我们目前在性别方面的优势是建立在该部门在妇女历史上公认的声誉上。妇女的历史仍然是我们许多人关注的中心问题。我们探索妇女的生活轮廓，她们积极参与历史动态以及界定她们所面临的极限和可能性的社会结构。对于我们许多人而言，关于妇女的那些问题仍然与我们目前对性别的参与有关。但是，性别也超越了女性的历史领域，因为它把重点转移到了特定的历史背景上，这塑造了男人和女人的含义。性别强调男性和女性角色的观念始终是在社会上构建的，从而有可能历史化归因于自然的男性气质和女性气质。性别还揭示了男性气质和女性气质的概念对各种力量动态
Our current strength in gender builds on the department's well-established reputation in women's history. Women's history remains a central concern for many of us. We explore the contours of women's lives, their active participation in the dynamics of history, and the societal structures that defined the limits and possibilities they faced. For many of us, those questions about women remain connected to our current engagement with gender. Gender, however, also transcends the field of women's history, because it shifts the focus to the specific historical contexts that shaped what it meant to be a man as well as a woman. Gender emphasizes how conceptions of men's and women's roles have always been socially constructed, making it possible to historicize qualities of masculinity and femininity that were once attributed to nature. Gender also reveals the broader implications of conceptions of masculinity and femininity for various power dynamics?social, cultural, economic, and political. Given its analytical power, gender features in our work differently. Some of us study the development of gender roles and conceptions of femininity and masculinity as subjects in their own right. Others use gender primarily as an analytical tool to obtain new insight into topics such as race relations, economic inequality, sexuality, legal change, policy and politics. But what connects all of our work is the way that we use gender to reveal new, exciting elements of the past.