Abstract
Before the 1970s, there was meagre interest in understanding the productive efforts of women in the national story. Historians tended to assume that the work of defining, ruling and defending the nation had been done mostly by men so that it was unlikely that women, generally excluded from the public realm, would have exercised much influence. Feminist historians have challenged the traditional claim that men of power and influence have been the key drivers of social and political change. Their insights have led to the expanding fields of transnational and international feminist history that have further highlighted the limits and historically contingent nature of ideas about national identity, democratic citizenship and the nation-state.
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Key Readings
Damousi, Joy. 1999. ‘Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating a Nation and Australian Historiography’. Gender and History 11(3): 612–24.
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Laing, K. (2020). Reconceiving the Nation. In: Sawer, M., Jenkins, F., Downing, K. (eds) How Gender Can Transform the Social Sciences. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43236-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43236-2_8
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