Gender Arguments Flashcards
1
Q
impact of gender history on women’s history
A
- signalled a deepening commitment to the history of women
2
Q
recent developments in history of women / gender history
A
- shifts away from seeing gender as simply a product of discourses
- instead emphasised importance of subjective experience
3
Q
limitations of history of women as historical field of inquiry
A
- emerged during 1960s and 1970s alongside second wave feminism
- attempt to return women and women’s activities to historical record
- influence of feminist experience and thought both source of illumination and weakness: scholars often projected contemporary ideals and values into the past as an anachronism
- women’s history inherently marginalised in itself, women treated as subcategory of men, reflected in marginalised status in field as whole
4
Q
Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis” (1896)
A
- founding article, widely cited and criticised
- aimed to write women into history by redefining and enlarging traditional notions of historical significance, to encompass personal and subjective experience as well as public and political activities
- gender: cultural constructions, “a social category imposed on a sexed body”
- influenced by poststructuralist and psychoanalytical literary critics at Brown University during 1980s (Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney)
- emerged as category of analysis, represented an invitation to think critically about how the meanings of sexed bodies are produced, deployed, and changed
5
Q
gender history and separate spheres
A
- challenged the interpretive utility of concept of separate spheres
- historians highlighted inadequacies of separate sphere model of gender roles
- boundaries between public and private were unstable and regularly transgressed
6
Q
Leonore Davidoff & Catherine Hall
A
- “Family Fortunes” (1987)
- brilliant demonstration of new insights which gender perspectives can yield
- traced evolution of capitalist enterprise in England at end of 19th century, focussed on middle-class families
- illuminated complexities that underpinned stereotypes (hidden investments of female knowledge, labour, and capital in apparently male-only enterprises)
- agreed that socially constructed spheres could never truly be separate
7
Q
Amanda Vickery
A
- “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?” (1993)
- separate spheres ideology performed an important service for women’s history
- however in order to successfully map more widespread scope of female experience it is necessary to develop new categories and concepts
8
Q
history of masculinity
A
- investigation into male identities and their ability to achieve and exercise patriarchal power over women
- permitted more accurate understanding of female experience and formulation of female identity
- necessary to examine relationships between men and women
9
Q
John Tosh & Michael Roper
A
- “Manful Assertions” (1991)
- landmark work in study of masculinity in modern Britain
- argued that the concept of masculinity was complex since it was “the product of both lived experience and fantasy”
- explores discussions in sexual politics with historical analysis to demonstrate that masculinity is an historical and cultural construct
10
Q
R W Connell
A
- Masculinities (1995)
- hegemonic masculinities: describes the processes that serve to maintain patriarchy both in relation to deviant and cadet masculinities but primarily in relation to women
- allowed historians to analyse relations of power, how they are subjectively experienced, and how this affects behaviour of individuals
11
Q
problem with history of masculinity
A
- masculinity continues to be viewed more as a matter of social or cultural construction than as an aspect of personality
- need for approaches that explore points of connection between the social and the psychic
12
Q
Martin Francis
A
- “The Domestication of the Male?” (2002)
- explored the “emotional economy” of the postwar PMS Churchill, Eden, and Macmillan
- negotiated the dominant upperclass masculine script of the “stiff upper-lip” in response to newer regimes of emotional and sexual expression
- reaction to both ebb and flow of postwar emotional codes, and prewar public and familial experiences and relationships
- approached postwar milieu in their 60s with personalities which were in fundamental ways already fixed
13
Q
problem with gender history
A
- increasing number of gender historians have raised concerns regarding the critical edge of gender as a category of historical analysis
14
Q
Jeanne Boydston
A
- “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis” (2008)
- category of gender has supplanted the historical subjects in historical work, and consequently narrowed and predetermined findings
- tendency of many historians to be blinded by rigidity of the category of historical analysis prevents the development of nuanced ways to talk about systems that might include the male and the female but not in a fixed binary
15
Q
Suzanna Desan
A
- Family on Trial (2005)
- explored the extent to which revolutionary ideology challenged patriarchal ideology during the French Revolution
- tribunal des famille achieved remarkable success for women in divorce and inheritance disputes
- illustrates how family and the state were engaged in a mutual refashioning, and how vital considerations of both gender and family were actively creating the new state and its politics
