Tessie P. Liu

Teaching the differences among women from a historical perspective: Rethinking race and gender as social categories

Abstract Fully acknowledging the diversity of womens experience begins with understanding how the differences among women are constructed relationally in specific social processes. This essay suggests, through an analysis of the historical roots of social classification systems, that institutionalized racism is a form of sexism. Scholars must move beyond understanding racism as purely an outgrowth of irrational prejudices and begin to think of race as a widespread principle of social organization. Race as a social category relies on biological metaphors of common substance to mark boundaries of privilege and entitlement. Thus, European societies before colonial contact with others were already racially stratified societies divided by lineage and bloodlines but not by skin color. The centrality of reproduction in this definition of race allows us to see why racial categories are predicated upon control of women and sexuality. Racial thinking, however, does not view all women as the same, but divides women by experience and by assigned function within the same social order. Through an analysis of race, we gain insight into the structural underpinnings of why womens experiences differ but also why such differences are implicated in each other.

Race and Gender in the Politics of Group Formation: A Comment on Notions of Multiculturalism

West as a place where diverse peoples were thrown together by cycles of conquest and migration, and where through relations of domination and exclusion as well as cooperation, indigenous populations, Hispanics, Anglos, and Asians fashioned a multicultural and multiracial society. The heterogeneity of society in the American West makes the study of women in the West an ideal place to explore theoretical issues bearing on the connections between race and gender in multicultural settings. As a feminist concerned with the pressing need to address the differences among women and to cement ties across racial and cultural as well as class barriers, I am persuaded by these papers that western womens history is fertile ground for exploring these vital issues. But as an outsider to this field and someone who hopes to garner from it a model for wider application, I found myself asking as I read these fascinating and descriptively rich accounts: how will a more generalizable understanding of the relationship between race and gender emerge from these case studies? Although these papers suggest many intriguing connections, key arguments linking the crucial terms in the analysis remain unarticulated.