摘要：

As our own society evolves we increasingly want to ask new questions of the past and to explore and interpret history in fresh and innovative ways that shed light on the world we live in today. Gender history has been at the forefront of these new approaches and has provided us with a wealth of new insights into our past. This module offers students the opportunity to explore this new scholarship and to study the role of sex and gender in the lives of British men and women over the past five hundred years. Questions to be considered will include: Why were women seen as the more lusty sex in the early modern period? Why was the concept of honour so central to early modern masculinity? What does the persistence of the political sex-scandal tell us? When did the idea of men and women as separate sexes emerge? How were same-sex relationships understood prior to the invention of the terms 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual'? Does the eighteenth century deserve its reputation as 'the century of sex'? Why does the idea of the 'new' man or woman keep getting recycled? How, if at all, did women engage in politics prior to the suffrage movement? Why was male adultery not seen as grounds for divorce until 1923? Did the twentieth century witness the emergence of equality between the sexes and why?

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