The unseamed picture: Conflicting narratives of women in the modern European past

Gender and History

Volumn 20, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 628-643

  Abrams, Lynn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER DISPARITY; GENDER ISSUE; SOCIAL HISTORY; WOMENS STATUS;

EURASIA; EUROPE;

EID: 54549102460     PISSN: 09535233     EISSN: 14680424     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2008.00540.x     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Mary Nash, 'Rethinking Narratives in European Women's History: Motherhood, Identities and Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Spain', in Terry Brotherstone, Deborah Simonton and Oonagh Walsh (eds), Gendering Scottish History: An International Approach (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1999), p. 113.
2. Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 61.
3. A point made by Deborah Simonton in 'WritingWomen into Modern Europe', in Deborah Simonton (ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 2.
4. These include Rachel G. Fuchs and Victoria E. Thompson, Women in Nineteenth Century Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
5. Gisela Bock, Women in European History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)
6. Bonnie G. Smith, Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1989).
7. See e.g., Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (eds), History of Women in the West, 5 vols (London: Belknap Press, 1992-94) and the six-volume Longman History of European Women series.
8. A point made by Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert in Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present (1987; 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) where they acknowledge that the earlier sense of a 'shared woman's experience' concealed a more 'diverse and conflictual reality', p. 3.
9. Canning, Gender History in Practice, pp. 60-61.
10. Lynn Abrams, The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789-1918 (London: Longman, 2002)
11. Lynn Abrams, Myth and Materiality in a Woman's World: Shetland 1800-2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
12. There are too many works to mention here, but examples of studies that challenge so-called 'national' histories include: Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Janes Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History Since 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005)
13. Siân Reynolds, France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996)
14. Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain 1640-1990 (London: Routledge, 1999).
15. Notably Amanda J. Vickery, 'From Golden Age to Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of EnglishWomen's History', Historical Journal 36 (1993), pp. 383-414
16. Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
17. Deborah Simonton (ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since 1700 (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 8-9. The staying power of this organising concept is exhibited in the chapters contained in Simonton's edited volume.
18. See also PerryWillson (ed.), Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860-1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 2004).
19. Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 189.
20. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987; 2nd edn, London: Routledge, 2002)
21. and the subsequent debate led by Vickery, 'Golden Age', and taken up by early modern historians, for instance, Pamela Sharpe, 'Continuity and Change: Women's History and Economic History in Britain', Economic History Review 48 (1995), pp. 353-69.
22. Nash, 'Rethinking Narratives', p. 115.
23. Nash, 'Rethinking Narratives', p. 113.
24. Liz Stanley, 'Rescuing "Women" in History from Feminist Deconstructionism', Women's Studies International Forum 13 (1990), pp. 151-7, here p. 154.
25. See e.g., Mary S. Hartmann, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
26. Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose, 'Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations', Gender&History 13 (2001), pp. 427-43.
27. For a comprehensive survey of these newperspectives see Canning, Gender History in Practice, ch. 1, pp. 3-62.
28. For the notion of symbolic referents, see Anthony P. Cohen, Whalsay: Symbol, Segment and Boundary in a Shetland Island Community (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 115-16.
29. Shetland Archive is one of only two in Scotland (Orkney is the other) that contain devolved papers from the National Archives of Scotland.
30. For a discussion of this process see Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 15
31. and Penny Summerfield, 'Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews', Cultural and Social History 1 (2004), pp. 65-93.
32. See Anna Green, 'Individual Remembering and "Collective Memory": Theoretical Presuppositions and Contemporary Debates', Oral History 32 (2004), pp. 35-44
33. Michael Roper, 'Slipping out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History', History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), pp. 57-72.
34. Shetland Archive (hereafter SA): D 1/135, Scrapbook, cutting from the Scotsman, 2 September 1903.
35. The stories of May Moar and Grace Petrie, for example, both of whom received official recognition for their acts of heroism at sea, are immortalised in publications and in museum exhibits. See Abrams, Myth and Materiality, pp. 28-9.
36. 'Jessie Saxby', in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes, Siân Reynolds and Rose Pipes (eds), The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 312-13
37. The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1934), directed by Jenny Brown (Scottish Film and Television Archive)
38. Christina Jamieson, 'TheWomen of Shetland', The New Shetlander 177, Hairst 1991, pp. 31-3
39. 'Christina Jamieson', in Ewan, Innes, Reynolds and Pipes (eds), The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, pp. 182-3.
40. Cohen, Whalsay, p. 173.
41. Marsha E. Renwanz, 'From Crofters to Shetlanders: The Social History of a Shetland Island Community's Self Image, 1872-1978' (unpublished doctoral thesis, Stanford University, 1980), p. 291.
42. Hazel Hughson, 'Ethel and Jeanie: Twentieth Century Knitters', unpublished paper, Shetland 2007; Lynn Abrams, 'Knitting, Autonomy and Identity: The Role of Hand-Knitting in the Construction of Women's Sense of Self in an Island Community, Shetland c.1850 to 2000', Textile History 37 (2006) pp. 149-65
43. Anne Douglas (ed.), How Might We Revalue Traditional Ways of Making? A Research Project Revaluing Shetland Knitting - The Maakin Lab (CD-ROM, Aberdeen: The Robert Gordon University in collaboration with Performing Arts Laboratories, 2005).
44. SA 3 (Oral History Interviews): 1/123, John Gear.
45. 'Mary Manson', in Ewan, Innes, Reynolds and Pipes (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, p. 248. Mary was born in 1897.
46. For a more extensive discussion of this narrative, see Abrams, Myth and Materiality, pp. 39-44, 201-2.
47. SA: 3/1/77/2 (Mary Manson, interviewed in 1982).
48. See Janet L. Nelson, 'Gender, Memory and Social Power', Gender & History 12 (2000), pp. 722-34, here pp. 723-4.
49. SA: 3/1/77/2.
50. SA: 3/1/1396, interview with Mary Ellen Odie, conducted by the author, 2001.
51. SA: 3/1/1396.
52. Sally Cole, Women of the Praia: Work and Lives in a Portuguese Coastal Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 41.
53. Selma Leydesdorff, 'Gender and the Categories of Experienced History', Gender & History 11 (1999), pp. 597-611, esp. pp. 599, 604.
54. SA: 3/1/1395, Interview with Agnes Leask, conducted by the author, 2002.
55. Cole, Women of the Praia, p. 40.
56. 'A Woman's Island? Women in Shetland, Past, Present and Future', Shetland Museum and Archives, 20-22 April 2007.
57. See e.g., Caroline Brettell, Men who Migrate, Women who Wait: Population and History in a Portuguese Parish (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)
58. Allyson M. Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
59. Marisa Rey-Henningsen, TheWorld of the Ploughwoman: Folklore and Reality in Matriarchal Northwest Spain (Helsinki: Acedemia Scientiarum Fennica, 1994).