Abstract
This chapter will explore the connections between women’s liberation and the development of women’s history in the post-war period. Women’s liberation was born out of the radical politics of the 1960s. Women’s liberation groups rejected masculinist political theory and structures and asserted the superiority of feminine politics, values and beliefs. They challenged many of the discriminatory practices women faced daily and demanded equal pay, equal opportunity employment, better childcare services and the right to abortion.
We’ve heard enough about history, let’s hear about HERSTORY!!!!
1970s feminist slogan
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Notes
Ann Curthoys, ‘Shut up you Bourgeois Bitch: Sexual Identity and Political Action in the Anti-Vietnam War Movement’, in Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 332.
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Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 3.
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Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover: Wesleyan, 1997), p. 94.
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Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (London: Polity, 1997), p. 192.
See, for instance, Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri, Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, the Political, The Professional (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999).
Delores Barracano Schmidt and Earl Robert Schmidt, ‘The Invisible Woman: The Historian as Professional Magician’, in Berenice A. Carroll (ed.), Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 423.
Linda K. Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 9.
Linda K. Kerber, ‘On the Importance of Taking Notes’, in Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri, Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, the Political, The Professional (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999) p. 53.
Deborah Gorham, ‘Making History: Women’s History in Canadian Universities in the 1970s’, in Beverley Boutilier and Alison Prentice (eds), Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), pp. 273–7.
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Jill Roe, ‘From Sydney to Boston and Back in Twenty-Five Years, with an Account of Many Strange and Unexpected Happenings along the Way, or There’s No Place like Home’, Australian Historical Studies, 106 (1996): 37.
Rosalind Miles, The Women’s History ofthe World (London: Paladin, 1988).
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For a detailed discussion of the development of women’s history internationally see Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson and Jane Rendall (eds), Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Women’s History and the Rewriting of History’, in Christine Farnham (ed.), The Impact of Feminist Research in the Academy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 1987), p. 36.
Joan Kelly-Gadol, ‘The Social Relations of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History’, Signs, 4, 1 (1976): 809.
Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 3.
See, for instance, Sheila Johansson, ‘“Herstory” as History: A New Field or Another Fad’, in Berenice A. Carroll (ed.), Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973) and
Ann Forfreedom (ed.), Women out of History: A Herstory Anthology (Los Angeles: Forfreedom, 1973).
Glenda Riley, ‘Continuity and Change: Interpreting Women in Western History’, Journal of the West, 22, 3 (1993): 7.
David M. Potter, ‘American Women in the American Character’, in John Hague (ed.), American Character and Culture: Some Twentieth Century Perspectives (Deland: Everett Edwards Press, 1964).
Between 1970 and 1980 numerous revisionist texts were published about the role of women of the Frontier. See, for instance, Lillian Schlissel (ed.), Women’s Diaries of Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1982) and
Sandra L. Myres (ed.), Westward Ho for California! Women’s Overland Diaries from the Huntington Library (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1980).
Margaret Walsh, ‘Women’s Place on the American Frontier’, Journal of American Studies, 29, 2 (1995): 243–8.
E.A. Grosz, ‘The In(ter)vention of Feminist Knowledges’, in Barbara Caine, E.A. Grosz and Marie de Lepervance (eds), Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critiques of Knowledges (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 94.
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© 2002 Mary Spongberg
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Spongberg, M. (2002). ‘Clio’s Consciousness Raised’? Women’s Liberation and Women’s History. In: Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_9
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