{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03422409751523676, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007032348804500703, 'mean_word_length': 5.486322188449848, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice

In The Gender ofHistory: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, Bonnie G. Smith confronts readers with the proposition that scientific historiography has been inherently gendered and culturally influenced since its inception, despite claims that its methodology provides a means to report an unbiased, "value-free" account of past events. The author disputes the viability of the mirror as a metaphor of "a 'true' vision of historical reality recounted by an invisible, omniscient narrator" (p. 2), since this "scientific" narrative is told almost exclusively by male European historians during the nineteenth century. Missing from this reflection by scientific history is the woman author, whose amateur contributions were systematically discounted by professional male counterparts as superficial, repetitive, self-regarding, and "indicative of vanity or love of luxury--connotating the sensual rather than the rational" (p. 3). Instead, Smith asserts that the views of history provided by amateur women writers during the development of "scientific history" not only provided more complete reflections of the past, but also shaped historiography into a more comprehensive methodology that now must begin to acknowledge the "dialogical, multiple, and charged nature of writing the past" (p. 240). Smith's description of the development of parallel spheres of professional (masculine) and amateur (feminine) history writing during the period 1800-1940 provides valuable comparisons between the two approaches to historiography. Although it may be a truism to state that gender bias exists in any field of scholarship, the author provides ample evidence that professional male historians consistently discounted and dismissed the work of amateur women historians. The author disputes the idea that history of the past two centuries has been written by and mainly about men. Through detailed biographies and a broad survey of women's historical writing, the author supports her stance throughout the book that "there was no 'one' without the 'other'" (p. 13) when