Gender

Most overtly, the book engages with the issues of gender. As Sian Reynolds has written, ‘women’s history has led to something that would never have emerged from previous (i. e. male-centred) history - the development of gender as an analytical concept, and as something with a force in history comparable to class’.23 Thus, gender grew out of women’s history, and it gives shape to the ways we think and write about women’s history. It helps make sense of the process of recovering women in the past as well as focusing attention on how women became hidden. Gender informs and underpins this book, and we would agree with Natalie Zemon Davis that:

Our goal is to discover the range in sex roles and in sexual symbolism in different societies and periods, to find out what meaning they had and how they functioned to maintain the social order or to promote change. Our goal is to explain why sex roles were sometimes tightly prescribed and sometimes fluid, sometimes markedly asymmetrical and sometimes more even.24

So, we ask questions about how the European past fashioned ideas about what it means to be male or female, and we look at how concepts of masculinity and femininity shaped the ways people of the past understood and constructed their society. As the authors demonstrate, gender is not an unchanging feature of the past; rather, relations between the sexes ‘varied appreciably, along with political, economic or cultural changes’.25 As the title of this book indicates, it is a history of women but, throughout, it engages with the gendered context of society. It is not a gendered history in the sense of trying to historicise masculinity and draw out issues of manliness. It is situated in the discourses of gender and gender history whilst keeping its focus on women and their engagement with the gendered world around them.