Routledge Handbook of Gender and the 1960s

Editors: Mark Donnelly and Sinead McEneaney

Call for Chapter proposals

Deadline 13 May 2024

The editors of The Routledge Companion to Gender and the Sixties have been commissioned by Routledge to to draw together original contributions from scholars, artists, activists and others who can offer insights into gender issues and the 1960s. We welcome abstracts from scholars in any relevant discipline, working on any aspect of gender globally during the period of the 1960s.

About the publication:

The Routledge Companion to Gender and the Sixties will provide fresh perspectives on the transformational changes of the global sixties. The volume will feature work by writers who analyse how gender-related ideas and practices had a structuring effect on social relations during the decade. The Handbook will focus on the sixties as a phenomenon that affected colonial, capitalist and communist societies across the global north and south. The editors are particularly interested in work that explores the intersections of gender, race, class, sexual orientation and other subject positions. One of the key gains of such an intersectional approach is the composition of a new – and less western-centric – story about an emergent politics of feminism in the period. Alongside this, the volume will seek to explore how new discourses about masculinities and other gendered subjectivities were also formed at this time. It will also reflect and contribute to ongoing debates about the legacy of the sixties in relation to a gendered past and present.

We are keen to include work by scholars concerned with the following themes:

• the process of gendering the past and the legacy of the sixties in creating paradigms around gender and history;
• the narrative of continuity and change in respect of women’s social, political and economic positioning;
• the intellectual and cultural products of the decade;
• critical debates about bodily autonomy, which manifested quite differently in global contexts;
• the evolving nature of sixties historiography as the balance between lived experiences and academic retrospection shifts with time.

Note that this is not an exhaustive list: please consider submitting an abstract if you think your work fits into the broad scope indicated by the title of the volume.

Publication and reach:

We anticipate that  the volume will be published in 2026, when it  will emerge into the cycle of remembering the sixties as a discrete decade of change – the ‘sixties at sixty’. We hope to include contributions from scholars/writers at all career stages, and we are particularly interested in work that examines the Sixties outside the European/American spheres.

Chapters will be approximately 5000 words in length. First drafts of chapters will be due for submission in January 2025.

If you are interested in writing a chapter for this volume, please send an abstract of 300-500 words either in docx or pdf format to mark.donnelly@stmarys.ac.uk and/or sinead.mceneaney@open.ac.uk by 13 May 2024. The abstract should include the following: 

• Title of chapter
• Brief description of content and approach / main argument
• One line indicating your academic or other affiliation/career stage

We look forward to reading your proposals.