Gender and Labor History: The nineteenth-century legacy

Abstract

All disciplines and sub-disciplines are defined through a series of inclusions and exclusions. They are based on specific assumptions and conventions that delineate their appropriate objects and methods of study. Historians, like scholars in other fields, including the so-called “natural sciences”, do not simply record some objective reality that exists independently of their taken-for-granted ideas about the nature of that reality. Rather, their decisions as to which subjects and events will be objects of study and how they will be conceptualized are shaped both by widely accepted philosophical tenets and common-sense understandings of the nature of human society.