Space, Place and Gendered Identities

In the last two decades, historians have increasingly sought to understand how environments, ‘built’ and otherwise, architectural surroundings, landscapes, and conceptual ‘places’ and ‘spaces’ have affected the nature and scope of political power, cultural production and social experience . The essays in this collection expand upon this already rich field of inquiry by combining an analytical approach sensitive to questions of gender with an exploration of ideas of political space. The volume demonstrates how the gendered and political meanings of space―be that space domestic or public, rural or urban, real or imagined, or a combination of all these and more―are fashioned through the movement of historical actors through space and time. Whether in delineating the gendered and politicized space of the pulpit; the sickroom; the Irish farmyard; the London suffrage atelier; the domestic space created by the wireless; the lesbian ‘scene’ of rural Canada; the eighteenth-century ladies' ‘closet’; or the public space within the ‘public history’ of historic houses, the volume demonstrates how the meanings of these spaces are not fixed, but are challenged and reformulated.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.

Kathryne Beebe is Assistant Professor of Medieval History and Digital Humanities, University of Texas at Arlington, USA. Her research interests include medieval pilgrimage, the history of the book, women's history and the cultural history of spirituality.

Angela Davis is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History, University of Warwick, UK. Her current research project is a comparative study of Jewish motherhood in England and Israel in the second half of the twentieth century.