While researching for my short essay on the development of transnational history and its impact on the historiography of women’s history, I came across another dimension that I could incorporate into my project: that of gender history and theory. While I was always intending to engage with and contribute to women’s history through my project, gender theory and history could bring a new dimension and further nuance.
Women’s history ultimately looks at bringing women into the historical narrative and giving light to their experiences, contributions, and voices which had previously been excluded. Gender theory emerged after women’s history. As noted by Bonnie Smith in the Introduction to Women’s History in Global Perspective, it focuses on the categories of masculine and feminine and their associated characteristics with male and female. It analyses how these characteristics shaped and even produced people’s lives, and challenges them and their agency and dominance. Opposite to sex which focuses on the biological determinants, gender sees masculinity and femininity as mutually constituted, socially constructed concepts. These understandings produce hierarchies where the masculine generally dominates the feminine, and these produce values, meanings and understandings.
Gender theory directly links to my project: the women involved in international women’s organisations, including during the interwar years, were actively challenging their gender roles. This was both through their organisation, activism and presence in the public sphere, as well as overall through many of the issues and goals they were campaigning for. By incorporating gender theory into my project, it could increase the understanding into the background against which women were campaigning and working collectively against, and the extent and significance of their collective work and achievements due to how deeply traditional gender roles were embedded into society.
Additionally, some of this week’s key readings illuminated yet another dimension of analysis that I could potentially incorporate into my project: that of transversal and transcultural history. In our very own Milinda’s article, Transversal Histories and Transcultural Afterlives: Indianised Renditions of Jean Bodin in Global Intellectual History, he notes that the globalised movement of a concept also involves it weakening, negation, agitation, and reformation as well as just being transferred and translated. As part of this, transversal history looks at how different moments become connected, and resultantly how “new ethnic-political decisions” are made because of these connections. In the realm of intellectual history, it especially means regarding discursive moments (page 166).
In relation to my project, I think this could, for example, provide a further insight and analysis of a concept such as women’s suffrage. I could look at this in different places at different times, and see how it was understood in different international women’s organisations. Through analysing the impact of different cultures and understandings on something such as suffrage, it could provide information on variations of how it was perceived and thought of, wider implications and associations, and resulting decisions. Therefore, through incorporating these as well as gender theory, they could provide further beneficial insights, backgrounds, and dimensions.