930 the prominent pacifist Frederick Libby commented that women "constitute the backbone of the peace movement in America"; the fact that Jane Addams and Emily Balch both won Nobel Peace Prizes for their work in the interwar peace movement underscores the international recognition accorded women's peace networks. Women appear prominently in most histories of twentieth-century pacifism.5 Works by BarbaraJ. Steinson and Harriet H. Alonso, in particular, detail the history of organized women's peace groups, explicitly connecting peace networks to women's culture and women's history.6

To recognize that women played important roles, even within fairly restricted ''women's spheres," expands the possibilities for integrating women into the history of foreign affairs. Such an approach emphasizes that women wielded power in the international arena, not by becoming atypical of their gender, but by pressing the possibilities of the socially constructed women's spheres to the limit, all the while helping redefine their boundaries.

In important ways, however, the women's work/women's culture approach can re- main trapped within the same limits as the exceptional women paradigm: the theory of "separate spheres," of women's versus men's culture. While the first approach looks for women who tried to act equally alongside men in a male sphere, the second emphasizes the different contributions made by women within a women's sphere. The danger in both cases is that gender spheres may be reified rather than historicized, implicitly set forth as natural realms of sex-segregated attitudes and activities. If flattened into static, ahistorical analyses, explanations based on the idea of separate spheres may imply that women are to be blamed for their own restricted opportunities, and that idea may obscure the complex processes by which gender boundaries are constantly redrawn over time.7

4Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven, 1984); Patricia Ruth Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920 (Ann Arbor, 1985). Works on the roles of women in the British Empire, dealing especially with the ambiguities of being the "inferior sex" within the "superior race," could be suggestive for American foreign relations. See, for example, Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener, eds., The Incorporated Wife (London, 1984); Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture, and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Urbana, 1987); Margaret Strobel, "Gender and Race in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire," in Be- coming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston, 1987), 374-96. On women nurses in the Vietnam War, see Joe P. Dunn, "Women and Vietnam: A Bibliographic Review,"Journal of American Culture, 12 (Spring 1989), 79-86.

5 Quoted in Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels against War: The American Peace Movement, 1941-1960 (New York, 1969), 5. See, for example, Charles Chatfield, For Peace andJustice: Pacifism in America, 1914-1941 (Knoxville, 1971); Charles DeBenedetti, Origins of the Modern American Peace Movement, 1915-1929 (Millwood, 1978); Harold Josephson, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders (Westport, 1985).

6 BarbaraJ. Steinson, American Women's Activism in World WarI (New York, 1982); Harriet H. Alonso, The Women's Peace Union and the Outlawry of War, 1921-1942 (Knoxville, 1990).

7 Recent exploration of this issue may be found especially in Linda Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History, 75 (June 1988), 4-39; Joan W.



Gender 119

The two approaches based on separate spheres need to be complemented with a third: a quest to understand the ever-changing ideologies related to gender and their social and political implications. Certainly Crapol, Hunter, Alonso, and others have successfully used the historical context of changing gender ideology to analyze the actions and impact of individual women or groups of women. Studying gender ideology will not only provide appropriate background for the study of specific women in history; it will also illuminate the symbolic systems that underlie power relationships in specific historical periods. Discourses related to gender may provide deeper understanding of the cultural assumptions from which foreign policies spring.8

Ideas about natural hierarchies and dependence that were embedded in gendered imagery at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, were part of a pervasive cultural milieu that supported foreign policies of domination. The subtle psycho- logical and rhetorical linkages between attitudes regarding gender, race, and foreign policy have received recent exploration in cultural studies such as Michael Rogin's Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Richard Drinnon's Facing West.9 Women, nonwhite races, and tropical countries often received the same kinds of symbolic characteriza- tions from white male policy makers: emotional, irrational, irresponsible, un- businesslike, unstable-, and childlike. Such "naturally dependent" peoples could be expected to exhibit the same kinds of "natural" responses to patriarchal tutelage. They were assumed, if behaving properly, to be loving, grateful, happy, and ap- preciative of paternal protection. Concepts of dependency-both in the United States family order and in the international one -reinforced and helped legitimate each other.

