ABSTRACT
This chapter considers that the developments in women's history in the mid-eighties is threaded through with references to Scott's clarion call. In an article published in 1983 Joan Scott called for the 'articulation of gender as a category of historical analysis'. Scott went on to look at how Marxism was adopted by American and British feminists, and argued that it offered no independent analytic status for gender. Anna Davin began by reviewing past generations of historians of women; examined the contributions made by labour history and social history to women's history, and reviewed the beneficial effects of the, albeit irksome, marginality of the discipline in the UK. Scott herself drew on the ideas of Derrida to develop an understanding of the use of gender as a category for analysis through the deconstruction of texts in order to understand how difference, in particular sexual difference, was used to establish meaning and to legitimise power.
