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 eld 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 spacebe that space domestic or public, rural or urban, real or imagined, or a combination of all these and moreare 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 Womens History Review.