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This introductory chapter begins with a brief survey of the potential contribution the history of masculinity can make to gender history, referring to ways in which it has grown out of but also conflicts with women's history. An analysis of the relationship between manhood – both as conceived and practiced – and patriarchal norms, is identified as the key focus for this study. A discussion of the principal primary sources serves first to map out the book's structure in two parts (the first focusing on representations of manhood and the second exploring social practice) and secondly to justify the use of a case study of the town of Cambridge, fully contextualised with reference to a wide range of other materials.

This chapter traces the birth of professional women's and gender history in the United States amid the broader social, political, and intellectual currents of the 1960s. In particular, it examines four conceptual “turns” in women's and gender history, along with their influence on the practices of American historians and the study of women: the emergence of women's history as an intellectual pursuit; the shift in focus from women to gender; the interrelationships among gender analysis, poststructuralism, and cultural studies; and the increasing importance of transnational history. The chapter explains how writing women into history arose as a political project riding the crest of second-wave feminism and how the shift to gender history helped move women's history “from periphery to center” in the field of U.S. history.

This chapter examines world history and historical studies of masculinity through the prism of Latin American Studies. It begins by discussing the materialist and culturalist approaches that drive a wedge between world historians and scholars of gender and sexuality before considering Latin American history in relation to both world history and transnational cultural studies. It then explores how discussions of gender and sexuality provide inspiration for integrating the changing face of the political economy with a critical aspect of gender history: the shifting nature of masculinity. It argues that we need to focus on the trajectories taken by area fields other than Latin American Studies and find field-specific ways of narrating masculinity as a global history.

This chapter examines multidisciplinary work on African women's and gender history between 1992 and 2010, calling this scholarship histoire engagée. After a brief overview of the development of African women's and gender history as well as African history's contributions to contemporary historical discourses, the chapter discusses the political economy of scholarly works on African women. It then analyzes Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí's argument, advanced in The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, that all “Western” women have a preset agenda in studying “African” women that is neocolonialist and irrelevant to “African” women. It also considers issues of gender identity, sexuality, and the politicizing of women's roles by focusing on women organizing, along with the place of religion in scholarship on African women's and gender history.

This chapter examines the formation, spread, social composition and inner workings of the French Prophets as a movement. Based on extensive prosopographical research, it argues that the Camisards did not appeal to isolated individuals, but rather to pre-existing networks of diplomats, merchants, lawyers, ministers, physicians and intellectuals. It demonstrates on this basis how the Camisards capitalised on a vibrant millenarian culture upon their arrival and that beliefs in prophecy and miracles survived among all levels of the social ladder well beyond 1700. This new insight into the religious landscape of early eighteenth-century England suggests that enthusiasm transcended religious and social boundaries and therefore that it ought to be distinguished from both radical dissent and what historians call ‘popular religion’.

Grey Osterud completed Putting the Barn before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York, which was supported by the Prelinger Award, twenty years after her first study of gender and generational relationships in a rural community. This chapter reflects on the constraints and opportunities of being a public historian, as well as the dynamic connections between feminist activism and grassroots-oriented research and education programs. It traces Osterud’s trajectory from Boston’s Bread and Roses through living-history museums and labor union workshops to her current vocation as a freelance editor helping authors in African American and women’s history reach wider audiences.

This chapter considers the historiography of Nest and women in medieval Wales, broadly understood, from the early eighteenth century to the emergence of formal academic historiography. It assesses the Welsh historiography, both formal and as expressed in other genres, especially travel writing, showing divergent tendencies to view Nest either with horror or embarrassment, or to make her a heroine; and this will be related to the ways in which she is made to relate to the English, and also to conceptions of the proper behaviour of a medieval princess. Comparison will be made with the developing historiography of contemporary Welsh princes.