At particular times in United States relations with weaker nations, gendered imagery helped convert stories about foreign affairs into mythic tales, often with the form and structure of popular romance novels. Romantic formulas helped articulate and justify policies of dependence, portraying the disorganized but alluring (feminine) tropics courted by and ultimately succumbing to the imprint of manly or- ganizers of civilization. Gendered imagery abounds in popular portrayals of international relationships: the noisy and muscular parting of mother earth in Panama; the fiery engines of progress that penetated virgin land in the American West and then in Latin America; the North American financial advisers who continually proclaimed the man-sized jobs they were undertaking in financially insolvent countries. Michael Hunt observes that when North Americans "saw themselves acting

Scott, "History and Difference," Daedalus, 116 (Fall 1987), 93-118; Mary E. Hawkesworth, "Feminist Rhetoric: Dis- courses on the Male Monopoly of Thought," Political Theory, 16 (Aug. 1988), 444-67.

8 SeeJoan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American HistoricalReview, 91 (Dec. 1986), 1053-75; and Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).

9 Michael Paul Rogin, RonaldReagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, 1987); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis, 1980). Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 1984) and Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and US. Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1987) concentrate on racial ideology but are nonetheless suggestive on gender themes. A model essay linking images and foreign policies with issues of race and gender is Elizabeth Schmidt, "Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Colonial State: An Alliance to Control African Women in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939," Signs (forthcoming).




benevolently, they liked to picture the Latino as a white maiden passively awaiting salvation or seduction." Annexationist rhetoric during the Mexican War thus sought to bring the Spanish maid into the Yankee's valiant arms; in 1898, Cuba frequently became an alluring damsel in distress.10

Such gendered images did not make an argument justifying creation of zones of dependence, but as powerful rhetorical devices, they exemplified the presumed naturalness of the hierarchical arrangements and helped to make argument unnec- essary. Mythical, transhistorical narratives contained in metaphorical images, as Richard Slotkin has argued in a different context, transcend policy argumentation, persuading by symbolic association."

The subtle tones of gendered imagery within stories about United States foreign relations, then, need careful dissection. Close attention to symbolic and rhetorical structures can provide keen analytical insights into systems of power, how they are constructed, described, challenged, legitimated, and challenged again. Attention to gender ideology may not yield a simple new interpretation of any particular fa- miliar diplomatic event, but it may provide substantial help in illuminating, for example, those core values that Melvyn Leffler sees as central to national security history and in elaborating the cultural approach that Akira Iriye has advocated.

A growing body of literature, moreover, explores possible connections between gender ideology and war.12 Outbursts of bellicose rhetoric about manliness in foreign relations seem to be historically related to the stirrings of domestic feminist challenges to male power.13 Similarly, although women have often gained temporary job opportunities when men were absent fighting, wartime nationalism and violence may ultimately have worked to constrict women's boundaries. During World War II, for example, wartime exaltation of family (reinforced by images of the nation as a family) and of male bonding amid danger and violence widened the gulf between social constructions of feminity and masculinity. In the Cold War period, the symbolism of gender difference persisted, narrowing opportunities for women while simultaneously suffusing the language in which foreign relations were often described by American policy makers. Defense intellectuals, as Richard J. Barnet has

10 Amy Kaplan, "Romancing the Empire," paper presented at the American Studies Association Convention, Nov. 1987 (in Emily S. Rosenberg's possession); Hunt, Ideology and US. Foreign Policy, 60-61. Michael J. Hogan, The Panama Canal in American Politics: Domestic Advocacy and the Evolution of Policy (Carbondale, 1986), while not specifically addressing gendered metaphors, provides an intriguing discussion of the construction of a romanti- cized "history" of the canal.

