Women and Gender in the Western Past : Prehistory-1815

by French, Katherine L.; Poska, Allyson M.

• ISBN13: 9780618246243
• ISBN10: 061824624X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-07-12
• Publisher: Cengage Learning

Summary

This two-volume survey of the history of women in western civilization spans prehistory to the present. While devoting attention to women of all classes, religions, and ethnicities, the text examines political, economic, intellectual, and social history through the lens of gender. The narrative emphasizes women's agency over oppression and makes cutting-edge scholarship in women's history accessible to a wide audience. Five major themes run throughout the narrative: the relationship between key historical events and ideas and women's lives, the history of the family and sexuality, the social construction of gender, cultural assumptions about women (versus their actual lives), and self perception and women's place in western societies. A rich collection of primary sources and biographies reinforces these themes. Sources from the Pastintroduce students to primary sources on women's history, from the poetry of Sappho and Sarah Fyge Egerton, to proposals on women's rights during the French Revolution and the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, to modern documents, including an oral history of the Holocaust and an excerpt from the Kinsey Report. TheWomen's Livesfeature tells the stories of interesting women, and engages students through the use of biography. Women profiled include the early Christian martyr Saint Perpetua, 19th century Russian activist Sofia Perovskaia, Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Redman Fauset, and the Nobel-prize winning chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. Maps and photos enhance the learning experience by introducing students to geography and visual sources. Each chapter includes an extensiveNotessection documenting the wealth of recent scholarship on women and gender. A short list ofSuggested Readingsprovides a useful starting point for student exploration.

Table of Contents

Unearthing Gender in the Ancient Mediterranean, to 600 B.C.E.

Ancient Greece, 3100–150 B.C.E

Women in Ancient Rome, 800 B.C.E.–200 C.E

Gender and the Evolution of Early Christianity, 60 B.C.E.–600 C.E

Women in the Early and High Middle Ages, 400–1200

Women and Urban Life: The Late Middle Ages, 1200–1500

Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700

Whose Enlightenment? Whose Revolution? 1700–1815

Women in the New Industrial Society, 1800–1900

Resistance, Revolution, and Reform, 1815–1900

Gender and Imperialism, 1830–1930

The New Woman from War to Revolution, 1880–1919

The Modern Woman Between the Wars, 1919–1939

New Possibilities, New Perils: Women in World War II, 1939–1945

Women and the Postwar Generation, 1945–1970

Gender at the Turn of the Millennium

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