Writing Gender History - (Writing History) 2nd Edition by Laura Lee Downs (Paperback)

About the Book

The second edition of this fantastic text includes a new chapter dedicated to race, gender and sexuality in colonial and transnational history. In focusing on the practical application of history in historical writing, the author provides a lucid contextualization of the role of gender in history, covering key feminist figures and critical debates.

Book Synopsis

How has feminist scholarship changed history? Writing Gender History explores the evolution of historical writing about women and gender from the 1930s until the early twenty-first century. With chapters on the history of Europe, the USA, colonial India and Africa, the disucssion moves from women's history to gender history, and then to poststructuralist challenges to that history.

This revised edition includes an exciting new chapter looking at recent scholarship on race, gender and sexuality in colonial and transnational history, and on the history of the body. Highly accessibly but also encouraging new debate, this book provides students with a comprehensive understanding of gender history, as well as its possible future.

Reviews of 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, Professor of American History, Harvard University.

'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... Sure to be seen as a landmark in the development of the field of history in the broadest sense.' Lynn Hunt, Professor of Modern European History, UCLA.

Review Quotes

"The author's grasp and presentation of such diverse material is astounding ... [This is] a sophisticated examination of some of the applications of theory and one which offers an indispensable bibliography ... The author presents and explores a dazzling array of voices, which together can form no easy narrative - and this is much the point of the book." --Cultural and Social History (of the first edition)

"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)." --Anne Logan, University of Kent, UK (about the first edition)

"No better guide to the field exists than this richly satisfying text." --Gender and History (about the first edition)

About the Author

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).