Women in World History brings together the most recent scholarship in women's and world history in a single volume covering the period from 1450 to the present, enabling readers to understand women's relationship to world developments over the past five hundred years.
Women have served the world as unfree people, often forced to migrate as slaves, trafficked sex workers, and indentured laborers working off debts. Diseases have migrated through women's bodies and women themselves have deliberately spread religious belief and fervor as well as ideas. They have been global authors, soldiers, and astronauts encircling the globe and moving far beyond it. They have written classics in political and social thought and crafted literary and artistic works alongside others who were revolutionaries and reform-minded activists.
Historical scholarship has shown that there is virtually no part of the world where women's presence is not manifest, whether in archives, oral testimonials, personal papers, the material record, evidence of disease and famine, myth and religious teachings, and myriad other forms of documentation. As these studies mount, the idea of surveying women's past on a global basis becomes daunting. This book aims to redress this situation and offer a synthetic world history of women in modern times.
This is an exhilaratingly revisionist narrative of world history. It accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of conceptualizing a history within which stories of differently positioned women and girls are brought together. She refreshingly demonstrates the possibilities still remaining within a grand narrative. The book is an exceptional work of critical history that informs and challenges in equal parts. Written throughout with great elegance and verve, it wears its prodigous scholarship lightly. This is the book, by a scholar at the top of her game, that will revolutionize how world history is studied and taught.
