What Is Women's History?

In what way is "women's history" distinct from the broader study of history? Why study "women's history" and not just history? Are the techniques of women's history any different from the techniques of all historians?

The discipline called "women's history" began formally in the 1970s. The feminist perspective led some to notice that women's perspective and earlier feminist movements were largely left out of the history books. While there had been writers for centuries who had written about history from a women's perspective and criticized standard histories for leaving women out, this new "wave" of feminist historians were more organized. These historians, mostly women, began to offer courses or lectures that highlighted what history looked like when a woman's perspective was included.

These historians asked questions like "What were women doing?" in various periods of history. As they uncovered nearly-forgotten history of women's struggles for equality and freedom, they realized that a short lecture or single course would not be adequate. Most of the scholars were surprised at the amounts of material that were, indeed, available. And so the fields of women's studies and women's history were founded, to seriously study not only the history and issues of women, but to make those resources and conclusions more widely available so that historians would have a more complete picture to work from.

They uncovered some sources, but also realized that other sources were lost or unavailable. Because at most times in history women's roles were not in the public realm, their part in history often didn't make it into the historical records. This loss is, in many cases, permanent. We don't, for instance, even know the names of the wives of many of the early kings in British history. Nobody thought to record or preserve those names. It's not likely we'll find them later, though there are some surprises.

To study women's history, a student has to be deal with this lack of sources. That means that historians taking women's roles seriously must be creative: the official documents and older history books often don't include much of what's needed to understand what women were doing in a period of history. Instead, in women's history, we supplement those official documents with more personal items, like journals and diaries and letters, and other ways that women's stories were preserved. Sometimes women wrote for journals and magazines, too, though the material may not have been collected as rigorously as writings by men have.

The middle school and high school student of history can usually find appropriate resources analyzing different periods of history as good source materials to answer common historical questions. But because women's history has not been studied as widely, even the middle or high school student may have to do the kinds of research usually found in college history classes: finding more detailed sources that illustrate the point, and forming conclusions from them.

As an example: if a student is trying to discover what a soldier's life was during the American Civil War, there are many books that address that directly. But the student who wants to know what a woman's life was like during the American Civil War may have to dig a bit deeper. She or he may have to read through some diaries of women who stayed at home during the war, or find the rare autobiographies of nurses or spies or even women who fought as soldiers dressed as men.

Fortunately, since the 1970s, much more has been written on women's history, and so the material that a student can consult is increasing.

In uncovering women's history, one other conclusion that many of today's students of women's history have come to: the 1970s may have been the beginning of the formal study of women's history, but the topic was hardly new. For centuries, there had been books written that analyzed women's contributions to history. Most had gathered dust in libraries or had been tossed out in the years in between. But there are some fascinating earlier sources that cover topics in women's history surprisingly astutely.

Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteeth Century is one such writer. A writer less known today is Anna Garlin Spencer. She was better known in her own lifetime. She was known as a founder of the social work profession for her work at what became the Columbia School of Social Work. She was also recognized for her work for racial justice, women's rights, children's rights, peace and other issues of her day. An example of women's history before the discipline was invvented is her essay, "The Social Use of the Post-Graduate Mother." In this essay, Spencer analyzes the role of women who, after they've had their children, are sometimes considered by cultures to have outlived their usefulness. The essay may be a bit difficult to read because some of her references are not as well known to us today, and because her writing is a style current nearly a hundred years ago, and sounds somewhat alien to our ears. But many ideas in the essay are quite modern. For instance, current research on the witch crazes of Europe and American also looks at issues of women's history: why was it that most of the victims of the witchhunts were women? And often women who didn't have male protectors in their families? Spencer speculates on just that question, with answers much like those current today in women's history.

Suggested Additional Reading

• Women's History Methodology: Assumptions
• Basic Approaches to Women's History - different ways to look at women's history
• Theory and Practice - Doing Women's History: about the history, theory, methodology and practice of women's history

_{Images: © ClipArt.com, modifications © Jone Johnson Lewis.}

Discuss in my forum

• feminist theory
• women's history basics