Basics Flashcards
To learn what was taught in the lecture about gender and women
What was the view on History and Historians in the 19th Century?
- The C19 was viewed as a ‘historical century’
- History was viewed as true historical knowledge
- It became a professionalised especially in the final decades, at the same time other fields were become professionalised like arts and medicine
- It was viewed as elite training
How was history used in the 19th century?
What did Bishop Stubbs say was the purpose of history?
- It provided a model for contemporary politics and arguments of national progress
- Bishop Stubbs said the purpose of history is ‘a science that teaches us lessons that are applicable to present politics’
What was history like in the 19th century, especially for women?
- It was deeply gendered, especially in western historical enquiry
- Women were seen as a-historical beings as man’s other
- Women were associated with reproduction and nature
- Women may have been interested in history but were excluded
- Women were viewed as incapable of historical discoveries
- Women were viewed similarly to the lower classes
When did women start being allowed to be involved in history?
- Not until they were allowed the vote in 1928
What was the focus in history in late 19th and early 20th century?
- There was a concern that citizens needed to be educated about their history
- Sources used related to historic male lives through printed religious records
- Male focused political, ecclesiastical and legal history
- There was a changing notion of male citizenship and individual agency
With the emergence of Journals in the late 19th century, what’s an example of a journal?
What was the aim of that journal?
- The English Historical Review (1886)
- The was ‘calm and scientific spirit’ which would interest ‘thinking men in historical’ study
Just because women weren’t historical academics were they involved in history?
- Women were in historical stories, books and paintings in society
- Women aside from queens played an important role in medieval and history to keeping the family together, passing on traditions - they were important to the C19
What did books, paintings and tapestries portray women as in the 18th century?
- Portray women as virtuous, lives as lesson and symbols of uniform femininity
How did women participate in history?
- Women used tapestries and paintings to portray public events to provide their own comments on their society
- In the C19 they would perform narratives in schools and local communities
Who are two historians that look at gendered history and women’s participation in history?
- Bonnie G Smith
- Billie Melmon
What biographies were written in the 19th Century about women?
- Sisters Agnes & Elizabeth Strickland: The Lives of the Queens of England (1840-48)
- Lives of the Queens of Scotland (1850-59)
- Lives of the Tudor Princes (1867)
What type of women were focused on in stories of history in the 19th century?
What impact did they have?
Were they popular and what effect did this have on historical scholarship?
- Focused on exceptional women
- Women history was popular
- Historical scholars often looked down on popularity
- Whilst also stressing the need for scholarly research on women
- But it did put women into history and gives women for the first time strong powerful role models
In the mid 19th century was there an expansion in women’s history?
What’s an example of it?
- A little
- Julia Kavanagh wrote ‘Women in France during the Eighteenth Century’ in 1850 and argued that women had power in the 18th century France but that ‘historians in the period have never fully or willingly acknowledged its existence. Their silence cannot efface that which has been’
What did women call themselves when writing history in the 19th century?
What did they avoid writing about?
- Many women called themselves amateurs
- They avoided direct observation/analysis of inequalities between genders
- Instead it offered a nostalgic better version of the past
When did women start going to uni?
- Women were trying to enter the academy to become professional historians
- Small numbers if middle class women being given admission to university
- It wasn’t a neat progress but some women in the late C19 were going to uni to study
- Women at Cambridge University weren’t allowed to get a degree until 1947
What were some women doing in academic history in the late 19th and early 20th century?
- Some academic women were engaging in various fields
- Many connected with the suffrage movement
Who was the first female university professor and when did she become it?
- 1908
- Edith Morley
What was the overall movement in history between 1870s-1940s?
- There was a move to focus from exceptional women to experiences of the majority of women in history
- What is crucial in this period is women become seen as a specific group in history
- It ties in with the Suffrage Movement and campaigns, as well as increase in educational opportunities
What happens in the 1920s and 1930s for women in history?
- Higher rates of representation
- Looked at work of the ordinary
- They were actively contributing to the evolving of historical profession not just women’s history or segregation
- 1 out of 3 women in more conservative societies like Royal Historical Society
- 90% of women in Historical Association
12% of women in American Historical Association
Who were some women in history academia in the 19/20th century?
- Social Historian, Eileen Power (1889-1940)
- Lilian Knowles (d. 1926)
- Bertha Phillpotts (1889-1940)
- M. Dorothy George (b. 1878)
- Helen Maud Cam (1885-1968)
What did women focus on in the 1920s-30s?
- 64% of women historians focused on social and economic history, this was the most common historical interest
- 23% focused on ‘women’s histories’, particularly women and work)
- Women were producing work finally viewed as professional
What did Sonya Rose say about women’s history in the 1920s and 1930s?
