Studying Women’s & Gender History

Outline• Pioneers

– Early Work– Second-Wave Feminism

• Revisions– Separate Spheres– Gender History

• Recent Developments – The Colonial Context– Queer History

• Sources• Conclusion

Pioneers

• Mainly feminist scholars • On margins of academia • Focused on women & work • Used social and economic historical methods

rather than political, diplomatic, intellectual history.

• Importance of LSE

Olive Schreiner 1855-1920http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/

LSE Students c. 1910 – LSE Flickr collection

Alice Clark 1874-1934

Pessimistic view of impact of industrialisationTalks of ‘Golden Age’ of Women’s Labour in 17th Century

Ivy Pinchbeck 1898-1982

Detailed consideration of impact of industrialisation on womenUltimately supports positive view that women (especially single women) were liberated by capitalism

Second Wave Feminism• Revival of feminist activism in 60s• Women began meeting together to

raise consciousness • Mantra was ‘the personal is political’,

presented most powerfully by Kate Millett in her book Sexual Politics published in 1970.

• Transformed women’s history from a minority strand of ‘mainstream’ history to a major intellectual movement.

Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History

Separate Spheres• Davidoff & Hall Family Fortunes• Demonstrated impact of changing gender

roles on formation of distinct middle-class identity

• Acknowledged rhetoric of ‘separate spheres’ in establishing boundaries between the public and private worlds

• Public life exclusively male domain • Domestic setting where women’s moral

virtues could be developed. • Ideals originally expressed by a small group of

Evangelicals

Gender History• Joan Scott Gender and the Politics of

History• Primary role of language in the

construction of gendered identity• Gender should be used as an analytical

category for historical investigation • Explore cultural meanings of masculinity

and femininity Part of wider debate about contribution of postmodernism and its concentration on the construction of meaning through language

Masculinity• Reconsideration as men’s role as historical actors • In late 1970s ‘men’s movement’ questioned modern

patriarchal gender roles• Seidler: ‘if we live in a man’s world it is not a world that has

been built upon the needs and nourishment of men. Rather it is a social world of power and subordination in which men have been forced to compete if we want to benefit from our inherited masculinity’

• Argued that subordinate forms of masculinity are subject to greater repression than the repression of women by men

• Does the rise of gender history write women out of the story?

Postcolonialism• Rose out of broader social history

tradition via 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

• Explore complex and contradictory relationships between gender, imperialism, and politics

Queer Theory/History• Queer theory/history emerges in

the 1970s but more sophisticated work appears since 2000

• Queer theory argues that sexuality is an unstable category which is shaped by social and cultural factors.

• Victorians were no more repressed than those who became before or after – merely that discourses change.

• Have challenged many established views of Victorian culture and society

Sources

Reconsideration of traditional sources (court records, parliamentary papers, newspapers)Use of new sources eg oral history (Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place)http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/workinglives

Conclusion

• Who can write women’s history?• Does it have status in the academy?• Do men adopt a misogynistic tone? Eg ‘Bitch

power’ • Are more sympathetic men “gender-traitors”?