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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 gender history is at the cutting edge of historical research precisely because it offers ‘a revolutionary development in the politics of historical knowledge’. No historian can be considered ‘up-to-date’ in the field of history without taking its findings into account. Offen addresses each of the five questions, making provocative arguments and rehearsing some of the achievements in providing an organizational structure that welcomes historians from many lands through the IFRWH. She emphasizes the vast expansion of publications in the field during the last twenty-some years in many languages besides English and addresses the controversies of the 1990s concerning the ‘turn’ to gender history and to theoretical analyses. Offen then proposes thinking about ‘women’ and ‘gender’ as two focal points along the continuum of the same project, using the analogy of the ‘zoom lens’. Making women's history an integral part of historical study requires a ‘gendered analysis’ of any historical topic, but it also requires deeper thinking about communication strategies that can bring the findings of our research to the general public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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, the necessity of which has been loudly insisted on since the middle of the 1990s. Third, it will explain the organizational development as observed in the establishment of the Gender History Association of Japan in which I myself participated and served as the second president from 2008 to 2010. The fourth point considered in the essay is the realignment of the Science Council of Japan to include more women and the resultant efforts on the part of practitioners of women's/gender history to change history textbooks for high school students to accommodate gendered viewpoints. Finally, the essay will discuss the task of gendering contact zones, colonialism and empire with particular attention to the issue of ‘comfort women’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper addresses the pressing question of why, in Russia, gender studies in history still have to prove their worth in the Russian academic world — and in the general public; why they operate in two discourses, and how common ground can be found between these. The first discourse is that of traditional gender roles which tends to legitimize the role of a woman as important but complementary with regard to the role of a man. The second discourse casts serious doubt on the naturalness or the essentialist predicament of the mutual complementarity of gender roles. The adherents to such a methodological perspective imply a feminist reflection both in posing their questions and choosing their approach to empirical data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article tackles various issues related to women's and gender history as of March 2016. These issues include a forum on the relationship between communism and feminism which was published in the first volume of the journal, the work of sociologist Maxine Molyneux on state socialist women's organizations during the Cold War, and the changes in socialist women's organizing in Poland from the 1940s to the 1980s.

In the Middle Ages, elite women acted as creators, donors and recipients of textile art. This article analyses a small but representative group of seventh- to thirteenth-century embroideries in order to examine the motivation for their creation and to investigate the ways in which women could mark their own presence through textile art. It discusses written sources alongside the material evidence; these sources include documentary, hagiographical and literary texts, which provide information about cultural norms and the expectations of society. Set within the context of these sources, the evidence suggests that society both channelled women's creativity into textile art and idealised it. At the same time, as artists and patrons of ornamented textiles, noblewomen had creative control over the medium; embroidery became a field in which their works were noted and celebrated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the political and gendered representations of Georges Loustaunau-Lacau and Marie-Madeleine Méric (later Fourcade), leaders of a French Resistance network during the Second World War. Both leaders came from the extreme-right and their commitment to the Resistance was questioned both during and after the war by critics who could not reconcile their rightist politics with the nature of resistance to the German occupation. Méric’s role as a female Resistance leader, moreover, was also highlighted in wartime reports and not always positively. In the postwar period, the representations of both resisters changed alongside the changing narrative about the French Resistance more generally. Loustaunau-Lacau continued to be a target for politically motivated accusations that questioned his Resistance record right up until his death, as he did not fit into the dominant Gaullist narrative. While Méric’s political capital improved, thanks to her conversion to Gaullism, she gets nudged out of many histories because of the exceptional nature of her role in the Resistance as a woman. This article suggests ways in which we might further explore the topic of Resistance, particularly when it was undertaken by people who have not fit comfortably in the existing narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]