Rethinking Time and Space: Gender, Transnational ... · Rethinking Time and Space: Gender,...

Rethinking Time and Space: Gender, Transnational Scholarship, and the Perils of

Periodization

Allyson M. Poska, University of Mary Washington, History

Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Cleveland State University, History

Lisa Vollendorf, San Jose State University, Literature

Workshop Description: Scholars of early modern women have long realized the difficulties in

organizing their within the temporal boundaries of traditional periodizations . Although the

historical moments that often mark the transition from medieval to early modern and from early

modern to modern, like the invention of the printing press, the contact with the Americas, the

end of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain, the French Revolution, and American independence

movements without a doubt affected women’s lives, it is not clear that these were the primary

moments of change for women. Recently, transnational and transatlantic scholarship on women

has further called into question the utility of those traditional historical markers as they blur the

nation-state boundaries around which much scholarship has been created. Women’s experiences

cannot be neatly packaged within national borders as Religious Orders, networks of

correspondence, and even legal norms transcended those man-made limits. In this workshop we

want to explore the ways that transnational/transatlantic scholarship on women has complicated

the traditional conceptualizations of the beginning and end of the early modern period. Among

the issues that we hope to address:

Does the periodization of early modern differ from one nation-state to another? Does early

modern have a different meaning when dealing with colonial subjects, as in the Spanish and

English cases? What does it mean when the periodization of metropole and a colony do not

coincide?

How does the eighteenth century fit into our conceptions of early modern/modern when it comes

to women?

Is there a literary periodization that is different than the historical one?

To what degree do traditional markers of the transition from medieval to early modern, such as

the War of the Roses and the succession of Ferdinand and Isabel in Spain also represent changes

in women’s experiences or was there more of continuum?

Attached Readings:

Shepard, Alexandra, and Garthine Walker. “Gender, Change, and Periodisation.” Gender and

History 30:3 (2008): 453-462.

Vollendorf, Lisa, and Grady C. Wray. 2013. “Gender in the Atlantic World: Women’s Writing in

Iberia and Latin America.” Theorising the Ibero-American Atlantic. Leiden: Brill. 99-116.

Suggested Readings:

Cannaday, Margaret. 2009. "Transnational Sexualities: Thinking Sex in the Transnational Turn:

An Introduction.” American Historical Review 114.5 (December): 1250-57.

Davis, Kathleen. 2010. “Periodization and the Matter of Precedent.” Postmedieval: A Journal of

Medieval Cultural Studies (1): 354-60.http://www.palgrave-

journals.com/pmed/journal/v1/n3/full/pmed201032a.html

Amussen, Susan D. and Allyson Poska. 2012. “Restoring Miranda: Gender and the Limits of

European Patriarchy in the Early Modern Atlantic World.” Journal of Global History 7:3

(November 2012): 342-363.

Sanz, Amelia, and Susan van Dijk. 2014. “Women Telling Nations: Introduction.” Women

Telling Nations. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 9-24.

https://owa.umw.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=7FqGpjb02EKMobGsVgffOcUQssTFDdJI9cz8qmwN5ProlSySrSOmvLEhbU7ljgJGQWAq2UE93Nw.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.palgrave-journals.com%2fpmed%2fjournal%2fv1%2fn3%2ffull%2fpmed201032a.html

https://owa.umw.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=7FqGpjb02EKMobGsVgffOcUQssTFDdJI9cz8qmwN5ProlSySrSOmvLEhbU7ljgJGQWAq2UE93Nw.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.palgrave-journals.com%2fpmed%2fjournal%2fv1%2fn3%2ffull%2fpmed201032a.html

Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker, ‘Gender, Change and Periodisation’Gender & History, Vol.20 No.3 November 2008, pp. 453–462.

