We Irish Women: Gender, History, and the World-Economy
Author(s)
Smith, Joan
Abstract
History is replete with the record of women. However, the notion that there is such a category that can be traced across time and space is seriously challenged. Rather, what should be the subject of an historical account is gendered relations and how these are articulated with forms of economic, social, and political institutions. In a review of a new anthology detailing the lives of Irish women this article argues that in the absence of that analysis there is a significant chance that the category “women” will be dislodged from its historical expression. As much as the world cannot be understood apart from the gendered relations that constitute it, conversely, gendered relations are meaningless in the absence of an account of their systematic connections to political, social, and economic structures. While there is nothing much new in this prescription of how to study gender and the socially organized ways it is constituted in much of the discourse concerning both gender and social structures, there is the predisposition to take the former as given while explicating the latter.
