Gender History

This introduction to the field of gender history offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places in scholarship since the 1970s. Inevitably political, gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject and how paying attention to gender subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past--and what they are today. Antoinette Burton explores how gender analysis has changed interpretations of the histories of slavery, capitalism, migration, and empire.