Gender History: A Very Short Introduction

This volume is designed to introduce readers to the scholarly field of gender history: its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places in the scholarship of the last five decades. Inevitably political, gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject and what difference gender difference makes. The book explores how gender history as a practice subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past—with ramifications, of course, for what they are today.