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.

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

Epistemological critiques – questions about how we know what we know – are intrinsic to gender history. Feminist historians, in bringing an explicitly gendered perspective into history, have produced new ways of knowing the past through a broad range of methods and epistemological frameworks. This diversity is evident within the collection of essays in which contributions to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and methods. 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. The result is a broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. For example: performance theory informs the analysis of women’s letters; attention to border crossers points to geopolitical dimensions of ‘how we know what we know’ about the gendered past; and archival silences act as starting points for explorations of unorthodox historical methods.  This important examination of how various ways of knowing operate in current historical research on gender demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history encompass surprising crossovers and common grounds unimaginable even two decades ago.