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Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and independent scholars have used oral history and life history, two slightly different but complementary methods, in order to help researchers develop a deeper understanding of the past in Africa. While both methods are best employed when analyzing late-19th-, 20th-, and early-21st-century history, these methods have also been used in histories of slavery and with survivors of trauma, displacement, and marginalization. Oral history is quite effective in gathering the histories of nonliterate populations, or people who are considered marginal to the larger society. While the study of oral history and life history has been powerfully fruitful in Africa, researchers must take care to consider both the benefits and limitations of these approaches. Is an oral history account the ultimate example of an unmediated African voice or do both individual and group memories reflect the selective memory that occurs as a result of the power dynamics evident in any society?

This chapter traces the connections and tensions between the political history of women and the history of British politics. First, it examines the historiographical development of a political history of women, exploring the key debates and focal points. Second, it considers how the political history of women was both a major beneficiary of the challenges faced by political history and itself a challenger to political history. Third, this chapter attempts to trace chronologies of women’s politics, thinking about how we might conceptualize the narratives of change and continuity. Finally, it considers the possible future directions that research might take, thinking about areas that seem important and in need of further study.

This chapter looks at women’s history and its successor, gender history, which emerged as strong new approaches beginning in the 1970s—precisely when the wider feminist movement began to have its most profound impact on at least Euro-American societies. Gender history and women’s history are not the same. The former, larger category overlaps with the latter, and also with areas such as masculinity history, critical race theory, and queer studies. However, it has only been since the 1980s that historians have considered ‘gender’ an historical subject or ‘a useful category of historical analysis’. Nevertheless, various radical, Marxist, and progressive historians had planted the seeds of gender history as early as the 1920s and 1930s, even as they privileged neither women nor gender as subjects. Their questioning of power structures and engagement of politics and relativist concepts were integral to the development of the field later in the twentieth century.

While explicit efforts at gender mainstreaming in foreign policy are relatively recent, a view of foreign policy through a feminist lens illustrates that foreign policy has always been gendered. Feminist scholarship in this area suggests that masculinity has historically shaped foreign policy in important ways, while the increased presence of women in national governments, government cabinets, and the diplomatic corps has produced some notable change in policy outcomes. An examination of two key concepts related to policymaking and gender—securitization and gender mainstreaming—shows how gender issues have come to the forefront of national and international security agendas since 2000. In particular, the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda promulgated by the United Nations has obligated individual states to address gendered security issues, and dozens of countries have responded with their own National Action Plans. While these national efforts have led to some improvement in the status of women and related humanitarian outcomes, feminist scholars generally agree that the WPS agenda has stalled in its efforts to produce transformative change. As a way forward, feminist foreign policy stances promise to produce more comprehensive outcomes, though a backlash toward gender mainstreaming and the re-emergence of more traditional security threats has led to questions about the future of such efforts.

Feminist sport historians have worked hard to bring women in from the accumulated (and imagined) histories of sport. This chapter outlines the various ways in which feminist sport historians have approached the institution of sport as a key site for the development of a critical feminist scholarship on gender. It traces the development over time of gender-sensitive sport histories alert to new forms of gender and to multiple forms of historical expression with attention to the precarious performance of gender and the ever-shifting politics of the sporting body in time and space. It also suggests avenues for future research in for sport historians of gender.

This chapter maps out the international field of feminist comparative policy (FCP) and emerging gender policy studies in France in relation to each other. While French researchers have been involved with FCP projects and non-French scholars have contributed significantly to general understanding, knowledge, and theory on France, gender policy studies in France have maintained a distinctive twist, including more interdisciplinary connections, less formalization, less of an explicit feminist approach, and more use of in-depth qualitative methods. The distinct nature of French gender policy studies has underpinned its dynamism inside and outside France and has allowed French research to make significant contributions to comparative feminist policy studies at an international level. This strong comparative connection is reflected by the degree to which the research agendas of the French and international research communities converge around implementation studies and intersectionality.

The subject of critical race theory is implicitly black men, and the main idea is race. The subject of feminism is implicitly white women, and the main idea is gender. When the main idea is race, gender loses its importance and when the main idea is gender, race loses its importance. In both cases, women of color, especially black women, are left out. Needed is a new critical theory to address the oppression of nonwhite, especially black, women. Critical plunder theory would begin with the facts of uncompensated appropriation of the biological products of women of color, such as sexuality and children.

