In American colleges and universities, courses in world history as well as those in women’s history and gender history entered the curriculum at about the same time, both of them growing rapidly in the last decades of the twentieth century. During that time, world historians have increasingly sought to address on a global level the issues about gender raised by other historians within a national or local setting:

In exploring such questions, historians face a major problem: the scarcity of sources written by women themselves, especially in the premodern era. Furthermore, most of the female-authored sources we do have derive from elite women. As a result, scholars must sometimes make careful use of documents written by men, often “reading between the lines” to discern the perspectives of women. The documents that follow explore various expressions of patriarchy and the women’s voices that emerged within them in several of the second-wave civilizations.