Gender History Across Epistemologies

Epistemological critiques - questions about how we know what we know - are intrinsic to gender history. Feminist historians, in bringing an explicitly gendered perspective into history, have produced new ways of knowing the past through a broad range of methods and epistemological frameworks. This diversity is evident within the collection of essays in which contributions to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and methods. The essays reveal how historians of gender are crossing boundaries - disciplinary, methodological, and national - to explore new opportunities for viewing gender as a category of historical analysis. The result is a broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. For example: performance theory informs the analysis of women's letters; attention to border crossers points to geopolitical dimensions of 'how we know what we know' about the gendered past; and archival silences act as starting points for explorations of unorthodox historical methods. This important examination of how various ways of knowing operate in current historical research on gender demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history encompass surprising crossovers and common grounds unimaginable even two decades ago.