What is Women’s History … ?

Abstract

It is perhaps a salutary exercise in the midst of writing a book whose scope is as breathtakingly wide as Women in European Society 1500–1800 to define what one is about. For me, a history of women implies a triple commitment. The first and most obvious is to discern women’s past rôle and situation — in this instance to locate them in the social, economic, religious, political and psychological monde immobile of traditional society. The second is to give the history of the period a ‘gender dimension’: less grandly, to suggest relevant areas or issues in the period under review where the attitudes or position of women, differentiated perhaps by class or national group, influenced the course of events, and hence to make clear that to write history without reference to gender is to distort the vision. Thirdly, women did not live in society in isolation. Indeed, much of the evidence about them in the period which my book covers, given differential literacy rates, was compiled or invented by men and rests on male assumptions. In examining some of these, we are looking not merely at how men conceived ‘the sex’ but also themselves. At this point, the history of women becomes the history of mentalities.

Writing women back into the record? Rewriting the past? Ghetto history? The study of the dynamics of power and oppression? The discovery of heroines? Gender analysis? What is women’s history?