Writing Gender History

Laura Lee Downs is Director of Studies at the Centre de Recherches Historiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of France at War (Berg, 2000), Childhood in the Promised Land (Duke University Press, 2003) and Why France? (Cornell University Press, 2007).

Downs puts the entire range of women's and gender history into context, showing how it challenges the conventional pieties, opens up new veins of research, and transforms our understanding of every aspect of history. Her command of the literature is simply astounding and her work is sure to be seen as a landmark in the development of the field of history in the broadest sense. -- Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History, UCLA (about the first edition) Ingenuity and perspicuity shine through Laura Lee Downs' superb distillation and analysis of women's and gender history. To understand accomplishments and changes in the field, put this book at the top of your list. -- Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University (about the first edition) This fills an important gap in the range of books available on historiography. I envisage that the 'case-study' approach in chapters will be useful to students (i.e hopefully will encourage them to read the texts featured). -- Dr Anne Logan, University of Kent (about the first edition) 20051014

• Introduction; Before the second wave: scholarship on women from the early twentieth century into the 1960s; Second-wave feminism and the rediscovery of women's history, 1968-1975; Feminist historians and the 'new' social history: the case of England, 1968-1995; Is female to male as nature is to culture? Feminist anthropology and the search for a key to all misogynist mythologies; Beyond separate spheres: from women's history to gender history; Gender history, cultural history and the history of masculinity; Gender, poststructuralism and the 'cultural/linguistic turn' in history; Gender and history in a postcolonial world; From separate spheres to the public sphere: gender and the sexual politics of citizenship; Gender and history in a post-poststructuralist world; Conclusion: women's and gender history as a work in progress