Liberating Women’s History? Feminism and the Reconstruction of History

This chapter will focus on the complex relationship between the development of feminist theory and the writing of women’s history in the 1970s and 1980s. While it came to be accepted that history was a phallocentric discipline, there remained much debate about how feminism should inform women’s history. As women’s liberation fragmented into various schisms, different feminisms evolved, each with their own specific agenda for women’s liberation, and consequently with a different vision of women’s role in the past. By the end of the 1970s women’s history had become a major vehicle in the struggle for feminist legitimacy, while feminist theory proved critical to historians of women deconstructing masculinist historiography.