Gender History Across Epistemologies offers broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. 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.

• Essays present epistemological and theoretical debates central in gender history over the past two decades
• Contributions within this volume to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and approaches
• The volume demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history suggest surprising crossovers and even the discovery of common grounds

Donna R. Gabaccia is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is author of We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998), Italy’s Many Diasporas (2000), and Foreign Relations: Global Perspectives on U.S. Immigration (2012); she is also co-editor of Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World (with Loretta Baldassar, 2010). Gabaccia is on the editorial board of Gender & History, Journal of American Ethnic History and Journal of Modern Italian Studies.  

Mary Jo Maynes is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Taking the Hard Road: Life Course and Class Identity in French and German Workers' Autobiographies of the Industrial Era (1995) and co-author of Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (with Jennifer Pierce and Barbara Laslett, 2008) and Family: A World History (with Ann Waltner, 2012). She is on the editorial board of Gender & History, the Journal of Global History, and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction: Gender History Across Epistemologies 1
DONNA R. GABACCIA AND MARY JO MAYNES

1 Master Narratives and the Wall Painting of the House of the Vettii, Pompeii 20
BETH SEVERY-HOVEN

2 ‘More Beautiful than Words & Pencil Can Express’: Barbara Bodichon’s Artistic Career at the Interface of her Epistolary and Visual Self Projections 61
MERITXELL SIMON-MARTIN

3 Public Motherhood in West Africa as Theory and Practice 80
LORELLE SEMLEY

4 Profiling the Female Emigrant: A Method of Linguistic Inquiry for Examining Correspondence Collections 97
EMMA MORETON

5 Beyond Constructivism?: Gender, Medicine and the Early History of Sperm Analysis, Germany 1870–1900 127
CHRISTINA BENNINGHAUS

6 ‘I Just Express My Views & Leave Them to Work’: Olive Schreiner as a Feminist Protagonist in a Masculine Political Landscape with Figures 157
LIZ STANLEY AND HELEN DAMPIER

7 Gender without Groups: Confession, Resistance and Selfhood in the Colonial Archive 181
CHRISTOPHER J. LEE

8 The Power of Renewable Resources: Orlando’s Tactical Engagement with the Law of Intestacy 198
JAMIE L. MCDANIEL

9 The Politics of Gender Concepts in Genetics and Hormone Research in Germany, 1900–1940 215
HELGA SATZINGER

10 The Language of Gender in Lovers’ Correspondence, 1946–1949 235
SONIA CANCIAN

11 Gender-Bending in El Teatro Campesino (1968–1980): A Mestiza Epistemology of Performance 246
MEREDITH HELLER

12 Changing Paradigms in Migration Studies: From Men to Women to Gender 262
NANCY L. GREEN

13 Reconsidering Categories of Analysis: Possibilities for Feminist Studies of Conflict 279
SHIRIN SAEIDI

14 An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras, Kothis and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India 305
ANIRUDDHA DUTTA

Index 331