Gender, Change and Periodisation

Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker

This volume marks the twentieth anniversary of Gender & History by revisiting andreasserting the potential of women’s history and gender history both to complicate and,more fundamentally, to revise received narratives of change. As Ludmilla Jordanovahas observed, periodisation hinges on the privileging of particular vantage points andthe selection of ‘symbolic markers’ according to ‘the weight given to distinct fields ofhuman activity’, and thus constitutes ‘a form of classification of the past’.1 Associatednarratives of change are also determined by issues of scale, depending on whether thelens of analysis is focused, to use Fernand Braudel’s calibration, on the longue duree, theconjoncture, or the evenementiel, and depending on our formulation of the relationshipbetween structure and agency.2 Despite historians’ oft-articulated dissatisfaction withtraditional period markers associated with teleological accounts of western civilisation– ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, ‘renaissance’, ‘reformation’, ‘early modern’, ‘modern’ – theirusage persists even if the narratives recounted about them have undergone seriousrevision as a result of the inclusion of a wider range of historical actors and as themoral or analytical frameworks for the evaluation of change have been dismantledand/or reconfigured. The incorporation of women, and the beginnings of a broadergender analysis that encompasses masculinity, has done much to refine and challengethe characterisation of these epochs but little to question the validity of particular‘periods’ as discrete units of study.

Questions of change and periodisation implicitly and explicitly informed women’shistory and feminist history from the beginning. The women’s history that emergedin the 1960s and 1970s was not only inspired by second-wave feminism but alsoreflected its trajectories and themes. In the UK, for instance, where historians of womenfrequently had ties to the political Left and the labour movement, women’s history wassimultaneously informed by and constituted part of developments in social and labourhistory. Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History (1973) began with the words: ‘Thisbook comes very directly from a political movement’; she was motivated by the desireto ‘unravel historically’ questions that arose in ‘the women’s liberation movement andon the Left about the situation of women in contemporary capitalism’.3 Such concernshad precursors in the work of early twentieth-century scholars, notably Alice Clark(1919) and Ivy Pinchbeck (1930), who investigated the impact on women’s work andlives of industrialisation and technological developments. New editions of Clark’s bookwere issued in 1968, 1982 and 1992, and Pinchbeck’s in 1969, 1977 and 1981, whenfeminist interest in these issues was rekindled.4 In the US, where feminist activismC© The authors 2008. Journal compilation C© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,Malden, MA 02148, USA.

454 Gender & History

was commonly connected to the civil rights movement, much women’s history of the1960s and 1970s shared liberal concerns about women’s claims to citizens’ rights.5

Earlier scholarship here had similarly focused on women’s rights and suffrage, theHistory of Women’s Suffrage (1881) being perhaps the best known example.6 By theend of the 1980s, the contributions to a volume marking the state of women’s historyinternationally, which spanned twenty-two countries and all continents, demonstratedthe extent to which contemporary feminism not only stimulated women’s history butalso injected it with a particular flavour according to diverse national and culturalcontexts.7

Histories of women inspired by feminism sought both to chart the changes overtime that brought women to their present circumstances and to create change in thepresent in order to produce a future for them that was different from their past. The ques-tion of where women fitted into conventional accounts of change over time was rapidlyreframed to ask, first, did women fit into such historical narratives at all, and second,were such changes positive or negative for women? Joan Kelly’s 1977 essay on whetherwomen had a Renaissance is perhaps the most-cited example. Indeed, Kelly believedthat interrogating accepted schemes of periodisation from women’s perspective wasone of ‘the tasks of women’s history’. She argued that, while conventional accountsof the Renaissance presented it as a period of great cultural progress, women’s legal,economic and political conditions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries deterioratedrather than improved. Kelly’s work had implications for the history of the Renaissanceas much as for the history of women. The association of the Renaissance as a period ofgreat cultural progress is challenged if conditions declined for some half of the Euro-pean population.8 Over the past four decades, historians have applied similar questionsto other centuries and regions.9

