Welcome to Monday Methods!

Today we'll take a closer look at gender history and its methodical/historical forerunner of sorts, women's history.

Women's history as in the study of the role of women in history and the methods required for said study developed – as so many things relevant to historians in their studies today – with the big boom and encompassing paradigm shift of social history in the 1960s and 1970s.

Within the broader history of the field, this was a very productive and important time. Historians of the post-WWII generation questioned how history had been done up to this point and started to criticize popular narratives within the field. Their points were that a.) history is more than just a succession of events and important men and b.) that history can look different depending on whose perspective it is written from.

Social historians focused on social structure rather than political history, assigning a higher importance to how a society was organized politically and in other ways than to the individual decisions of individual actors, while other historians thought to write history from new perspectives, including that of women.

Exemplifying this was Joan Kelly's seminal article "Did women have a Renaissance?" from 1977. In it, Kelley shows that the traditional periodization that the popular historical narrative followed was one that only applied to men, in the sense that the Renaissance as a time of expanding definitions of the political as well as the expansion of opportunities in terms of the political and the social were applicable only to men while for women, the time frame commonly referred to as the Renaissance was one that brought more passivity and less opportunity than before. Kelley demonstrates in way that is still masterful despite the age of the article an important lesson for all those in the field of history: The historical narratives we write and the way we organize the past in our texts are contingent on the perspective of the people at the center of our study, whether they are women, men, white, black, Hispanic or so on.

This realization of monumental importance for anyone "doing" history as well as the accompanying debate on how to reconstruct these perspectives – the essential question of Can the subaltern speak? – can not be underestimated in terms of how much of an impact they still have today. The study of a multitude of perspectives on historical events, including those of women, are crucial in expanding our own knowledge and understanding of the past and do and should form at least the backdrop of any serious scholarly engagement with history.

But this was by far not the end of the big paradigm shifts. With the 1980s and the growing influence of cultural history, i.e. the historical perspective centered on the question what frames of reference for producing meaning and explaining the world, past societies had as well as with the growing influence of post-modern philosophy and methods – primarily discourse –, a new set of sub-fields emerged among them gender history.

What gender history does and where its importance lies is, in the words of German historian Achim Landwehr, in that "it makes one wonder about things about nobody usually wonders." Meaning that it expands what categories are seen as subject to the process of historical change. In this case and broadly speaking, what it means to be a woman or man in past societies and times.

To understand the foundations of gender history as well as its importance, it is imperative to understand the crucial distinction at the basis of the field: The category of "sex" meaning to denote the physical attributes of a person and if they are female, male, something in between or neither, the category of "gender" is meant to denote the social context and implications of what it means to be male, female, in-between or neither. E.g. consider how Romans perceived it as very masculine to be the active partner during a sexual encounter with another male; something which lost its connotation as being "manly" in modernity.

Gender history has subjected gender roles, i.e. what it constitutes to be male of female in a social context, to historical inquiry, rejecting the overcome notion of them being "god-given" or "natural" as they have been portrayed in the past, but rather seeing them, as so many social categories, as subjects to historical change and changing social circumstances. It does so by subjecting historical sources to inquiry as to how gender roles are constructed within them. To take a very obvious example from my field of study: What did the BDM in Nazi Germany teach young women about their role in society? And how does that align with the regime's policies towards women?

As Joan W. Scott writes in „Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” that gender is constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships based on power. Changes in the organization of social relationships always corresponded to changes in in the representation of power, but the direction of change is not necessarily one way. For her, it involves four interrelated elements that historians need to be aware when studying history:

• Culturally available symbols, when they are invoked, how, and in what context; meaning for example Mary and Eve in Western Christian traditions as symbols for of women.

• Normative concepts set forth in the interpretation for the meaning of symbols and surrounding it, the conflicts or social census surrounding these; e.g. was the Victorian ideology of domesticity of women created whole and only afterwards reacted to or was it subject to constant differences of opinion?

• Gender as one way a society constitutes itself and organizes power in social relations that go beyond kinship; i.e. what role does gender play in historical societies in the labor market, education, and the polity?

• Subjective identity. How did historical individual actors deal with gender in their given society and how do they construct their own gender identity.

Using and studying these elements as part of a historical inquiry has the potential of furthering our own understanding of the past and open up whole new avenues of interesting investigations. Women's and gender history have become an essential part of the academic field of history and were pivotal in expanding our approach to history by subjecting previously unquestioned categories such as perspective and what it means to be a man or a woman or something in-between or neither in the past. While some may deny it, these kinds of investigations and their broader implications for the discipline as a whole have been pivotal in shaping modern historical inquiry and teaching historians new ways to engage with their subject matter in order to increase knowledge and understanding.