Writing Gender History

How has feminist scholarship changed history? Writing Gender History explores the evolution of historical writing about women and gender from the 1930s until the early twenty-first century. With chapters on the history of Europe, the USA, colonial India and Africa, the discussion moves from women's history to gender history, and then to poststructuralist challenges to that history. This revised edition includes an exciting new chapter looking at recent scholarship on race, gender and sexuality in colonial and transnational history, and on the history of the body. Highly accessibly but also encouraging new debate, this book provides students with a comprehensive understanding of gender history, as well as its possible future.

In a pathbreaking study of the gendering of the practices of history, Bonnie Smith examines the differences in19th-century approaches to history between male and female perspectives. Smith demonstrates that even today, the practice of history is still propelled by fantasies of power and subjugation.

Five essays address such themes as the relationship between feminist history and women's history, the use of the concept of "experience", the development of the history of gender, demographic history and women's history and the importance of post-structuralism to women's history.

The role of gender in the history of the working class world

Engendering History broadens the base of empirical knowledge on Caribbean women's history and re-evaluates the body of work that exists. The book is pan-Caribbean in its approach, though most articles are on the English-speaking Caribbean, highlighting the research pattern in Caribbean women's history.

The eight essays collected in this volume examine the practice of gender history and its impact on our understanding of European history. Each essay takes up a major methodological or theoretical issue in feminist history and illustrates the necessity of critiquing and redefining the concepts of body, citizenship, class, and experience through historical case studies. Kathleen Canning opens the book with a new overview of the state of the art in European gender history. She considers how gender history has revised the master narratives in some fields within modern European history (such as the French Revolution) but has had a lesser impact in others (Weimar and Nazi Germany).Gender History in Practice includes two essays now regarded as classics?"Feminist History after the 'Linguistic Turn'" and "The Body as Method"--as well as new chapters on experience, citizenship, and subjectivity. Other essays in the book draw on Canning's work at the intersection of labor history, the history of the welfare state, and the history of the body, showing how the gendered "social body" was shaped in Imperial Germany. The book concludes with a pair of essays on the concepts of class and citizenship in German history, offering critical perspectives on feminist understandings of citizenship. Featuring an extensive thematic bibliography of influential works in gender history and theory that will prove invaluable to students and scholars, Gender History in Practice offers new insights into the history of Germany and Central Europe as well as a timely assessment of gender history's accomplishments and challenges.

The complaint of Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, that history has 'hardly any women at all' is not an uncommon one. Yet there is evidence to suggest that women have engaged in historical writing since ancient times. This study traces the history of women's historical writing, reclaiming the lives of individual women historians, recovering women's historical writings from the past and focusing on how gender has shaped the genre of history. Mary Spongberg brings together for the first time an extensive survey of the progress of women's historical writing from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating the continuities between women's historical writings in the past and the development of a distinctly woman-centred historiography. Writing Women's History since the Renaissance also examines the relationship between women's history and the development of feminist consciousness, suggesting that the study of history has alerted women to their unequal status and enabled them to use history to achieve women's rights. Whether feminist or anti-feminist, women who have had their historical writings published have served as role models for women seeking a voice in the public sphere and have been instrumental in encouraging the growth of a feminist discourse.

Inspired by the question of "what’s next?" in the field of Canadian women’s and gender history, this broadly historiographical volume represents a conversation among established and emerging scholars who share a commitment to understanding the past from intersectional feminist perspectives. It includes original essays on Quebecois, Indigenous, Black, and immigrant women’s histories and tackles such diverse topics as colonialism, religion, labour, warfare, sexuality, and reproductive labour and justice. Intended as a regenerative retrospective of a critically important field, this collection both engages analytically with the current state of women’s and gender historiography in Canada and draws on its rich past to generate new knowledge and areas for inquiry.

The third edition of Writing History provides students and teachers with a comprehensive overview of how the study of history is informed by a broader intellectual and analytical framework, exploring the emergence and development of history as a discipline and the major theoretical developments that have informed historical writing. Instead of focusing on theory, this book offers succinct explanations of key concepts that illuminate the study of history and practical writing, and demonstrates the ways they have informed practical work. This fully revised new edition comprehensively rewrites and updates original chapters but also includes new features such as: - new chapters on postcolonial, environmental and transnational history; - chapter introductions setting them within the context of historiography; - a new substantive introduction from the editors, providing a useful road-map for students; - an expanded glossary. In its new incarnation Writing History is, more than ever, an invaluable introduction to the central debates that have shaped history.