The usual story goes this way: Women’s History originated in social history and the feminist search for a usable past. Policy History originated as a reaction to the demise of political history. Women’s History was about everyday life and culture, the domestic and the private. Policy History was about government, bureaucracy, and politics, the public sphere. Policy History was born out of the anxieties of white men left behind by new identity-based histories, who, in searching for their own usable past, repackaged political history as policy history, looking to political science, of all deadly disciplines, to sex themselves up.Footnote ¹ They later became terribly threatened when women’s historians invaded their home turf at the first Policy History conference at Bowling Green and subsequent ones in Saint Louis—though they could avoid going to sessions about women and gender and ignore the gender historians, while cultivating women who disavowed emerging feminist paradigms.

Sometimes it seemed that Policy History and Women’s History would never get hitched, with the first threatened by the gender turn and the second preferring the suitors of cultural and social history. The writings of Jane Sherron De Hart complicate this origins narrative (as does the support for gender and women’s history by the editors of the Journal of Policy History). De Hart shows how the two fields could not only live together but also thrive by informing each other. Women’s History could not be history with the politics—or the law—left out, nor could Policy History be written without attention to gender, sex, and women’s diverse lives—or an understanding of culture. Her essays have illuminated women’s places in policy processes as well as the gendered components of politics and policy—with emphasis on questions of equality, difference, and rights.

Writing Policy History before the field gained its name, De Hart sought to bridge the divides of Women’s History and Political History. She had earned a substantial reputation in U.S. Women’s History. Her edited collection with Linda K. Kerber helped define the U.S. Women’s History survey.Footnote ² Already she was training a new generation of women’s political historians. De Hart taught the necessity of studying antifeminism as well as feminism and distinguishing between feminisms. Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA, a 1990 study of the ratification battle in North Carolina over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) written with Donald G. Mathews, revealed through the practice of writing history itself that historians of women need to take into account political and policy processes. But this prize-winning work further instructed historians of policy to consider gender ideologies and gendered interests in accounting for policy failure as well as success.Footnote ³ “Classification by sex,” which the ERA would have curtailed, proved central to both the discourse and strategy stories that De Hart has generated.Footnote ⁴

When women’s historians discovered that we were writing Policy History, many of us focused on social welfare. Our “maternalism wars” debated the discourse of motherhood and the focus on policies benefiting women and children that dominated Progressive Era reform. We debated the meanings of motherhood for women’s citizenship and questioned whether attention to female difference—women’s care responsibilities and even biological uniqueness—could beget equality.Footnote ⁵ It is not that De Hart ignored the racialized gendered social assistance system that commonly goes by the term “welfare,” though she would come to frame it in terms of national identity.Footnote ⁶ Or that she did not confront female “difference,” which she interrogated in essays on the antiratificationists (women opponents of the ERA) to uncover implications that stem from seeing women’s difference from men as more complicated than feminist revaluation of women’s culture or carework usually confronts.Footnote ⁷ Rather, De Hart emphasized the political process and women’s search for equality and rights, not their fight to meet social needs. She placed the political first. She focused on three arenas that we would do well to remember in writing the history of other political times, including our own: women as mobilizers for or against legislation, that is, as expressers of gendered political culture; women as elected officials, that is, as representatives of what political theorist Ann Phillips has named “the politics of presence”;Footnote ⁸ and the law and courts as both reflectors and shapers of gender, that is, the embodied meanings of law and social policy. In doing so, she stretched the locales for policy history as well as its methods and subjects.

Despite our discovery of the ubiquity of gender, most women’s historians have replicated the gender division of labor that characterized the emergence of women in public office since the 1970s, in which few women have sat on high-profile committees of budget/taxes or military affairs and most have lobbied for legislation impacting families, women, and children. We wrote about the politics of conventionally defined women’s issues, such as reproductive justice, protective legislation, child care, social assistance, or even peace. Many celebrated women in social movements or voluntary organizations who operated as lobbyists rather than legislators, who were used to asking others to act rather than make policy themselves.Footnote ⁹

De Hart, in contrast, embraced the necessity of partisanship. She lamented the failure of ERA advocates to leave the gendered political culture they inherited from a century of women in voluntary organizations “in which political efficacy resided in influencing those who held power” rather than in grabbing power oneself.Footnote ¹⁰ She highlighted the “deeply gendered policy priorities” that derived from gendered political cultures that led women elected officials to serve on committees charged with family issues identified as being at the top of women’s political concerns in gender gap polling.Footnote ¹¹ Some of this is changing in scholarship as in politics, with Jennifer Mittelstadt, for example, recasting the welfare state by looking at social benefits in the military and fusing the study of gendered political and intellectual cultures in the process, or Molly Michelmore, connecting “tax and spend” policies to race, welfare reform, and the rise of conservatism in post-1970s America.Footnote ¹² Despite some countercurrents, what De Hart noticed about legislatures a decade ago still reverberates for the academy: “Even as legislative bodies sexually integrate and even as women legislators extend their range of committee involvement, policy priorities remain strikingly gendered.”Footnote ¹³ Meanwhile, male historians writing on child care or maternal health are few and far between.

Building upon the rich literature on women’s civic participation and political engagement, De Hart further advanced analysis of the legislative process. Like suffragists and clubwomen, ERA activists behaved as “claimants.” Under the weight of nonpartisanship and sisterhood, working from the margins through “lobbying, litigation, and protest,” they deployed the indirection of the weak, but also the certainty of social movements that engage in “pressure group politics.” Women officeholders, in contrast, sought “to redefine political power.” These “advocates” sought equality through the act of “representation.”Footnote ¹⁴ However, their entrance into municipal and local councils coincided, De Hart posited, with a power shift away from such governing bodies. Whether or not such a generalization stands up, and we lack research on women’s power in municipalities over time and space, it highlights the emphasis on the gendering of policymaking that De Hart brought to the scholarly table.

