Louise Tilly’s thoughtful and provocative essay “Gender, Women’s History, and Social History” makes a genuine contribution to our thinking about the research that has been done in women’s history by proposing new categories for analysis and by addressing the current debate over the usefulness of deconstruction as a methodological tool for historians. She demonstrates that we have been engaged in “the study of women in time,” with some success. We have studied women’s occupations, sexuality, personal relationships, marriage choices, family roles, and education. We have examined changes in women’s legal and political rights, their engagement in social and political causes, their successes and failures in the political arena. We have analyzed the ways in which states have tried to regulate women’s behavior, the social and economic constraints under which women have functioned, and the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. And we know infinitely more than we did two decades ago about these subjects.

In her complex and subtle paper, Louise Tilly raises a host of intriguing, debatable issues. She tells us, pace Joan Scott, that women’s history has “arrived” in terms of both institotionaliza-tion within the academy and development into a separate historical specialty. She tells us that we must strive towards a women’s history that is not only descriptive (seeing the task “of retrieving women’s lives and achievements ... as sufficient unto themselves”) but also analytical (“connecting its problems to those of other histories”). She tells us, again pace Joan Scott, that a literary approach to gender downplays human agency and offers no constructive means of historical explanation. And she tells us that social history, as it has been informed and altered by women’s history in the last twenty years, is the best place for connection between women’s history and “the agenda of history as a whole.”

Judith Bennett has persuaded me that in the oral version of this paper I conflated five points: (1) All women’s history has a feminist motivation and message. (2) Descriptive women’s history has discovered valuable evidence about women in the past; this has now been accepted as historical “fact.” (3) Sociological use of gender as a concept adds an analytical edge to descriptive accounts. (4) Social history that makes gender and women’s experience problematic and analyzes it systematically can add to the achievements of descriptive/interpretive women’s history. (5) Both types of women’s history (descriptive/interpretive and analytical) can only benefit from explicitly demonstrating the ways in which their findings contribute to answering questions already on the historical agenda. I have revised my paper somewhat to clarify these points.