Abstract
Women’s history has come a long way. Some twenty years ago, Gerda Lerner wrote that ‘the striking fact about the historiography of women is the general neglect of the subject by historians’.1 Historical scholarship was far from ‘objective’ or ‘universal’, because it was based on male experience, placed men at the centre and as a measure of all things human, thereby leaving out half of humankind. In the past two decades, the situation has changed considerably. In an enormous (and enormously growing) body of scholarship women have been rendered visible. They have been placed at the centre, and what women do, have to do, and want to do has been re-evaluated in view of social, political and cultural change, of an improvement in women’s situations and, more generally, in terms of a change towards more freedom and justice. More precisely, what has been rendered historically visible by making women a subject of research was, in the first place, their subjection. In the second place, however, it was their subjectivity — because women are not only victims, but also actively shape their own lives, society and history.
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Notes
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© 1991 Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, Jane Rendall
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Bock, G. (1991). Challenging Dichotomies: Perspectives on Women’s History. In: Offen, K., Pierson, R.R., Rendall, J. (eds) Writing Women’s History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21512-6_1
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