11 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York, 1985).

12 See Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al., eds., Women, War, and History (New Haven, 1986); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York, 1987); Jean Bethke Elshtain and S. Tobias, eds., Thinking about Women, Militarism, and War (New York, 1987); Betty A. Reardon, Sexism and the War System (New York, 1985); Peggy Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance (Cambridge, Eng., 1981); and Cynthia Enloe, "Feminists Thinking about War, Militarism, and Peace," in Analyzing Gender: A Handbook of Social Science Research, ed. Beth B. Hess and Myra Marx Ferree (Beverly Hills, 1987), 526-47.

13 Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self Sex Roles in Modern America (New York, 1974), 104-27; Susan Jeffords, "Debriding Vietnam: The Resurrection of the White American Male," Feminist Studies, 14 (Fall 1988), 525-43; Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, 1989).



Gender 121

written, had above all to be tough and manly in their recommendations. Feminine symbolism became a code for weakness, defeat, and even treason.14

A comparative dimension may be useful here. George Mosse and Klaus Theweleit have explored complex connections between male experience and nationalistic action in German history. Theweleit examines the literature written by members of the ultranationalistic Freikorps during the 1920s and finds an obsession with the vision of communism as a Red Woman (a whore, an engulfing tide) contrasted with the vision of a White Woman (mother, wife, nurse).15 Seeing how the thoughts and the actions of the Freikorps so thoroughly intertwine international and gender imagery points toward other historical investigations of how gender identities might condition public policy execution.16

The discourse of international relations, then, is packed with terms and images that represent gender differences. How often does the gender symbolism of any particular age or event continue to lurk as unexamined expression in the structure and cadences of histories? Sensitivity to gender ideology can provide avenues for historians of United States foreign relations to investigate the systems of thought that underlie constructions of power and knowledge.

A fourth approach to issues of gender and foreign relations draws from a branch of the vast world systems literature. Here, scholars begin by asking whether it is possible to represent the changing world order if half of the population remains invisible.

People of the world can be divided and categorized in many different ways: by nations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and so on. Scholars of foreign relations typically group people into nations, as in "England went to war against Germany." For purposes of generalization, it is often necessary to employ some categories of difference and ignore others. But which categories should be used at any particular point? Marxist historians, for example, stress how historical situations may have different impacts for capital than for labor. Scholars using dependency theory, as Louis Perez's essay suggests, have argued that policies of development in metropol- itan centers have been agents of "undevelopment" in the periphery. And, more recently, feminist writers have shown how international changes can affect men's lives and women's lives in very different ways.

14 Sonya Michel, "American Women and the Discourse of the Democratic Family in World War II," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (New Haven, 1989), 154-67; Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals," Signs, 12 (Summer 1987), 687--718; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988); Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York, 1984); Richard J. Barnet, Roots of Wiar: The Men and Institutions behind US. Foreign Policy (New York, 1971), 109-10.

15 George L. Mosse, Nationalism andSexuality: Respectability andAbnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985); Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Min- neapolis, 1987).

16 On the changing imagery of American nationalism as expressed through female forms in statuary, art, and posters from the late nineteenth century through World War I, see Martha Banta, Imaging American W/omen: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York, 1987), 562-70. On nationalism and sexuality, see Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (New York, 1989); and Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War (New York, 1986).




This latter body of scholarship is sometimes classified under the term "women in international development" (WID). A somewhat misleading phrase, reflecting the initially liberal origins of this feminist scholarship, WID has recently come to label an ideologically diverse mass of work reassessing histories of international economic development in terms of specific impacts on women. Although much less visible than debates over nation-state power politics, over class, and over dependency theory, WID scholarship is highly relevant to histories of United States foreign relations.

