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The impact of the linguistic turn on the writing of U.S. women's/gender history has been to problematize the language used to describe the history of women and question the binary opposition of biological sex. The historian Joan Kelly (1976) argued that women's history attempts to return women to history and history to women. Women cannot be studied in isolation because to study one sex necessarily entails studying the other. Furthermore, women's history does not accept the social relations between the sexes as natural but insists that they are socially constructed by and for women.

The linguistic turn questions what is meant by women, womanhood, and femininity rather than accepting their meanings as standard. It also acknowledges that those meanings shift over time, that gender itself is dynamic. Joan Scott (1996) argued that in addition to the social relations of the sexes being socially and culturally constructed, scholars of women's/gender history must reject the idea of the binary opposition of the sexes. Thus, to understand how social relations between the sexes affect women's experiences, scholars must attempt to understand the construction and reconstruction of gender. By focusing on the construction of gender it is possible to locate power. It is in language that people locate meaning. The shift from the opposition of the sexes to the construction of gender also does damage to arguments that rest on the foundation of sexual difference, that is, cultural feminism.

There are many scholars whose work has contributed to the turn of the writing of U.S. women's / gender history to a more complex understanding of the construction of womanhood and femininity. In Cynthia Russett's Sexual Science (1989), for example, there is a description of how the Victorian medical profession devised a theory of conservation to explain and justify the subordinate role of women. The theory rested on a Darwinian explanation that women's evolution had stopped at a certain point to enable women to reproduce, which constrained their potential but facilitated the success of the species. Victorian doctors used this, according to Russett, to protect their status as men and as doctors. The theory rationalized that women's inequality was nature-ordained and that women therefore could never be equal to men in power, position, or authority.

Similarly, Ann Douglas (1973) described how womanhood was constructed in the nineteenth century by the cultural ideology that women were ill because they were women, thus linking female gender with incapacitation. Douglas found that many women considered themselves ill to escape the burdens of the kitchen and bedroom. She also noted that women were determined to be ill because they had violated their femininity by engaging in unfeminine pursuits such as intellectual ambition and lack of selflessness. To cure women, doctors tried to return them to their so-called feminine states. Thus, the American physician Weir Mitchell devised a ''rest cure'' that required days in bed with no mental stimulation. Women were considered the most feminine when they were pregnant, a sign of male potency.

Scholars of women's/gender history also look to visual representations of gender as cultural sites of the construction of gender. Barbara Melosh (1991) describes how New Deal public art represented male and female forms according to social expectations and needs rather than serving as accurate reflections of women's roles. Hence, cultural representations can reflect society's constructions of gender. Melosh portrays how women in public art almost never were depicted in their roles as professionals (teachers, social workers, nurses), and in the rare cases when they were, they always were presented as being subservient to men. Furthermore, the hero images served to illustrate men's strength and capacity as wage earners and women's roles as companionate helpmates to squelch social anxieties about women's increased visibility in the labor force, their legal right as voters, and their attempts at independent lifestyles. New Deal public art illustrates the idea that gender can be created not only to reflect but also to reinforce traditional notions of what constitutes womanhood. Artists and administrators alike vetoed images that depicted too many women or were on a scale that implied strength.

The construction of gender is relational: Women's weaknesses are celebrated by society to bolster men's strengths. As Susan Brownmiller (1984) argues, the creation of feminine ideals served to make appearance, rather than ambition or accomplishment, the emblem of female desirability. Hence, women compete not for professional achievement but in their efforts to reach feminine ideals. The construction of gender is fundamental to women's/gender history scholarship, for to understand and chronicle women's experiences, historians need to dissect what makes females women, how this has influenced their status, and how scholars might propose ways to change the system of social organization for the better.

The linguistic turn also can be considered part of the movement of scholarship beyond the search for sisterhood (Hewitt 1985). Understanding the ways in which gender is constructed enables scholars to explicate the myriad ways in which womanhood and femininity have served as cultural ideals that are not representative of all women at all times.

Bibliography:

Brownmiller, Susan. 1984. Femininity. New York: Lindon Press/Simon & Schuster.

Coward, Rosalind. 1985. Female Desires: How They Are Sought, Bought, and Packaged. New York: Grove Press, 1985.

Douglas, Ann. 1973. ''The Fashionable Diseases: Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America.'' Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4(1): 25-52.

Dublin, Thomas. 1979. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Hewitt, Nancy. 1985. ''Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women's History in the 1980s.'' Social History 10: 299-321.

Jensen, Joan M. 1986. Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kelly, Joan. 1976. ''The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History.'' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1(4): 809-823.

McCracken, Ellen. 1993. Decoding Women's Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Melosh, Barbara. 1991. Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.

Peiss, Kathy Lee. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Russett, Cynthia Eagle. 1989. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Scott, Joan. 1996. ''Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis.'' In Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott. New York: Oxford University Press.

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