This chapter explores changes in the history of Russia's women and of gender relations following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It begins by discussing how Cold War politics shaped the field of Russian and Soviet women's history. In particular, it considers the challenges faced by scholars in pursuing studies of women and gender, largely due to hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union that severely limited the sources that they were able to consult. Access to Soviet archives was restricted not only by political considerations, but also by the lack of access to lists of archival holdings. The chapter also examines the influence of social history on the field of Soviet history and how gender history transformed women's history in the 1990s, along with the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on Russian and Soviet history, Russia's complex relationship with Western Europe, the ways that gender structures and legitimates power relations during the first three decades of the Soviet experience, and gender analyses that focus on the Russian empire.

This chapter examines the gendered nature of modernity in the case of India by tracing the trajectory of Indian women's historiography in the late twentieth century. More specifically, it explores the complex relationship between historical pasts and contemporary contexts and its implications for women's and gender history in modern India. It begins with a discussion of how the writing of Indian women's history has been intertwined with both British colonialism and anticolonial nationalism. It then considers the consequences of nationalism and national liberation movements for the field of women's history and how colonial and anticolonial forces took up the “woman question.” It also looks at the historiography of women and gender in modern India as a means to address women's oppression as well as colonial and postcolonial modernity.

This chapter looks at women’s history and its successor, gender history, which emerged as strong new approaches beginning in the 1970s—precisely when the wider feminist movement began to have its most profound impact on at least Euro-American societies. Gender history and women’s history are not the same. The former, larger category overlaps with the latter, and also with areas such as masculinity history, critical race theory, and queer studies. However, it has only been since the 1980s that historians have considered ‘gender’ an historical subject or ‘a useful category of historical analysis’. Nevertheless, various radical, Marxist, and progressive historians had planted the seeds of gender history as early as the 1920s and 1930s, even as they privileged neither women nor gender as subjects. Their questioning of power structures and engagement of politics and relativist concepts were integral to the development of the field later in the twentieth century.

This book engages the most familiar and most thoroughly researched topic within Chinese gender and women's history: the cult of female chastity in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The institutionalized veneration of chaste widows and chastity martyrs first came to the attention of historians in the 1930s, who approached it from the perspective of the radical critiques and transformations of the old Confucian family system in their day. Different approaches to chastity, shaped largely by readings of social commentaries and hagiographic biographies of women written by literati men, and the writings of late imperial elite women themselves, offer a flexible model of the relationship between norm and practice that accounts for both the reproduction of orthodox values and structures and the diversity of accepted gender practices and interpretations of female virtue.

This book examines the intellectual and political production of women's history across time and space. Drawing on insights from scholars, it considers women's and gender history within national, imperial, and geographic contexts as well as the accomplishments, shortcomings, and future directions of the field. It shows that the writing of women's histories was chronologically deeper than initially thought and driven by wider intellectual, social, political, and economic developments. Furthermore, it explains how historiography on women and gender lends credence to the argument that all history is politics and how relationships of power intersect with politics. Through the prism of Latin American Studies, the book also discusses two distinct and rarely intersecting historiographies: world history and masculinity.

In this chapter one examines the major change took place under the Turkmen Seljuqs coming from Mongolia to the Middle East. They introduced the unique post of atabeg or (father-prince) to keep their military Turkmen identity. However, Turkish princess were essential to such post to succeed as the sultan divorce one of his wives and marry her to a loyal commander to bring up one of his sons and groom him for future kingship. In fact, what it meant to be an element of preserving the Turkmen identity, turned out as a major one in the disintegration of the dynasty. Almost every atabeg who marry a khatun-princess collaborate to establish his own political dynasties. Such cases took place in Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan where royal mothers contributed to the success of such atabegate. The post had a political impact on other Muslim dynasties in the centuries to come.

This chapter examines the political nature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical production on British women by focusing on a genre of women's history called “women worthies.” After discussing the range of motives and objectives underlying the “woman worthy” genre as it developed in Britain in the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, the chapter considers how histories of British “women worthies” became instrumental for advancing the debate over woman's capacity to learn and to exercise civic and political rights. In particular, it explains how the “woman worthy” enabled writers to formulate alternative and often inspirational models of womanhood, think more broadly and critically about the status and rights of women, and evaluate the politics of “Britishness” more generally. Finally, it assesses the implications and legacies of women worthies for approaches to the contemporary writing of women's and gender history.