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.     

Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women's Biography in Chinese History

This volume brings together accounts of biographies of women covering a span of history from the Han dynasty to the mid-twentieth century.Its aim is to define and provide interpretive clues on the genre.It is,as the editors Joan Judge and Hu Ying point out,partly a study of epistemology,as many of the authors grapple with the issue of whether or not historians can claim to know the lives,including the inner worlds,of Chinese women through time,using biographical information.That seems to me a bit of a "straw wo/man," for knowledge of historical subjects is always mediated by sources.Nonetheless,the contributors,writing from the perspective of history or literature studies,bring a wide variety of viewpoints to bear on questions of the usefulness of women's biography for understanding changes in society,and in the process introduce some fascinating Chinese women.     

Power and Ethnicity History and Anthropology

This essay reflects on the relationship between anthropological and historical scholarship of ethnicity, picking up on themes explored by Andre Gingrich, by considering the epistemological and evidentiary limitations of social scientific and historical analysis and reconstruction. Beginning with the consideration of the pioneering transdisciplinary efforts of Robert Darnton and Clifford Geertz, it argues that many of the weaknesses ascribed to such efforts are actually part of the nature of social scientific investigation which, in the terms of Peter Winch, must take into account two sets of relationships: that of the relationship between the scientist and the phenomena that he or she observes and the symbolic system that he or she shares with other scientists, which can only be understood from the social context of common activity. How these two relationships challenge social scientific analysis of ethnicity are examined through a consideration of the difficulties of applying Anthony Smith's definition of an ethnie to either Fredrik Barth's classic essay on “Pathan Identity and its Maintenance” or Helmut Reimitz's study of Frankish identity. It concludes that neither anthropologists nor historians are simply describing societies as they are or as they were but rather attempt to describe societies as witnesses within them thought they should be, and we do this for our own society, not for those of the participants, past or present.     

文化、权力与世界历史—兼评埃里克·沃尔夫《欧洲与没有历史的人民》

本文以埃里克·沃尔夫的《欧洲与没有历史的人民》为切入点,探讨了世界历史研究中的文化、权力等问题。文章以唯物史观为理论指导,首先批评了将文化理解为固定的、单一的和以自我为中心的错误观念,指出只有将文化视为开放和互动的系统,才能真正认识世界历史中复杂的联系。同时,文章也分析了世界历史编纂中"欧洲中心主义"背后所体现的知识与权力的纠结,以及欧洲是怎样运用它在知识上的这一权力去书写以自我为中心的世界历史的。在此基础上,文章提出世界历史研究应注意地区性历史与全球性历史的结合,既要看到全球性力量所带来的巨变,也要关注各种地区性力量在这一过程中起到的作用。唯如此,才能理解世界历史中统一性与多样性的联系,而不会将之看成是"欧洲中心"的力量在其中起主导作用的过程。     

Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History

This article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth-century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self-determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.     

Agency,Periodisation and Change in the Gender and Women's History of Colonial India

The paper begins with a critique of the ‘imperialism‐nationalism’ paradigm and its concomitant privileging of the period 1885–1947, which has dominated the writing of modern Indian history. It is argued here that the fixation with the ‘birth‐of‐the‐nation’ theme has led to the neglect of women's agency; that it has resulted in many inconsistencies, dilemmas and unresolved issues regarding a range of topics within Indian gender‐relations; and that this periodisation inhibits the reclamation of terms such as ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’. The second half of the essay proposes that women's agency can be recovered via a new chronology and a new template for understanding agency within which scholars will be enabled to retrieve the conscious voices of Indian women and record change in gender relations.     

From Margin to Centre: Recent Trends in Modern Italian Women's and Gender History

This article reviews the considerable progress that has been made in modern Italian women's and gender history over the last decade. It puts forward the argument that such history, whose roots lie primarily in the feminist movement of the 1970s, was until recently consigned to the margins of the historical establishment but is now beginning to make a much greater impact. The article looks at the richness of the current wave of new publications and the wide range of topics they cover but argues that in a number of areas the historiography is still somewhat uneven. It also suggests that there is a pressing need for works of synthesis to draw together the research that has been done to date.