Gendering the History of Education

Abstract

Gendered analysis has enacted a radical intervention in educational history through highlighting women’s roles and experiences, exploring gendered educational forces, institutions, practices, and policies, and expanding theories and methodologies. The field encompasses women’s, feminist, and gender history and diverse sites and periods of study. Although distinct in central concerns and emphases, these approaches continue to overlap, intersect, or unfold concurrently in practice, creating productive tensions that shape the field. The perspective of how the field is gendered depends in part on how its boundaries are drawn. This is both a theoretical and a methodological matter and, for many gender scholars, also a political one. The reach and production of gendered historiography is inevitably uneven, shaped by disciplinary identities, material conditions of embodied academic labor, and the uneven availability of resources to support historical research and teaching.