Journal of Women's History

Review Essays The Comparative Turn: Is Women's History Ready? Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Birgitte S0land, and Ulrike Strasser, eds. Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History. New York: Routledge, 1996.363 pp. ISBN 0-41591-297-0 (cl); 0-41591-298-9 (pb). UUa Wikander, AUce Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, eds. Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880-1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. 357 pp. ISBN 0-25202-1754 (cl); 0-25206-464-x (pb). Sonya Michel Over the past several years, the history of women and gender has be gun to move in a comparative direction. We now have shelves of multiauthor volumes, often germinated in specialized conferences and workshops, that examine selected themes across times and cultures. Less plentiful are detailed, single-author comparative studies of specific phenomena in two or three societies—and more is the pity. While much of the comparative work in collections has been a bit by-the-way, with an agglomeration of similar cases often substituting for deliberate analysis, the more delimited comparisons have produced precise and significant insights into differences among particular political systems and their implications for women and gender relations.1 But why the comparative turn, and why now? In many ways, because of its pronounced theoretical underpinnings, the project of women's history has long been a comparative one. Feminist assertions about systematic and pervasive power differentials between women and men have chaUenged historians to determine whether or not we can identify a phenomenon called patriarchy. This, in turn, has generated a set of readymade comparative analytical questions. Does male domination occur in all times and all places? If not, why not? If so, does the proliferation and persistence of male domination automatically imply the existence of a universal patriarchy, or are there alternative explanations? In addition, several recent developments in women's and gender history have quickened the impulse toward comparison. The sheer volume and range of research in the field has increased dramatically, as feminist scholars have opened up new areas of research and thickened our understanding of older ones. Too, the interdisciplinary cast of women's studies has brought his- © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 2 (Summer) 190 Journal of Women's History Summer torians into close contact with social scientists—particularly political scientists and sociologists—to whom comparisons seem to come more naturally . While the convergence of these developments urges us to undertake more comparative historical projects, it also pulls us in opposite directions . On the one hand, the proliferation of historical knowledge about women and gender invites broad cross-cultural and franshistorical comparisons ; while on the other, exposure to social scientific methodology cautions historians to refine and narrow questions, restrict the number of stray variables, and reach beyond superficial commonalities and distinctions among cases to pinpoint the underlying causes of specific outcomes. The risks and benefits of each of these approaches are evident in the two collections under review here. Taking the broad approach, Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History explores very general themes using the widest possible lens. Somewhat loosely bound by their common interest in the relationship between kinship and gender relations, the essays range from ancient Judaism to the present-day British Virgin Islands, and alternate between history and anthropology. Much more tightly focused, Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880-1920 contains studies of nearly a dozen societies that were linked not only by simUar histories with regard to protective legislation, but also by their participation in a series of international conferences that set the tone and, in many cases, started the momentum toward such laws. The phenomenon of an international movement involving a number of roughly similar national participants lends itself admirably to comparative analysis. Though the editors of Protecting Women do not take on this task in so many words, it seems fair to consider the volume a comparative study since they do attempt to sort out their cases and formulate generalizations. In Gender, Kinship, Power, the editors have organized their collection around five broad themes: the gap between kinship theories and practices ; women's perceptions...