Research cluster in gender history: who are we?
Welcome to the University of Reading research cluster in gender history. Our purpose is to explore gender in its complexity. Across time and space gender has often been viewed and imagined as binary. However, the construct of heteronormativity – the belief that people fall into two distinct and complementary genders with natural roles in life – must be questioned, examined, and investigated. Our work uses a range of approaches, such as political, cultural, and social history, all thoroughly anchored within gender history but with a cross- and interdisciplinary perspective.
About our banner image: This rock art was created at least 6,000, possibly 10,000, years ago in a cave in the Sahara Desert. At a time when the Sahara was green, wet, and featured lakes, our ancestors chose to draw swimmers, bodies unsexed, and no gender division of labour visible.
Research highlights
Astor100: Disrupting the male narrative of parliament
Jacqui Turner works with the British Parliament on the national Vote100 project, a major series of significant exhibitions and events to engage the public with the UK Parliament and enhance the understanding of the struggle for the vote. Her national Astor100 project will begin in 2019. This is a programme of public, community and academic events to coincide with the centenary of the first woman to sit in the House of Commons: Nancy Astor.
Working with diverse partners, Jacqui’s research group will establish a home for a series of events and exhibitions to continue to address gender balance issues and disrupt the male narrative of parliament. They will aim to encourage education policy makers and schools to think beyond suffrage and more broadly about minority access and contributions to politics and power.
Women's experiences of forced resettlement in Kenya
Beth Rebisz's research explores African women’s experiences of their forced resettlement into concentrated ‘villages’ during Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign fought in central Kenya, 1952-1960. In doing so, her project assesses the intersection of humanitarianism and development, two prominent aspects impacting life in the ‘villages’. Beth's project combines the oral testimonies of African women who were forcibly resettled along with archival material from international humanitarian organisations, church missionary records and those of the colonial government. This will also enable an examination of the instrumental roles played by European and African female welfare workers in the wellbeing of those affected by armed conflict and how these women contributed to an improved humanitarian discourse during the decolonisation period.
Photo credit (2nd image): Copyright ICRC Archives (ARR). Reproduced with permission.
The manliness of nationalism in Africa
Heike Schmidt's work concerns nation and nationalism with a special interest in the manliness of nationalism in Zimbabwe. Africanists have observed since the mid-1990s that the oldest and most important debates in the field of African Studies have focused almost exclusively on anti-colonial nationalism – party politics and writings and speeches delivered by party leaders. Because party positions were nearly all occupied by men, research has centred on male voices. This challenge has since led to an emerging Women’s History and Cultural History of nationalism that has so far neglected the maleness and manliness of those nationalist voices that often played pivotal roles in mobilization and party politics but also those of everyday life. As the major outcome of this research, Heike's monograph 'Nation and Nationalism in Zimbabwe: The Life and Times of King Itai David Mutasa' will be published in 2018.
Photo credit (3rd image): United Methodist Archives, Africa University, Zimbabwe
Contact us
Dr Heike I. Schmidt, gender history research cluster lead: genderhistory@reading.ac.uk
News and events
For the latest news, events and updates please visit our blog.
Stammtisch
Cluster staff members
Academic staff within the gender history cluster are drawn from a range of locations and research specialisms. Read on for an introduction to each member and their research.
RICHARD BLAKEMORE
Richard Blakemore works on the social history of seafarers during the early modern period, their connections with society ashore, and their role in the development of imperial and commercial networks.
Rachel foxley
Rachel is interested in gender as it relates to the history of political thought. Her work focuses on the English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, and its aftermath. These political events created anxieties about political order which were intertwined with, and sometimes expressed through, anxieties about gender.
HANNAH NEWTON
Hannah Newton is a social and cultural historian of early modern England, whose research centres on what it was like to be ill, or to witness the illness of a loved one, in the past. Gender is a vital theme in this work: Hannah’s first book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, explores how ideas about masculinity and femininity shaped parents’ emotional responses to the pains, illnesses, and deaths of their sons and daughters.
Rebecca rist
Rebecca Rist is interested in male and female piety in the High and Late Middle Ages. Alongside her primary research on the medieval papacy, she writes on various aspects of popular piety including crusader motivation, devotion to saints’ cults and the boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy.
