Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class & Citizenship

Kathleen Canning

Cornell University Press, 2006 - History - 285 pages

The 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 Method"--as 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 the welfare state, and the history of the body, showing how the gendered "social body" was shaped in Imperial Germany. The book concludes with a pair of essays on the concepts of class and citizenship in German history, offering critical perspectives on feminist understandings of citizenship. Featuring an extensive thematic bibliography of influential works in gender history and theory that will prove invaluable to students and scholars, Gender History in Practice offers new insights into the history of Germany and Central Europe as well as a timely assessment of gender history's accomplishments and challenges.

Contents

• Gender History Meanings Methods and Metanarratives: 15
• Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn Historicizing Discourse and Experience: 63
• Difficult Dichotomies Experience between Narrativity and Materiality: 101
• Beyond Insularity? The Relevance of Labor History at the Turn to the Twentyfirst Century: 123
• Social Policy Body Politics Recasting the Social Question in Germany 18751900: 139
• The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History: 168
• Of Meanings and Methods The Concepts of Class and Citizenship in Germany Hisotry: 193
• Claiming Citizenship Suffrage and Subjectivity in Germany after the First World War: 212
• Selected Thematic Bibliography: 239
• Index: 283

About the author

Kathleen Canning is Professor of Women's Studies and German at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914, which won the Conference Group for Central European History's Book Prize.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class & Citizenship; Gender history in practice
• Author: Kathleen Canning
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2006
• ISBN: 0801489717, 9780801489716
• Length: 285 pages
• Subjects: History / Historiography; History / Women; Social Science / Gender Studies; Social Science / Women's Studies