Gendered Histories of Emotion

Summary The intersection of gender history and the history of emotions has produced a vibrant body of scholarship attentive to the cultural construction, social circulation, and political utility of emotions across time and place. Emotions are conceptualized both as potent mechanisms of gendered regulation and as modes of resistance and reconfiguration of social order. They are approached not primarily as internal states, but as historically contingent practices shaped by discursive, material, and embodied conditions with the power to affect the social and political landscape. A central focus has been the gendering of emotional prescriptions, with women often portrayed as more emotional than men—a trope deployed to justify their marginalization from political, legal, and economic life. Yet emotional norms and their meanings have shifted alongside broader social changes. Historical studies have traced how femininity was redefined through emotional ideals, from the dangerous excess of the emotional woman to the moralized sensibility of the domestic caretaker. Racial, class-based, and colonial hierarchies have intersected with gendered emotional codes, shaping how different groups were imagined to feel and be felt about. Emotions have circulated in ways that sustained imperial ideologies and missionary efforts, while reinforcing normative ideals of white femininity and domesticity. Emotional expectations—such as cheerfulness, compassion, or shame—have been imposed unevenly across social and racial boundaries, serving to uphold existing power structures. Historians have also identified moments when emotional behavior disrupted dominant hierarchies. Female ritual mourning, emotional “dryness” in witch trials, and the strategic reallocation of shame by African and European women alike reveal how emotions could unsettle prevailing orders. Emotional practices, whether scripted or improvised, have served to forge community, contest subordination, and assert new social identities. Scholars have sought to approximate women’s emotional experiences across diverse domains of life—such as marriage, motherhood, migration, and work—attending to both emotional communication and labor. They have shown how emotions were conditioned by cultural imperatives and structural constraints, thus challenging assumptions about universality or historical stability in emotional experiences. Autobiographies, periodicals, popular culture, letters, court testimonies and more provide insight into how women navigated the demands of emotional norms and articulated their feelings in strategic and sometimes subversive ways. The field continues to grapple with theoretical and methodological challenges of identifying emotions or felt experience. Nonetheless, the deployment of a wide variety of sources, interdisciplinary inspiration, and sustained attention to emotional dimensions of everyday life as well as extraordinary events have proven indispensable to understanding gendered experience. By tracing the operations and representations of emotion, scholars have revealed how emotional life both reflected and reshaped gendered subjectivities, social hierarchies, and political cultures in the past.