Joan Wallach Scott transformed historical methodology with this argument for using gender as a category of analysis comparable to class and race. The book collects essays that demonstrate how gender organizes knowledge and power across seemingly unrelated domains: labor history, political theory, and historiography itself. Scott draws on poststructuralist theory, particularly Derrida and Foucault, to argue that gender is not a fixed biological reality but a way of signifying relationships of power. Her famous essay 'Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis' becomes the centerpiece of a larger argument about how historians construct their subjects. Scott examines how French revolutionary discourse deployed gender to define citizenship, how nineteenth-century labor movements negotiated masculinity and class, and how feminist historians have challenged the discipline's exclusions. The thirtieth anniversary edition includes a new preface reflecting on how gender studies has evolved and engaged debates about transgender identity that were not yet prominent when the book first appeared. Scott, emerita professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, writes with theoretical sophistication that rewards careful attention. The book remains essential for understanding how gender operates not merely as subject matter but as a fundamental organizing principle of social life and historical knowledge.