While familiar periodising categories have been declared inappropriate for the his-tory of women, they have not usually been replaced by alternative schemas. Historianshave been less diligent in investigating the role of women and gender in constitut-ing change.10 In work on women and gender in history, questions of periodisation andchange appear often to have been jettisoned altogether in favour of continuities and sta-sis. Partly this is a consequence of viewing History as a story of progress and women’semancipation as the standard by which ‘progress’ for women is evaluated. Hence GerdaLerner’s assertion in 1975 that ‘all history as we now know it is, for women, merely pre-history’.11 This not only applies to textbooks and surveys (where broad brushstrokesare typical and not reserved for women’s history) but also constitutes a metanarra-tive favoured by certain kinds of women’s history, especially that informed by radicalfeminism with its emphasis upon the transhistorical nature of patriarchy and women’soppression by men.12 Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism(1978), for example, roared across periods and continents, finding and illuminatingpatriarchy’s horrors in Indian sati, Chinese foot-binding, African genital mutilation,European witch burning and American gynaecology. In this story of misogyny, womenare accorded little agency; or rather, their agency is punished by a society that insistsupon their inferiority. For radical feminists, patriarchy, whatever form it takes, alwaysand inevitably insists upon the oppression of women by men. Change over time fromthis perspective was insignificant as, over the centuries, patriarchy merely shifted tooppress women in new ways. Some forms of women’s history did allow for the po-tential of women’s agency and change within existing social, economic and political

C© The authors 2008. Journal compilation C© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008

Gender, Change and Periodisation 455

structures. Liberal feminists, for instance, emphasised the role of education in bringingabout change in women’s status relative to men, while socialist feminists viewed suchchange as the desired and possible outcome of a broader restructuring of economic andpolitical life.

From the outset, historians of women lamented the inadequacies, limitations andinapplicability of existing explanatory and theoretical frameworks within academichistory.13 Women’s history played a key role in the development of new methods andapproaches to historical research in dialogue with practitioners of the then ‘new’ socialhistory, the Annales School, and feminist scholars in other disciplines. Historians ofwomen were also at the cutting edge of historical research in the 1980s and 1990s.One such development was that of comparative women’s histories across nations andcontinents as well as time. The International Federation for Research in Women’s His-tory/Federation internationale pour la recherche de l’histoire des femmes was foundedin 1987 in order to foster such comparisons. Another was the cultural or linguistic turn,as historians of women, sexuality and masculinity were among the first to explore theimplications of linguistic theories – especially post-structuralism – for History as adiscipline.

The emergence of ‘gender’ as an analytic category is often associated with thisshift as if there was a linear evolution from a focus on feminism (politics) to women(specialised history) to gender (theory). But this is an oversimplification of a far morecomplex trajectory.14 However defined, historians continue to explore and publishresearch categorised as women’s and as gender history and, in many instances, thedistinction between them is false. The concept of gender was not new in 1986 whenJoan Scott first published her essay on gender as a category of historical analysis (nor didshe claim it to be). Nor did it ‘replace’ or sideline women’s history. In fact, both Gender& History and The Journal of Women’s History were founded in 1989, and Women’sHistory Review followed three years later. Issues of gender – the consequences ofbeing male or female, the meanings ascribed to femininity and masculinity, the mannerin which those categories are constructed, the practical repercussions of genderedlanguage and concepts, and the relation of gender to power – were already present inwomen’s history and feminist scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s.15

The category of gender was most thoroughly defined and theorised for historiansby Joan Scott in 1986, and rapidly became the most popular tool employed to digdeeper below the top soil that earlier women’s historians had turned up.16 Scott’s articleis one of the most cited historical works of its time, leading to comparisons with E. P.Thompson in terms of its influence on the discipline in general.17 So great an impacthas her definition had that twenty years later, the editors of one volume of genderhistory describe the concept of gender in Scott’s words without acknowledgement ineither the text or notes.18 Scott’s achievement was not to invent ‘gender’ but to defineand theorise it as an analytic category in a more nuanced and sophisticated way thanhistorians had done hitherto, and to present a method of analysing the concept at workin any historical period. A great strength of this definition and approach lies in itspotential to identify and analyse not only gender but also other categories such as class,race, religion, ethnicity, or any other form of difference, and – crucially – the waysin which they operate together discursively to legitimate or undermine historicallyspecific relationships of power. Gender thus offered a lens by which historians couldexplore not only relations between the sexes, women, or sexuality, but also markets,