The politics of presence, which relies on the embodiment of representatives, also highlights the significance of the body for Policy History. As sociologist Ava Baron and I have argued elsewhere, “the body” enters scholarship as discourse and representation, as a site of power for regulation/discipline, and as corporeal or material presence—all aspects that politics and policy both reflect and shape.Footnote ¹⁵ This bodily turn is immensely productive. It helps explicate reactions made by opponents of the ERA to proposals to draft women that De Hart recorded. Female soldiers faced the possibility of rape and shame because they shared close quarters with men. Such reactions saw danger but not economic or social advancement coming from women’s entrance into the military.Footnote ¹⁶ A focus on the body also links racism to sexism through the politics of the toilet. During the ratification battle in North Carolina, “the ladies room” not only came to function like the male latrine/urinal as a representative of sexual defilement and loss of femininity with racial overtones. But in a place that still was emerging from the era of segregation, opponents linked civil rights and women’s rights. “Forced busing, forced mixing, forced housing. Now forced women,” one anti proclaimed. As the battle over equal rights following World War II shows, sexuality and bodies served as a terrain upon which economic, political, and other struggles took place. Thus, segregationists and upholders of the free market constructed a slippery slope from black and white children going to school together, to working next to each other as adults, to marrying when opposing a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee after World War II.Footnote ¹⁷

But a woman is not merely a woman and certainly may not define herself as a feminist; likewise, gendered policy can move in multiple directions. De Hart’s interpretation of the equality and difference debate undermined tendencies toward universalism in feminist thought and discourse. Like many other feminists, she focused on ideology and belief systems. “Discourse provides the crucial key to understanding,” she declared, “Politicians have always known how to say something without saying it, using ‘loaded’ words, gestures, and pauses symbolic of a range of meanings.”Footnote ¹⁸ The ERA failed in part because it symbolized the end of gender difference.

Whether or not they left the home for employment elsewhere, De Hart’s antis rejected “equality” not merely for undermining “the very foundation of personal identity, social stability, and more order.” They also lamented destruction of “the benefits of female culture by forcing women to compete as autonomous individuals in a male-dominated public sphere devoid of nurturing, affiliative virtues.” In rejecting possessive individualism, the antis resembled Carol Gilligan, Sara Ruddick, and other cultural or difference feminists—despite divergent stances toward patriarchy (antis “seek protection within,” while difference feminists “challenge patriarchal privilege).” Indeed, legal scholar Joan Williams, as De Hart points out, found in domesticity’s critique of capitalism a condemnation of possessive individualism as well. Thus, it hardly surprises that both antis and difference feminists embraced the “classification by sex” that the ERA would eliminate because a certain dichotomous gender identity was essential to their core identities. Equality was masculine; it was the “denial of difference.” Equality also was scary: without the same resources, education, and training as men, responsible for children, homes, and kinwork, women entered the playing fields of the market and polity at a disadvantage. Retreat into difference was one understandable response.Footnote ¹⁹

Recognizing difference, however, could generate policies that enhance the possibility of equality rather than bolster patriarchy. Some of these policies are about the body, as De Hart has shown through astute discussions of the legal battle over pregnancy, work, and disability. Some legal feminists critiqued rights-based frameworks in law and policy, valuing “separatism” and rejecting “assimilation” to male norms. “By showing how the articulation of rights allowed new contradictions to unfold, they have helped to clarify what sexual equality really requires,” De Hart appreciatively argued. She provocatively claimed, “rights can be what we make of them.”Footnote ²⁰

Gender analysis has underscored the significance of discourse, language, symbolic interaction, cultural systems, identities, and culture in its broadest sense. De Hart’s attentiveness to discourse and culture deeply enriches the meaning as well as the process of policymaking. A decade ago, she wondered “whether power itself can be redefined, its meaning enlarged to include responsibility, altruism, and nurturance: tough and caring.”Footnote ²¹ That combination failed to propel Hillary Clinton into the presidency, though perhaps she didn’t show enough of either.

With the emergence of Alaska governor Sarah Palin onto the national stage, De Hart has provided tools to analyze the astute framing of this new kind of woman candidate, who called herself a “pit-bull with lipstick,” and who has provided a litmus test of sorts for all kinds of commentators. While some conservatives have embraced Palin as a new kind of feminist and others have projected her as a younger conservative Phyllis Schlafly, the governor herself provided another take on the equality/difference debate. A high school basketball player, she has applauded Title IX—the federal law that leveled the playing fields for school girls and college women—for making her as competitive and disciplined as any man. So she has taken for granted women’s equality, confessing, “When people talk about me being the first female governor, I’m a little absent from that discussion, because I’ve never thought of gender as an issue.”Footnote ²²

Still she has evoked a gender-based solidarity. At one rally, Palin warned, “There’s a special place in Hell, for women who don’t support other women”—a misquote of former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who had spoken of helping other women experiencing human rights abuse against women and girls around the world.Footnote ²³ Whether Palin supported policies that help women, however, is questionable. She rejected key planks in contemporary feminism, like reproductive choice and court remedies for pay discrimination. Thus, in her celebration of evangelical, small-town America, she has embodied an alternative woman’s politics captured earlier by De Hart’s writings.

The feminist interrogation of equality, rights, and care reformulated the meaning of citizenship. It illuminated not only the welfare state, but with De Hart, political culture and the policy process. As the 2008 presidential campaign suggests, a turn to intersectional analysis of race, gender, age, and other attributes is the next step in rewriting the narrative of politics and subsequent policy outcomes.