The past in the present: historicising contemporary debates about gender and education

Abstract

History is often embedded, explicitly or implicitly, in discourses on contemporary aspects of gender and education, but relatively few scholars engage critically with history as they grapple with current issues. This article posits ‘historical sensibility’ as a means of engaging constructively with the past when scrutinising and working on current issues in gender and education. Four features of historical sensibility are mapped out and compared with established ways of approaching the relationship between the present and past. The utility of historical sensibility is demonstrated with reference to ongoing debates about the feminisation of schooling, the sexualisation of children and the leisure pursuits of young women.

Keywords:

• sociology
• history
• time
• femininities

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Some postmodern theorists, such as Jenkins (1991), argue we should not bother with histories because of the impossibility of accurately knowing the past. While accepting the limitations of historical knowledge, we do not subscribe to this view.

2. Definition from the online Free Dictionary, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sensibility, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensibility [Accessed 5 July 2013].

3. We use discourse to mean ‘a group of statements which structure the way a thing is thought, and the way we act on the basis of that thinking’ (Rose, 2007, 142).

4. The Ladette is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (6th edn) as: ‘A young woman who enjoys social drinking, sport, or other activities customarily considered to be male-oriented, and typically displays attitudes or behaviour regarded as irresponsible or brash’. Portraits of the ladette in the UK media are almost invariably critical and frequently hostile (Jackson and Tinkler 2007).

5. Janet Fink and Helen Lomax, 'Through whose eyes? Memory and meaning in photographs of motherhood from the 1950s'. Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) seminar series (no. 4, 26 November 2010): Women in Britain in the 1950s. http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/sociology/about/events/esrcseminars/

6. ‘Baby P’ (Peter Connelly) was a 17-month-old boy who died in London in 2007 after suffering sustained abuse for over eight months. The case received widespread media attention in the UK, and local child protection services and other agencies were severely criticised.

7. ESRC seminar series: Women in Britain in the 1950s. http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/sociology/about/events/esrcseminars/

8. The misuse of history in political discourse, especially in the context of war and claims about national identity, has been much discussed by historians (Macmillan 2009), but the misappropriation of the past is also evident in less highly charged discursive contexts.

9. The journalist wrongly describes these photos as produced for Picture Post; an earlier pub outing was photographed for Picture Post in 1954. The photos featured in Figure 2 were produced for ‘Life’ magazine, 1956.