ABSTRACT
Judith Bennett has recently urged that the most important task currently confronting feminist historians is to think more clearly about the analysis of historical change. We need, she argues, to develop historical narratives of short-and long-term transformation of gender relations; we need to think about the extent of the impact of shifts in the meanings of masculinity and femininity on the ongoing system of gender relations: in short, gender needs to become a category of historical analysis.1 This is not as easy as it sounds. Vast historical changes may barely disturb the relations of power between men and women. On the other hand, concepts of gender may display extraordinary volatility at certain moments, such as the French Enlightenment or the German Reformation. They may even, as, for instance, in the propagandist attacks on Marie-Antoinette in the French Revolution as a lesbian and prostitute and her husband Louis XVI as an impotent cuckold, become the currency of political debate itself2-yet little may actually change in the relations between the sexes.