WID scholarship emerged in the early 1970s when some influential studies sug- gested that economic development in Third World countries had negative effects on women. In the previous decades, economists and bureaucrats, nearly all male, had theorized about development and "modernization" as if women did not exist, as if women's production were extraneous to tasks of national advancement. Rural peasants (persistently one of the banes of modernization theorists) were uniformly signified by the male pronoun, as though agricultural production were inherently a male-dominated activity. New scholarship by women, however, began to show that such male-centered perspectives on the developmental process distorted history and contributed, in some places, to a sharp decline in the status of women. Works by Ester Boserup, Irene Tinker, and others, together with the activism generated through the 1975 World Conference of International Women's Year inaugurating the United Nations Decade for Women, raised significant new questions about the whole notion of development.'7

Much WID scholarship has focused on the ways in which new technology and outside capital can alter the social context of production in the Third World. Thus, women who might have had customary rights to land have often lost status and livelihood as a result of "reform" of land titles. External development credit for farmers (considered male by development planners) was frequently unavailable to women, even those who traditionally did most of the farming. Even the introduction of small-is-beautiful, "appropriate" technology in some cases overburdened the productive tasks of already-stressed women workers when that technology shifted production from what had customarily been men's work into the women's sphere. (This happened in some cultures if outside agencies tried to substitute ecologically efficient small animals for larger ones.) Studies from a liberal developmental perspective have tended to emphasize the damaging exclusion of women from new capitalist production and commercial relationships. Other scholars have highlighted the deepening oppression of women, because of both class and gender, that can result from their inclusion in development in subordinate and often unremunerated roles.

One overwhelming message of this new scholarship, whether liberal capitalist in

17 Ester Boserup, Women s Role in Economic Development (New York, 1970); Irene Tinker and Michele Bo Bransen, eds., Women and WorldDevelopment (New York, 1976). For a critique of Boserup, see Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen, "Accumulation, Reproduction, and Women's Roles in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited," in Women s Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender, ed. Eleanor Leacock and Helen I. Safa (South Hadley, 1982), 141-57.



Gender 123

orientation or critical of liberal capitalist assumptions, is clear: In global production, women have provided the bulk of agricultural work, of reproductive labor, and of services provided in the informal sector. Labor demands upon the time of women have been frequently more intense than those upon the time of men. Consideration of development, modernization, or dependence, therefore, must consider women's production and the impact of changes that may affect the patterning of work time in women's lives. Analyses of the global political economy, whether historical or related to current policy, must be subjected to gender analysis, not out of any fashionable desire to include women but because divisions of labor by gender have, historically, provided a fundamental organizing principle of economic systems.18

Although gender is often an essential analytical category, studies sensitive to gender issues do not presuppose any particular conclusion but rather highlight the diversity of human experiences. Feminist theory grows out of this emphasis on diversity, contextuality, and contingency and thus links up with critical postmodernist approaches that can be of great relevance for historians of foreign relations. By ques- tioning universalistic formulations and policy truths, the growing body of postmodernist criticism emphasizes the importance of "local knowledge" and examines reality not as a single, discoverable condition but as the product of situational van- tage conditioned by location within larger systems of power. In that criticism, power relationships and the constructions of knowledge that buttress them are not ac- cepted as natural but are pried open and challenged from diverse perspectives. Fem- inist scholars do not provide the only access to critical insights, but they have been especially prominent among postmodernist theorists.19

Several critiques of the discourses of power within American foreign relations help open the way for analyses that establish their perspective from places on the periphery, away from the assumptions of power centers. My own Spreading the Amer-