Heike schmidt
Heike is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Southern and East Africa. She is writing a history of nation and nationalism in Zimbabwe that considers the manliness and the role of women in nationalist discourse and activism both in Zimbabwe and its diaspora from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Natalie thomlinson
Natalie Thomlinson is a historian of gender and feminism in modern Britain, though her work is fundamentally concerned with how both gender and feminism are mediated through categories of difference such as race and class.
Jacqui Turner
Jacqui Turner is a modern British political historian and her research examines the parliamentary contribution of early female MPs, sex-candidacy and marriage during the interwar period in Britain. She has a special interest in Nancy Astor.
EMILY WEST
Emily West is an historian of slavery in the antebellum US South. All of her research has focused upon the ways in which gender shaped the everyday experiences of enslaved people, be this in terms of their labour, their family lives and intimate relationships, or physical abuse and sexual exploitation.
Our students
amy austin
My research focuses on transgender identities in Britain from 1870 to the 1940s. Through an analysis of medical literature, legal documentation, press coverage and autobiographical material I aim to discover to what degree there was a cultural and medical awareness of trans identities and how these were expressed and treated. I am interested in the changing medical treatments, from hormonal therapy to the advent of sex reassignment surgery and the influence of Magnus Hirschfeld’s pioneering Institute on British medical practice.
I explore the work of British sexologists, particularly Havelock Ellis and John Symonds Addington, with regards to gender-crossing behaviours. I compare both the medical and cultural experiences for transmen and transwomen. I engage with debates surrounding terminology and how best to categorise gender fluidity in a period that predates modern terms. I also examine the extent to which a transgender subculture existed in Britain and the outlets for and modes of expressing gender variance before medical procedures were available.ELIZABETH BARNES
My research focuses on racialised sexual violence in the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction South. Within this, my primary aim is to analyse continuities from the antebellum period through the Civil War and into Reconstruction. My work also explores the ways in which black women seized upon the opportunities that freedom gave them to challenge and reshape prevailing narratives of gender, race, and sexuality. In particular, I analyse how women’s testimony addressed ideas of rape and consent, and how women used their voices during Reconstruction to redefine their past abusive relationships with white men. In this way, I explore the testimony that women gave as not only stories of abuse, but central facets of Reconstruction battles over social boundaries and relations.
Amie Bolissian
My Wellcome-funded doctoral research investigates the experiences of ageing patients in early modern England, c.1570-1730. Contrary to common assumptions, 20% of the adult population was aged over 60 in this period. My study asks how doctors and laypeople understood and treated the diseases and infirmities of this neglected demographic, and seeks to uncover the impact of these conditions on the lives and emotions of sufferers and their families. Drawing on sources such as published medical texts, diaries, and doctors’ casebooks, my research investigate how contemporary gendered medical theories of the body applied to the older patient, and provides opportunities for testing entrenched ideas about gender norms of this period. For example, how undervalued older women really were in society, given the time and money spent on their treatment, and whether weeping – a culturally 'feminine' emotion gesture – was regarded with greater tolerance in 'ancient' men, as they 'abounded' with excess detrimental ‘humoral moisture’.
CHarlotte crouch
Through analysis of mostly original marriage contracts and charters, I ask how powerful a tool marriage could be for the aristocratic family, and how regulated this tool was. The family I am researching passed their comital title through the female line for nearly a century. These women held a special status as landowners, lords of their lands, which held obligations regardless of gender, even if those obligations themselves could be seen to be highly gendered. I question how these heiresses navigated such waters, and to what extent marriage could be utilised as a tool of power for the aristocracy as a whole, for a specific aristocratic family, and for these heiresses themselves.
AMY gower
melanie kHuddro
My research interest focuses on the religious identity of the first woman to take her seat in British Parliament: Viscountess Nancy Astor. Astor not only entered an exclusively male domain, but adopted Christian Science - an ideology that was somewhat conflicted with the interwar Established Church of England. This devotion was evident for much of her Parliamentary career; she used it to foster friendships with several of her influential male peers and it was simultaneously the source of some hostility. The most conspicuous feature of the early Christian Science movement was its founder, Mary Baker Eddy. In creating the dogma Science and Health, Eddy challenged both the masculine archetype of ‘traditional’ religion and male-centric Biblical readings. Nonetheless, the extent to which these approaches were applied and created female accessibility in the hierarchical structure of the church has been contested.
helen lockhart
My research is on Elizabeth, 6th Baroness Craven's public position in society, in terms of the wider historical context of female autobiographical writing and changing attitudes to women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The research examines Lady Craven's memoirs, travel-writing and the material culture of her portraits and country house, in order to establish her public position in society, during a period of intense social and political change. In particular it considers the challenges posed by the publication of women's memoirs and travel-writing for consumption in the public sphere, in terms of gender, genre and ideology.
