Gender History: Critical Readings

Description

Drawing together crucial articles and essays, Gender History: Critical Readings provides an extensive reference collection which is essential for all students and scholars needing to gain a critical understanding of gender and gender history. Collating scholarly historical texts on the subject from the last 50 years from a wide range of sources, this four-volume set offers a key knowledge resource for the field. Arranged chronologically in terms of the time period studied for ease of use, the four volumes assemble around 60 essays and papers from the pioneering pieces published in the 1960s and 1970s through to the landmark texts of the recent past and present. There is a global scope and Gender History: Critical Readings gives crucial insights into how the field was formed, how it developed and into how gender history will be studied in the future. Volume 1 explores gender history concerned with antiquity through to the year 600 CE and pays particular attention to issues of work, politics, religion and gender roles. Volume 2 traces gender history's arc in the field of medieval history, with coverage of topics like domesticity, women's networks and social status. Volume 3 considers the early modern world and the significance of imperialism in relation to gender history. Volume 4 covers the modern world through to the present day, with material on nation states, activism and the changing nature of society. Each volume includes a substantial contextualizing introduction surveying the development of the field.

Bonnie G. Smith is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, USA. She is the author of several books, including Women's Studies: The Basics (2013), Europe in the Contemporary World: 1900 to Present: A Narrative History with Documents (2007) and The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (2000). She is also the co-author, along with Lynn Hunt, Thomas Martin and Barbara Rosenwein, of The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures (4th Ed., 2012) and the general editor of the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History (2008), which won the American Library Association Outstanding Reference Work Award.

Smith deserves praise for presenting an in-depth compendium that wrestles with ideas intended to spark discussion rather than a more contemporary, and introductory, anthology dependent on copious illustrations. This work should find its audience among scholars and serious students rather than casual readers and belongs on the shelf at academic institutions. It especially addresses specialists seeking to expand their knowledge to less-well covered parts of the world (namely the majority of the planet outside of Europe and North America). Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels and professionals. * CHOICE *