Joan Wallach Scott’s now classic essay, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” was published nearly forty years ago (1986). In an update to the essay in 2010, she detailed how gender is a generative analytic that historians can bring to bear on different historical dynamics, spaces, people, and periods.Footnote ¹ Drawing from social constructionist and poststructuralist theorizing to keep the concept of “gender” open as a question rather than a category with assumed, static meanings, Scott expanded gender theorizing in historical scholarship in ways that continue to hold promise today. Scott wrote:

Her emphasis here on criticality and openness charged historians to cast aside any fixed assumptions about what “gender” might mean, and instead to consider its context-specific manifestations: for example, gender as concept or characteristic intersecting with disability, class, sexuality, race, nation, or other key positionings, and continually shifting in meaning and salience across time and context. In short, how historians “see” gender shapes its limits—and potential—as an analytic.

Many have taken up Scott’s charge in their historical work. Publications on the history of education represent the productivity of gendered historical analysis across decades. Karen Graves and I assessed the field for a 2016 essay in John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura’s Oxford History of Education handbook, pointing to the diverse ways women’s, gender, and feminist history have developed simultaneously to shape the field from their different perspectives. We noted that Woman, rather than Man, has primarily signaled “gender” in historical analysis, a fact that has necessitated the productive expansion of masculinity, intersectional, LGBTQ, spatial, and international studies, which have infused the field with a more textured knowledge of gender. We traced the varied theories, methodologies, and writing styles scholars have used, the diverse sites of gendered analysis scholars have considered—from bodies to institutions to biographies—and the productive objects and documentary sources scholars have used to amplify marginalized histories. And yet, just as we concluded then, we recognize today there is much unexplored and underexplored terrain left to consider.Footnote ³ It is thus a welcome occasion to introduce the essays in this volume of the History of Education Quarterly that focus on this very issue. A collection spearheaded by Kim Tolley, the four essays collectively foreground gendered analysis in the history of education, inviting readers to consider the range of questions that historians have asked about gender’s manifestations and pointing to underexplored trajectories in their fields of specialization. Together, they echo Scott’s invitation from decades ago to continue to explore the productivity of gender as a supple, open, critical category of historical analysis.

Michael S. Hevel and Timothy Reese Cain’s essay, “Where Is Gender in the Historiography of LGBTQ+ College Students?,” considers scholarship on women in college student history and their recognition of the ongoing need for gendered analysis in the historiography of LGBTQ students. Pointing to robust areas of gendered scholarship in histories of college students, such as women’s affectionate and romantic relationships, they also recognize gender as too often a felt, but unnamed, presence in scholarship on queer students who deviated from dominant norms in their gender-nonconforming corporeal expressions and their same-sex desires and relationships. Such analysis of gendered norms reflects the value of established scholarship that considers educational institutions as heteronormative (as well as gendered, classed, and racialized) spaces that can contribute to reproducing dominant ideologies and behaviors for students and school workers alike.Footnote ⁴ Such mechanisms can control student behavior through pushing LGBTQ+ people, for example, to comply with gender and sexual norms or become hyper-visible and vulnerable through their refusal. In this sense, as Suzanne Pharr underscored in 1988, homophobia can become a powerful social and institutional weapon of sexism because deviations from gender/sexual norms can signal that people are failing to be proper gendered subjects—failing to act like “good” boys and girls—in refusing the gendered/sexual prescriptions of their historical moment.Footnote ⁵

Such refusals not only perpetuate narrow ideologies of behavior for men and women based on a binary sex model but have resulted in institutional and interpersonal violence against LGBTQ+ people, as Cain and Hevel note in their essay, and thus remain important areas of inquiry in college student life. Although examples of entrenched gender norms are prevalent, their essay illustrates how college campuses have been dynamic spaces of gendered, racial, and LGBTQ activism that have nourished student organizing, expanded freedoms for various groups, and established legal cases beneficial to LGBTQ student rights. Cain and Hevel note the variety of institutional responses to LGBTQ+ students’ organizing efforts that have established some legal victories enabling LGBTQ+ groups’ formal recognition. Ongoing inquiry into legal cases and student dynamics provides other possibilities for expanding explicit and sustained gendered analysis of college student life.

The significance of recognizing intersectionality as a robust but undertheorized and underapplied analytic in the history of education scholarship is the focus of ArCasia James-Gallaway’s essay, “A Case for Interrogating the Relationships of Patriarchy, Masculinity, and Whiteness to Structural Power in the History of Education.” That race is always gendered, and gender is always raced (and sexualized, etc.) is a well-theorized analytical position in contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship, particularly in the work of Black feminist, gender, race, and queer theorizing, but this position has yet to actualize its promise in the history of education. In fact, as James-Gallaway reminds readers, whiteness and masculine hegemony are always present in educational history but remain persistently ignored dimensions of analysis in the scholarship historians produce. She notes her frustration at these missed opportunities, “how infrequently the field of the history of education centers analyses on powerholding groups, namely, men and boys in general, white people in general, and white men and boys.” Like the scholarship on “gender” that has long prioritized “women” as the subjects who “have gender”—rather than, for example, seeing “men,” transgender, or nonbinary individuals as gendered subjects—scholarship on “race” has often focused on minoritized racial and ethnic groups as “having race” at the expense of sustained racial analysis of whiteness. Examining the ways that whiteness and masculinity have sustained the operations of power, she contends, is critical to historical analysis and to strengthening historians’ work.

