Book Description

Using gender as a tool of historical analysis has been immensely liberating, both addressing some of the theoretical issues raised by women's history and opening up the history of masculinity as a new area of enquiry. This volume provides a clear and accessible guide to the evolution and use of gender as a concept in historical studies. It presents some of the most influential contributions in the field, outlining in the process key issues of historical controversy: the feminine and masculine domains in history; anatomical conceptions of sexual difference; the development of domestic ideology; seventeeth-century female prophets and the nineteenth-century Marian revival; the role of women in formal and informal political behaviour and discourse, and the role of gender in conflict in periodic realignments of the sexual division of labour. The work represented offers new understandings of the history of women as well as a new way of thinking about the history of men. But these insights cannot be confined: areas of history as disparate as science, religion, and politics are all affected by the 'gender revolution'. The aim of books in the Arnold Readers in History series is to bring together selections of important, formative or controversial essays and writings. Each book will make available in a single accessible volume examples of the writings of many key figures in the field, along with essays that in one way or another are (or seem destined to become) historiographical benchmarks.