Introduction

Extract

Some three decades have elapsed since feminists turned the scholarly spotlight on the previously ignored historical experience of half the world's population. Nearly two decades have transpired since the publication of Joan Scott's pathbreaking essay on gender and history.Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, 5 (1986). See also Joan Scott's article “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (1987): 1–13, and her reflections on gender as a category of historical analysis in “Preface to the Revised Edition,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 2000), especially ix–xii. Since then, women's history and increasingly sophisticated forms of gender analysis have altered understandings of and approaches to many fields of history.