Rose - What Is Gender History?

What is History?

John H. Arnold, What is Medieval History?

Peter Burke, What is Cultural History?

John C. Burnham, What is Medical History?

Pamela Kyle Crossley, What is Global History?

Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, What is Migration History?

Andrew Hinde, What is Population History?

J. Donald Hughes, What is Environmental History?

Andrew Leach, What is Architectural History?

Stephen Morillo and Michael Pavkovic, What is Military History?

Sonya O. Rose, What is Gender History?

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book is primarily about what gender historians do. It is not a history of gender, but rather it is about approaches to the field and their development, and considers some of the topics in history that have concerned gender historians. I have tried throughout to focus on gender or the meanings and expectations concerning what it means to be male or female. It is not a book about womens history, although there is some discussion of the field and its contributions to gender history. The primary purpose of this volume is to provide an introduction to the subject both for students who have had some training in history but have not previously encountered gender history as a field, and for students who have studied women and gender in other disciplines but have not had the opportunity to learn about how historians approach these topics. The book takes up certain controversies that have developed among scholars of womens and gender history, it provides an overview of some of the complexities in studying gender history, and it considers new directions in the field. This should make it useful to more advanced students and scholars who might find such an overview of value.

Chapter 1 provides basic definitions of the terms gender, history, and feminist history. It charts the development of gender history from womens history and discusses its uneven influence on scholarship. Chapter 2 complicates the distinction between sex and gender and considers histories of the body and histories of sexuality. Chapter 3 takes up gender and its intersections with race and class using as examples among other topics, slavery, and colonialism. Chapter 4 introduces the reader to the study of men and masculinity, discussing different approaches to the topic and emphasizing the changing understandings of masculinity over time as well as the various ways that manhood is understood and practiced in a given historical period. Chapter 5 illustrates how historians of gender have contributed to questions that have been central to historians generally. It focuses especially on colonial conquest, revolution, nationalism, and war and covers examples from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Chapter 6 examines some of the controversies over approaches to studying gender in history, and introduces the reader to some of the new directions being taken, including psychoanalytic and other approaches to subjectivity, and transnational or global histories. It serves, as well, as a review or reminder of some of the other issues and topics covered in the book.

The book is written as an engaged overview that attempts both to synthesize how scholars have approached the field and to give fairly detailed examples of historical scholarship on particular topics of concern to gender historians. It is impossible for such a book to cover everything in a domain of inquiry as diverse and rich as gender history, and thus I have attempted to provide the reader with a sense of the kinds of questions gender historians ask and how they have gone about answering them. While the text draws heavily from work on North America and Britain, I have also attempted to provide examples from across the world. As my own work specializes in modern history, especially the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this is the focus of much of the book. However, I have also included some discussion of the exciting work done by scholars whose work is on periods ranging from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. I wanted to give some idea of the histories of particular topics from a variety of regions and/or countries and time periods, and although such examples might seem to lack historical context because their histories will simply be less familiar it is my hope that the reader will nonetheless be able to learn from them some of what these gender historians have discovered in their research.

I am indebted to a host of feminist historians whose work has inspired me over the years. I cannot hope to list them all here, nor will they necessarily find their work specifically cited in the text. Many of them, however, will be included in the topically organized list of selected readings at the end of the book. Thanks also are especially due to Andrea Drugan at Polity, who has been a model of what an editor should be supportive, encouraging, and quick to respond to various drafts and queries, and to Justin Dyer, for a heroic and truly helpful job of copy-editing. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Polity and my London friends, Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Bill Schwarz, for listening to my concerns as I worked on this book. Special thanks go to Sue Juster for suggesting examples of particularly interesting scholarship on gender in Colonial North America. Most especially, I thank Guenter Rose for his patience and support and for putting up with the angst I experienced as I found writing this book to be a much more difficult and complex undertaking than I had anticipated.