Epistemological critiques – questions about how we know what we know – are intrinsic to gender history. Feminist historians, in bringing an explicitly gendered perspective into history, have produced new ways of knowing the past through a broad range of methods and epistemological frameworks.
This diversity is evident within the collection of essays in which contributions to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and methods. The essays reveal how historians of gender are crossing boundaries – disciplinary, methodological, and national – to explore new opportunities for viewing gender as a category of historical analysis. The result is a broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. For example: performance theory informs the analysis of women’s letters; attention to border crossers points to geopolitical dimensions of ‘how we know what we know’ about the gendered past; and archival silences act as starting points for explorations of unorthodox historical methods.
This important examination of how various ways of knowing operate in current historical research on gender demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history encompass surprising crossovers and common grounds unimaginable even two decades ago.
From the Back Cover
Epistemological critiques – questions about how we know what we know – are intrinsic to gender history. Feminist historians, in bringing an explicitly gendered perspective into history, have produced new ways of knowing the past through a broad range of methods and epistemological frameworks.
This diversity is evident within the collection of essays in which contributions to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and methods. The essays reveal how historians of gender are crossing boundaries – disciplinary, methodological, and national – to explore new opportunities for viewing gender as a category of historical analysis. The result is a broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. For example: performance theory informs the analysis of women’s letters; attention to border crossers points to geopolitical dimensions of ‘how we know what we know’ about the gendered past; and archival silences act as starting points for explorations of unorthodox historical methods.
This important examination of how various ways of knowing operate in current historical research on gender demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history encompass surprising crossovers and common grounds unimaginable even two decades ago.
About the Author
Donna R. Gabaccia is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is author of We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998), Italy’s Many Diasporas (2000), and Foreign Relations: Global Perspectives on U.S. Immigration (2012); she is also co-editor of Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World (with Loretta Baldassar, 2010). Gabaccia is on the editorial board of Gender & History, Journal of American Ethnic History and Journal of Modern Italian Studies.
Mary Jo Maynes is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Taking the Hard Road: Life Course and Class Identity in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies of the Industrial Era (1995) and co-author of Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (with Jennifer Pierce and Barbara Laslett, 2008) and Family: A World History (with Ann Waltner, 2012). She is on the editorial board of Gender & History, the Journal of Global History, and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.
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