Performativity is an influential model for understanding the human experience. This collection considers how the approach may provide a deeper understanding of women's lives in historical perspective, using case studies that range from the medieval to the modern.

1. Introduction: Performing the Self: women's lives in historical perspective Katie Barclay and Sarah Richardson 2. Performing the Self, Performing the Other: gender and racial identity construction in the Nanteuil Cycle Victoria Turner 3. Writing the Self: the journal of Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, 1774-1843 Gillian Beattie-Smith 4. Writing Women's Histories: women in the colonial record of nineteenth-century Hong Kong Jane Berney 5. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's Travel Letters: performative identity-formation in epistolary narratives Meritxell Simon-Martin 6. 'A notable personality': Isabella Fyvie Mayo in the public and private spheres of Aberdeen Lindy Moore 7. 'The Subject is Obscene: No Lady Would Dream of Alluding to It': Marie Stopes and her courtroom dramas Lesley Hall 8. Body and Self: learning to be modern in 1920s-1930s Britain Charlotte Macdonald 9. Performing the Political Self: a study of identity making and self representation in the autobiographies of India's first generation of parliamentary women Annie Devenish 10. Eve Drewelowe: feminist identity in American art Lindsay E. Shannon 11. Women Activists: rewriting Greenham's history Elaine Titcombe 12. The Changing Face of Exhibiting Women's Wartime Work at the Imperial War Museum Alyson Mercer 13. Concluding Thoughts: performance, the self, and women's history Penny Summerfield