Mary Jo Maynes & Donna R. Gabaccia 
Gender History Across Epistemologies 

Gender History Across Epistemologies offers broad range
of innovative approaches to gender history. The essays reveal how
historians of gender are crossing boundaries – disciplinary,
methodological, and national – to explore new opportunities for
viewing gender as a category of historical analysis.

* Essays present epistemological and theoretical debates central
in gender history over the past two decades

* Contributions within this volume to the work on gender history
are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and
approaches

* The volume demonstrates that recent approaches to gender
history suggest surprising crossovers and even the discovery of
common grounds

Table of Content

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction: Gender History Across Epistemologies 1

DONNA R. GABACCIA AND MARY JO MAYNES

1 Master Narratives and the Wall Painting of the House of the
Vettii, Pompeii 20

BETH SEVERY-HOVEN

2 ‘More Beautiful than Words & Pencil Can
Express’: Barbara Bodichon’s Artistic Career at the
Interface of her Epistolary and Visual Self Projections 61

MERITXELL SIMON-MARTIN

3 Public Motherhood in West Africa as Theory and Practice
80

LORELLE SEMLEY

4 Profiling the Female Emigrant: A Method of Linguistic Inquiry
for Examining Correspondence Collections 97

EMMA MORETON

5 Beyond Constructivism?: Gender, Medicine and the Early History
of Sperm Analysis, Germany 1870-1900 127

CHRISTINA BENNINGHAUS

6 ‘I Just Express My Views & Leave Them to
Work’: Olive Schreiner as a Feminist Protagonist in a
Masculine Political Landscape with Figures 157

LIZ STANLEY AND HELEN DAMPIER

7 Gender without Groups: Confession, Resistance and Selfhood in
the Colonial Archive 181

CHRISTOPHER J. LEE

8 The Power of Renewable Resources: Orlando’s Tactical
Engagement with the Law of Intestacy 198

JAMIE L. MCDANIEL

9 The Politics of Gender Concepts in Genetics and Hormone
Research in Germany, 1900-1940 215

HELGA SATZINGER

10 The Language of Gender in Lovers’ Correspondence,
1946-1949 235

SONIA CANCIAN

11 Gender-Bending in El Teatro Campesino (1968-1980): A
Mestiza Epistemology of Performance 246

MEREDITH HELLER

12 Changing Paradigms in Migration Studies: From Men to Women to
Gender 262

NANCY L. GREEN

13 Reconsidering Categories of Analysis: Possibilities for
Feminist Studies of Conflict 279

SHIRIN SAEIDI

14 An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras, Kothis and the
Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern
India 305

ANIRUDDHA DUTTA

Index 331

About the author

Donna R. Gabaccia is Professor of History at the
University of Minnesota. She is author of We Are What We Eat:
Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998),
Italy’s Many Diasporas (2000), and Foreign
Relations: Global Perspectives on U.S. Immigration (2012); she
is also co-editor of Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and
Domestic Lives in a Mobile World (with Loretta Baldassar,
2010). Gabaccia is on the editorial board of Gender &
History, Journal of American Ethnic History and
Journal of Modern Italian Studies.

Mary Jo Maynes is Professor of History at the University
of Minnesota. She is the author of Taking the Hard Road: Life
Course and Class Identity in French and German Workers’
Autobiographies of the Industrial Era (1995) and co-author of
Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social
Sciences and History (with Jennifer Pierce and Barbara Laslett,
2008) and Family: A World History (with Ann Waltner, 2012).
She is on the editorial board of Gender & History, the
Journal of Global History, and the Journal of the History
of Childhood and Youth.