Introduction

The complaint of Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, that history has ‘hardly any women at all’, is not an uncommon one and until fairly recently few historians would have disagreed. That is not to say that women were entirely absent from history or that historians of women did not exist before the 1970s. On the contrary, it is possible to document women in history from the time of Herodotus, and there is evidence to suggest that women have engaged in historical writing from the first century CE.1 Since the 1960s historians of women have continually reclaimed the lives of individual women historians, ‘recovered’ women’s historical writings from the past and established traditions of women’s history dating back to ancient times. An overarching impression remains, however, that women are somehow situated outside ‘history’.2