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The social impact of Allied Forces on the Australian home front is central to research on World War II gender relations but is often overlooked in South Australia. The arrival of 20,000 American se...

Neither archives nor museums are neutral. They reflect particular sets of priorities: those of the institution; the collectors and curators within them; and those of their intended audiences. In th...

The Barros family, has, for centuries, administered the morgado of Real, the chapel of Senhora da Graça and a hospital in the city of Braga that harboured poor women. This hospital, named the Hospital de Santiago and the Hospital das Velhas (hospital for elderly women), was founded in the Late Middle Ages and continued to function until the 19th century. The current study analyses how aid to the poor, in an urban context, served as a catalyser of the prestige of the family that administered it. Using manuscript, printed and iconographic sources, processed by a multidisciplinary methodology, this investigation discusses the main patrimonial, social and symbolic coordinates that allowed the survival of the morgado and of the hospital in the long term., This work was supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under Grant 2020.04746.BD., Esta publicação tem o apoio do Financiamento Plurianual do Laboratório de Paisagens, Património e Território (Lab2PT), Ref.ª UID/04509/2020, financiado por fundos nacionais (PIDDAC) através da FCT/MCTES.

More often than not, a broad-brush approach has been taken in describing the past, and large sectors of society have been portrayed on the basis of simple stereotypes rather than trying to reflect ...

The masculine façade of the music Conservatoire belies the extent to which these establishments fostered close relationships between women. This article analyses the student cohorts of the Paris and St Petersburg Conservatoires in the early twentieth century, to show that women made up a formidable presence and created supportive communities within these institutional frameworks. It argues that these relationships not only facilitated women’s involvement in public cultural life, but also impacted their private experience of music and listening, as illustrated by the close musical bond between sisters and conservatoire alumnae, Lili and Nadia Boulanger.

Scholarship on transnational correspondence networks has until recently tended to focus on men’s intellectual endeavours. While the first phase of feminist scholarship focused on recovery of women’...

The 1920s and 1930s in Mexico were an important moment of transition for women’s sport, as women’s interests in sport as spectators and participants increased, giving rise to social debate. Much of these debates formed part of a broader discussion about the emergence of the ‘modern woman’ or, in the case of Mexico, la chica moderna. By focusing on the representation of the modern woman boxer in Mexican newspapers and popular media, this article analyses the socio-cultural construction of femininity through the discourse of sport in the postrevolutionary context of the 1920s and 1930s. This work considers how authors and publications with close ties to the postrevolutionary regime allocated the modern boxing woman a place within the postrevolutionary project, which provided the project a progressive appeal that argued for a true social equality. However, commentators also went to great lengths to reconcile the transgressive and modern character of women boxers with the state’s more traditional discourses on acceptable femininity and clear limits remained in place for women. Nevertheless, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a remarkable opening up of possibilities for alternative types of femininities in a context that sought to establish a new national citizen in terms of gender.

Threaded with racialized and gendered pathologies, Black folx wrestle with a normative gaze that understands them as irrational, unintelligent, and deserving of constant surveillance. In this way, ...

Taking a Feminist perspective as a starting point, this introductory piece seeks not only to integrate women as the main agents within the history of humani- tarian relief, but also to understand their assistance to victims, from the Franco- Prussian War to WWII, as a type of situated knowledge which was broadly associated with the notion of care through the implementation of practices such as dressing wounds, vaccinating, feeding and clothing vulnerable popula- tions. This political and epistemological position allows us to analyse the agency of women humanitarians as a caring power involving strong gender, class, religious and colonial power relations within the history of Western Empires. Furthermore, our Feminist approach enables us to deconstruct the essentialist vision through which women humanitarians have frequently been depicted as compassionate mothers or loving angels, as well as to contextualize their contrasting experiences of complicity with Western Empires and resistance to male delegates and political and medical representatives. Far from heroic representations, women humanitarians had to navigate through complex glo- bal hierarchies although this did not necessarily come into conflict with their dreams about female emancipation.

