”Ska det vara så jäkla svårt att ha med en ledande kvinna…” : En undersökning om gymnasielevers syn på genus, historiemedvetande och historisk identitet i deras lärobok.

Sammanfattning: The main purpose of this essay was to interview students to get an idea of what their views of images with women in their history textbook is and how the representation, or the lack of, can affect their historical consciousness and historical identity. In order to find out this information, an unstructured interview in form of a focus group, with four students in high school, was used as well as an own review of their textbook to give a picture of the students’ perspective. The main theoretical starting point was based on gender theory with a focus on the distinction between the sexes which was used to help illuminate how the book differentiates between the sexes in terms of representation. Two theories, historical consciousness and historical identity, were also used to highlight how students are actually affected by the potentially unequal gender representation in images in their textbooks. What this essay shows is that there is a very skewed representation with a majority of men in the pictures in the book and when it is a woman she is in a position of less significance of a man. This is something the students are not happy with in general and it shows that they want a better representation in the pictures in their textbook. This has to some extent also affected their view of their historical identity as well as the students’ view of the past, present and future from a historical perspective.