Amateurs or Professionals? Women’s History in the Academy

This chapter will explore the experiences of those women who achieved success as academic historians from the end of the nineteenth century until the rise of women’s liberation in the 1960s. While the vast majority of women who engaged in historical writing did so outside the academy, a small but growing number of women trained at university and took up places in the newly formed discipline of history. These women had to face numerous obstacles as they slowly worked to gain acceptance within the academy. They dealt with male hostility and were relegated to peripheral standing in the university system. These exclusions allowed women historians to form powerful networks of female scholars and to draw inspiration for their work from this sense of female community. The first forty years of the twentieth century proved particularly fruitful for women historians, with a number of women making significant innovations in the new sub-genres of social and economic history.