Lieutenant Joseph de Dorlodot (1871-1941), a Belgian aristocrat and philanthropist, was the Director of the Belgian Correspondence and Documentation Office in Folkestone, England. This article uses the 'Joseph de Dorlodot' archive collection (Archives Générales du Royaume de Belgique, Bruxelles) to investigate the emotional support provided by the Correspondence Office during the First World War. Throughout the conflict, its mission was to facilitate the sending of mail between Belgians, to provide them with legal advice and to offer humanitarian assistance to those who were in material and emotional distress. This was particularly the case of soldiers at the front. In the spring of 1916, the Office set up a mail system between Belgian soldiers and wartime godmothers - 'marraines' - from Canada and the USA. Lieutenant de Dorlodot imposed a precise moral and political framework for correspondence, where an intimate space was created in order to strengthen patriotic sentiment on the one hand, and control masculinities and femininities on the other. Through their letter exchanges with soldiers, godmothers participated in the war effort by bringing emotional reinforcement to the front line, from their homes, through a type of caring work often ignored or at least disconnected from any notion of work in the history of the Great War.

What do the terms sex and gender identity, or gender history, mean in a medical context? When does it matter to a healthcare professional whether a patient has male or female reproductive biology? How should a doctor approach a patient who does not wish for their biological sex to be openly acknowledged? The General Medical Council (GMC) advises doctors that transgender patients may have the marker for their sex amended to instead reflect their gender identity. This paper will attempt to critically examine two key points in the GMC trans healthcare ethical advice using Beauchamp and Childress' Four Principles approach, exploring how doctors might consider an incongruence between sex and gender identity in clinical practice.

What is Work? is a hugely impressive and important contribution to the fields of labour history, gender history and social history and one which should remain an essential text for some time to com...

Jen Manion, associate professor of history at Amherst College, has previously explored Early Modern–era carceral, sexuality, and gender history. Her new contribution, Female Husbands, focuses on th...

This article explores mobility in the North-Atlantic between 1890 and 1920 as manifested in the entanglements of different cultural flows within the peripheral town of Reykjavik, Iceland's capital....

This article discusses the personal factors which influenced my decision to become a historian. It traces the impact of my family background and the diverse cultural and parental influences of my childhood on my growing awareness of social, racial and political issues. These, I suggest inspired my later focus on social, political and gender history. The piece then goes on to discuss the impact on my historical interests and perspectives of my education at Oberlin College and the University of Wisconsin and of my experience living and teaching in Paris while researching and writing my PhD. It concludes with my choice to come to the University of Melbourne and my arrival there in 1974.

The present contribution starts from the debate about kinship as a social institution in medieval Europe initiated by Jack Goody's pioneering anthropological work in the 1980s and drawn upon by his...

This paper considers the emergence of amateur women’s rowing between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in light of contemporaneous social norms relating to gender and sport. It doe...

This article follows the discussion on female consumers in Swedish advertising journals and handbooks. The aim is to problematise the gendered aspects of Swedish consumer and early advertising history, by studying how the notion of the female consumer intersected with notions of social class, marital status and sexuality. The article also closes in on the persons who were invited to embody the consuming women and what kind of interests they represented. The article concludes that, from the start of the twentieth century, gender and class was prevalent in the advertising literature. The married woman was also from the start seen as the head of the consuming family. Therefore, reaching her through advertising became key for facilitating the relations between producer and consumer. With time, different women’s organisations, the weekly press, and new theories of advertising from the US addressing the notion of ‘Mrs Consumer’ came to influence the Swedish advertising trade press. The result became the...

The history of the Ukrainian Hetmanate has been studied from the perspective of war, political struggle, and diplomacy. This article studies various aspects of women’s lives in Cossack society: the...

Extensive research on differences in women's and men's gender attitudes and more recent work on sexual orientation differences in these and other social attitudes have overlooked the potential intersection between gender and sexual orientation in predicting Americans' gender attitudes. I use data from the 2012 American National Election Survey 2012 to investigate differences in views on gender roles, gender discrimination and inequality, and abortion among lesbian and bisexual women, gay and bisexual men, heterosexual women, and heterosexual men. The results suggest that heterosexual men hold the most conservative views on gender, while lesbian and bisexual women are most conscious of gender discrimination and inequality. These differences are partially explained by LGB Americans' liberal political ideology and heightened awareness of homophobic discrimination-two mechanisms that are also gendered. I conclude by arguing that the intersection between sexual orientation and gender produces unique lived experiences that, in turn, produce gendered sexual orientation gaps in worldviews.