classes, diplomacy and, indeed, masculinity. An approach that disrupted what seemedto be fixed oppositions such as nature/culture and public/private, and the analysis ofhow such language and concepts changed over time and in different contexts, did allowfor agency and change. However, not everybody has interpreted Scott’s argument inthis way.

The most heated responses to Scott’s work are perhaps from those who madelittle or no distinction between her debt to post-structuralism and what they believedto be the grave implications for the discipline of History of post-structural linguistictheory in its purest form. In particular, critics suggested that the kind of gender historyadvocated by Scott locked women into a position of inferiority via binary oppositionsin language, which allowed no room for change and, therefore, agency on the part ofwomen and other subaltern groups. A category of analysis that privileged language (andrepresentations) rather than experience (and reality) at its heart was both ‘difficult’ and‘dangerous’ when applied to women’s history.19 Some works of gender history mayseem to (re)produce a history of gender that looks very much the same no matter whichcentury or culture is examined. This, however, reflects a broader methodological shiftthat is not confined to gender historians. The cultural turn has brought with it lossesas well as gains. While the influence of post-structuralism, literary and cultural theory,and symbolic anthropology has generated qualitative and textual analyses of particularhistorical moments, there is little attempt to explain change over time in much historicalwriting. It is perhaps this, rather than the concept of gender per se, that distinguishesmuch recent gender history from the women’s history of the 1970s. Yet change andperiodisation were already thorny problems within women’s history: the tendency tomeasure change in terms of either progress or decline, liberation or repression, oralternatively to see these issues as transhistorical; the recognition that the category of‘woman’/’women’ itself collapsed in the face of the plurality of women’s experiencesthat defied generalisation about ‘the position of women’ and therefore its measurementover time. The fact that gender history proved not necessarily to solve all of theseproblems is not simply a matter of ‘gender’ leading us astray from what was otherwisea clearly lit path.

Neither have questions of chronology and periodisation been at the forefront ofthe history of masculinity since its dramatic growth out of the ‘new men’s studies’of the 1980s. Some of the blame can again be laid at the door of the ‘new’ culturalhistory. Emerging alongside the cultural turn, the history of masculinity has empha-sised the multiplicity and contingency of male identities, rather than a category thatmight be traced in a singular way across a linear time scale, and has prioritised rep-resentation above the material and subjective realities of men’s lives which providethe key to understanding historical agency and the link to questions of causation. AsLaura Lee Downs has put it, ‘without some way of connecting discursive process tosocial experience, historians are hard put to explain how the meanings of masculineand feminine might shift over time’ – let alone how gender has been a constitutive partof wider processes of transition.20 The most ambitious account of change over time hasbeen undertaken not by a historian, but by the sociologist R. W. Connell, in an attemptto identify the long-term roots of hegemonic forms of contemporary Euro/Americanmasculinity in the Reformation, the rise of individualism, and the relentless engineof imperialism.21 As Konstantin Dierks has observed, the history of masculinity hastended to work within received metanarratives rather than engage or challenge them.22