James-Gallaway asserts that the absence of sustained scholarship on the historical dynamics of power, which are always gendered and racialized, obscures the ways the machinations of power can continue to reproduce and transmogrify in contemporary educational dynamics. She notes, “The field contains scant analyses of power, oppression (i.e., deprivation), or privilege from a white or masculine viewpoint, a concerning limitation that obscures how power works to reinscribe, sustain, and proliferate itself.” Drawing from her own work and other recent exceptions to this pattern, she describes scholarship on Black masculinities and racialized patriarchy in school desegregation, the ways racial analyses of power can obscure patriarchy’s role, the perpetuation of education as a “white” rather than wider “public” good, white women’s opposition to desegregation and their many benefits from white supremacy historically, and white children’s racialized and gendered socialization in the Jim Crow South. She points to feminists of color who have unpacked the significance of gender, race, and class in women of color’s educational experiences, and the necessity of bringing gendered analysis to scholarship on the many male leaders who have benefited from gendered power. The essay urges historians of education to deploy the unrealized potential of analytics that, as Scott suggests, keep gender open and dynamic in different periods and topics. For James-Gallaway, it is important for our collective future that scholars bring gendered, racialized, sexual, and class analytics to bear on educational issues that have been long studied only through unidimensional lenses. She contributes to that mission by offering a range of robust intersectional analytic questions that historians can use in their research.

In their essay, “Degrees of Change: The Historiography of Women’s Higher Education in England and Ireland,” Jane Martin and Judith Harford explore feminist, gender, and women’s educational historiography in two national contexts. They use a four-part framework of access, curriculum, institutional presence, and networks to synthesize historiographical patterns across a 150-year period in England and Ireland, a framework useful for other contexts as well. Visible in their essay, too, is the necessary consideration of gender’s intersections with other analytics such as context, class, and nation in educational historiography. Martin and Harford describe feminist studies that have critiqued historiographies exclusive of women, advanced knowledge of women’s roles and activities in higher education, and detailed diverse angles of the field. For example, they note the importance of early scholarship that focused on women’s educational access as an avenue for liberation and set the stage for scholars’ expanding analysis of power dynamics, experiences, and networks over subsequent decades. As Graves and I noted in 2016, such access remains an important theme for analyzing girls’ and women’s education around the globe, even as women’s educational history has expanded well beyond this topic.

Scholarship on religious, patriarchal, and political ideologies governing national politics and education in different locales expanded knowledge about the various norms shaping women’s educational experiences and spurred the development of gendered academic fields appropriate for women to study. Martin and Harford note how the field incorporated single-sex and coeducational analysis, biographies, women students’ and faculty members’ experiences in different contexts, and the value of diverse networks—all components on which women relied both outside and inside education to agitate for change, fuel and disseminate scholarship, and engage in broader political and social issues. In alignment with James-Galloway’s contribution, Martin and Harford call on scholars to acknowledge that “gender is only one axis in a range of wider inequalities that operate across higher education,” and note the necessity of attention in future research to the rich theories and methodologies that scholars can use in gendered history and to the ways women’s experiences converge and diverge over time based on positionality, geography, and context.

The final essay amplifies gendered analytics through the study of Chinese women’s roles in educational history and the expansion of archival sites of study. In Stella Meng Wang’s essay, “A New Way of Looking: Gender and the Education of Chinese Women in the Colonial World,” she foregrounds the value of studying Chinese women as “hidden figures” in the archives for insights into the colonial world. Although historians have traced a range of domestic and public sites in which Chinese women were active, Wang notes the educational historiography of Chinese women is still growing—and is particularly scarce in colonial history. Echoing James-Galloway’s emphasis on systems of power that shape both educational history and scholars’ analysis of it, Wang notes that Chinese women’s marginalization in educational historiography results from the dominance of masculinized Chinese history and Euro-American paradigms. For me as a reader, Wang’s work further underscores the conceptual point that our very imaginaries and theories of where we see—and don’t see—gender shape entire fields of study. Chinese women, like other gendered subjects addressed in this forum—LGBTQ+ students, people of color, and white men—have always been present in history, yet they have received little recognition as sites for exploring gendered educational histories. Wang’s work also echoes Scott’s recognition that gender, in addition to manifesting in groups of people, can operate in many objects and spaces such as academic fields, archives, institutions, and urban life.

Wang traces power dynamics, archives, discourses, and people to consider the machinations of gender in Chinese colonial history. She argues that the Chinese state and missionaries bolstered their power through constructing Chinese women as “subordinated, marginalized, feminine colonial subjects” who were essential to creating the modern state. Attending to discourses of power, urban education, public health, and other forces at play throughout the history of Chinese women’s education expands gender beyond bodies to situate it in larger colonial processes that relied on gendered subjects to accomplish their mission. These power dynamics shaped Chinese women’s urban and educational experiences both within and beyond formal education. Wang also wrestles productively with the gendered and colonizing power of archives that often dictate who can later emerge as historical actors.Footnote ⁶ She puts the colonial and public archives in dialogue with each other to reveal gendered dynamics. Wang writes, “Part of this exercise of putting the everyday life of Chinese women into layered contexts—the immediate, local, colonial, and transnational—involves making the colonial archive that overlooked Chinese women speak to the everyday archive that documented Chinese women.” Her work situates gendered subjects who both navigate and are shaped by the gendered realities of their contexts, while also situating them in larger processes of empire.

The rich contributions in this issue of HEQ are inspiring invitations to continuously nurture the possibilities of diverse gender analysis in educational history. We can seek gendered dynamics in nooks and crannies, grand discourses and daily rhythms, boardrooms and classrooms, and familiar and overlooked spaces to honor the multidimensional resources that scholars have established for amplifying the promise of this aspect of educational historiography. Consider these essays as echoing and extending Scott’s call to treat “gender” as an open, critical category of analysis to explore in diverse topics and contexts.