Description
Book SynopsisThe eight essays collected in this volume examine the practice of gender history and its impact on our understanding of European history. Each essay takes up a major methodological or theoretical issue in feminist history and illustrates the necessity of critiquing and redefining the concepts of body, citizenship, class, and experience through historical case studies. Kathleen Canning opens the book with a new overview of the state of the art in European gender history. She considers how gender history has revised the master narratives in some fields within modern European history (such as the French Revolution) but has had a lesser impact in others (Weimar and Nazi Germany).Gender History in Practice includes two essays now regarded as classics?Feminist History after the ''Linguistic Turn'' and The Body as Methodas well as new chapters on experience, citizenship, and subjectivity. Other essays in the book draw on Canning''s work at the intersection of labor history, the history of
Trade Review
"Gender History in Practice conveys the richness of Kathleen Canning's thought and the depth of her knowledge of German history. It shows a stunning breadth of knowledge and reading, an admirable refusal to accept simple dichotomies, and an insistence that if theory and history are to engage fruitfully, they must be as complex and flexible as the issues and evidence they seek to explain."—Mary Nolan, New York University
"Gender History in Practice is a serious, probing collection of essays by a leading historian of gender history. The essays are broad in scope, and range over the most controversial issues in the field of gender history, among them, the relationship between discourse and experience, the politics of the body, and the construction of political subjectivity for women. Kathleen Canning's exhaustive analysis of the historiographical literature in these areas, as well as her own provocative insights, in particular about the body, will make Gender History in Practice required reading for all historians of gender and sexuality."—Mary Louise Roberts, University of Wisconsin–Madison
