Journal of China Women’s University. 2014, (01)

From Women’s History to Gender HistoryChinese Full Text

Laura Lee Downs;YUAN Lili;

Abstract: This article focuses on the evolution of historical writing about women since the mid-1970s,and stresses convergent trends in both Europe and the United States. It begins with the important place of social and labor history,and with the complex and,at times,conflictual relationship between feminism and Marxism in defining the emergent field of women’s history in the context of post-1968 social movements,notably second-wave feminism. It then moves on to the mid-1980s,when feminist scholars began turning away from social history,with its basis in macro-structural forms of analysis,toward more cultural and discursive forms of analysis,often grounded in more micro-historical contexts. Feminist scholars took these cultural and linguistic turns in hopes that they might better utilize the emerging concept of gender,which was based on a distinction between biological sex,understood as the material ground of one’s identity,and gender,that is,the more malleable,socially-constructed norms and behaviors that code one as male or female,but that vary across time and space so as to reveal their constructed nature. The feminist challenge to notionally stable social categories like male and female,achieved through the historical study of gender relations as they have shifted in time,thus preceded the arrival of post-structuralist theory in American and British history departments,giving feminist scholars a leading role in the theoretical methodological debates that shook the historical discipline from the late-1980s to the mid-1990s. The article concludes by analyzing four important works written at three different moments in the evolution of the field-from women’s history as social history,then to gender history,and finally to gender history’s subsequent engagement with poststructuralism-in order to explore more concretely what the consequences of this evolution in the epistemological bases of analysis have been for the shape of the field as a whole.

Keywords：

women’s history; gender history; experience; subjectivity; identity; post-structuralism;

DOI：
10.13277/j.cnki.jcwu.0010
Series：
Subject：
Classification Code：
C913.68

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From Women’s History to Gender HistoryChinese Full Text

Laura Lee Downs;YUAN Lili;

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