Studying Gender and Women’s History
Historiographical patterns
1)
Early women’s history
Examples:
Olive Schreiner, Women and labour (1911)
Alice Clark, The working life of women in the seventeenth
century (1919)
Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries (1922)
Ivy Pinchbeck, Women workers and the industrial revolution
(1930)
Largely feminist scholars on the margins of academia who sought to restore the
women of the common people to the historical record and demonstrate women
too were agents in history. Used techniques of social and economic history versus
political, diplomatic, intellectual history.
2)
Women’s history and second-wave feminism
Examples:
Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History (1973)
Sally Alexander, ‘Women’s work in 19th century London’ in
Anne Oakley and Juliet Mitchell (eds), The Rights and
Wrongs of Women (1976)
Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘“Women’s History” in transition: the
European case’, Feminist Studies, 1976
Joan Kelly, ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’ in Renate
Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds), Becoming visible.
Women in European History (1977)
Influenced by feminist movement and ‘history from below’. Sought to uncover
roots of male domination and the history of women’s oppression. Considered
issues such as women’s labour, sexuality, history of prostitution, struggle for the
suffrage. Were acutely aware of differences between women whether of race,
ethnicity, class, religion or sexual orientation which undermined ‘unity’ of feminist
message.
3)
‘Separate spheres’ debates
Examples:
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of love, labor of sorrow. Black
women work and the family from slavery to the present
(1985)
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family fortunes: men
and women of the English middle class (1987)
Linda Kerber, ‘Separate spheres, female worlds, woman’s
place: the rhetoric of women’s history’, Journal of American
History, 1988
Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to separate spheres? A review
of the categories and chronology of English women’s
history’, Historical Journal, 1993
Kathryn Gleadle, ‘“Our several spheres”: middle-class
women and the feminisms of early Victorian radical politics',
in K. Gleadle and S. Richardson, eds, Women in British
Politics, 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat (2000)
Focuses on the many and diverse guises that separate spheres ideologies (most
crudely public v private) have assumed in different historical contexts. Allowed
women to be integrated into political histories.
4)
Gender and cultural history
Examples:
Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (1983)
Joan Scott, Gender and the politics of history (1988)
Denise Riley, Am I that Name? Feminism and the category
of women in history (1988)
Anna Clark, The struggle for the breeches (1995)
Puts men back into the picture and is associated with the rise of histories of
masculinity in the 1980s and with studying issues of power relationships between
men and women. Concerned particularly with the construction of masculine and
feminine identities across the social spectrum.
5)
Gender and postcolonialism
Examples:
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial masculinity (1997)
Frances Gouda and Julia Clancy-Smith (eds), Domesticating
the Empire. Race, gender and family life in French and
Dutch colonialism (1998)
Nancy Hunt, Gendered Colonialisms (1998)
Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without borders (2003)
Colonial/postcolonial studies rose out of the broader social history tradition via
critiques that arose from within – particularly feminist and nationalist critiques of
the primacy of class as a category. Feminist scholars of the developing world
have attacked western feminists for refusing to explore the different meanings
that being a woman may have in various class, racial, ethnic or religious contexts
thus maintaining First World/Third World connections.