Everyday Life and Gender

Definition

The relation between the history of everyday life and the history of gender is, in Dorothee Wierling's phrase, "not close kin, but they can and should enter into a carefully considered alliance"—the most productive modus vivendi being "that of an 'open relationship'" (Wierling, pp. 150, 163). Both fields share subject matter (the private, informal, reproductive), but this very affinity risks a shared ahistoricism: "'Everyday life' and 'women' are categories associated with similar connotations: nonpolitical, private, informal, powerless, exposed. … both often connote 'nature'" (pp. 154–155). Wierling's programme is therefore not to celebrate women's everyday competence (Tüchtigkeit) but to historicize it, and to investigate the how of male domination in concrete everyday encounters: "gender history would cease squandering its energies in a bootless search for the origins of a universal 'patriarchy'; instead, it would turn its scrutiny to examining concrete relations between the sexes" (p. 157). The everyday is "the sphere in which men and women—as acting subjects—repeatedly negotiate and renegotiate this relationship," where "power relations, such as those in the family, are formed face-to-face" (p. 155).

Key Thinkers

• Dorothee Wierling — the chapter "The History of Everyday Life and Gender Relations" (no author page yet — see log).
• Joan Kelly — the rejection of sex/class/race analogies; gender as a universal category.
• Joan W. Scott — "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis"; the "how" of domination.
• Karin Hausen — the critique of "patriarchy" via individualism/familialism.
• Natalie Zemon Davis, Gerda Lerner, Gianna Pomata — the women's-history interlocutors.
• Rita Felski — the later feminist revaluation of the everyday in the wiki.
• Shirley Ardener, Doreen Massey — the wiki's other gender-and-space theorists.

Related Concepts

• Gender and the Interior — the wiki's interior-focused gender concept.
• Separate Spheres — the private/public division Wierling argues was never neat.
• Everyday Life — the sphere of the alliance.
• Alltagsgeschichte — the historiography the alliance addresses.
• Power — the relation gender history investigates in everyday contexts.
• Homosocial Space — the sex-segregated counterpart.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Wierling's chapter (pp. 149–163) in full: the servant-girl study; gender as a category; the "natural couple" critique; the open-relationship model; the thematic fields of labour, family, public sphere and power; Brecht's kitchen dictum.

Open Questions

• If the everyday necessarily frames gender, and gender necessarily frames the everyday, can the two be disentangled enough to avoid circularity?
• Wierling argues gender must also be sought "external to Alltag," in the state, bureaucracy and world economy — but can a history of everyday life follow it there without ceasing to be a history of everyday life?