What is Gender History? Flashcards
What does Joan Scott write when speaking about gender as a ‘social construct’?
gender history “insists on the need to examine gender concretely and in context to consider it a historical phenomenon, produced, reproduced, and transformed in different situations and over time”
What does Virginia Woolf write in regard to gender history?
“for all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. nothing remains of it all. all has vanished. no biography or history has any word to say about it.” - “nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century”.
What is Simone de Beauvoir famously known for saying?
“one is not born a woman, one becomes one” - there is no biological, psychological destiny that defines what a woman is. it is history that has done it.
What are the 5 challenges of writing history through the lens of gender?
- avoiding essentialism
- overcoming historical silences
- addressing intersectionality
- avoiding binary thinking
- addressing bias
What are two main reasons historians would want to consider gender?
- Allows historians to interpret historical events and social structure through the lens of gender, providing insight into how gender dynamics have shaped historical processes.
- the use of ‘gender’ in historical analysis aims to understand the significance of gender groups and uncover the various meanings and symbolism associated with sex roles in different societies and time periods.
What do feminist scholars believe the study of women allows for?
it not only introduces new subject matter but also force a critical re-examination of existing scholarly work.
enlarges traditional notions of historical significance to include personal and subjective experiences and not just public and political activities.
What does Mary Wollstonecraft believe women were taught from birth?
“beauty is a woman’s sceptre…and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their life”.
Vindication of the rights of women - date published and over arching theme:
- argued that women’s apparent weak and passive nature was owed more to social rules than their physical makeup.
What does Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff highlight about gender?
masculinity and femininity are constructs specific to historical time and place.
John Tosh on masculinity:
“men turned away domesticity and towards empire to assert masculinity and dominance, considering the role of empire in day-to-day life. how men strive to assert masculinity, to shape themselves in the world”.
Michael Roper on masculinity:
has used cultural sources to examine histories of masculinity and utilise psychoanalysis from 1990s onwards - “I have never been comfortable with the study of masculinity outside a relational framework - by ‘relational’ I dont just think of relations between men and women, but between different kinds of men”.
James Messerschmidt on masculinity:
masculinity is the culturally idealised form of masculinity in a given historical and social setting, culturally honoured, glorified, mass media, constructed.
what does trans history facilitate?
trans history facilitates critique of the gender binary system as one that subordinated women as well as people who fail to fit into one of the two dominant categories.
