Teaching a Contextual and Feminist History of Geography through Role Play: Women's Membership of the Royal Geographical Society (1892–1893)

Abstract

Focusing on the debate around women's membership of the Royal Geographical Society (UK) 1892–1893, a role play was written using archive and secondary sources and is reproduced here as a resource. In the first instance the role play makes women visible in the late nineteenth-century geographical discourse. It also shows how institutional practices, grounded in prevailing views, excluded women from institutional recognition, but that this was both local and contested. Although place and time specific, the example provided demonstrates the value of using role plays to tackle historical issues within geography. Largely qualitative analysis of student and colleague feedback shows the importance of placing these historical issues, especially gender, in wider socioeconomic contexts and suggests that by taking this approach a time- and place-specific event allows discussion of much wider issues on the nature and practice of geography, including notions of how geographical discursive practices have been validated, policed and challenged. The use of contextualized historical material appears to have negated ‘backlash’ responses to questions of gender and female equality. The role play can be used to initiate discussion on the nature of geography, the gendering of geography and international comparison of the historical practices of geographical institutions.

Keywords:

• Feminist history
• contextual history
• role play
• gender
• archive sources

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers archive staff and all the students at Oxford Brookes University and colleagues at the RGS/IBG Women and Geography Study Group workshop (May 2005) who took part in the role play and provided such useful feedback. She would also like to express her thanks to Martin Haigh for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as Rachel Spronken-Smith and the other anonymous referees for the Journal of Geography in Higher Education for their constructive feedback.