Abstract
Women’s history is an area of scholarly endeavour still in its first full and variegated bloom. Historians of women have properly adopted no single methodological approach, but have instead developed a multiplicity of perspectives on how it should be practised. This is probably more true in the United States than elsewhere, for a number of reasons. In the American setting, ideology is suspect, and eclecticism accepted. This would be true even if, as in many countries, women’s history had been concentrated on the experiences of its own women. But this is not the case. While historians of women in the US have been mining the vast field of material on women readily to hand those US-based historians who study women in other parts of the world, more restricted in access to research materials, have had more time to concentrate on theory.1 Another reason for the variety of approaches in the field is the concept of women’s studies, which brings together scholars across disciplines to work on the topic of ‘women in society’.2 Historians of women differ on whether, or to what degree, they should utilise anthropological methods, for instance. There are serious differences between historians and students of literature on the uses of autobiography; yet the recent discussions on deconstruction by historians have been provoked by interchanges with practitioners of literary theory.
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Notes
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© 1991 Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, Jane Rendall
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Stock-Morton, P. (1991). Finding Our Own Ways: Different Paths to Women’s History in the United States. 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_4
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