Gender and History最新文献

In the late twentieth century, Geraldine L. Wilson emerged as one of the leading voices in early Black childhood education, grounding her pedagogy in Black history and culture. This article traces the origins of her intellectual thought to her girlhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Using historian Jarvis R. Givens' framework of ‘Black student witness’ it examines what Wilson experienced in the city's integrated yet segregated public school system during the 1930s and 1940s, exploring how these educational spaces birthed a Black woman educator and thinker who reimagined a new educational future for Black children.

This study examines segregation in postcolonial Dar es Salaam through the lens of girlhood by focusing on Khoja Shia Ithna Asheri (Ithna Asheri) women's experiences of being students at the city's most diverse and prestigious school, the International School of Tanganyika (IST), from the 1980s to the early 2000s. The study argues that longstanding and evolving racial, class and inter-Asian segregation entrenched religious-based gender segregation for Ithna Asheri girls. The entanglement of continuing colonial-era racial and ethnic segregation, the post-independence state's anti-segregationist socialist policies and the Ithna Asheri community's endorsement of Islamic purdah in the 1980s yielded an Ithna Asheri girlhood respectability that was gender-segregationist, restricting Ithna Asheri girls’ social autonomy. The study also contends that the manifestation of purdah was powerful but not hegemonic. IST Ithna Asheri girls pushed against segregationist boundaries to pursue undertakings they aspired to, as well as practice Ithna Asherism according to their preferences. IST Ithna Asheri girls’ actions impacted Ithna Asheri girlhood respectability and forged greater gender, racial, ethnic and class integration.

This introduction to the Special Issue explores the ways in which a gendered analysis illuminates histories of segregation. It argues three key points. First, it is essential to understand segregation from an intersectional perspective, one that fully integrates gender alongside other factors and dynamics in order to fully understand the differences and similarities in segregation between different regional and temporal contexts. The second is the need to go beyond the most obviously applicable and well-known historical examples of segregation to other times and places. Third, focusing on segregation is not, and should not be, limited to processes of seclusion alone.

This article examines the late Mughal period, a time of dramatic political reconfiguration, to trace the relevance of practices of elite female seclusion, and particularly of the complex space of the imperial harem, to narrations of an empire under strain. Contemporary Persian-language histories of the reign of Ahmad Shāh (1748–1754) provide divergent accounts of internal and external threats to the sanctity and order of the harem, expressed in differential representations of even its most prominent denizens and their diverse social backgrounds. This article argues that this evidence reveals the centrality of the birth and social origins of individual harem women to how gender segregation was variously invoked within articulations of dynastic vulnerability. Attention to these diverse representations enables a better understanding of the multiple ways in which elite female seclusion was understood, referenced and negotiated during a period of uncertainty and change, both in the historical sources and by historical actors themselves.