Mari-Liis NeuBauer
beth rebisz
My research explores African women’s experiences of their forced resettlement into concentrated ‘villages’ during Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign fought in central Kenya, 1952-1960. In doing so, my project assesses the intersection of humanitarianism and development, two prominent aspects impacting life in the ‘villages’. My project combines the oral testimonies of African women who were forcibly resettled along with archival material from international humanitarian organisations, church missionary records and those of the colonial government. This will also enable an examination of the instrumental roles played by European and African female welfare workers in the wellbeing of those affected by armed conflict and how these women contributed to an improved humanitarian discourse during the decolonisation period.
Image credit: Copyright ICRC Archives (ARR). Reproduced with permission.
Erin shearer
My research investigates the use of violence by enslaved women in the Antebellum South as a form of resistance between 1815-1861. This thesis will address the fundamental questions: Were women deliberately excluded from organised collective violence because of their gender? Should acts of individual violent discord undertaken by women be categorised as ‘everyday resistance?’ Why have scholars associated violence to be inherently masculine in nature? This thesis will examine the extent of enslaved women's exploitation to determine why women used violence as a strategy of resistance and secondly, by establishing the frequency and different modes of violence deployed by female slaves within North and South Carolina.
Aisha Djelid
My research examines the forced reproduction of enslaved men and women in the antebellum South as a means of sexual exploitation. Forced reproduction was an informal practice where enslavers compelled, either subtly or violently, enslaved men and women to have sexual relationships to produce children for profit. By stereotyping black women as hypersexual, enslavers forced them to procreate with multiple enslaved men, either through marriage or through rape. My research focuses on the methods employed by enslavers to force enslaved couples together, and the impact that this had on concepts of masculinity, parenthood, and marriage. I primarily use sources from formerly enslaved men and women, such as interviews and autobiographies, who witnessed or experienced incidents of forced reproduction. Through this, I highlight how forced reproduction was a prevalent, and often violent, form of sexual labour experienced by most enslaved people.
Selected publications
Foxley, R.H. (2006) Gender and intellectual history. In: Whatmore, R. and Young, B. (eds.) Palgrave advances in intellectual history. Palgrave advances. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, UK, pp. 189-209. ISBN 9781403939005
Newton, H. (2012) The sick child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp262. ISBN 9780199650491
Rist, R.A.C. (2017) The crusades, Catholic piety and chivalry in the novels of Walter Scott , Reading Medieval Studies, 43. pp. 99-122. ISSN 0950-3129
Schmidt, Heike I. (2018 - in press) Nation and Nationalism in Zimbabwe: The Life and Times of King Itai David Mutasa, Harare.
Schmidt, H. I. (2015) Shaming Men, Performing Power: Female Authority in Zimbabwe and Tanzania on the Eve of Colonial Rule. In: Shetler, J. B. and Hodgson, D. (eds.) Gendering Ethnicity in African History: Women's Subversive Performance of Ethnicity. Women in Africa and the Diaspora. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI, pp. 265-289.
Schmidt, H.I. (2008) Colonial intimacy: the Rechenberg scandal, homosexuality and sexual crime in German East Africa. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17 (1). pp. 25-59. ISSN 1535-3605
Thomlinson, N. (2016) Race, ethnicity and the women's movement in England, 1968-1993. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. ISBN 9781137442796
Thomlinson, N. and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, F. (2018) National Women Against Pit Closures: gender, trade unionism, and community activism. Contemporary British History, 32 (1). pp. 78-100. ISSN 1743-7997
Turner, J. (2018) The Labour Church: religion and politics in Britain 1890-1914. International Library of Political Studies. I.B. Tauris, London, UK, pp304
Turner, J. et al (2018) Voice and Vote: Celebrating 100 Years of Votes for Women (London).
Turner, J. (2017) Women and the Vote: Nancy Astor
West, E., Paton, D., Machado M.H.P.T., Cowling, C. (2017) co-editor and introduction co-author, Mothering Slaves: Comparative Perspectives on Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies, Slavery and Abolition 38 (2) and the Women’s History Review (forthcoming 2018).
West, E. (2014) Enslaved women in America: from colonial times to emancipation. African American History Series. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland, USA, pp160. ISBN 9781442208711