Studying Women’s & Gender History

1. Studying Women’s & Gender History

2. Outline • Pioneers • Second-Wave Feminism • Separate Spheres • Gender History • The Colonial Context • Sources • Status

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 1855-1920http://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 1898-1982 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. 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

15. 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”?