Women in World History

Women in World History brings together the most recent scholarship in women's and world history in a single volume covering the period from 1450 to the present, enabling readers to understand women's relationship to world developments over the past five hundred years.
Women have served the world as unfree people, often forced to migrate as slaves, trafficked sex workers, and indentured laborers working off debts. Diseases have migrated through women's bodies and women themselves have deliberately spread religious belief and fervor as well as ideas. They have been global authors, soldiers, and astronauts encircling the globe and moving far beyond it. They have written classics in political and social thought and crafted literary and artistic works alongside others who were revolutionaries and reform-minded activists.
Historical scholarship has shown that there is virtually no part of the world where women's presence is not manifest, whether in archives, oral testimonials, personal papers, the material record, evidence of disease and famine, myth and religious teachings, and myriad other forms of documentation. As these studies mount, the idea of surveying women's past on a global basis becomes daunting. This book aims to redress this situation and offer a synthetic world history of women in modern times.

Bonnie G. Smith is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, USA. She is the author of several books, including Women's Studies: The Basics (2013), Europe in the Contemporary World: 1900 to Present: A Narrative History with Documents (2007) and The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (2000). She is also the co-author, along with Lynn Hunt, Thomas Martin and Barbara Rosenwein, of The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures (4th Ed., 2012) and the general editor of the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History (2008), which won the American Library Association Outstanding Reference Work Award.

Introduction
1. Productive and Reproductive Lives-c. 1450-1600
2. Early Modern Structures of Power
3. Imagining Their World 1450-1600
4. Productive Life across a Connected Globe 1600-1750
5. Populations, Ideas, and the Industrious Revolution 1600-1800
6. Revolts, Revolutions and States 1650-1830
7. Industrial Work and the Local/Global Economy, 1750-1880
8. Modernizing Women and the Nation 1830-1900
9. Expanding Empires, 1870-1914
10. Global Warfare, 1914-1945
11. Decolonizing the World, Decolonizing Women
12. At the Vanguard of Change: Women's Globalization
Bibliography
Index