Joan Wallach Scott (born December 18, 1941, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is an American historian, best known for her pioneering contributions to the study of French history, women’s and gender history, and intellectual history as well as to feminist theory. Her work, which was influential well beyond the confines of her own discipline, was characterized by its integration of historiography, philosophy, and gender theory.
Scott grew up in a family dedicated to education and social justice. Both her parents were high-school teachers of history, and her father was active in New York City’s teachers’ union. In 1951 her father was suspended and then fired from his job for refusing to collaborate with a McCarthy-style committee investigating alleged communist activities in education. That event, as Scott herself recognized, partly motivated her commitment to freedom of speech. She later took a vocal stand against the USA PATRIOT Act (2001) and other perceived threats to academic freedom, both as a scholar and in her position as chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors (1999–2005).
In 1962 Scott graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University (B.A.). She attributed her decision to become a historian to her attending a course on Western civilization taught at Brandeis by the intellectual historian Frank Manuel. She then obtained master’s (1964) and doctoral (1969) degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, writing her dissertation on the impact of technological changes on French working-class politics in the late 19th century. The publication of that study in social history in 1974 established Scott’s reputation as a talented historian capable of marrying methodological rigour and nuanced analysis. She obtained her first faculty position at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1970–72) and then taught at Northwestern University (1972–74), the University of North Carolina (1974–80), and Brown University (1980–85), where she held a distinguished professorship. At Brown she was founding director of the Pembrooke Center for Teaching and Research on Women from 1981. In 1985 she became the second woman to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where she was a professor of social science and later (2000–14) Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science. In 2010 she cofounded History of the Present, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to critical and theoretically rich historiography.
An influential critic of the empiricist tradition in American historiography, Scott referred to her work as a form of “critical history,” “history of difference,” and “history of the present.” Her studies combined archival research with the insights of critical theories such as deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Inspired by the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, she approached intellectual history not as an inquiry into the origins of a present otherwise taken for granted but rather as a way to question contemporary assumptions and to highlight the historical contingencies of categories like gender. In her landmark article “The Evidence of Experience” (1991), Scott criticized the tendency of feminism to accept uncritically (and “de-historicize”) the reporting of personal experience as an authentic expression of women’s reality. She observed that she used history to complicate feminist theory, and the reverse certainly held true as well. Although many applauded Scott for challenging the epistemological presuppositions that underlay the study of history, other scholars, dedicated to the empirical basis of historical research, rejected her approach as exemplary of the relativist threat posed by postmodernism.
While Scott first gained attention as a scholar of 19th-century France, she also turned to history as a resource from which to contribute to contemporary political debates. In The Politics of the Veil (2007), for example, she examined the ban imposed in 2004 on the wearing of the Islamic veil (and, officially, all conspicuous signs of religious affiliation) in French schools. She addressed that controversial topic by examining the fraught relationship between the French understanding of republican equality, based on a conception of the citizen as an abstract individual free of any particular trait, and the recognition of the social differences that pervade complex societies. Far from promoting equality and integration, she argued, the law targeted Muslim women and perpetuated their exclusion from French society.
Some of Scott’s other seminal works included the article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (1986) and the books Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), and The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011). Sex and Secularism (2017) and Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (2019) were among her later works. Scott was the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008) and the Award for Scholarly Distinction (2009), presented by the American Historical Association for lifetime achievement in the discipline.