Eric Hobsbawm & the (male) gendered space of socialist history before 1968
Jacobin have published a fascinating piece about the building of an electronic bibliography of all the writings of the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (link below). It raises many interesting and important issues about how we understand, categorise and use the work and ideas of an important historian like Hobsbawm.
One caveat well worth underlining is that certainly before the late 1960s when the women’s liberation movement arose in part from the Ruskin History Workshop meetings socialist history was a very male space.
It is better now 50 years on but there is still much progress required
Beyond Hobsbawm himself, the bibliography speaks to the shape of both the historical profession and left-wing intellectual life in postwar Europe. One of the most obvious points is that these were overwhelmingly male spaces. There are vanishingly few women listed in the bibliography. They do not appear much as coeditors, collaborators, or even subjects of research. Even the interviews listed in the database are invariably with men or by men.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/eric-hobsbawm-marxism-history-bibliography
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