This essay is an attempt to address a problem that seems resistant to easy solution: the one face by feminist historians in their attempts to bring women as a subject and gender as an analytic category into the practice of labor history. If women as subject have increased in visibility, the questions raised by women’s history remain awkwardly connected to the central concerns of the field. And gender has not been seriously considered for what it could provide in the way of a major re-conceptualization of labor history. The main argument is that there is a connection between the study of “language” and the study of gender, that certain epistemological theories provide a way to recast our understanding of the place of gender in history: if we attend to the ways in which “language” constructs meaning we will also be in a position to find gender.
