Gender History Across Epistemologies

Epistemological critiques – questions about how we know what we know – are intrinsic to gender history. Feminist historians, in bringing an explicitly gendered perspective into history, have produced new ways of knowing the past through a broad range of methods and epistemological frameworks. This diversity is evident within the collection of essays in which contributions to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and methods. The essays reveal how historians of gender are crossing boundaries – disciplinary, methodological, and national – to explore new opportunities for viewing gender as a category of historical analysis. The result is a broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. For example: performance theory informs the analysis of women’s letters; attention to border crossers points to geopolitical dimensions of ‘how we know what we know’ about the gendered past; and archival silences act as starting points for explorations of unorthodox historical methods.  This important examination of how various ways of knowing operate in current historical research on gender demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history encompass surprising crossovers and common grounds unimaginable even two decades ago.

Notes on Contributors vii Introduction: Gender History Across Epistemologies 1 DONNA R. GABACCIA AND MARY JO MAYNES 1 Master Narratives and the Wall Painting of the House of the Vettii, Pompeii 20 BETH SEVERY–HOVEN 2 ‘More Beautiful than Words & Pencil Can Express’: Barbara Bodichon’s Artistic Career at the Interface of her Epistolary and Visual Self Projections 61 MERITXELL SIMON–MARTIN 3 Public Motherhood in West Africa as Theory and Practice 80 LORELLE SEMLEY 4 Profiling the Female Emigrant: A Method of Linguistic Inquiry for Examining Correspondence Collections 97 EMMA MORETON 5 Beyond Constructivism?: Gender, Medicine and the Early History of Sperm Analysis, Germany 1870–1900 127 CHRISTINA BENNINGHAUS 6 ‘I Just Express My Views & Leave Them to Work’: Olive Schreiner as a Feminist Protagonist in a Masculine Political Landscape with Figures 157 LIZ STANLEY AND HELEN DAMPIER 7 Gender without Groups: Confession, Resistance and Selfhood in the Colonial Archive 181 CHRISTOPHER J. LEE 8 The Power of Renewable Resources: Orlando’s Tactical Engagement with the Law of Intestacy 198 JAMIE L. MCDANIEL 9 The Politics of Gender Concepts in Genetics and Hormone Research in Germany, 1900–1940 215 HELGA SATZINGER 10 The Language of Gender in Lovers’ Correspondence, 1946–1949 235 SONIA CANCIAN 11 Gender–Bending in El Teatro Campesino (1968–1980): A Mestiza Epistemology of Performance 246 MEREDITH HELLER 12 Changing Paradigms in Migration Studies: From Men to Women to Gender 262 NANCY L. GREEN 13 Reconsidering Categories of Analysis: Possibilities for Feminist Studies of Conflict 279 SHIRIN SAEIDI 14 An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras, Kothis and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India 305 ANIRUDDHA DUTTA Index 331

Donna R. Gabaccia is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is author of We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans ( 1998), Italy’s Many Diasporas (2000), and Foreign Relations: Global Perspectives on U.S. Immigration (2012); she is also co–editor of Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World (with Loretta Baldassar, 2010). Gabaccia is on the editorial board of Gender & History , Journal of American Ethnic History and Journal of Modern Italian Studies.    Mary Jo Maynes is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Taking the Hard Road: Life Course and Class Identity in French and German Workers′ Autobiographies of the Industrial Era (1995) and co–author of Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (with Jennifer Pierce and Barbara Laslett, 2008) and Family: A World History (with Ann Waltner, 2012). She is on the editorial board of Gender & History , the Journal of Global History , and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.