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.

Laura Lee Downs is Director of Studies at the Centre de Recherches Historiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Introduction1. Before the second wave: scholarship on women from the early twentieth century into the 1960s2. Second-wave feminism and the rediscovery of womens's history, 1968-19753. Feminist historians and the 'new' social history: the case of England, 1968-19954. Is female to male as nature is to culture? Feminist anthropology and the search for a key to all misogynist mythologies5. Beyond separate spheres: from women's history to gender history6. Gender history, cultural history and the history of masculinity7. Gender, poststructuralism and the 'cultural/linguistic turn' in history8. Gender and history in a postcolonial world9. From separate spheres to the public sphere: gender and the sexual politics of citizenship10. Gender and history in a post-poststructuralist worldConclusion: women's and gender history as a work in progress