Abstract
The complaint of Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, that history has ‘hardly any women at all’, is not an uncommon one and until fairly recently few historians would have disagreed. That is not to say that women were entirely absent from history or that historians of women did not exist before the 1970s. On the contrary, it is possible to document women in history from the time of Herodotus, and there is evidence to suggest that women have engaged in historical writing from the first century CE.1 Since the 1960s historians of women have continually reclaimed the lives of individual women historians, ‘recovered’ women’s historical writings from the past and established traditions of women’s history dating back to ancient times. An overarching impression remains, however, that women are somehow situated outside ‘history’.2
History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in …. I read it a little as duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1818
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Notes
From ancient Rome there is fragmentary evidence of a history of the Julio-Claudian family written by the Empress Agrippina (15–59 Ce), wife of the Emperor Claudius and mother of the Emperor Nero, which is mentioned by Tacitus and other ancient writers. See Estelle C. Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986) p. 13. From China we know of the efforts of Pan Chao (c 45–114 Ce), Daughter of Pan Piao and sister of Pan Ku, court historians to the Emperor Chang. With her father and brother, Pan Chao contributed to the official history of the Hang Dynasty. See
Nancy Lee Swann, Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China (New York: Century, 1932).
Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘the Woman Question’ (New York: Routledge, 1991) p. 2.
See Gerda Lerner, ‘New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History’, Journal of Social History, 4, 4 (1969): 333–56;
Linda Gordon, Persis Hunt, Elizabeth Pleck, Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild and Marcia Scott, ‘Historical Phallacies: Sexism in American Historical Writing’ and Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle and Nancy Schrom Dye, ‘The Problem of Women’s History’, in Berenice A. Carroll (ed.), Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 55–74, 75–92.
Despite the explosion of interest in women’s history during the 1970s, only two articles were published that focused on women’s historiography in previous centuries. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘American Female Historians in Context 1770–1930’, Feminist Studies 3, 1 (1975–76): 169–83
Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers 1400–1820’, University of Ottawa Quarterly 50, 1 (1980), reprinted in
Patricia H. Labalme (ed.), Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (New York: New York University Press, 1983), pp. 153–82.
Jane Lewis, ‘Women, Lost and Found: The Impact of Feminism on History’, in Dale Spender (ed.), Men’s Studies Modified: The Impact of Feminism on the Academic Disciplines (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981), pp. 55–72.
Judith Allen, ‘Evidence and Silence: Feminism and the Limits of History’, in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross (eds), Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 173.
JoanW. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 3.
Linda Gordon, ‘What is Women’s History?’, in Juliet Gardiner (ed.), What is History Today? (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 93.
For various critiques of masculinist historical methodology see the collection Liberating Women’s History edited by Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1976); and
Natalie Zemon Davis,’ “Women’s History” in Transition: The European Case’, Feminist Studies, 3, 3 /4 (1976): 83–103;
Joan Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 139–65;
Michelle Perrot (ed.), Writing Women’s History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).
Bonnie G. Smith, ‘The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain, France and the United States 1750–1940’, American Historical Review, 89 (1985): 307.
See for instance Jane Lewis, ‘Women, Lost and Found: The Impact of Feminism on History’ and Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataret, ‘Restoring Women to History’, in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World 1500 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 3–17;
Olwen Hufton, ‘What is Women’s History?’, in Juliet Gardiner (ed.), What is History Today? (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 82–5;
Elizabeth H. Pleck, ‘Women’s History: Gender as a Category of Historical Analysis’, in James B. Gardiner and George Rollie Adams (eds), Ordinary People and Everyday Life: Perspectives on the New Social History (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1990), pp. 51–65.
Joan Thirsk, ‘Foreword’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 1–21;
Joan Thirsk, ‘The History Women’, in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (ed.), Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1995), pp. 1–11; and ‘Woman Local and Family Historians’, in David Hey (ed.), Oxford Companion to Local and Family Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 498–504;
Billie Melman, ‘Gender, History and Memory: The Invention of Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century’, History and Memory, 5, 1 (1993): 5–41;
Rohan Amanda Maitzen, Gender, Genre and Victorian Historical Writing (New York: Garland, 1998)
Rosemary Mitchell, ‘“The Busy Daughters of Clio”: Women Writers of History from 1820–1880’, Women’s History Review 7, 1 (1998): 107–34;
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, ‘“From Good Looks to Good Thoughts”: Popular Women’s History and the Invention of Modernity, ca. 1830–1870’, Modern Philology, 97, 1 (1999): 46–75.
Greg Kucich, ‘Romanticism and Feminist Historiography’, Wordsworth Circle, 24, 3 (1993): 133–40;
Jane Rendall, ‘Writing History for British Women: Elizabeth Hamilton and the Memoirs of Agrippina’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France 1780–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 79–93.
Daniel R. Woolf, ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England 1500–1800’, American Historical Review, 102, 3 (1997): 645–79.
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York: Oxford University Press: 1993), pp. 249–73.
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© 2002 Mary Spongberg
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Spongberg, M. (2002). Introduction. In: Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_1
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