How has feminist scholarship changed history? Writing Gender History explores the evolution of historical writing about women and gender from the 1930s until the early twenty-first century. With chapters on the history of Europe, the USA, colonial India and Africa, the discussion moves from women's history to gender history, and then to poststructuralist challenges to that history. This revised edition includes an exciting new chapter looking at recent scholarship on race, gender and sexuality in colonial and transnational history, and on the history of the body. Highly accessibly but also encouraging new debate, this book provides students with a comprehensive understanding of gender history, as well as its possible future.

How has feminist scholarship changed history? Writing Gender History explores the evolution of historical writing about women and gender from the 1930s until the early twenty-first century. With chapters on the history of Europe, the USA, colonial India and Africa, the disucssion moves from women's history to gender history, and then to poststructuralist challenges to that history. This revised edition includes an exciting new chapter looking at recent scholarship on race, gender and sexuality in colonial and transnational history, and on the history of the body. Highly accessibly but also encouraging new debate, this book provides students with a comprehensive understanding of gender history, as well as its possible future. Reviews of the first edition: 'Ingenuity and perspicuity shine through Laura Lee Downs' superb distillation and analysis of women's and gender history. To understand accomplishments and changes in the field, put this book at the top of your list.' Nancy F. Cott, Professor of American History, Harvard University. 'Puts the entire range of women's and gender history into context, showing how it challenges the conventional pieties, opens up new veins of research, and transforms our understanding of every aspect of history. Her command of the literature is simply astounding... Sure to be seen as a landmark in the development of the field of history in the broadest sense.' Lynn Hunt, Professor of Modern European History, UCLA.

Feminist scholarship has changed history writing to where it is no longer imaginable to write history, whether of the political, military, social, economic, or intellectual varieties, without taking gender into account. Downs's book explores the evolution of historical writing about women and gender from the 1930s until the early twenty-first century. The discussion moves from women's history to gender history, and then to poststructuralist challenges to women's and gender history. Designed to be accessible to students, discussion focuses neither on abstract theory nor on historiography per se, but rather upon the practical application of theory in historical scholarship on women and gender.

Five essays address such themes as the relationship between feminist history and women's history, the use of the concept of "experience", the development of the history of gender, demographic history and women's history and the importance of post-structuralism to women's history.

In a pathbreaking study of the gendering of the practices of history, Bonnie Smith examines the differences in19th-century approaches to history between male and female perspectives. Smith demonstrates that even today, the practice of history is still propelled by fantasies of power and subjugation.

The role of gender in the history of the working class world

The complaint of Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, that history has 'hardly any women at all' is not an uncommon one. Yet there is evidence to suggest that women have engaged in historical writing since ancient times. This study traces the history of women's historical writing, reclaiming the lives of individual women historians, recovering women's historical writings from the past and focusing on how gender has shaped the genre of history. Mary Spongberg brings together for the first time an extensive survey of the progress of women's historical writing from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating the continuities between women's historical writings in the past and the development of a distinctly woman-centred historiography. Writing Women's History since the Renaissance also examines the relationship between women's history and the development of feminist consciousness, suggesting that the study of history has alerted women to their unequal status and enabled them to use history to achieve women's rights. Whether feminist or anti-feminist, women who have had their historical writings published have served as role models for women seeking a voice in the public sphere and have been instrumental in encouraging the growth of a feminist discourse.