October 23, 2024

Women’s history and gender history were next for historiography. He started the lecture by going on about how 50% of the population has XX chromosomes (I don’t think that’s actually accurate but okay), he was basically saying this to push the point that women make up pretty much half of the population and yet have been fairly neglected in history. Obviously not all women had XX chromosomes, and not everyone with XX are women. Anyway he went on to list many powerful women throughout history (mostly monarchs) to further cement his point. We were then shown a paintings of Elizabeth I and queen Victoria, and were asked to talk about the differences: Victoria was almost always painted with her children while Elizabeth did not have any, I guess one queen had a motherly image while the other was more militaristic. To me the main difference was time and art style, but whatever.

Women’s history emerged in the 60s as a distinct study but was always a part of social history. Then we defined the different waves of feminism: first wave = suffrage, second wave = economic equality/sexual revolution, third wave = intersectional and queer (very focused on what a woman even is). Women’s history tends to focus on second wave feminism and its definition of what a woman is, which he said is being born female (not that he believes that personally, thats just what the definition was in second wave feminism, I do not think my professor is transphobic). He then talked about Susan Groag Bell who was rejected by Stanford University PhD program because she was a woman, thats literally what was stated in her rejection letter. My professor said universities do not do that anymore, I guess some students made faces and he pointed that out that maybe they didn’t believe him but he clarified that what he meant was that rejection letters can’t be like that anymore. Universities here will not state outright that the reason they rejected you is because you are a woman. Statistically there are more women in undergraduate programs, but in PhD programs there are way more men, faculty of universities also are mostly men, why is that? A student said that women have a biological clock and the societal expectation of having a family. Another student said that upper education tends to be a bros club, my understanding is that he was saying that these places are hostile to women (just look at how women are treated in engineering). There are also implicit biases against women. But our school in particular has a woman president so there is some progress! But I don’t know if that means much considering the president doesn’t really do anything substantial. So what is the difference between women’s history and gender history? Well apparently gender history focuses on how gender is constructed and deployed to maintain power, while women’s history focuses on women through history.

We had to read “Did women have a renaissance?” By Kelly-Gadol for this class and the idea was that in the so-called “Middle Ages” women had more power than they did during the renaissance, there was still inequality but it was worse during the “rebirth.” During the renaissance, military power became more important and thus women were actively pushed out. Kelly-Gadol makes references to the bourgeoisie and early capitalism, bourgeoisie capitalism leads to new sexual politics (men are in the public while women were pushed into the private): women now have to please men, rather than what it used to be (men winning a woman’s favour and old timey romance). Looks like Marx can NEVER be avoided!