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World History and the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
MERRY WIESNER-HANKS
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
| In his recent—and excellent—study of the development of world history, Navigating World History, Patrick Manning remarks on the lack of intersection between social history and world history as the two fields have developed over the last several decades.1 World history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality have also seen relatively few interchanges, which several women's historians, including Bonnie Smith, Judith Zinsser, Margaret Strobel, and I, have noted in various venues.2 Manning does as well in Navigating World History, writing "World history, especially as a history of great states and long-distance trade, included little recognition of gender and little space for women ...it remains striking that studies of women and gender roles in world history have developed so slowly and that their development has been restricted to a small number of themes."3 |
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Why might this be? In his comments about this issue, Manning suggests that the reason for this is the "well established presumption that women's lives are acted out in the private sphere of the family rather than the public sphere of the economy and politics" and notes that one reason scholarship on colonized societies seems to be leading the way in a gendered approach to world history is that "in colonial situations, the state interferes in the working of families and social values generally."4 This may indeed be a well-established presumption among world historians, whom Manning knows very well. Most historians of women, gender, and sexuality today begin with the exact opposite presumptions, however: that women's history is not the same as the history of the family, that the state has always interfered in the working of families and social values (and continues to do so), that the boundaries between public and private are contested, variable, and shifting, and perhaps don't really exist at all. |
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Manning's statements and his thorough discussion of the field of world history inadvertently highlight what I would see as the reason for this situation: women's/gender history and world history have both developed at the same time as, in part, revisionist interpretations arguing that the standard story needs to be made broader and much more complex; both have been viewed by those hostile or uninterested as "having an agenda." Both have, as Judith Zinsser has commented, "had to write with the stories of men's lives in the United States and Europe paramount in their readers' memories."5 Both have concentrated on their own lines of revision and, because there is only so much time in a day and only so many battles one can fight, have not paid enough attention to what is going on in the other. Thus neither has a very good idea of what the other has been doing over the last several decades, and each conceptualizes the other in terms that the other would find old-fashioned: world historians see women's history as a matter of families and private life; women's/gender historians see world history as area studies and world-systems theory. |
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