In this oration Gouda poses three questions for the feminist movement. First, how can the historical profession, in particular, and humanistic and social science scholarship, in general, be transformed in an integrated fashion by incorporating a gender analysis? Second, how to recognize that prescriptions of masculinity and femininity are far from universal and timeless? Third, how 'whiteness' as a reference to the skin color, tends to have variable meanings that are grounded in locally specific patterns of authority and subservience.