1. Studying Women’s & Gender History

2. Outline Pioneers Revisions Recent Developments Sources Conclusion
Early Work
Second-Wave Feminism
Revisions
Separate Spheres
Gender History
Recent Developments
The Colonial Context
Queer History
Sources
Conclusion

3. 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

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

5. LSE Students c. 1910 – LSE Flickr collection

6. Alice Clark 1874-1934 Pessimistic view of impact of industrialisation
Talks of ‘Golden Age’ of Women’s Labour in 17th Century

7. Ivy Pinchbeck
Detailed consideration of impact of industrialisation on women
Ultimately supports positive view that women (especially single women) were liberated by capitalism

8. 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.

9. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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?

13. 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

14. 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

15. Sources
Reconsideration of traditional sources (court records, parliamentary papers, newspapers)
Use of new sources eg oral history (Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place)

16. 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”?