Textbooks accompany young people throughout their childhood and youth and shape their value systems. Despite much competition from other educational media, textbooks have retained their importance, particularly in the core subjects. This innovative, interdisciplinary work investigates how concepts of gender are applied in textbooks, and how language is used to convey those concepts. The recipient of this award examined textbooks published between the 1890s and the 2010s for German and mathematics – that is to say, books that do not explicitly address questions of gender. But as textbooks nevertheless depict the knowledge deemed to be acceptable or desirable by policy-makers, they illustrate the gender roles that were to determine each generation’s perceptions. Using a linguistic approach, the work questions how textbooks refer to gender, who influences these depictions, how these processes are woven into the overall social context and what changes are visible over the course of the 120-year period covered by the study. The author also explores the institutional factors that influence the creation of textbooks and interviewed textbook authors and publishing representatives to expand upon this theme.

This innovative work, both in terms of textbook research and gender linguistics, provides an exceptional disciplinary overview and demonstrates outstanding methodology. The depth of findings is fascinating and insightful – such as, for example, those concerning the collective forms of speech used during the Third Reich, or the efforts towards equal representation of the sexes in the 1980s, as well as the waning interest in the use of gender-sensitive language since the turn of the millennium. This highly informative work of superb academic quality systematically and convincingly illustrates how general linguistic developments can affect attitudes to gender.