This general diversion from issues of chronology and periodisation is reflected inthe content and coverage of Gender & History over the last twenty years. The inauguralvolume of the journal included very little discussion of matters of change, with histo-riographical essays reflecting primarily on the relationship between women’s historyand gender history, alongside innovatory work in the history of masculinity. Whileless concerned with challenging established chronologies than with staking out a fem-inist agenda for the analysis of enduring systems of patriarchal oppression, Judith M.Bennett’s landmark essay in that volume implicitly invoked the longue duree as the ap-propriate time-span for gender historians – a point to which she returns in her reflectionsbelow.23 However, subsequent contributors have mostly retained narrower and largelyconventional timeframes. One notable exception by Julia M. H. Smith, examining theplace of women in the extensive cultural adaptation associated with the transforma-tion of the Roman world, demonstrates the potential of gender history to illuminatekey phases of transition without sacrificing complexity or resorting to generalisationsabout the position of women.24 Several other essays have similarly sought to integrategender analysis to enrich existing accounts of change, for example in relation to classformation and its associated modes of capitalist patriarchy, or the reconfiguration ofthe medieval into the early modern Italian church.25 Yet the challenges of reshapingestablished chronologies, while repeatedly lauded as a goal of gender history, havelargely been overshadowed by the more urgent imperative of widening coverage inorder both to reflect the myriad forms of gender construction and varied experiencesof women and men, and to counter the Euro- and US-centrism of gender analysis.26

Gender & History has arguably achieved more success in broadening its geographicalthan chronological coverage with reference to its stated aims of displacing periodisa-tion based on the dominant narratives associated with the post-Enlightenment west.27

The only period term to receive any sustained critical engagement within the journal’scovers is ‘modernity’.28

This celebratory volume was envisaged as an opportunity to reflect on the extentto which gender analysis suggests alternative chronologies to conventional periodisa-tion.29 More fundamentally, the essays it features explore the ways in which genderfunctioned as a force of endurance or transition in the past, and the ways in which itmight have been constitutive rather than merely reflective of either continuity or change.It seems a fitting tribute to twenty years of Gender & History to engage with questionsat the heart of the discipline of history as a means of showcasing the contribution genderanalysis can make to our characterisation and classification of the past. In the essaysthat follow, this has involved not only the rejection of some period markers and theconfirmation of others, but also the interrogation of some of the foundational narrativesof change associated both with women’s history and the shifting construction of gendercategories over time. Further, it has generated some theoretical discussion of both howwe are to approach women’s agency in the past and how we might best deploy theconcept of gender as a category of analysis in ways that avoid partiality and anachro-nism. Obviously, constraints of space mean that we cannot offer exhaustive coverageof these wide-ranging questions and what follows is both geographically and chrono-logically limited to a few select (albeit as varied as possible) times and places. Sadly,geographical breadth in this instance has given way to chronological depth, despite ourmany efforts to solicit articles with a non-western and more global range. However theessays gathered here demonstrate the rich possibilities for rethinking the central tenets



of European historiography – including several foundational claims of women’s andgender history – even from within the perspectives generated by western scholarship.And the many general reflections on methods for the classification of change and itsimplications for the interrogation of gender as a category will be of relevance to periodsand regions that are not represented here. It is therefore hoped that this collection ofessays will both re-open questions that were of fundamental importance to first- andsecond-wave feminist scholarship and stimulate further investigation both under andbeyond the umbrella of gender history.

With one exception, the contributions that directly interrogate conventionalchronologies reject rather than confirm the integrity of period markers in the light ofgender analysis. Lynda L. Coon’s exploration of early medieval ‘somatic styles’ chal-lenges both the notion of a ‘rupture’ between classical antiquity and the so-called ‘DarkAge’ and the assumption of an alien pre-Enlightenment sexuality based on a ‘one-sex’model of the body against which a ‘modern’ sex/gender system has frequently beenjuxtaposed, emphasising the eclectic and varied use of classical medical teachings evenby the clerical elites whose voices dominate the sources surviving from the seventh totenth centuries. Investigating the more recent past, Padma Anagol demonstrates howhistoriographical privileging of the nationalist response to imperialism in modern In-dian history has obfuscated women’s agency under colonial rule and created a truncatedaccount and inadequate appreciation of feminism in India and the broader formationof Indian subjectivities. Anagol’s essay provides a model of the problems generatedby gender-blind scholarship and the legacy of its chronological frameworks that, inthis instance, actively inhibit analysis of women’s agency. Critical too of discursiveapproaches to gender for their neglect of female agency and their lack of chronologicalmoorings, Anagol goes on to place gender relationships at the heart of the formationof modern India, stressing its deep roots in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesas a corrective to an undue emphasis on the period from 1885 to 1947. Kevin Passmoreis similarly critical of the way in which political religions’ theorists, explaining therise of fascism as a feature of the transition between tradition and modernity, have af-forded no space for women’s agency. Cast as the embodiment of tradition on the basisof femininity’s timelessness, women are associated with passivity and superstition inorder to draw a distinction between the compliant (feminised) masses and the mascu-line elite. Passmore traces these assumptions back to the totalitarianism theory of the1950s and 1960s and, more fundamentally, to the canonical thinkers of the sociologicaltradition from which political religions theory derives. Moreover, Passmore warns thatconventional sociology presents a problematic legacy that also risks being unheededby gender historians.

