Can We Have a Total American History? A Comment on the Achievements of Women's and Gender History

Aruga comments on Cornelia H. Dayton and Lisa Levenstein's essay "The Big Tent of U.S. Women's and Gender History." An important goal of women's history is its integration into general US history, not just being legitimized as a scholarly field. Gender history was conceived...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of American history (Bloomington, Ind.) Ind.), 2012-12, Vol.99 (3), p.818-821
Main Author: Aruga, Natsuki
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American history
Childbirth
Childrens rights
Cultural history
Dayton, Cornelia H
Feminism
Gender studies
History instruction
Japanese culture
Levenstein, Lisa
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Periodization
Political history
Postmodernism
Round Table
Sexuality
Theoretical linguistics
United States history
Women
Womens history
Womens studies
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Summary:Aruga comments on Cornelia H. Dayton and Lisa Levenstein's essay "The Big Tent of U.S. Women's and Gender History." An important goal of women's history is its integration into general US history, not just being legitimized as a scholarly field. Gender history was conceived through the challenges to women's history by multicultural forces of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, with additional stimulus from postmodern and linguistic theories, and postcolonialism. Gender, along with race, has now become an essential perspective and tool in all scholarly studies of US history. Dayton and Levenstein indicate through examples of significant works with a gender perspective that women's history has brought about reinterpretations of events and phenomena in US history. It is the concept of gender that has given women's history such a powerful influence. Although women's and gender history has started to change general US history, it has not yet affected the periodization of general history. Although US history surveys since the 1980s have given much space to women's history and incorporated women's history into what used to be male domains such as the American Revolution, those events are still discussed in the framework of a basically traditional periodization.
ISSN:0021-8723
1936-0967
1945-2314
DOI:10.1093/jahist/jas465