ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses complexity of the task facing historians of women in the United States, and the resulting debates about what conceptual framework was appropriate to their work. A focus on gender in the study of historical material was put forward as a way of making such work coherent, and also of challenging accepted ways of seeing the past, one which could encompass both women's and men's histories. Joan Kelly's article put forward a theory of social change which traced the origins and historical forms of patriarchy to 'the society's mode of production'. Sally Alexander identified the operation of the patriarchy - without naming it as such - in the sexual division of labour, whose origins she understood to lie in the family. The editors looked to Joan Kelly's 'doubled vision of feminist theory' to 'resolve the conflicts between radical-feminist and socialist-feminist, feminist and Marxist, American and British which results from attempts to reduce sex oppression to class interests.
