Gender

Judith P. Zinsser

pp. 189-214

in: Marnie Hughes-Warrington (ed), Palgrave advances in world histories, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

For conventional historians, "gender" has been as revolutionary a concept as "world" history. Both arose out of the radical questions of the 1960s and 1970s, when historians in many parts of the world, both women and men, began to question the traditional narratives. In Europe and the United States, they came to see history as the story of the political activities of "white male elites". They began to recast national and regional histories to include men of many classes and races. Some envisioned similarly dramatic changes to "world history". Writing from what they characterized as a truly global perspective, they melded national and regional histories together in new ways.¹ They identified global and comparative themes that would not privilege the European or North American role in events and that emphasized "encounters' between cultures, each with a long, full historical reality. The history of Africa, for example, would not suddenly appear in the narrative as the story of European penetration and conquest. There would no longer be, in the words of the anthropologist and historian Eric Wolf, "peoples without history".