The Feminist History Reader gathers together key articles, from some of the very best writers in the field, that have shaped the dynamic historiography of the past thirty years, and introduces students to the major shifts and turning points in this dialogue.
The Reader is divided into four sections:
early feminist historians' writings following the move from reclaiming women's past through to the development of gender history
the interaction of feminist history with 'the linguistic turn' and the challenges made by post-structuralism and the responses it provoked
the work of lesbian historians and queer theorists in their challenge of the heterosexism of feminist history writing
the work of black feminists and postcolonial critics/Third World scholars and how they have laid bare the ethnocentric and imperialist tendencies of feminist theory.
Each reading has a comprehensive and clearly structured introduction with a guide to further reading, this wide-ranging guide to developments in feminist history is essential reading for all students of history.
Introduction Part 1: Bringing the Female Subject into View 1. The Trouble With Patriarchy 2. Feminism and History 3. Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History 4. Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium 5. Women's History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate 6. History and the Challenge of Gender History Part 2: Deconstructing the Female Subject: Feminist History and 'The Linguistic Turn' 7. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis 8. Does Sex Have a History? 9. Gender History/Women's History: Is Feminist Scholarship Losing its Critical Edge? 10. Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis 11. Postmodern Blackness 12. Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism' Part 3: Searching for the Subject: Lesbian History 13. Who Hid Lesbian History? 14. Does it Matter if They Did it? 15. Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory? 16. Queer: Theorizing Politics and History 17. 'Lesbian-Like' and the Social History of Lesbianisms 18. Toward a Global History of Same-Sex Sexuality Part 4: Centres of Difference: Decolonising Subjects: Rethinking Boundaries 19. Gender and Race: The Ampersand Problem in Feminist Thought 20. Challenging Imperial Feminism 21. An Open Letter to Mary Daly 22. 'What Has Happened Here?': The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics 23. Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency and Tradition in Colonial and Postcolonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India 24. Gender and Nation 25. 'Introduction' to Civilizing Subjects 26. Rethinking Boundaries: Feminism and (Inter)Nationalism in Early-Twentieth-Century India 27. Actions Louder than Words: The Historical Task of Defining Feminist Consciousness in Colonial West Africa 28. 'Under Western Eyes' Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles 29. Feminism's History
