Women's History and Biography

Books reviewed in this article: Helen M. Hopper, A New Woman of Japan: A Political Biography of Kato-Shidzue Delia Jarrett-Macauley, The Life of Una Marson 1905-65 Cynthia Nelson, Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart Judith Olmstead, Woman Between Two Worlds: Portrait of an Ethiopian RuralLeader Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life     

Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare

This essay examines the genesis and continuing influence of certain core narratives in the history of western women's healthcare. Some derive from first‐wave feminism's search for models of female medical practice, an agenda that paid little attention to historical context. Second‐wave feminism, identifying a rift between pre‐modern and modern times in terms of women's medical practices, saw the pre‐modern European female healer as an exceptionally knowledgeable empiricist, uniquely responsible for women's healthcare and (particularly because of her knowledge of mechanisms to limit fertility) a victim of male persecution. Aspects of this second narrative continue subtly to effect scholarly discourse and research agendas on the history of healthcare both by and for women. This essay argues that, by seeing medical knowledge as a cultural product – something that is not static but continually re‐created and sometimes contested – we can create an epistemology of how such knowledge is gendered in its genesis, dissemination and implementation. Non‐western narratives drawn from history and medical anthropology are employed to show both the larger impact of the western feminist narratives and ways to reframe them.     

让历史告知未来--评《漳州市志·漳台关系》卷

1999年12月,<漳州市志>出版发行.阅读<漳州市志>,令笔者印象最深的要属<漳台关系>卷,它使这部鸿篇巨著更能体现自己独特而又鲜明的个性.<漳台关系>卷位于全书5册中的第4册卷47,该卷分6章26节,计8.85万字,除了用一章记述对台工作的情况外,全卷用大量篇幅反映漳州与台湾之间在地理、历史、经济、文化、风俗、语言之间的渊源关系,展示了漳台之间地缘相近、血缘相关、文化相同、习俗相近、经济相关的密切关系,它不仅是漳台关系的历史记录,而且是一部台湾早期开发史.     

A History of the Future

Does history have to be only about the past? “History” refers to both a subject matter and a thought process. That thought process involves raising questions, marshalling evidence, discerning patterns in the evidence, writing narratives, and critiquing the narratives written by others. Whatever subject matter they study, all historians employ the thought process of historical thinking. What if historians were to extend the process of historical thinking into the subject matter domain of the future? Historians would breach one of our profession’s most rigid disciplinary barriers. Very few historians venture predictions about the future, and those who do are viewed with skepticism by the profession at large. On methodological grounds, most historians reject as either impractical, quixotic, hubristic, or dangerous any effort to examine the past as a way to make predictions about the future. However, where at one time thinking about the future did mean making a scientifically–based prediction, futurists today are just as likely to think in terms of scenarios. Where a prediction is a definitive statement about what will be, scenarios are heuristic narratives that explore alternative plausibilities of what might be. Scenario writers, like historians, understand that surprise, contingency, and deviations from the trend line are the rule, not the exception; among scenario writers, context matters. The thought process of the scenario method shares many features with historical thinking. With only minimal intellectual adjustment, then, most professionally trained historians possess the necessary skills to write methodologically rigorous “histories of the future.”     

我国城市化发展的历史、现状与未来

中华人民共和国成立以来,中国的城市化与其经济、社会发展一样,走过半个多世纪的艰难曲折的道路。从发展阶段来看,1978年改革开放为重要的“分水岭”,我国的城市化历程明显可以分为两个不同的历史阶段:1978年以前为城市化的徘徊起伏阶段,1978年以后为城市化的迅速推进阶段。我国城市化发展具有发展水平非典型性、地区发展不平衡、公共服务水平低的特点。实现城市化是新世纪中国经济社会发展的宏观目标和各级政府面临的重大使命。     

The History of Knowledge and the Future of Knowledge Societies

The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re‐definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance in making knowledge. These issues have pertinence in the current climate where expertise is increasingly questioned and authority seems to lose its ground. Illustrated with examples from recent historiography of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, we indicate some fruitful new avenues for research in the history of knowledge. Taken together, we hope that they will show that the history of knowledge could build the expertise required by the challenges of twenty‐first century knowledge societies, just like the history of science, throughout its development as a discipline in the twentieth century, responded to the demands posed by science and society.     

读《西方政治思想史》札记

西方政治思想是世界政治明的宝库,它推动了人类对政治现象的认知与思维。中国越是开放,越需要了解世界,越需要吸收借鉴人类明的积极成果,越需要深入地、发展地去认识和理解那些斑驳陆离、变幻无穷的政治现象以及各种思想化的进步性与局限性,把握人类社会政治发展的规律,从而启迪我们的政治思维．结合国情,拓展思路,改革和完善自己的政治体制。     

“新妇女史”在中国大陆的兴起

近年来,妇女史研究在中国大陆出现了一种前所未有的繁荣局面,一些学在受到女性主义思想启迪之时,同时运用新社会史的方法来研究妇女史,使中国的妇女史研究呈现出不同于西方的特色。笔用“新妇女史”这一概念来指称今天中国大陆的妇女史研究,并且通过统计分析,对近十多年来中国的妇女史研究理论与实践进行了评介。