Writing Gender History / Edition 2

by Laura Lee Downs, Heiko Feldner, Kevin Passmore, Stefan Berger, Lizette Jacinto

Overview

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 disucssion 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.

Reviews of the first edition:

'Ingenuity and perspicuity shine through Laura Lee Downs' superb distillation and analysis of women's and gender history. To understand accomplishments and changes in the field, put this book at the top of your list.' Nancy F. Cott, Professor of American History, Harvard University.

'Puts the entire range of women's and gender history into context, showing how it challenges the conventional pieties, opens up new veins of research, and transforms our understanding of every aspect of history. Her command of the literature is simply astounding... Sure to be seen as a landmark in the development of the field of history in the broadest sense.' Lynn Hunt, Professor of Modern European History, UCLA.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780340975169
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/01/2010
Series:	Writing History
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Laura Lee Downs Directrice d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France and Professor of History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy

Heiko Feldner is Senior Lecturer in Modern German History at Cardiff University, UK.

Heiko Feldner is co-director of the Centre for Ideology Critique and Žižek Studies at Cardiff University, UK. He is also the General Editor of Bloomsbury's Writing History series on historiography and historical theory, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London. A former lecturer in the departments of political economy and history at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, he has written several books, including Zizek: Beyond Foucault (with F. Vighi, Palgrave 2007).

Kevin Passmore is Professor of History at Cardiff University, UK.

Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute of Social Movements and the House for the History of the Ruhr at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He is the author of numerous books, including Nationalizing the Past (2015) and Germany: Inventing the Nation (2004) and the editor of A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe: 1789-1914 (2009). He is, along with Kevin Passmore and Heiko Feldner, one of the Series Editors for Bloomsbury's successful student book series, Writing History.

Lizette Jacinto holds a BA in History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico (2001), MA studies in History by the Institute f or Social Sciences and Humanities "Alfonso Vélez Pliego" (ICSyH) of the Benemeritus Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP), Puebla, Mexico (2003), and the Dr.-Phil. degree in History from the Witten-Herdecke University, Witten, Germany (2010), obtained under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jörn Rüsen, and in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies (KWI), Essen , Germany. She has taught at the University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany, and the Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany, and has also been a guest lecturer at different universities in Europe and Latin America. Since 2015 she has been the lead trainer for Latin America of the research proposal writing courses Dies-ProGRANt, sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), Germany. Since December 2015 she is a full Research Professor of the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities "Alfonso Vélez Pliego" (ICSyH) of the BUAP university in Puebla, Mexico. Since 2017 she is a member of the National System of Researchers, SNI Level I, in Mexico. She is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Historia da Historiografía, Brazil, and the electronic journal iMex - México Interdisciplinario, of the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. Since 2020 she is Member of the Board of Advisors of Bloomsbury Publishers, England, for the collection Theory and Method. In 2022, she was the organizer of the IV Congress of the International Theory of History Network (INTH), held in Puebla, Mexico. She has coordinated the books Género y Ciencia, Editorial Velvuert, 2011, and Racismo, cuerpo y violencia en América Latina, BUAP-Ediciones del Lirio, 2019. Her lines of research are associated with Theory of History (microhistory, cultural history and conceptual history), Social Movements, Feminism, History of Mexico in XX-XXI centuries, as well as Mexico-German Relations, especially the German-speaking left-wing Exile in Mexico.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Before the second wave: scholarship on women from the early twentieth century into the 1960s; Second-wave feminism and the rediscovery of women's history, 1968-1975; Feminist historians and the 'new' social history: the case of England, 1968-1995; Is female to male as nature is to culture? Feminist anthropology and the search for a key to all misogynist mythologies; Beyond separate spheres: from women's history to gender history; Gender history, cultural history and the history of masculinity; Gender, poststructuralism and the 'cultural/linguistic turn' in history; Gender and history in a postcolonial world; From separate spheres to the public sphere: gender and the sexual politics of citizenship; Gender and history in a post-poststructuralist world; Conclusion: women's and gender history as a work in progress

Editorial Reviews

The author's grasp and presentation of such diverse material is astounding ... [This is] a sophisticated examination of some of the applications of theory and one which offers an indispensable bibliography ... The author presents and explores a dazzling array of voices, which together can form no easy narrative – and this is much the point of the book.” —Cultural and Social History (of the first edition)

“Downs puts the entire range of women's and gender history into context, showing how it challenges the conventional pieties, opens up new veins of research, and transforms our understanding of every aspect of history. Her command of the literature is simply astounding and her work is sure to be seen as a landmark in the development of the field of history in the broadest sense.” —Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History, UCLA (about the first edition)

“Ingenuity and perspicuity shine through Laura Lee Downs' superb distillation and analysis of women's and gender history. To understand accomplishments and changes in the field, put this book at the top of your list.” —Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University (about the first edition)

“This fills an important gap in the range of books available on historiography. I envisage that the 'case-study' approach in chapters will be useful to students (i.e hopefully will encourage them to read the texts featured).” —Anne Logan, University of Kent, UK (about the first edition)

“No better guide to the field exists than this richly satisfying text.” —Gender and History (about the first edition)

From the Publisher

Ingenuity and perspicuity shine through Laura Lee Downs superb distillation and analysis of women's and gender history. To understand accomplishments and changes in the field, put this book at the top of your list.

Harvard University (first edition) Nancy Cott

Puts the entire range of women's and gender history into context, showing how it challenges the conventional pieties, opens up new veins of research, and transforms our understanding of every aspect of history. Her command of the literature is simply astounding and her work is sure to be seen as a landmark in the development of the field of history in the broadest sense.

UCLA (first edition) Lynn Hunt