Women, Gender, and American History

This chapter analyzes the methods, sources, and relationship between women’s and gender history, arguing American women’s and gender history is its own interpretation of American history, focused on how ideas about women and gender shaped people’s lives as they participated in the processes of migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, community-building, and political mobilization. It explores the field as an integrated one that embraces tensions between women’s history and gender history, as well as intersectional analysis and new understandings of sexuality, to consider who counts as a “woman” and for what purpose. The field challenges the conventional chronology of the United States and the primacy of the nation as a unit of history. The field’s archive innovation excavates histories hidden in plain sight and scrutinizes silences in the historical record, challenging the nature of historical evidence and remapping what counts in historical interpretation of the past.