Women's history
The main centers of scholarship have been the United States and Britain, where second-wave feminist historians, influenced by the new approaches promoted by social history, led the way.
[8][9] Notable women throughout history include political leaders such as Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Indira Gandhi;[10] writers such as Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison;[11][12] activists such as Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, and Malala Yousafzai;[13][14] and scientists such as Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, and Ada Lovelace.
The structural discrimination in academia against the subject of gender history in France is changing due to the increase in international studies following the formation of the European Union, and more French scholars seeking appointments outside Europe.
[23] In 1865, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (ADF) was founded as an umbrella organization for women's associations, demanding rights to education, employment, and political participation.
[25] Historians have paid special attention to the efforts by Nazi Germany to reverse the political and social gains that women made before 1933, especially in the relatively liberal Weimar Republic.
In addition, institutional resistance continued, as evidenced by the lack of undergraduate or graduate programs dedicated to women's and gender history at Hungarian universities.
[36][37] General overviews of women in Asian history are scarce, since most specialists focus on China, Japan, India, Korea or another traditionally defined region.
[55][56][57][58] The earliest historical research in the west came from Gertrude Stern (Marriage in Early Islam), Nabia Abbott (Aishah, the Beloved of Muhammed and Two Queens of Bagdad), and Ilse Lichtenstädter (Women in the Aiyam al-Arab: A Study of Female Life during Warfare in Preislamic Arabia).
[54] Following a relatively dormant period, the western version of the discipline became revitalized by the feminist movement, which renewed interest in filling gendered gaps in historical narratives.
[60] Amira El-Azhary Sonbol's Beyond the Exotic: Women's Histories in Islamic Societies brings together twenty-four historians' essays on sources that can be used to fill gaps in conventional historical narratives.
[55] Similarly to scholarship of the ancient and medieval Middle East, many researchers have drawn from the later Ottoman Empire, this time to discuss the lives and roles of women during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
[61] It is also important, according to Tucker, that scholars keep in mind the differing rates of influence other countries and global dynamics exerted according to region and time period in the Middle East, over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
[61] Across all time periods, the Middle East has been a large region of multiple countries and numerous groups, and scholars have generated research on a wide variety of specific peoples and places, both pre-modern and modern.
[66] A central concern in the development Middle Eastern studies is orientalism, or the tendency of western groups to view civilizations in African and Asia as backwards, exotic, and underdeveloped.
[54][55][67] Keddie and Anne Chamberlain describe this approach to the so-called "Orient" as being heavily entangled with western interpretations of Middle Eastern women's roles in their families and societies.
Multiple authors, including Chamberlain, criticize approaches to Middle Eastern gender relations which rely on narratives of female oppression and victimization, as well as perhaps over-confidence in western feminist thought.
[citation needed] Several authors link discussions of orientalism with the issue of translating western feminist discourses to women's historiography in the Middle East.
She also argues that the complex relationships between gender, colonialism, and class and ethnic relations in Middle Eastern localities create very different climates for the development of women's histories compared with those of (at least mainstream) feminism in the west.
[78] Scholars have turned their imagination to innovative sources for the history of African women, such as songs from Malawi, weaving techniques in Sokoto, and historical linguistics.
By bringing an oppressive form of Christianity to Africa, European colonizers altered its trajectory by introducing and imposing patriarchal ideals and systems to replace the matriarchy that had aided in upbringing the African continent.
They reported that when all the men left for war, the women took command, found ersatz and substitute foods, rediscovered their old traditional skills with the spinning wheel when factory cloth became unavailable, and ran all the farm or plantation operations.
In 1972, Sarah Lawrence College began offering a Master of Arts Program in Women's History, founded by Gerda Lerner, which was the first American graduate degree in the field.
Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), which helped to open up analysis of race, slavery, abolitionism, and feminism, as well as resistance, power, and activism, and themes of violence, sexualities, and the body.
One trigger for the revolution was the development of the birth control pill in 1960, which gave women access to easy and reliable contraception in order to conduct family planning.
[96][97] Taking a pessimistic side, Alice Clark argued that when capitalism arrived in 17th century England, it made a negative impact on the status of women as they lost much of their economic importance.
The sons and daughters of the noble and bourgeois elites were given gender-specific educations: boys were sent to upper school, perhaps a university, while their sisters – if they were lucky enough to leave the house – would be sent to board at a convent with a vague curriculum.
A plethora of social movements concerned with improving public morals co-existed with a class system that permitted and imposed harsh living conditions for many, such as women.
With widespread unemployment among men, poverty, and the need to help family members who are in even worse condition, The pressures were heavy on women during the Great Depression across the modern world.
The Nazi women's organizations, other propaganda agencies and the authorities all attempted to shape such consumption as economic self-sufficiency was needed to prepare for and to sustain the coming war.
[125] During the twentieth century of total warfare the female half of the population played increasingly large roles as housewives, consumers, mothers, munitions workers, replacements for men in service, nurses, lovers, sex objects and emotional supporters.
