new perspective. Volume 7. Number 2. December 2001

We start here with a brief glossary.

Women’s history. Women’s history is a term which is usually used to cover all history which is specifically about women. It has only, however, really been used to describe histories of women’s lives since the 1960s.

Feminist history. A feminist history is one which is for women whether or not it is solely about women. Feminist history is history written as an aid to understanding the roots of contemporary oppression of women and to guide political and social action geared to improving the status of women today. Thus, feminist history has a present- and a future-centred political agenda. That agenda is to confront male supremacy and women’s subordination in the present by studying its past. It is also important for feminists to establish (through their studies) that patriarchal relations are not natural or inevitable but contingent and changeable: dependent upon social construction and social power rather than upon biological inevitabilities. This allows for social change to improve the economic and social position of women.

Feminist history involves a challenge to patriarchal authority because it seeks to challenge historical knowledge that is put forward as neutral and value free by revealing the partiality and bias embodied in its concerns, the sources which it has used and the concepts and terms which are employed in the writing.

Gender history. This has developed largely out of feminist history but also as a reaction to it by those historians interested in the social construction of men and masculinity (alongside women and femininity).

Gender is the social construction of sexual difference and the meanings attached to those sexual differences. The study of gender involves consideration of how gender difference is formed, perpetuated and/or changed. Gender study involves consideration of unspoken assumptions and other subtle forms of gendered power and its perpetuation in society. It also involves looking at male as well as female gender as the two cannot be understood in isolation from one another.

Women’s history and feminist history have their roots in the nineteenth century. Most early studies were of feminists and significant figures in politics.

This gave way to more broadly-based women’s history but it was very much a minority subject until the 1960s and 1970s when it became very popular. This was no accident in light of the contemporary women’s liberation movement and the growth of feminist politics. Since the 1980s, it has developed into the history and analysis of gender (that is, the social construction of sexual difference).

i) The rise of women’s history was at first characterised by the writing of parallel histories of women’s lives to match the written history of men. The idea generally was to fill in the gaps in history which were there because of the male orientation of the predominantly male historical profession. The hope was to make history more accurate and comprehensive. (In the 1970s ‘herstory’ was talked about as the parallel of ‘history’ although the etymology of ‘history’ makes this entirely inappropriate except as a play on words!). Most often in this stage, women’s history was pursued quite separately from mainstream history and did not directly challenge it at all. From the perspective of traditional male historians, it appeared to be marginal: no more important than urban history or transport history or any other subdisciplinary branch of history. From the point of view of more radical feminist historians, much women’s history was justifiably open to the criticism that it was working along a parallel course and to an agenda set by male-orientated history: addressing the major debates already present in historical accounts and using the same periodisation and approaches (especially prominent here was ‘history from below’ looking at the lives of working class and poor women, women in social protest, etc, often from a socialist feminist perspective). Much useful research resulted but women’s history in this period, because of its isolation from mainstream history on one hand and because of its deference to mainstream history on the other, was far from reaching its full potential.

ii) The accumulation of research on women by the 1990s, led to a questioning of accepted views and alteration to the terms and timing of debates, for example, on the movement of living standards, the formation of class, on demographic change, the impact of enclosures, change in unemployment, etc. This has entailed greater integration of women’s history into mainstream debates and accounts but this has not actually progressed very far and women’s history is too often still very separate from the mainstream.

iii) Ultimately, for some historians, earlier developments have led on to a much more radical challenge to conventional history. Most feminist historians today see their work as not just setting the historical record straight by filling in the gaps (or writing more fully the history of the female half of the population) or even by reintegrating women into mainstream accounts, but by writing an entirely different sort of history.

i) Feminist history of the last few years has brought into question the very procedures of conventional history. These are seen as inherently problematic because conventional history possesses a scale of subjects regarded as historically important and as legitimate topics for research. These largely exclude women because they concern war, diplomacy, large scale economic enterprise, public cultural forms. In other words, conventional history contains criteria of historical significance which privileges the public world over the private, production over reproduction or consumption, political over personal, culture over nature. This makes many areas of women’s lives automatically much less worthy of study.

Thus, feminist history is now challenging what we mean by history itself: what the legitimate concerns of history should be. In doing this it also, of course, challenges the importance of existing chronologies and narratives as well as historical subjects. Most periodisations in history arise in relation to public and political life (for example, reigns of kings or queens, dominance of particular governmental forms) or to shifts in production regimes (for example, industrial revolution, Great Depression etc) and not to changes in private or family life, reproduction or consumption which are the foci of most female lives.

ii) Women’s history challenges the nature as well as the scope of historical research. Elton wrote in 1967 that

‘...historical study is not the study of the past but the study of the present traces of the past’

The crucial factor in his view is evidence, not the fact of past existence. For Elton, and many others, questions for whose answer no conventional historical source material exists are strictly non questions.