18 Basic studies include the special issue "Women and National Development: The Complexities of Change," ed. Michelle McAlpin et al., Signs, 3 (Autumn 1977), 1-338; Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, eds., Women and Colonization (New York, 1980); Naomi Black and Ann Baker Cottrell, eds., Women and World Change: Equity Issues in Development (Beverly Hills, 1981); Lourdes Beneria, ed., Women and Development: The Sexual Division of Labor in Rural Societies (New York, 1982); Pamela M. d'Onofrio-Flores and Sheila M. Pfafflin, eds., Scientific- Technological Change and the Role of Women in Development (Boulder, 1982); June C. Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelley, eds., Women, Men, andthe International Division ofLabor (Albany, 1983); Iftikar Ahmed, ed., Technology and Rural Women (London, 1985); Gita Sen, Development, Crisis, and Alternative Visions: Third World W~omen's Perspectives (DAWN) (Stavanger, Norway, 1985); Linda Y. C. Lim, Women Workers in Multi- national Enterprises in Developing Countries (Geneva, 1985); Lourdes Beneria and Martha Roldan, The Crossroads of Class and Gender (Chicago, 1987); and Irene Dandelman and Joan Davidson, Women and Environment in the Third World: Alliance for the Future (London, 1988). See also Francisco 0. Ramirez, "Global Changes, World Myths, and the Demise of Cultural Gender: Implications for the United States," in America's Changing Role in the World-System, ed. Terry Boswell and Albert Bergesen (New York, 1987), 257-89; Suzanne Smith Saulniers and Cathy A. Rakowski, eds., Women in the Development Process: A Select Bibliography on Women in Sub- Saharan Africa and Latin America (Austin, 1977); and Women and Development: Articles, Books, and Research Papers Indexed in the Joint World Bank-International Monetary Fund Library, Washington, D.C. (Boston, 1987). Michigan State University issues a fine series of papers on Women in International Development.

19Jane Flax, "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory," Signs, 12 (Summer 1987), 621-43; Joan W. Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Post-Structuralist Theory for Feminism," Feminist Studies, 14 (Spring 1988), 33-50; Mary Poovey, "Feminism and Deconstruction," ibid., 51-65; Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," ibid. (Fall 1988), 575-99. For a feminist critique of postmodernism, see LindaJ. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodern- ism (New York, 1990).




ican Dream, for example, provides an extended critique of the abstracted tenets that I call "liberal-developmentalism," those presumably self-evident propositions that encoded and extended the hegemonic power of internationally oriented political and economic elites within the United States. Michael H. Hunt's Ideology and US. Foreign Policy similarly challenges dominant ideological structures related to race and revolution.20

As single truths evaporate and certainty about the legitimacy of power and posi- tion erodes, ethnocentrism, as well as sexism, can be more effectively recognized and challenged. William 0. Walker III, for example, has demonstrated how United States policies toward international drug traffic in the twentieth century have persistently failed because of lack of attention to the "local knowledge" of Bolivia. Simi- larly, Charles R. Lilley and Hunt have demonstrated how the influences of new critical perspectives are binding histories of foreign relations closer and closer to particularistic social and cultural investigations. Feminist critical theory, as part of a larger postmodernist approach to knowledge, can thus help historians of American foreign relations ask probing questions about systems of power generally, not simply those related to gender.21

Scholarship related to women and gender, in sum, is increasingly affecting histories of foreign relations. Some valuable recent studies have looked at women who entered the "man's world" of foreign policy and at those who extended the special- ized sphere of women's work to the international scene. Other new approaches have emerged from the work on gender ideology, women in international development, and feminist theory. Investigations in these areas are integral parts of a larger fer- ment within the historical profession as a whole. Many historians of foreign relations, like those in other subfields, are being nudged by feminist scholarship to ask the kinds of critical questions that are redefining basic notions of knowlege, power, and history itself.

20 Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York, 1982); Hunt, Ideology and US. Foreign Policy.

21 Charles R. Lilley and Michael H. Hunt, "On Social History, the State, and Foreign Relations: Commentary on 'The Cosmopolitan Connection,"' Diplomatic History, 11 (Summer 1987), 243-50; William 0. Walker III, "Drug Control and the Issue of Culture in American Foreign Relations," ibid., 12 (Fall 1988), 365-82. See also Akira Iriye, "The Internationalization of History," American Historical Review, 94 (Feb. 1989), 1-10.



Documents

1990.Gender