This stimulating volume presents an overview of key gender theories and debates, tracing the development of gender as an analytic category in the writing of history. Covering a broad timespan, Kent makes the origins, concepts and methods of gender history accessible to students, showing how they can use gender in their own historical studies.

This stimulating volume presents an overview of key gender theories and debates, tracing the development of gender as an analytic category in the writing of history. Covering a broad timespan, Kent makes the origins, concepts and methods of gender history accessible to students, showing how they can use gender in their own historical studies.

Women's quest for the vote Kent argues, was indissolubly linked with other feminist demands for reform which would overturn the cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity and determined their powerlessness in both public and private.

Aftershocks studies how meanings of shellshock and imagery presenting the traumatized psyche as shattered contributed to Britons' understandings of their political selves in the 1920s. It connects the force of emotions to the political culture of a decade which saw extraordinary violence against those regarded as 'un-English'.