A feminist would challenge this positivistic view of history and suggest that without room for deduction, inference and reading the silences of records, women’s history cannot be written. Women’s history and any historical account which attempts fully to integrate female experience requires a different method and a different epistemological approach. (Epistemology means a way of building up knowledge).

iii) Women’s history also challenges the procedures of history and attempts to expose and undermine wider ideological structures. Joan Scott has written that we need to know ‘By what processes men’s actions come to be considered a norm, representative of human history generally and women’s actions either overlooked, subsumed or consigned to a less important, particularised arena?’

It is important to recognise that the professionalisation of history in the nineteenth century and its growth as an academic subject in schools and universities involved almost exclusive focus on documentary evidence. This led to a denigration of older practices and sources of knowledge of popular history and collective memory in which women’s lives figured much more prominently than they did in documentary sources, for example, oral traditions, folk tales, myths, songs, rituals and everyday practices.

Documentary sources for women’s history are sparse and difficult to deal with. Writing women’s history inevitably leads to a questioning of the effect which power relations based on sex have upon the generation and survival of documentary sources and upon the construction of the evidence contained within them.

i) Women’s lives and details about their economic and social activities, beliefs, ideas, are rarely recorded in written form. Men in the past have had more powerful and more public lives, have been more educated and, hence, have left more records. Most documentary sources record aspects of the lives of men or of their families drawn up by heads of households or by local or national male officials. For example, the Census enumerators’ books, land surveys, taxation or household listings, parish registers, etc. Even documents like diaries or letters are largely generated by men because women (for social reasons) generally lack self-confidence, and belief in the worth of their lives, lead less public lives, and so write less down. Women in the past were less often educated in active literacy (that is, ability to write) because they generally did not need this skill for business or public life as men did.

ii) Documents generated by women have less chance of surviving because they are regarded as less important than those generated by men. The latter are generally more formal and about public rather than private life so they are more likely to be preserved. Women’s writings are seen as less important or about ostensibly less important things such as recipes, shopping lists or family medicinal cures, yet these sorts of records are the stuff of important new approaches to economic, social and cultural history.

iii) Documents which relate to women have, generally, been generated in response to questions framed by men, about male concerns. The evidence has been collected by men. Women themselves have responded to questions (which have resulted in historical documents such as court records or census returns) in ways influenced by the male-dominated ideas of the time. Most documents which historians use concerning women’s lives are, therefore, biased and difficult to interpret. Because women’s history has to be so concerned about sources and their biases it does not lend itself to an unquestioning traditional style of history.

Women’s history suggests that some of the older popular practices of history need to be rehabilitated: oral traditions and oral testimony, collective memory, folk tales, alongside a different and more questioning use of documentary sources which involves more listening to silences and unwitting testimony (that is, more recognition of the influence of past gender relations upon the generation and construction of evidence).

This has found most recent and radical expression as part of a more general post-structuralist/post-modern approach to history which advocates the deconstruction of all ‘facts’ and knowledge into their component parts, paying particular attention to the role of dominant groups in society in creating knowledge and to the ways in which knowledge is often unquestioningly absorbed as neutral or value free when it is not. The idea is, basically, that knowledge is not a value-free neutral thing but a form of power.

Gender history has been particularly influential in deconstructing the language contained in documents from the past and in the historical literature itself and seeing the words and terms used as themselves embodying a gender-specific view of the world and of the past. Most key words important for understanding sources and writing history have been coined by a male-dominated culture with a view to understanding male experience. They have become accepted as, in themselves, value free or part of common-sense understanding when they should really be questioned. For example: ‘class’, ‘work’, ‘the economy’, ‘family’, ‘skill’, ‘knowledge’, ‘employment’ and ‘unemployment’.

Some feminist historians, notably Joan Scott, argue that you can never get a real women’s history or integrated history of the whole population without a full attack upon language (used by both historical actors and by historians) and its gendered structure and composition. The idea is that language constructs meaning and that there is no meaning without language. This is seen to affect both sources and historical writing.

Attempts to integrate women into mainstream history and to alter the terms of debates and the debates themselves to incorporate this, together with the new linguistic awareness, has raised the concept of gender as an analytical category high in the armoury of most modern economic, social and cultural historians.

There is more to women’s history than just putting women back into the picture as though they had somehow slipped out. The entire basis and procedures of academic study and discourse can be seen to have been inadequate where the history of women and, hence, society as a whole are concerned. If consideration of gender becomes central, history may become a radical new subject generating accounts of the past which are very different from those of traditional history.

FURTHER READING: Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 1988; Joan Wallach Scott, Feminism and History, 1996; Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: explorations in feminism and history, 1992; Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990, 1999.