Scott talks about her essay Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. She explains that the essay was an amalgam of two sets of influences, one coming from history, the other from literature. Her goal is to discover the range in sex roles and in sexual symbolism in different societies and periods, to find out what meanings they had and how they functioned to maintain the social order or to promote change. The essay is about asking historical questions; it is not a programmatic or methodological treatise. It is above all an invitation to think critically about how the meanings of sexed bodies are produced, deployed, and changed; that, finally, is what accounts for its longevity.