Five essays address such themes as the relationship between feminist history and women's history, the use of the concept of "experience", the development of the history of gender, demographic history and women's history and the importance of post-structuralism to women's history.

Writing Women's History: International Perspectives

History

Offen, Karen

Pierson, Ruth Roach

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Indiana Univ. Pr

European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History

This ambitious book explores challenges to male hegemony throughout continental Europe. It focuses especially on France, but it also offers comparative material on developments in the German-speaking countries and in the smaller European nations and aspiring nation-states. Spanning 250 years, the sweeping coverage extends from Portugal to Poland, Greece to Finland, Ireland to Ukraine, and Spain to Scandinavia―as well as international and transnational feminist organizations. The study has several objectives. For general readers and those interested primarily in the historical record, it provides a comprehensive, comparative account of feminist developments in European societies, as well as a rereading of European history from a feminist perspective. By placing gender, or relations between women and men, at the center of European politics, where the author argues that it belongs but from which it has long been marginalized, the book aims to reconfigure our understanding of the European past and to make visible a long but neglected tradition of feminist thought and politics. On another level, by providing a broad and accurate historical analysis, the book seeks to disentangle some misperceptions and to demystify some confusing contemporary debates about the Enlightenment, reason, nature, equality vs. difference, and public vs. private, among others. The author argues that historical feminisms offer us far more than logical paradoxes and contradictions; feminisms are about sexual politics, not philosophy. Feminist victories are not, strictly speaking, about getting the argument right, nor is gender merely “a useful category of analysis”; sexual difference lies at the heart of human thought and politics.

Europe

Stanford University Press

Reference

Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920 (New Studies in European History)

Karen Offen offers a magisterial reconstruction and analysis of the debates around relations between women and men, how they are constructed, and how they should be organized, that raged in France and its French-speaking neighbors from 1870 to 1920. The 'woman question' encompassed subjects from maternity and childbirth, and the upbringing and education of girls to marriage practices and property law, the organization of households, the distribution of work inside and outside the household, intimate sexual relations, religious beliefs and moral concerns, government-sanctioned prostitution, economic and political citizenship, and the politics of population growth. The book shows how the expansion of economic opportunities for women and the drop in the birth rate further exacerbated the debates over their status, roles, and possibilities. With the onset of the First World War, these debates were temporarily placed on hold, but they would be revived by 1916 and gain momentum during France's post-war recovery.

Cambridge University Press

The Woman Question in France, 1400–1870 (New Studies in European History)

This is a revolutionary reinterpretation of the French past from the early fifteenth century to the establishment of the Third Republic, focused on public challenges and defenses of masculine hierarchy in relations between women and men. Karen Offen surveys heated exchanges around women's 'influence'; their exclusion from 'authority'; the increasing prominence of biomedical thinking and population issues; concerns about education, intellect, and the sexual politics of knowledge; and the politics of women's work. Initially, the majority of commentators were literate and influential men. However, as more and more women attained literacy, they too began to analyze their situation in print and to contest men's claims about who women were and should be, and what they should be restrained from doing, and why. As urban print culture exploded and revolutionary ideas of 'equality' fuelled women's claims for emancipation, this question resonated throughout francophone Europe and, ultimately, across the seas.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Offen, Karen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Offen, Karen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Offen, Karen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Writing Women's History: International Perspectives

European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History

European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History

Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920 (New Studies in European History)

The Woman Question in France, 1400–1870 (New Studies in European History)

Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920 (New Studies in European History)

The Woman Question in France, 1400–1870 (New Studies in European History)