Twenty-First Century Women’s Historiography

The concept of women’s history was truly a fundamental change in historiography (paradigm shift), not only in methodology or theory, but also in whom could and should be included in historical discourse. This shift included women as a subject matter, but also as historical authors. In the twenty-first century, historians’ research in women and gender history expanded to include not only women but other marginalized groups by blending post-modernism, post-colonialism, and third wave feminism.

Over the last two centuries there have been many historiographical paradigm shifts; each one changing the focus, methodology, and breadth of their historical purview. However each shift that questioned how history had been written did not begin to include women until the the late twentieth century. Beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides writing about histical moments in ancient times, each shift expanded and challenged the status quo of the period. In the medieval ages, the emphasis on religion and teleological (finality as the purpose of history) emphasis changed in the Enlightenment during the eighteenth century, with a break away from the Church. The enlightment approach was then replaced with Leopold von Ranke in the early 1800s who demanded scientific approaches to history and focused on political history. The Annales School in France broke away from this tradition in the early twentieth century, explored the concept of total history and began to include common people, but not women. Marxist history which focused on class struggle opened a new realm of people and history to reseach, but again had no emphasis on women, depsite them being part of the poor classes emphasized.

Women’s history was developed alongside second wave feminism and an academic shift towards cultural history in the 1960s. Second wave feminists questioned what it meant to be a woman in the late twentieth century and how women should be able to move throughout the world and challenged society to view women as important. As a result, second wave feminism addressed many issues that faced women in academia such as the sexual harassment and discrimination. The 1960s and 1970s were times in which students, both male and female, demanded more college curriculum that was pertinent to the issues they faced (Popkin 2016, 129). Increased numbers of female students in academia, the rise of second wave feminism and female independence, and post-modernism created what would become women’s history.

Twenty-first century historians in gender and women’s history built off the pioneering work published during the 1970s and 1980s. Crucial historians whose work fundamentally changed historiography are Joan W. Scott, Gerda Lerner, and Bonnie Smith. Joan Scott’s article Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis criticized how academia viewed women and gender as synonymous and challenged the concept that it was a niche subject. This article fundamentally changed feminist and women’s history. This article was so impactful Scott responded to it in two separate articles Unanswered Questions in 2008 and Gender: Still A Useful Category of Historical Analysis in 2010. In her article Unanswered Questions, Scott states “I was giving voice to – not inventing – some of the ideas and questions that the feminist movement had posed, looking for ways to turn political questions into historical ones” (Scott 2010, 1422). These women continue their historical research through the twenty-first century and have inspired many historians who continue to use their groundbreaking works.

Post-modernism, which has its roots in the cultural and linguistic shifts that academia experienced in the 1960s crucial role in the movement of inclusion of otherwise marginalized people. The “linguistic turn” emphasized that language was the key to understand history and led to a new “cultural history” which emphasized an interpretive search for meaning which challenged long held assumptions about historiography and other social sciences (Popkin 2016, 135). Post-modernism challenged historians to analyze and criticize how history was written, who history was written for, written by, and written about.

An influential post-modernist who impacted women’s history is Michel Foucault. He is considered a pioneer in gender theory, especially his book The History of Sexuality, published between 1976 and 1984. Foucault questioned what sexuality is, how society interacted with it, and challenged many long-held beliefs regarding sexual feelings and actions (Foucault, 1974). Foucault’s challenges to the way sexuality had been represented in history created new ways of interpreting and understanding sexuality. Foucault’s challenge to language and categorization had a huge impact within various fields of study. This impact can be seen as an influence in many historian’s work, such as Victoria Harris’s paper Sex on the Margins: New Directions in the Historiography of Sexuality and Gender. Harris uses Foucault’s analysis of gender as the foundation and starting point of her historiographical analysis, continuing through works published after 2000 (Harris 2010). Foucault created a whole new world of questions, theories, and contexts within the past that historians can explore and analyze.

Women’s history and gender analysis have impacted post-colonial historiography in an irreversible and symbiotic approach (Nair 2008, 60). Discussions surrounding race and gender during the 1980s led to a new global awareness of non-Western representation. An example of this is the creation of the Subaltern Studies Group in India. This group was created in India during the 1980s and focused on the silent poor and women within Indian history. They grappled with scare documentation of these groups as well as the necessity of using documents created by the ruling British administration (Popkin 2016, 148).

Subaltern and post-colonial studies have grown exponentially during the twenty-first century due to historians such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and his article Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts? challenging ethnocentrism in non-European historiography. The blending of subaltern, post-colonial and women’s history is seen in Janaki Nair’s article, The Troubled Realtionship of Feminism and History. Nair analyzes the academic presence of women’s history and its impact on feminism in India and Indian history. Nair builds the foundation her analysis off of the influential contributions made by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Joan Scott (Nair 2008). When post-colonialsim and subaltern studies are combined with women and gender analysis, they create a rich and complex history of near-forgotten and excluded people.

