ABSTRACT
In her recent work History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism , Judith Bennett notices that, although gender scholarship has burgeoned in recent years, its connection with feminism is fading, especially in the United States.1 Bennett argues that the gradual depoliticization of women’s history with its detachment from feminist activism was the high price to be paid for the institutionalization of gender studies in academia, especially since the 1980s.2 Bennett cynically states:
As women’s history has gained institutional sanction in the United States, some of us have succumbed to pressures to produce studies that are palatable to our nonfeminist colleagues-studies that avoid hard feminist questions and that appear more mainstream. And as feminism itself has matured, changed, and survived media assault, some of us have turned away from explicit feminism.3
