Gender History Around the Globe – serie

Women, Gender and History in India examines Indian history through a thematic lens of women and gender across different contexts.Through an inter-disciplinary approach, Nita Kumar uses sources from literature, folklore, religion, and art to discuss historical and anthropological ways of interpreting the issues surrounding women and gender in history. As part of the scholarly movement away from a Grand Narrative of South Asian history and culture, this volume places emphasis on the diversity of women and their experiences. It does this by including analyses of many different primary sources together with discussion around a wide variety of theoretical and methodological debates – from the mixed role of colonial law and education to the conundrum of a patriarchy that worships the Goddess while it strives to keep women in subservience.This textbook is essential reading for those studying Indian history and women and gender studies.

Women, Gender and History in India examines Indian history through a thematic lens of women and gender across different contexts.Through an inter-disciplinary approach, Nita Kumar uses sources from literature, folklore, religion, and art to discuss historical and anthropological ways of interpreting the issues surrounding women and gender in history. As part of the scholarly movement away from a Grand Narrative of South Asian history and culture, this volume places emphasis on the diversity of women and their experiences. It does this by including analyses of many different primary sources together with discussion around a wide variety of theoretical and methodological debates – from the mixed role of colonial law and education to the conundrum of a patriarchy that worships the Goddess while it strives to keep women in subservience.This textbook is essential reading for those studying Indian history and women and gender studies.

This introductory text explores the gendered history of the modern Middle East, from the eighteenth century to the present, studying the various ways in which gender has defined the region and shaped relations in the modern era.The book captures three aspects of change simultaneously: the events that mark the “modern” Middle East, women’s encounters with the transition to modernity and gendered responses to modernity. It contains both new fieldwork and a synthesis of secondary scholarship that highlight the role of gender in the modernization of Egypt, Turkey, Iran, the Levant and the Persian Gulf states. Chapters are organized chronologically to chart the rapid developments of the modern era, but each chapter also stands on its own, with coverage of masculinity and femininity, sexuality, marriage and the family, labor and women’s contributions to Arab Spring uprisings. Through this comprehensive account, the book pushes back on stereotypes that the Middle East is an ahistorical region and that women have not been vital actors in the process of change.Richly illustrated and accessible for a variety of readers, History, Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in gender studies and Middle Eastern history.