The eight essays collected in this volume examine the practice of gender history and its impact on our understanding of European history. Each essay takes up a major methodological or theoretical issue in feminist history and illustrates the necessity of critiquing and redefining the concepts of body, citizenship, class, and experience through historical case studies. Kathleen Canning opens the book with a new overview of the state of the art in European gender history. She considers how gender history has revised the master narratives in some fields within modern European history (such as the French Revolution) but has had a lesser impact in others (Weimar and Nazi Germany).Gender History in Practice includes two essays now regarded as classics?"Feminist History after the 'Linguistic Turn'" and "The Body as Method"-as well as new chapters on experience, citizenship, and subjectivity. Other essays in the book draw on Canning's work at the intersection of labor history, the history of the welfare state, and the history of the body, showing how the gendered "social body" was shaped in Imperial Germany. The book concludes with a pair of essays on the concepts of class and citizenship in German history, offering critical perspectives on feminist understandings of citizenship. Featuring an extensive thematic bibliography of influential works in gender history and theory that will prove invaluable to students and scholars, Gender History in Practice offers new insights into the history of Germany and Central Europe as well as a timely assessment of gender history's accomplishments and challenges.

About the Author

Kathleen Canning is Professor of Women's Studies and German at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850'1914, which won the Conference Group for Central European History's Book Prize.

Reviews
"Gender History in Practice conveys the richness of Kathleen Canning's thought and the depth of her knowledge of German history. It shows a stunning breadth of knowledge and reading, an admirable refusal to accept simple dichotomies, and an insistence that if theory and history are to engage fruitfully, they must be as complex and flexible as the issues and evidence they seek to explain."-Mary Nolan, New York University
"Gender History in Practice is a serious, probing collection of essays by a leading historian of gender history. The essays are broad in scope, and range over the most controversial issues in the field of gender history, among them, the relationship between discourse and experience, the politics of the body, and the construction of political subjectivity for women. Kathleen Canning's exhaustive analysis of the historiographical literature in these areas, as well as her own provocative insights, in particular about the body, will make Gender History in Practice required reading for all historians of gender and sexuality."-Mary Louise Roberts, University of Wisconsin-Madison



Book Information
ISBN 9780801489716
Author Kathleen Canning
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 155mm * 18mm