The one conventional period marker that receives any defence amongst the essaysbelow is ‘early modernity’. While happy to dispense with the organising principlesand disciplinary boundaries associated with the term ‘Renaissance’, Merry Wiesner-Hanks argues that there certainly was an ‘early modern’ period for European womenand that gender analysis is critical to understanding the key transitions with which itis associated – in particular the Reformation, military revolution, and the dramatic in-tensification of global interaction. Wiesner-Hanks is concerned not to render women’shistory ‘motionless’ over the longue duree by contrast to the changes deemed defini-tive in men’s lives, and argues not only that women’s as well as men’s lives weretransformed by the key events associated with early modernity but also that women



were key agents and gender played a constitutive role in these changes. These con-clusions are given further weight by Martha Howell’s essay on the commercial expan-sion associated with the early modern west. The commercial revolution, she argues,was accompanied and enabled by the creation of a class-specific, normative genderbinary that newly afforded honourable masculinity to the merchant by realigning pro-duction with the male householder citizen and domesticating (and thereby taming)consumption as the purview of the virtuous wife. Gender was inextricably boundup with, and a dynamic force in, the creation of the class identity of the Europeanbourgeoisie.

Alongside concerns with conventional periodisation, several of the contributorsare sceptical about some of the foundational narratives of change and accompanyingchronologies produced by women’s history and gender history. Monica H. Green takesto task western feminist narratives concerning the history of women’s healthcare, andrejects the categorisation of the late medieval period or (more loosely) a pre-modern eraas a ‘golden age’ for European women’s medical practices in relation to reproductivehealth. Such accounts have come about, she argues, from a politically motivated andpolarising perspective that has produced a partial story shaped by a moral frameworkwhich accords liberating potential to the deeds of women and patriarchal oppressionto the activities of men on the basis of distorted evidence and, ultimately, in the faceof improving medical outcomes. Lynn Abrams wrestles with the stranglehold thatthe dominant narrative of ‘separate spheres’ has placed on the history of women inmodern Europe and the paradox created by this model’s failure to represent women’ssense of their own past within local contexts. Exploring what happens when women’svoices are prioritised by historians, Abrams seeks a path through the dissonance createdby the relationships between the general and the particular, the mainstream and themargins that leads her to more than a simple confirmation of the heterogeneity offemale experience. Rather than a timeless exception to a European rule, Shetlandwomen’s accounts of their own agency offer a situational corrective to the narrativestold about modern European women and, more importantly, to the methodologies bywhich they are constructed.