- The rise of an informal form of women’s history and its development in the 20s and 30s contributed to a ‘rethinking of historical practice that was takin place among historians who considered knowledge about the everyday lives of ordinary people as important as making sense of the past’
What was Ivory Pinchbeck’s book and why was it important?
- ‘Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850’
- Was important in showing wide range of societal experience and pulling apart and dissecting national history
- It thinks about hierarchies of class and gender
What was second was feminism?
- Late 1960s onwards
- Organised mass feminist movement
- Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963) - describes it as bubbling up from student protests, anti-war movement, civil rights movements and strikes
- Feminist consciousness-raising groups
What did Catherine Hall say about the feminist movement on her work?
- She attended the First Women’s Liberation Group, Birmingham, 1970
- She argues her work moved from medieval to more feminine and gender in relation to what she became interested in during her life
- Shows that cultural context impacts on what historians do
What emerged in the 1970s for the development off women’s history?
What did academic focus on in this period?
- Academic books
- E.G. Martha Vicinus, Suffer and be Still (1972)
- Lots of the work was focused on recovery
- They wanted to restore women and recover women to history. They sort to explicitly amend their exclusion from male dominated history
- Post war there was this feeling to professionalise history
How did women’s history develop in relation to labour and socialist-marxist history?
- Interwoven with women’s history as feminist historians started to question class in relation to women
- There was the idea of a working-class women’s class struggle - a focus on working women
- Marxist and labour history often excluded women
- Division of Labour was a primary cause for the subordination of women
- While feminist historians argued instead that the patriarchy was the main cause for subordination of women
- Looked at how women’s labour contributed to households and economies
- There was a broadening outside of politics to look at private lives
What institutions were created in the 1970s for women?
- Archives and libraries: The Women’s Research and Resources Centre (London, 1975)
- The Feminist Archive. (bath, 1978)
- Women’s studies programmes like the Centre for Women’s studies (York, 1984)
What anxieties were there in the 1980s?
- From 1980s onwards there became anxieties that talking about struggles of women was stopping looking at other areas on women like race and class
- Women’s history was seen separate to women
- There was anxieties about universalising the experiences of women
What was a new way of thinking about Gender history in the 1980s onwards?
- Gender history was viewed now as relational
- By looking at both genders, class and race together gives a historian a greater understand of history and society
What did Natalie Z. Davis say about the significance of sexes of gender groups in the past?
‘the significance of the sexes of gender groups in the past’ would ‘help promote a rethinking of some of the central issues faced by historians - power, social structure, property, symbols and periodisation.’
What tensions were there for gender history?
- There was still a feeling in the 70s/80s that gender was separate from gender and class. Non-white women felt their history wasn’t being heard and the idea of ‘sisterhood’ didn’t cover them
What did Hazel Carby argue?
- She argued that white women historians ‘write their history and call it the history of women but ignore our lives…that is the moment in which they are acting within the relation of racism and writing history.’
What did Valerie Amos and Prathibha Parmer say about gender history?
- ‘The herstory… which white women use to trace the roots of women’s oppression…is an imperial history’
- They urged to be cautious wand to look at how women also encourage oppression.
Who is one of the most influential writers in gender history and their article called?
- Joan Scott
- Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis (1896)
What did Scott say in her article?
- Began to criticise women’s history
- Gender is a ‘constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes’
- It is als a ‘primary way of signifying relationships of power…one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimate and criticised.’
- Investigation these issues ‘will yield a history that will provide new perspectives on old questions (about how, for example, political rule is imposed),
- redefine the old questions in new terms’ considering family and sexuality will make women more visible as active participants
What did the 1990s say about masculinities in history?
- Made us think about the different types of masculinities that have shaped the 19th and 20th century
What did Mrinalini Sinha say about masculine stereotypes?
- The stereotypes of the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ served to legitimise colonial rule and racial hierarchy in the C19 India
- Different notions on masculinity shaped political controversies in India and Britain
What is the name of Ben Griffin’s book? What does it say about masculinity?
- ‘The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle of Women’s Rights’
- Looks at male behaviour in parliament in the 19th century
- How male political elites have constructed these very clear masculine hierarchies within Parliament
Where is gender history at now?
- There is no simplistic progress from women’s history to gender history to post-feminst history
- There are continuing concerns about the relationship between women’s history, gender history and the wider disciplines.
- Arguments that gender history is more conservative than women’s history and why can’t women have women’s degrees in history
How many History Professors are women in Britain?
When was the first black women to be a History professor ?
- 20.8%
- 2018
What did David Cannadine say about gender and women’s history?
- ‘The arrival of gender and women’s history has been the greatest development in the discipline of history since the second world war’
