Working with Paper

Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender. Through a series of dynamic investigations covering Europe and North America and spanning the early modern period to the twentieth century, this volume breaks new ground by examining material histories of paper and the gendered worlds that made them. Contributors explore diverse uses of paper—from healing to phrenological analysis to model making to data processing—which often occurred in highly gendered, yet seemingly divergent spaces, such as laboratories and kitchens, court rooms and boutiques, ladies’ chambers and artisanal workshops, foundling houses and colonial hospitals, and college gymnasiums and state office buildings. Together, they reveal how notions of masculinity and femininity became embedded in and expressed through the materials of daily life. Working with Paper uncovers the intricate negotiations of power and difference underlying epistemic practices, forging a material history of knowledge in which quotidian and scholarly practices are intimately linked.

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Working with Paper makes an original and significant contribution to the histories of knowledge, work, and gender through the lens of one extremely important material. It is itself a valuable epistemic paper tool for students and experts alike.

Medical History

This is an incredibly thoughtful collection of essays. Each presents its material and insights clearly, and several shed light on practices and people who should be central to the ways that historians think about labor, gender, knowledge, and the mediating role that paper played in bringing these spheres together.

Metascience

The authors of the collection provide invaluable insight into the history of women and their making of knowledge through paper technologies. . . . Through the multifaceted lenses that editors and writers use to explore paper, this work provides a substantial intellectual contribution to many fields. In addition to the unique scholarly contributions, the volume also provides a substantial bibliography to pursue other works as well.

British Journal for the History of Science

This volume allows historians to see some of the tacit knowledge about paper’s rich materiality alongside its manifest social effects.

Clio

There is much new information about the governmentality involved in the use of paper. . . . Fresh insights into this topic also animate this lively and always engaging volume.

Centaurus

Working with Paper makes a compelling case for the ways in which women were part of every facet of the expanding influence of paper. Exciting and timely, this volume reveals traditionally overlooked dimensions of paper’s capacity to identify, record, share, distribute, expand, and participate in knowledge production, while drawing attention to important relationships among gender, women’s work, and print culture.

Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, University of Minnesota

Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge

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320 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

June, 2019

isbn : 9780822945598

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