Studying Women’s & Gender
History
Outline
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Pioneers
Second-Wave Feminism
Separate Spheres
Gender History
The Colonial Context
Sources
Status
Pioneers
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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 1855-1920
http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/
LSE Students c. 1910 – LSE Flickr collection
Alice Clark 1874-1934
Pessimistic view of impact of
industrialisation
Talks of ‘Golden Age’ of
Women’s Labour in 17th Century
Ivy Pinchbeck 1898-1982
Detailed consideration of impact
of industrialisation on women
Ultimately 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
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/wo
rkinglives
Status
• 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”?