Perhaps one of the most entrenched, albeit widely contested, narratives of change(re)produced by gender history has its roots in Thomas Laqueur’s argument thateighteenth-century Europe witnessed a fundamental shift in the construction of thesexed body as a ‘pre-modern’, ‘one-sex’ model – based on a male–female hierarchicalcontinuum – was replaced by a ‘modern’, ‘two-sex’ system of incommensurable dif-ference.30 Dror Wahrman revisits these claims, and the counter-arguments they haveproduced that emphasise either long-term continuities or enduring synchronic diver-sity (and which are also represented here in the essays by Lynda Coon and MonicaGreen). He does so less to adjudicate the merits of each side of the argument than toexplore the relationship between gender history and cultural history and the method-ological and conceptual limits of the latter’s ‘uncompromising constructivism’ which,he argues, lacks explanatory force when confronted with evidence of long-term con-tinuity. Breaking one of the persistent taboos of feminist history against naturalisingthe body, Wahrman challenges gender historians to undertake a ‘corporeal critique’ inorder to explore ‘where the culturally constructed ends and the ahistorical and extra-cultural begins; and thus, most importantly, how they relate to each other’. This involveswidening the lens of analysis to encompass the deep historical perspective afforded by



neurohistory – an example of which Wahrman offers to complement other such forayson the basis of psychoanalysis or evolutionary psychology.

Jeanne Boydston’s essay is also concerned with the conceptual limits of genderanalysis, but prescribes attending to local particularity above deep historical continuity.Claiming that gender’s status as a ‘category of analysis’ risks ahistoricism by reifying acontemporary, western epistemological order, Boydston argues that we should insteadapproach gender as ‘historical process’ and historicise gender as a concept. If gender isthe product of social constructionism, then it should behave differently across time andspace. The appearance of long-term continuity for Boydston, then, is a chimera that hasbeen produced by the inability of the category of gender to accommodate difference thatdoes not conform to an oppositionally based binary which risks (wrongly) assuminguniversal status across place and time.

Finally, by way of an epilogue to the volume, Judith M. Bennett contributes someshort reflections that once again reiterate the importance of the longue duree to feministhistory. Concerned that women’s history has narrowed its sights to the recent past,Bennett urges historians of women and gender to reinvigorate history’s relationshipwith feminist theory in order to restore its potential to address contemporary agendasfor change vested in the long view the distant past affords. We have come, then, fullcircle to the agenda articulated by the emergent field of women’s history in the 1970s.The essays in this volume have, however, proceeded by way of some approachesand conclusions that are radically at odds with many of the foundational methodsand findings of both women’s history and gender history. Noting that gender-blindscholarship has not been alone in producing partial accounts of female agency, severalcontributors confront the uncomfortable reality that women’s agency did not only occurin progressive domains, but could sustain and benefit from systems of oppression.Others wrestle with the conceptual constraints inherent in the deployment of gender asa category of analysis, particularly in relation to gender’s close association with boththe strengths and weaknesses of cultural history. While Boydston advocates detailedattention to the particularities and localities that contradict an assumed oppositionalbinary pitting male against female, the general consensus is that the long view is onethat gender history cannot afford to lose. Nor can the discipline of history afford to bewithout the perspective this allows, since conventional timeframes are constructivelyenriched and challenged by gender history and the analysis of women’s agency in thepast.

Notes1. Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 127, 132.2. Fernand Braudel, La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a l’epoque de Philippe II (Paris: Colin,

1949).3. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History (1973; 3rd edn, London: Pluto Press, 1990), pp. ix–x.4. Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1919); Ivy

Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London: Routledge, 1930).5. E.g., Gerda Lerner, ‘Women’s Rights and American Feminism’, The American Scholar 40 (1971),

pp. 235–48.6. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols

(New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881).7. Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson and Jane Rendall (eds), Writing Women’s History: International Per-

spectives (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991).



8. Joan Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Renate Blumenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds),Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 137–64, herep. 137.

9. E.g., Phyllis Culham, ‘Did Roman Women have an Empire?’, in Mark Golden and Peter Toohey (eds),Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World (London and New York:Routledge, 1997), pp. 192–204.

10. For an exception, see Maxine Berg, ‘What Difference did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial Revolu-tion?’, History Workshop Journal 35 (1993), pp. 22–44.

