About Women's History

Four Perspectives An article by your Women's History Guide, Jone Johnson Lewis

In the previous article in this series, I outlined the basic assumptions of women's history.

In this article, I want to acknowledge and outline four approaches that women's history can take towards understanding women and women's roles in history and how those relate to the broader perspective of history.

These four approaches have developed more or less in sequence -- that is, the first that I've listed is one that developed early among those writing about women's history, and it's also that one that tends to first attract individuals to women's history today. The second developed in part out of the sense that the first approach had some flaws, and was an attempt to correct those problems. The third approach similarly developed out of a critique of both the first and second approaches, and the fourth approach is the most recent attempt to respond to the other three.

But the first three approaches haven't disappeared. Each approach also has its own strengths, and those who prefer each approach will point out the benefits of that approach over both "earlier" and "later" approaches. What I mean by this will become clearer as I describe the pluses and minuses of each approach.

It's not my intention in this article to fully develop each of these four perspectives, but to introduce them so that when you read about women's history, you might be able to see which of the approaches the historian is taking. In a future article, I'll show how some particular issue can be seen using each of these approaches. For now, an introduction.

Continued on next page (1 > 2 > 3)

Illustration: Modifications
© 2000 Jone Lewis
Text copyright 2000-2001 © Jone Johnson Lewis. All rights reserved.