‘Heroines of Domestic Life’: Women’s History and Female Biography

By the mid-nineteenth century there were so many women engaged in historical writing they were becoming the subject of hostile reviews bemoaning their abundance.1 J. M. Kemble wrote in Fraser’s Magazine in 1885: ‘we [men] must plead to a great dislike for the growing tendency among women to become writers of history’.2 Underpinning this hostility was concern that women were ‘feminising’ history, at a time when it was reasserting its manliness through professionalisation. In spite of criticism, women engaged enthusiastically with historical writing throughout the nineteenth century, although the types of history women wrote were somewhat constrained by gender prescriptions stressing women’s essential domesticity.