Gender and Feminist Studies in History

Abstract

Gender history, feminist history, and women's history identify overlapping areas of inquiry whose relationships to each other have become more complex and more contested in the past decade. Feminist history, which emerged as a distinct field in the 1970s, initially was conceived as nearly synonymous with women's history in the sense that most practitioners of the latter embraced the politics of the former. But feminist history could also define an area of investigation—the origins and development of movements for women's rights and sex equality. Building on earlier concerns with the social relations of the sexes, gender analysis appeared as a separate but related approach to history in the mid-1980s. Advocates of gender analysis asserted the critical importance of exploring historical changes in individual and collective subjectivities in relational terms and the centrality of gender in signifying forms and relationships of power. Drawing examples from medieval England, colonial North America, modern Latin America, Europe, the USA, and the African diaspora, this article sketches out various ways that gender and feminist historians have transformed basic terms and categories of historical analysis; explored the interplay of gender with class, race, nationality, and sexuality; examined differences among women as well as between women and men; wielded and critiqued postmodernist theories; and analyzed the impact of globalization and transnationalism on women, women's movements, and gender relations.