Gender History

Antoinette Burton argues that gender history is hiding in plain sight, at work everywhere we look.This volume introduces the field of gender history—its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It 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 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, what difference gender makes, and how attention to it subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past—and what they are today. The book explores how gender analysis has changed interpretations of the histories of slavery, capitalism, migration, and empire. As a field, gender history has been extraordinarily...