Gender in history : global perspectives The title of this book would have made little sense to me when I chose to be a history major nearly five decades ago. I might perhaps have thought it an analysis of linguistic developments as gender was something I considered (and bemoaned) largely when learning German nouns. The womens movement changed that as it changed so much else. The feminist movement that began in the 1960s often termed the second wave to set it apart from the first wave of feminism that began in the nineteenth century included a wide range of political beliefs with various groups working for a broad spectrum of goals one of which was to understand more about the lives of women in the past. This paralleled a similar rise of interest in womens history that accompanied the first wave of feminism. Womens and Gender History Advocates of womens rights in the present myself included looked at what we had been taught about the past as well as what we had been taught about literature psychology religion biology and most other disciplines and realized we were only hearing half the story. Most of the studies we read or heard described the male experience man the artist man the hunter man and his environment though they often portrayed it as universal. We began to investigate the lives of women in the past asserting that any investigation of past power relationships had to include discussion of patriarchy that predominant social system in which men have more power and access to resources than women of the same group and in which some men are privileged over other men and some women over other women Ideas ideals norms and laws Early human history (to 3000 BCE) Ancient cities and states (3000 BCE 500 BCE) Classical cultures (500BCE 500 CE) The middle millennium (500 1500) The early modern world (1500 1800) The modern world (1800 2020).