American Women’s and Gender History

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor
History
UC Davis

Lisa Materson
History
UC Davis

In the early 1990s, feminist scholars developed gender as an analytical tool for deconstructing relationships of power sending a shock wave through the field of history. Some historians celebrated the prospect that gender history would replace women’s history with a more nuanced understanding of the interlocking historical categories of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Others asserted that gender history would refocus attention away from women and back onto men. In the 2000s, transnational and global history transformed the field again, challenging frameworks situating identities and institutions within national boundaries. The debates surrounding these new challenges are still in their formative stages and have lively iterations in other disciplines beyond history. It is therefore an ideal moment to collaborate on a new synthesis of gender and women’s lives in American history, integrating transnational and international contexts.This conference was open to the public and featured leading scholars of American women’s and gender history from across the country. Each is a contributor to an addition of the high profile Oxford Handbook series, The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History. Generously supported by the UC Davis Offices of the Provost and Chancellor, the UCHRI, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Institute for Social Sciences, and the Department of History, this conference was designed both to workshop contributors’ papers and to engage a broad audience from across multiple disciplines.