The history of European women’s engagement with political power is a developing field. The following list consists of a selection of comparative works followed by some examples of national, regional and local studies and collections that focus on a particular theme.
Caine, Barbara and Glenda Sluga, Gendering European History, 1780-1920. London: Leicester University Press, 2000. Excellent synthesis on the gendering of citizenship in national contexts and across Europe.
Downs, Laura L., Writing Gender History. London: Hodder Arnold, 2004. Accomplished account of the genesis of gender history which explores the changing narratives of women’s relationship to political power.
Offen, Karen, European Feminisms, 1700-1950. A Political History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. An encyclopaedic study of feminism across the whole of Europe. Offen, Karen, Ruth R. Pierson and Jane Rendall, eds, Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives. Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1991. Demonstrates the different concerns and emphases of national feminist historiographies.
Scott, Joan W., Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Remains an important collection of essays that stimulate a reinterrogation of the history of politics
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry, Gender in History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Her chapter on ‘Political Life’ raises some important questions for a gendered history of politics.
Applewhite, Harriet B. and Darline G. Levy, eds, Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Useful collection which includes important work on France but also explores women’s relationship to politics in countries such as the Dutch Republic.
Canning, Kathleen and Sonya O. Rose, eds, special edition on Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivity, Gender & History, 13, 3 (2001). Stimulating collection with case studies on the gendered meanings of citizenship in a range of different historical moments, such as postFranco Spain and Bolshevik Russia.
Blom, Ida, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall, eds, Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Centur'y. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Important collection which ranges beyond Europe but includes studies of Prussia, Ireland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Latvia.
Bock, Gisela and Pat Thane, eds, Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s. London: Routledge, 1991. Explores the range of ways that maternalism has affected women and the politics of a series of western European countries, including Norway, Spain and Italy.
Clements, Barbara E., Bolshevik Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. A detailed comparative study of the lives and revolutionary activism of the first generation of Bolshevik women which gives broader insights into women’s experience of the Russian Revolution.
Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. London: Pimlico, 1994. In exploring how Britain was made, considers the gendering of nation and its effect on women’s political activities.
Davis, Belinda, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and E-veryday Life in World War I Berlin. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Fascinating study of gender and the politics of everyday life.
Duchen, Clare and Irene Bandhauer-Schoffmann, eds, When the War was Over: Women, War and Peace in Europe, 1940-56. London: Leicester University Press. Includes studies of women and the politics of Italy, Greece, Finland, Hungary, France and Germany in the transition from war to peace.
Frevert, Ute, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation. Oxford: Berg, 1989. A single-volume women’s history of Germany which includes women’s changing relationship to formal and informal politics across two centuries.
Gleadle, Kathryn and Sarah Richardson, eds, Women and Bri~tish Politics, 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat. Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000. A range of new scholarship which challenges assumptions about women’s exclusion from political participation in the era before the organised women’s movement.
Gruber, Helmut and Pamela Graves, eds, Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe between the Two World Wars. Oxford: Berghahn, 1998. Covers socialist and communist women’s activism across much of inter-war Europe with useful additional comparative chapters by Louise Tilly and by Geoff Eley.
Hall, Catherine, Keith McClelland, Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. An important micro-study of a particular moment in the making of citizenship, exploring how the possession of the franchise was marked by gender, race and class.
Hannam, June and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s, London: Routledge, 2002. Explores the competing identities of socialist women by comparing biographical journeys and exploring socialist women’s relationship to suffrage, internationalism and the politics of consumption.
Holton, Sandra S., Suffrage Days. Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Mo-vement. London: Routledge, 1996. Comparative biographical study that explores many of the themes in the new revisionist suffrage history of Britain.
Landes, Joan, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Key dissection of the French Revolution as the initiator of a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois sphere.
McMillan, James F., France and Women, 1789-1914: Gender, Society and Politics. London: Routledge, 2000. A thorough national study which argues that French political culture was sexist and that across the political spectrum there was a profound distrust of women’s political action.
Passmore, Kevin, ed., Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-45. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Very good coverage of the gendering of fascism and its affect on women across Europe, including a range of Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Romania and Serbia.
Rendall, Jane, ed., Equal or Different: Women’s Poli'tics, 1800-1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. A pioneering collection on a broad range of British nineteenth-century women’s politics.
Rupp, Leila J., Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Mo-vement. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Insightful study of internationalism as a practice amongst ‘first wave’ feminists through a comparison of the Internal Council of Women, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Siim, Birte, Gender and Citizenship: Politics and Agency in France, Britain and Denmark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Thoughtful comparison of the ways in which distinct national political cultures shape the practice of women’s citizenship.
Scott, Gillian, Feminism and the Politics of Working Women: The Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War. London: UCL Press, 1998. Study of a major British women’s auxiliary organisation composed of working-class wives and their attempt to find a political practice that balanced class and gender identities.
Vickery, Amanda, ed., Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Important collection which rethinks ‘the political’ and argues for a redefinition of political activity, placing a range of female activists into their broader political context.
Von der Fehr, Drude, Anna G. Jonasdottir and Bente Rosenbeck, eds, Is there a Nordic Feminism? Nordic Feminist Thought on Culture and Society. London: UCL Press, 1998. Useful group of chapters on ‘Politics in Ambiguous Times’.
World History
