Abstract
This chapter will focus on the complex relationship between the development of feminist theory and the writing of women’s history in the 1970s and 1980s. While it came to be accepted that history was a phallocentric discipline, there remained much debate about how feminism should inform women’s history. As women’s liberation fragmented into various schisms, different feminisms evolved, each with their own specific agenda for women’s liberation, and consequently with a different vision of women’s role in the past. By the end of the 1970s women’s history had become a major vehicle in the struggle for feminist legitimacy, while feminist theory proved critical to historians of women deconstructing masculinist historiography.
Woman is and makes history.
Mary Ritter Beard, Woman as Force in History, 1946
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Notes
Judith Evans, Feminist Theory Today: An Introduction to Second-Wave Feminism (London: Sage, 1995), p. 67.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 561.
See, for instance, Berenice A. Carroll, ‘Mary Beard’s Woman as Force in History: A Critique’, in Berenice A. Carroll (ed.), Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 29.
Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Feminism and History’, in Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 1.
Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 11.
Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals 1780–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5.
Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: New Left Books: 1980), p. 30.
Robert L. Harris, ‘Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro- American Historiography’, Journal of Negro History, 67, 2 (1982): 107.
Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro- American Women (New York: Praeger, 1991), p. 99.
See especially Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (London: Nelson, 1969), p. 140. In this text Tiger wrote: ‘I do not claim that females have no organisations; obviously they join and are active in a number of social and services clubs, but female organisations affect political activity far less than male ones… women do not form bonds. Dependent as most women are on the earnings and genes of men, they break ranks very soon.’
Barbara Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood 1820–1860’, American Quarterly, 18 (1966): 151–74
and Aileen Kraditor, Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968). See also
Gerda Lerner, ‘The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson’, Midcontinent American Studies Journal, 10, 1 (1969): 5–15.
For further discussion of ‘contribution’ history see Gerda Lerner, ‘Placing Women in History: A 1975 Perspective’, in Berenice A. Carroll (ed.), Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 358 and Lewis, ‘Women, Lost and Found’, p. 59.
Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’s Sphere in New England 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 197.
Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36, 2 (1993): 383.
See Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, ‘Women, Culture and Society: A Theoretical Overview’, in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture and Society (Stanford: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 17–42; ‘The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding’, Signs 3 (1980): 389–417 and
Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male As Nature is to Culture?’, in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture and Society (Stanford: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 67–88.
Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: David McKay, 1974).
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America’, Signs, 1 (1975): 3.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘Politics and Culture in Women’s History: A Symposium’, Feminist Studies, 6 (1980): 55.
Mary P. Ryan, ‘The Power of Women’s Networks’, in Judith Newton, Mary P. Ryan and Judith R. Walkowitz (eds), Sex and Class in Women’s History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 167–86;
Blanche Wiesen Cook, ‘Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman’, in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (eds), A Heritage of Her Own (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), pp. 412–44;
Estelle Freedman, ‘Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism 1870–1930’,Feminist Studies, 5, 3 (1979): 512–29;
Katherine Kish Sklar, ‘Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers’, Signs, 4 (1985): 658–77 and
Nancy Sahli, ‘Smashing: Women’s Relationships Before the Fall’, Chrysalis, 8 (1979): 17–27.
Nancy A. Hewitt, ‘Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women’s history in the 1980s’, Social History, 10, 3 (1985): 301.
Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (London: Virago, 1984), p. 18.
Alice Echols, ‘The New Feminism of Yin and Yang’, in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (London: Virago, 1984), p. 71.
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© 2002 Mary Spongberg
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Spongberg, M. (2002). Liberating Women’s History? Feminism and the Reconstruction of History. In: Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_10
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