We could bring a gender history perspective to bear on the history of war, on politics and kingship as well as on revolutions. Gender history entered the historical mainstream. It was about power and about how sexual difference was constructed, through language and through a series of social behaviours. In short, through what we learned from the French philosopher Michel Foucault to think of as `discourse`. What did it mean, for instance, to talk about the rise of democracy and the rights of the citizen, if you didn`t look at how the very idea of political participation was constructed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as male? Gendered political history was about far more than when women won the vote.

We are now at an exciting historical moment. So this is an ideal time to be thinking historically about what all these changes mean. History, is a really helpful way of opening these questions up.

Keywords: gender, history, sexuality