11. Gerda Lerner, ‘Placing Women in History: A 1975 Perspective’, Feminist Studies 3 (1975), pp. 5–14,reprinted in Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), as ‘PlacingWomen in History: Definitions and Challenges’, pp. 145–59, here p. 159.

12. This theme is elaborated in Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 54–81, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, ‘The Hubrisof Writing Surveys, or a Feminist Confronts the Textbook’, in Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seeff (eds),Attending to Early Modern Women (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and AssociatedUniversity Presses, 1998), pp. 297–310.

13. E.g., Gerda Lerner, ‘New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History’, Journal of So-cial History 3 (1969), pp. 53–62, reprinted in Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past, pp. 3–14; see alsopp. 153–5.

14. Noted by Joan Scott, ‘Women’s History’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing(Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 42–66, here p. 43.

15. E.g., Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: the Longest Revolution’, New Left Review 40 (1966), pp. 11–37, here p. 11;Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women’s History in Transition: the European Case’, Feminist Studies 3:3/4 (1976),pp. 83–103.

16. Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review 91(1986), pp. 1,053–75.

17. Kevin Passmore, review of Joan Wallach Scott, Feminism and History (Oxford and New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996), Women’s History Review 7 (1998), pp. 261–5.

18. ‘Gender is not only a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences betweenthe sexes, it also is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. It is of crucial importance for thecreation of meaning in social and political life far beyond gender [as an object of study] itself’: KarenHagemann and Jean H. Quataert, ‘Gendering Modern German History: Comparing Historiographies andAcademic Cultures in Germany and the United States through the Lens of Gender’, in Karen Hagemannand Jean H. Quataert (eds), Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography (New York:Berghahn, 2007), pp. 1–38, here pp. 3–4. Scott’s essay is mentioned later, however: pp. 18–21.

19. Joan Hoff, ‘Gender as a Postmodern Category of Analysis’, Women’s History Review 3 (1994), pp. 149–68,here p. 150.

20. Laura Lee Downs, Writing Gender History (London: Hodder Arnold, 2004), p. 83.21. R. W. Connell, ‘The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History’, Theory and Society 22 (1993),

pp. 597–623.22. Konstantin Dierks, ‘American Men’s History and the Big Picture’, Gender & History 18 (2006), pp. 160–64.

See also the Special Section on periodisation and the history of masculinity, ‘What Have Historians Donewith Masculinity: Reflections of Five Centuries of British History, circa 1500–1950’, ed. Karen Harveyand Alexandra Shepard, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005).

23. Judith M. Bennett, ‘Feminism and History’, Gender & History 1 (1989), pp. 251–72.24. Julia M. H. Smith, ‘Did Women have a Transformation of the Roman World?’, Gender & History 12 (2000),

pp. 552–71.25. Theodore Koditschek, ‘The Gendering of the British Working Class’, Gender & History 9 (1997), pp.

333–63; Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘When the Bishop Married the Abbess: Masculinity and Power in FlorentineEpiscopal Entry Rites, 1300–1600’, Gender & History 19 (2007), pp. 346–68.

26. See e.g., the introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities’, in whichthe ‘need to reconsider existing chronologies in the formation of nations’ in the wake of gender analysis isacknowledged but deferred as a task for the future. Gender & History 5 (1993), pp. 159–64.

27. See the editorial to issue 1 of vol. 6 of Gender & History (1994), reflecting on the first five years’ content,pp. 1–6. Similar concerns were echoed in the introduction to the Special Issue of vol. 11, on ‘Gender andHistory – Retrospect and Prospect’, celebrating ten years of publication (1999), pp. 415–18.

28. See e.g., the Special Issue on ‘Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivity’, Gender & History 13:3 (2001), andthe forum on ‘Domestic Service since 1750’, Gender & History 18:2 (2006).



29. The volume has its origins in a two-day workshop held at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in April 2007. Weare grateful to the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College for hosting the workshop, and to the participantsat the workshop for their contributions. We are also indebted to the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund forfinancial support for this event.

30. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1990).


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