Introduction

This Special Issue on women’s and gender history consists of substantially revised papers that were initially presented at the XXII International Congress for the Historical Sciences, held in August 2015 in Jinan, China, which met jointly with the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. A number of commentators respond to a position paper on ‘Women’s History At the Cutting Edge’, presented by Chen Yan and Karen Offen, noting the existence of contextual and political specificities that condition (and constrain or promote) the possibilities for researching and writing women’s history in their respective countries.