The essay is part of a round table on Cornelia H. Dayton and Lisa Levenstein' s essay "The Big Tent of U. S. Women's and Gender History: A State of the Field", which assess the state of the field, emphasizing how the scholarship of the past decade challenges U.S. historians to think in new ways about how to teach, synthesize, and design research. The essay focuses on the different meanings of the category of "gender", on the issue of the relationship between historical profession and new generations of female scholars, on future research subjects that can innovate the discipline.