The author discusses perspectives on gender formation or diagnosis focusing on ideas from transactional analysis, post-Jungian thinking, and aspects of psychoanalysis to illustrate approaches to wo...

Agency, activism and organisation have been central and constant themes in women’s and gender history. They provide useful lenses through which to study women’s interaction with the social world. Both separately and in combination, they constitute a valuable analytical framework for the study of women’s lives, culture and experience in past societies by foregrounding and articulating historical challenges made to patriarchy, social structure and the status quo. Agency highlights the individual action/social structure explanatory dichotomy whilst activism and organisation help focus on the specific ways in which women have challenged, resisted, overthrown or gained entrance to social structures and institutions that had tended to ignore, exclude, disadvantage or penalise them.

The purpose of this study was to describe the influence of gender-based family roles on the process of gender transition for transgender women in the United States. Secondary analysis was undertake...

This article explores the strategies followed by the International Olympic Committee for the achievement of gender equality. It is argued that this international body can go beyond simply adopting ...

Schools are often sites of surveillance for students as behaviors are governed and regulated by gendered norms and sexed expectations. For transgender and gender non-conforming students, school environments can produce anxiety as students are categorized into gender binaries. This article draws from Canadian policy in public schools and higher education, interview data, as well as transgender teen narratives, to analyze gender policing in schools through gender binary washrooms. Building upon prior research and writing on gender binary washrooms [Cavanagh, S. L. 2010. Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Ingrey, J. C. 2012. “The Public School Washroom as Analytic Space for Troubling Gender: Investigating the Spatiality of Gender Through Students’ Self-Knowledge.” Gender and Education 24 (7): 799-817; Ingrey, J. C. 2013a. “Shadows and Light: Pursuing Gender Justice Through Students’ Photovoice Projects of the Washroom Space.” Jou...

Despite the ongoing increase of women in the medical force, gender inequalities persist in medicine. The purpose of this paper is to study the mechanisms that regulate the contemporary gender order through a critical discourse analysis. We conducted 21 narrative interviews with Italian physicians, and 1 focus group with 10 Italian senior-year medical students. We used Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework to explain how “hegemonic masculinity” shapes discourses of sameness aimed at silencing gender inequalities in medicine; “natural female domesticity” challenges this sense-making and introduces new sparks in the debate about female career paths; similarly, “influential group power” discourses nurture the reflections about elitism in the profession. Our findings show that the new generation of physicians challenges the dominant gender order proposing new ways of negotiating gender roles in favour of a greater gender equality. This paper offers causes for reflection on a profession that has prof...

This article examines challenges in writing histories of feminist reforms in schooling and educational administration. The focus is gender equity reforms in Australian schools since the 1970s, looking at how those earlier interventions are now remembered, represented and forgotten, in policy memory and collective narratives. Such feminist endeavours were part of the policy landscape and the administration of schools during the 1970s and 80s. I argue that feminist agendas can also be examined as themselves sites for managing the conduct of teachers and students and for regulating new forms of identity and social relations. These paradoxical aspects of feminist reform are analysed through a Foucauldian lens. The discussion identifies contextual themes in JEAH before considering debates within gender and feminist history. A revisiting mood has initiated a stocktake of the stories told not only about feminism but also the accounts feminism gives of itself. Extending this, I propose that critical atten...

This article examines particularities of the communist gender policies towards sportswomen and men in early Yugoslav socialism. By situating Yugoslav gender history of sport in transnational perspe...

The literature on women in STEM areas displays the barriers that women face at scientific workplaces, showing important interaction where they do and undo gender. However, there is a lack of resear...