This chapter explores music education’s relationship to social justice for sexual-diverse and gender-diverse persons and communities. It focuses on music education in the context of public schooling as both a critical site for social justice and social justice education, particularly as related to gender and sexual diversity, and a robustly heteronormative enterprise that receives and sustains oppressive ideologies with regard to gender-sexual diversity. To bring together ideas, Kumashiro’s work in social justice education is drawn upon, specifically his four-part activist theory of anti-oppressive education, as well as recent, emerging research in music education regarding gender-sexual diversity and discussion of music education students and practice. Whether acknowledged or not, social justice intentions and actions with regard to gender and sexual minorities are precast and limited by our awareness of and readiness to identify and act against the multiplicity of ways we benefit from the gender and sexual status quo.

Gender, like race, is a controversial and volatile topic. We encounter one another as embodied and thus gendered beings. But what precisely is gender? What does it mean to be feminine? This chapter offers a philosophical analysis of the concept of gender and discourses about gender. The opening sections begin with a discussion of key terms and distinctions such as gender essentialism, gender as a social construction, the distinction between gender and (biological) sex, gender realism and nominalism, and so forth. Specific examples—both historical and contemporary—are employed to elucidate the claim that gender is socially constructed. Two sections are devoted to prominent feminist philosophers, Judith Butler and Linda Martín Alcoff. The topics addressed in these sections include: Butler’s notion of performing gender and her rejection of the gender/sex distinction, and Alcoff’s development of gender as positionality and fluid identity and her historically and materially sensitive version of gender realism.

1. The Incongruity of Law and Gender 2. A Tale of Two Cases 3. Theories of Law and Gender 4. Transmissions Through Time: Gender, Law and History 5. Gender and the Jurisprudential Imagination 6. The Siren Call of Legal Reason 7. Concluding Thoughts Bibliography

This essay sets out the history and historiography of medieval women and gender as it stands in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It begins with a long view, tracing how approaches to medieval women have developed and changed from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. It then focuses on how feminist scholarship on the subject has developed since the 1970s. The essay addresses the importance of both women’s history and gender history; discusses topics explored and consensus conclusions; describes major debates in the field; and signals emerging topics and areas hitherto neglected. A summation of the state of the field, it both surveys what has been done to date and looks to what might be done in the future.

In the last three decades, gender has become an indispensable category of analysis in the study of slavery in the Americas, illuminating both the day-to-day lives of enslaved and enslaving peoples and ideas about race and slavery. While studying gender means much more than studying women, the literature on enslaved women is especially influential, in part because of gender analysis's origins in women's history and in part because of women's central importance in slavery: women and ideas about them shaped slavery from beginning to end. This article discusses the origins of slavery, the gendered division of slave labour, reproduction in slavery, sexuality, enslaved families, black femininity and masculinity, mastery and white gender identities, and politics.

This chapter studies the political consequences of gender differences in public opinion among the American – and global – public, examining what is currently known about the nature, persistence, and origins of different gender gaps in political involvement and attitudes. It then discusses the role that gender stereotypes play in shaping reactions to political figures, and also includes a selective literature review which is focused on some of the main trends and findings within this research field.

Emerging scholarship in the late 1970s was beginning to inquire about the reliability of ancient male depictions of women, and about how male interests might shape their representations of female experience. The section on the history of scholarship would thus have been relatively brief, particularly if the emphasis was on scholarship of the last several decades. This article deals with several overlapping issues, including prosopographic work (the identification of particular actual ancient Christian women); the reconstruction of the activities and beliefs of Christian women; an analysis of those activities and beliefs from the perspective of the study of religions more broadly and theoretically; and a consideration of specifically Christian constructions of gender within the broader discourses of gender in the ancient world.

This article examines gender difference issues related to the politics of technology. It discusses feminists' identification of men's monopoly of technology as an important source of their power and women's traditional lack of technological skills as an important element in their dependence on men. It explains the concept of the so-called technofeminism and shows that such a perspective on technology adds a new dimension to the political analyses of gender difference and sexual inequality. It suggests that the process of technical change is integral to the renegotiation of gender power relations and that the recognition that gender and technology are mutually constitutive opens up fresh possibilities for feminist scholarship and action.

1. Why Gender and Empire? 2. Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century 3. Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century 4. Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century 5. Medicine, Gender, and Empire 6. Sexuality, Gender, and Empire 7. Gender and Migration 8. Nations in an Imperial Crucible 9. Legacies of Departure: Decolonization, Nation-making, and Gender 10. Empire and Violence 1900-1939 11. Childhood and Race: Growing up in the Empire 12. Faith, Missionary Life, and the Family 13. Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories