Women's History at the Cutting Edge: a joint paper in two voices

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis is, as the subtitle indicates, a joint paper in two voices. Each author has worked with her counterpart to revise what began as their position paper for the Round Table ‘Women’s History at the Cutting Edge’ at the International Congress for the Historical Sciences, held in August 2015 in Jinan, China, which met jointly with the International Federation for Research in Women's History (IFRWH). Chen Yan explains her perplexity about the reticence of Chinese historians (based in China) to embrace topics in women's and gender history, using her own case as an example. She then poses five questions in the paper to stimulate reflections from the commentators, drawing on their varied experiences as historians of women and gender in other countries. Her particular objective is to ‘jump-start’ research and publication in these areas in China, where a variety of obstacles dissuade scholars from pursuing this path. Karen Offen’s contribution builds out from that of Chen Yan, arguing that women's and gender history is at the cutting edge of historical research precisely because it offers ‘a revolutionary development in the politics of historical knowledge’. No historian can be considered ‘up-to-date’ in the field of history without taking its findings into account. Offen addresses each of the five questions, making provocative arguments and rehearsing some of the achievements in providing an organizational structure that welcomes historians from many lands through the IFRWH. She emphasizes the vast expansion of publications in the field during the last twenty-some years in many languages besides English and addresses the controversies of the 1990s concerning the ‘turn’ to gender history and to theoretical analyses. Offen then proposes thinking about ‘women’ and ‘gender’ as two focal points along the continuum of the same project, using the analogy of the ‘zoom lens’. Making women's history an integral part of historical study requires a ‘gendered analysis’ of any historical topic, but it also requires deeper thinking about communication strategies that can bring the findings of our research to the general public.