03/06/2025
Call for Submissions to a Special Issue : “Global Histories of Gender and Old Age” for the Journal of Women’s History
Coeditors: James Chappel (Duke), Corinne Field (University of Virginia), Alissa Klots (University of Pittsburgh)
In nearly every part of the world, more people are living into old age. A demographic transition is taking place and already impacting politics, both in the forms of austerity-minded leaders seeking to cut welfare programs and natality-minded ones seeking to boost birth rates. This phenomenon has attracted a great deal of scholarly commentary—most of which has been in schools of medicine or public policy. This special issue seeks to bring historical analysis to bear on these pressing concerns.
We hope to bring attention to the gendered nature of aging, both past and present. Aging is very much a women’s issue: women live longer than men in the aggregate, and they also perform the vast bulk of the care labor that is required in aging societies. This is often ignored, as popular discussions of aging focus so intently on the aging of male workers or politicians. Historical work is no different. While there is a large and growing scholarship on the history of aging, it tends to take the aging male worker in Europe or North America, and his pension, as the primary unit of analysis. Through this special issue, we hope to reorient the field by showing how the history of aging is always a history of gender and by demonstrating how non-Western societies have grappled with the issue.
We understand “Gender and Aging” in a capacious way, to encompass histories of care and the family more generally. The special issue seeks to incorporate “age” into genuinely intersectional analyses of the past, understanding how age and gender have interacted across time and space. We also define history in the broadest terms, welcoming work that engages the past through literary studies, anthropology, sociology, art history, performance studies, or gender studies, among other disciplines. We are particularly interested in research that focuses on regions beyond North America and Europe, including but not limited to the history of gender and old age in Asia, the Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and/or the Middle East, as well as diasporic, transnational and global approaches. We welcome scholarship that focuses on periods before the modern or employs a broad chronological scope.
This special issue invites submissions that consider, but are by no means limited to, the following thematic approaches involving gender and old age:
· Work and retirement
· Generational relations
· Families
· Sexuality
· Politics
· Health
· Science
· Culture
· Art and performance
· Migration
· Colonialism and independence
· Slavery, bound labor, and freedom
· Religion and spirituality
At this stage, we are collecting abstracts. Please submit an abstract (300 words max) and a CV by 15 May to Corinne Field, [email protected]. We will make our decisions by 15 June, and the deadline for paper drafts will be 1 August 2026. It is our ambition to host a workshop, either in-person or virtual, in the Fall of 2026 to discuss the papers and plan revisions.
The award-winning Journal of Women’s History is a quarterly, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press that showcases the dynamic international field of women’s history. The JWH features cutting-edge scholarship from around the globe in all historical periods. For more information, see: https://jwomenshistory.org/.
JWH Style Guide: https://jwomenshistory.org/jwh-style-guide/
JWH Style Guide – journal of women’s history
The Journal of Women’s History follows the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. Each article, book review essay or letter to the editor must be double-spaced throughout, including quoted material. Each article, book review essay or letter to the editor should be submitted as word documents (.doc...
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