Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, Clara Maier and Hedwig Richter

Venue: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung
Time: 11.-13.09.2019
Proposals by: 04.02.2019

The emergence of democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries was bound up, in myriad and complex ways, with radical changes in gender relations. Yet the study of the concrete connections between these two phenomena remains marginalised in the historiography on democracy. There is a wide-ranging theoretical debate on gender, the role of concepts of masculinity for the definition and legitimation of politics, as well as a large literature on the exclusion of women from politics. This literature exists in isolation from a mostly social and cultural history of female political participation.

The conference aims to combine these political-theoretical and historical perspectives in a new way, and to expand scope of research on gender and democracy in the fields of the history of political thought and political history. It seeks to explore and problematise the gendered orders which connect themselves to the legitimation of modern democracies from a historically informed point of view. Stretching from the Early Modern period to the crisis of democratic legitimacy in our own times, the conference will explore the concrete practice of gender in democratic societies, the significance of such practices for the legitimacy of democratic politics, and the interactions of democratic equality and gender inequality. Read more and source … (Web)