This paper examines the representation of sexual violence in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. The comic book was published between 1986 and 1987 by DC Comics – and later collected into one volume in 1987 – and is set in an alternative reality, conceptually converging with points in history spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s. Watchmen hinges, on a number of levels, on the (alleged) rape of Silk Spectre by the Comedian in the early 1940s, an event shown as a flashback within the narrative. Although forming a short part of the comic book, and taking up a minimal number of frames, the episode of sexual violence is proposed in Watchmen as the conceptual fulcrum on which much of the narrative pivots, as well as the conceptual dynamics between the vigilante characters and their identification with the ‘United States’ as an entity. In my analysis, I connect sexual violence to notions of disrupted memory, collective historical narrative, (un)patriotism, and the ‘nation’ as a gendered entity. Ultima...

This essay examines the architectural antecedents for and cultural significance of Juliet’s balcony. The exchange between Juliet and Romeo colloquially known as “the balcony scene” is the most famo...

In recent years, women’s and gender historians have paid attention to the dissonance between the grand narratives of European women’s history and the history and experiences of marginal regions and...

This paper aims to analyse and discuss conditions for gender equality in police leadership. This is done by interviewing 28 sworn police leaders in Sweden, and using a doing ...

This paper examines the reworking of gender in the measured university and the impact this has on gender equality in academia. Neoliberal market rationalities and measurements embedded in academic publishing, funding and promotion have transformed Australian higher education and impacts upon the careers of academic women in ways that are gendered. Based on a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with female academics, this paper focuses on the performative and discursive decisions women make in regards to their academic careers, and argues that the mainstreaming of gender equity in Australian universities seeks to render gender inequality invisible. It employs ‘cruel optimism’ to highlight how our optimistic attachment to gender equity and diversity policies as tools for improving the representation of women may be detrimental to academic women’s career progression and the realisation of gender equality in academia.

Rachel T. Hare-Mustin describes a career of feminist activism in academic life, the professions, and clinical practice in the 1970s and 1980s. She has been an advocate for changes in professional ethics and improving conditions for women. Her primary areas of influence have involved applying feminist theory to the study of gender and pointing out that the sex role model of gender differences has an inherent bias that overlooks the gender hierarchy. Women’s voices are silenced, not only in the process of therapy, but in the wider society as well.

This is, as the subtitle indicates, a joint paper in two voices. Each author has worked with her counterpart to revise what began as their position paper for the Round Table ‘Women’s History at the Cutting Edge’ at the International Congress for the Historical Sciences, held in August 2015 in Jinan, China, which met jointly with the International Federation for Research in Women's History (IFRWH). Chen Yan explains her perplexity about the reticence of Chinese historians (based in China) to embrace topics in women's and gender history, using her own case as an example. She then poses five questions in the paper to stimulate reflections from the commentators, drawing on their varied experiences as historians of women and gender in other countries. Her particular objective is to ‘jump-start’ research and publication in these areas in China, where a variety of obstacles dissuade scholars from pursuing this path. Karen Offen’s contribution builds out from that of Chen Yan, arguing that women's and gen...

Concerns about the ‘modern girl’ have a long tradition, and the changes and disruption brought about by the First World War exacerbated these anxieties. Particular fears were generated about young ...

This presentation sketches the slow growth of acceptance for and ultimate success of women's & gender history in French academic circles. In order to briefly evoke the French situation, the author ...

This article concerns gender and feeling real. Beginning with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of gender as an ontological category, it argues that the subjective experience of gender as real has been underaccounted for. By reviewing Butler’s work on gender melancholy and then elaborating psychoanalytic theories of identification and reality, this article links feeling real to the dual capacities to both separate from and connect with the object. To illustrate the implications for thinking gender identity and transformation, it concludes with a reading of Miles Walser’s poem about the name discarded in a gender transition.

Our contribution will focus on some of the intellectual developments occurring in gender history/women’s history in Canada in the twenty-first century, while also drawing attention to the decline of women’s history outside of the university environment. In the mid-1990s there was a vigorous debate over the merits of gender history vs. women’s history. Over the past decade, these debates have quieted along with a growing recognition that gender history and women’s history have many common goals. Today, biography and recent history (post 1945) figure among the strong trends in Canadian women’s and gender historiography. But the impact of government funding cuts under the previous decade-long Conservative government has seriously handicapped federal institutions such as museums and archives. So far, the current Liberal administration is moving in a more positive direction.

