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Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 676p. bibl. index. $124.95, ISBN 0-631-22393-2.
Once upon a time, women's experiences were largely missing from written history. Then came the discovery that some women had in fact been present, and the history stew was peppered with the names of individual women. They provided more flavor to history, but didn't change the basic recipe of great men, politics, and wars. But, close to forty years ago, feminist historians began doing more than adding women and stirring. They started to apply gender as a wider analytic category, understood by the editors of A Companion to Gender History as "a culturally constructed, historically changing, and often unstable system of differences" (p.2). They created whole new meals consisting of thousands of articles, dissertations, and books that re-examined historical concepts and events through the lens of gender, particularly with respect to American and European history.(1)
The latest advance in gendering history is the recognition that it applies globally. And that's the smorgasbord Meade and Wiesner-Hanks took on in A Companion to Gender History. It's a tall order. As they say in their introduction, "There is no aspect of human existence -- labor and leisure, family and kingroups, laws, war, diplomacy, foreign affairs, frontier settlement, imperialism, aggression, colonial policy and the resistance to it, education science, romance and personal interaction, the construction of race and ethnicity -- that is untouched by gender" (p.6).
One can clearly see the impossibility of covering...