Women’s history in the twenty-first century was strongly influenced by third wave feminism. Third wave feminism gained its identity with the article published in Ms. Magazine, Becoming Third Wave, by Rebecca Walker. (It is important to note that Rebecca Walker’s mother, whom she references in her article, was prominent second wave feminist, Alice Walker). Walker’s article articulated the challenges that women faced and demanded action from all women to make a societal change:

I am ready to decide, as my mother decided before me,to devote much of my energy to the history, health, and healing of women… To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of my life. It is to search for personal clarity in the midst of systemic destruction, to join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand power structures with the intention of challenging them… I write this as a plea to all women, especially the women of my generation… that the fight is far from over. (Walker 1993)

As Walker expressed, third wave feminists felt their fight was far from over and that all women should be included rather than divided. This created an emphasis on inclusion of other marginalized communities such as minorities and LGBTQ. Feminists and historians in the twenty-first century felt a strong need to increase representation and inclusion of these groups of women, which can be seen throughout women and gender historiography. Many articles, papers, and books written regarding women also include some other intersectional aspect to it, whether it be race, sexuality, or class.

The issues and goals discussed within third wave Feminism can be seen throughout scholarship in women and gender history. In 2007, an international conference convened to discuss the impact of gender in history and the future of the field. Martina Kessel defined gendered historiography as: “the rewriting and gendering of certain fields of history, women writing history, or the writing of women’s lives” (Lindner 2009, 314). It is important to remember the distinction between gendered history and gender history. Gender history, while also still under the umbrella of “women’s history”, looks at the relationship between sexuality, identity, masculinity, femininity, etc., in a historical context. The distinction between of women/gendered and gender is one of the more notable changes that has developed over the last eighteen years. While Scott had first expressed this idea in 1986, it was not until the twenty-first century it was commonly discussed.

While women’s history and gender history has made huge strides since 2000, there are still many challenges that women in the field of history as well as women’s history faces. One of the challenges of using the lens of women or gender in a historical narrative, or being a female historian, is that their work is frequently categorized as “feminist”, which can be perceived as “radical” (Nair, Janaki. 2008). In Beverly Southgate’s book, What is History For?, he digresses away from Bonnie Smith’s criticisms of self-gendering history as male with a disclaimer that her argument “may sound initially like the paranoid raving of a latter-day feminist” (Southgate 2005, 80). It is only after this disclaimer that he continues his analysis of Bonnie Smith’s criticisms to argue that gendering the past is one of historian’s hidden agendas.

Historians who research gender and women during have hoped to bring more representation to the field, including previously ignored groups. Notably, such groups include those of whom are transgender, intersex, and otherwise non-binary and how they interacted within their society. (It is crucial to remember not all women’s history or female historians are feminist, nor does all feminist history have to be solely about women or written by women.) An amazing example is the article by David Rubin, “’An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name’: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender”. Rubin uses feminist methodology to trace the role intersex played in the development of gender in the twentieth-century biomedicine. (Intersex is defined as: Relating to or denoting a person that has both male and female sex organs or other sexual characteristics (Oxford Dictionary)). Rubin reanalyzes second wave feminism into a new and more expansive theory:

While second-wave feminists theorized the social construction of gender to critique the determinist fallacy that “anatomy is destiny,” feminist and queer scholars have more recently pushed at the limits of gender constructionism, asking whether the very frame of binary gender naturalizes heteronormativity, sexual dimorphism, and the relations of power that underlie those structures. (Rubin 2012, 21)

Riley further continues his analysis of intersex and its history within biomedicine, feminism, and culture to argue that “intersex is actually central to the history of the analytic categories that have fundamentally shaped the diverse intellectual trajectories, paradigms, pedagogies, and politics of the field” (Rubin 2012, 23). He cites many influential historians and theorists such as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Ann Oakely, and Denise Riley who opened the door to gender and sexuality studies and pushed the boundary even further. Rubin’s argument would never have come to fruition without the work of historians and theorists who’d come before him challenging the status quo of who should consider historically relevant.

Women have not only struggled to find recognition in the profession (outside of feminism), but women’s history has struggled to find its place in the historical record. Jeremy Popkin explains in his book, From Herodotus to H-Net, “women in history experienced considerable frustration and often outright anger as they pushed to expand their career opportunities and gain recognition with the profession” (Popkin, Jeremy. 2016. 144). Martina Kessle further explains “Women wrote themselves back into the profession, they often did not succeed in writing themselves back into the national canon” (Lindner 2009, 314). Women are more able to participate in the historical profession, while still often being labeled feminist regardless of its methods or theory, and yet women as significant historical figures has yet to come to fruition.

Expanding the scope of history of whom should be included in our historical canon should not be filtered or censored, but encouraged and embraced. Overall, women’s history and gender history has experienced a growth of subject matter, has expanded its representation of society and included many more marginalized groups than had been considered in its creation. The field still continues to expand to other historical theories and methodologies and has strong roots in its feminist background. In time, not only will women be written back into the mainstream and national histories, but other marginalized communities of people.

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