The Century of Women and Possibility of a Feminist Narrative?

Over the past few years I have started to reflect on the profoundly gendered assumptions embedded in the framing of broad historical narratives, from periodization to the anchoring of these narratives around major events or types of measurements of change over time.  To put it bluntly, masculinist assumptions about the value of specific human actions and what counts as significant change over time have dominated most synthetic historical analyses to the core.  Gender historians have also been more successful at deconstructing rather than reassembling long duree narratives, with a focus on power difference still embedded in the same masculinist tropes that are being critiqued.  My book develops a broad synthesis to redefine the most significant changes over the recent past from a squarely feminist humanist perspective.  My argument for defining the 1900s as ‘the century of women’ is simply that the most remarkable and unprecedented changes that took place around the world during this time—from the demographic explosion to the transformation of the world economy into a post-industrial service based one—cannot be fully grasped without analyzing how women have been both the subject and object of these major shifts, from an unprecedented set of new rights to new cultural norms, and overall greater agency as a category of humans.  As important as these shifts have been for all women and the rest of humanity, they have also helped usher in new forms of inequality among women.