Women's history, feminist history
June Hannam
The writing of women's history has always been closely linked with contemporary feminist politics as well as with changes in the discipline of history itself. When women sought to question inequalities in their own lives they turned to history to understand the roots of their oppression and to see what they could learn from challenges that had been made in the past. If a woman's role could be shown to be socially constructed within a specific historical context, rather than natural and universal, then feminists could argue that it was open to change.
Activists within the first organised women's movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries found that women were largely absent from standard history texts and this inspired them to write their own histories. Detailed studies of women's work, trade unionism and political activities were produced by authors such as Barbara Hutchins, Barbara Drake and Alice Clark.(1)
Suffrage campaigners were also anxious that the achievement of the vote, and women's part in gaining this victory, should not become lost from view and therefore they took an active part in constructing a narrative of the campaign that would have a long-lasting influence on subsequent generations of historians. The Suffragette Fellowship and the Library of the London Society for Women's Service (successor of the London women's suffrage organisation led by Millicent Fawcett) were established in the 1920s to collect source material about the militant and constitutional sides of the movement respectively, while many campaigners produced autobiographies about the suffrage years. Ray Strachey and Sylvia Pankhurst, both participants in the suffrage campaign, wrote histories of the movement that are now considered classic texts.(2)
With the fragmentation of the women's movement after the First World War, however, these pioneering histories tended to be lost from view. Women's history continued to be written – there was a renewed interest, for example, in the history of women's suffrage during the 1950s and early 60s – but these studies had little influence on the writing of history more generally or on the academic curriculum.
It was the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), or 'second wave feminism', from the late 1960s that would have the greatest impact on the writing of women's history. Political activists again pointed to the lack of references to women in standard texts and sought to re-discover women's active role in the past. Sheila Rowbotham produced a pioneering study, Hidden From History,(3) that was followed by detailed investigations into varied aspects of women's lives, including employment, trade unionism, women's organisations, family life and sexuality. A context was provided by developments in social history and the social sciences that sought to recover the history of less powerful groups – 'history from below' – and challenged conventional wisdoms about what should be seen as historically significant.
Feminists made a distinctive contribution to these developments by highlighting women's specific experiences in institutions such as the family, drawing attention to the significance of sexual divisions in the workplace and in the home and exploring the interconnections between public and private life. By looking at history through women's eyes they questioned familiar chronologies and notions of time and argued that family concerns, emotional support and personal relationships were just as important as waged work and politics. In doing so they went beyond putting women back into a familiar framework and began to reconfigure the way in which history in the broadest sense was written.
Women's history and feminist history are often used interchangeably but this serves to play down the specific approach of feminist historians. Feminists argue that the power relationship between men and women is just as important as that between social classes in understanding social change, and that a recognition of conflicts between men and women leads to a re-interpretation of standard accounts of social movements and ideas, as well as opening up new areas of enquiry. Thus, Barbara Taylor's study of women's involvement in Owenite Socialism (4) provided a new lens through which to understand the aims and ideas of that movement. Although women are usually the subject of feminist history that is not invariably the case, since a feminist approach can be used to understand all areas of history. For example, Sonya Rose and Wendy Webster have brought feminist insights to the study of national identity, race and citizenship during the Second World War and the post-war years.(5)
The writing of women's history flourished in the 1970s and 80s, in particular in the United States and Britain, although there were differences of emphasis and approach that mirrored divisions within the contemporary women's movement, in particular between radical and socialist feminists