Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:41:20.959Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gender, Women’s History, and Social History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Louise A. Tilly
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Recently, I attended a seminar at which a historian of women presented a dazzling interpretation of the polemical writing of Olympe de Gouges and its (not to mention her) reception during the French Revolution. A crusty old historian of the Revolution rose during the question period and inquired, in his own eastern twang, “Now that I know that women were participants in the Revolution, what difference does it make!” This encounter suggested to me what I will argue are two increasingly urgent tasks for women’s history: producing analytical problem-solving studies as well as descriptive and interpretive ones, and connecting their findings to general questions already on the historical agenda. This is not a call for integrating women’s history into other history, since that process may mean simply adding material on women and gender without analyzing its implications, but for writing analytical women’s history and connecting its problems to those of other histories. Only through such an endeavor is women’s history likely to change the agenda of history as a whole.

Type
Comment and Debate
Information
Social Science History , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , Winter 1989 , pp. 439 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1989 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrams, Philip (1982) Historical Sociology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Blewett, Mary H. (1988) Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Bloch, Marc (1961 [1941]) Apologie pour l’histoire ou Metier d’historien. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin.Google Scholar
Bordin, Ruth (1981) Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Carr, Edward Hallett (1963) What Is History? New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Clinton, Catherine (1983) The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Cooper, Patricia A. (1987) Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Cott, Nancy (1987) The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Davidoff, Leonore, and Hall, Catherine (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon (1976) “Women’s history in transition: The European case.” Feminist Studies 3: 83–103.Google Scholar
DuBois, Ellen Carol, et al. (1985) Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs (1988) Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order. New Haven and New York: Yale University Press and Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano (1986) Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Godineau, Dominique (1988) Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française. Aix-en-Provence: Alinea.Google Scholar
Gordon, Linda (1986) “What’s new in women’s history,” in de Lauretis, Teresa (ed.) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 20–31.Google Scholar
Gordon, Linda (1988) Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Gullickson, Gay L. (1986) Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750-1850. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, Leloudis, James, Korstad, Robert, Murphy, Mary, Jones, Lu Ann, and Daly, Christopher B. (1987) Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Hewitt, Nancy A. (1984) Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Hewitt, Nancy A. (1985) “Beyond the search for sisterhood: American women’s history in the 1980’s.” Social History 10: 299–321.Google Scholar
Hollis, Patricia (1987) Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865-1914. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Janiewski, Dolores E. (1985) Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Johansson, Sheila Ryan (1976) “‘Herstory’ as history: A new field or another fad?” in Carroll, Berenice (ed.) Liberating Women’s History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 400–430.Google Scholar
Jones, Jacqueline (1985) Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Kelly, Joan (1984 [1976]) “The social relation of the sexes: Methodological implications of women’s history,” in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1–18.Google Scholar
Kessler-Harris, Alice (1982) Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Laslett, Barbara, and Brenner, Johanna (1988) “Gender and social reproduction: Historical perspectives.” Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Lebsock, Suzanne (1984) The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Levine, Susan (1984) Labor’s True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Milkman, Ruth (1987) Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Oakley, Ann (1972) Sex, Gender, and Society. New York: Harper Colophon Books.Google Scholar
Ryan, Mary P. (1981) Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1780-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, Joan Wallach (1988a [1983]) “Women’s history,” in Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press: 15–27.Google Scholar
Scott, Joan Wallach (1988b [1986]) “Gender: A useful category of historical analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press: 28–50.Google Scholar
Smith, Bonnie G. (1981) Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Stansell, Christine (1986) City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles (1980) “Two callings of social history.” Theory and Society 9: 679–681.Google Scholar
Valenze, Deborah M. (1985) Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Vicinus, Martha (1985) Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
White, Deborah Gray (1985) Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton.Google Scholar