This piece addresses the key questions posed by Chen Yan and Karen Offen in their joint position paper on the current state of women's history and its place at the cutting edge of historical practice. Having made the case that women's and gender history has had a significant and multi-level impact (empirical, conceptual, methodological and theoretical) on that practice, my article observes that acknowledgement of this is still very limited among those not centrally involved in the field. It notes the tensions between the aspiration both to identify and pursue women's and gender history as discrete fields of scholarly endeavour and the aspiration for women and gender to be treated as topics/categories which should be constitutive of all historical inquiry. It goes on to consider the relationship of women's history to gender history, to post-colonial and cross-cultural scholarship, and to recent work in spatial histories. It argues that in the first case the two approaches are mutually reinforcing, ...

This essay explains first how women's history developed in Japan, referencing early research on the topic. Then, it will discuss the arguments about the shift from women's history to gender history...

In this excellent book, Rolandsen Augustin examines processes of institutionalization and mobilization related to gender equality policies at the European level. Through the analysis of institution...

Theoretical writings on intersectionality have long emphasized the unique ways women of color experience race/ethnicity and gender, particularly compared to White women; however, little empirical e...

Differences in gender equality based on social, political and economic factors is cited, by some writers, as a contributory factor in the differentially greater achievement of boys in STEM subjects through the concept of gender stratification. Gender differences, especially in mathematics, have been linked directly to gender parity in wider society. Such a link is predicted by gender stratification via both the gender similarities and gender stratification hypotheses, for example (Else-Quest et al. 2010 and Hyde and Mertz, 2009). Analysis by Ainara González de San Román & Sara de la Rica Goiricelaya (2012) appears to support the hypothesis that the gender gap is smaller, in mathematics, when the society has a higher equality index. However, more recently, Stoet & Geary (2015) report evidence, based on PISA outcomes from 2000 to 2009, that there is little or no correlation between the gender gap and wider equality. This paper takes up this analysis using PISA data from the 2012 round, for both science and mathematics, and the Global Gender Gap Index in a European context. The results support Stoet & Geary’s findings and cast doubts on any link between national gender equality and achievement in science or mathematics. Whilst the conclusion reached in this paper supports Stoet & Geary’s findings further work is needed to explain the observed differences in achievement between boys and girls.

In February 1902 the Victorian suffragist Vida Goldstein helped establish the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Washington, D.C. Four months later, the Commonwealth Franchise Act gave white women unprecedented political privileges. Despite these pioneer achievements, Australian women struggled to achieve prominence within the international suffrage movement before the First World War. Discounting traditional explanations that expense and distance kept Australians on the IWSA’s margins, this article reconsiders the concept of national representation – a central tenet of liberal internationalism. In the wake of Federation, deep colonial loyalties persisted and women remained ambivalent about assuming the responsibilities of national and international citizenship.

Despite many efforts to increase gender fairness in education in recent years, the issue has not yet become obsolete: Gender discrimination still exists and finds expression in unused chances and limited action repertoires for both sexes. This article gives an overview on existing gender differences across the lifespan before providing explanations for these differences from a developmental perspective. We present psychological theories of development dealing with the adoption of gender typical preferences and behaviors in children, and draw the connection to the role parents’ and teachers’ gender stereotypes play in this process. The mechanisms contributing to the perpetuation of gender differences are illustrated via empirical studies. Finally, we offer starting points for interventions to prevent the development of these gender differences, and introduce the REFLECT program which enhances gender competence in secondary school teachers and their students, and a training program for kindergarten ...

This article constitutes a first attempt to systematically map the presence of women in the greatly changing Swedish advertising industry since 1930. The overarching aim of the study is to analyse ...

This paper explores how trauma (individual, cultural, and historical) experiences and gender stories of women behaving more like men become intermingled. Drawing upon stories of women in Jewish literature (Beruriah and Yentl), psychoanalytic theories of gender, and intergenerational transmission of trauma, the author unpacks how women carry vulnerability and helplessness whereas men are seen as stronger and agentic. The author believes that gender performance and passing highlight how gender becomes enlisted as a mode of traumatic transmission and possibly 1 type of internal psychic reparative resolution to complex traumatic experiences.