Second-wave historians rebuilt the archive of women’s pasts
Women’s history studies women’s roles and the methods needed to recover them, including rights movements. Its scholarly centers grew in the United States and Britain as second-wave feminist historians, armed with social history tools, hunted lives textbooks had skipped.
The founders of the field were activists in women's liberation who went looking for the lives of their foremothers and found almost nothing in print. History had been written largely by men about war, politics, diplomacy and administration, and when women appeared at all they were cast as wives, mothers, daughters or mistresses. The field is therefore openly revisionist, questioning what counts as historically worthy and tracing how race, class and status shaped women's lives differently. Early work recovered lost stories; later scholarship folded women's experience into mainstream narratives and fed gender studies and feminist theory.
There were forerunners. In 1801 the Welsh protofeminist Hester Thrale published Retrospection, a popular history from a woman's viewpoint; one reviewer sneered that it read like an old lady's dreams, but it is now read as feminist history and even as anticipating Marxian ideas. Regional fields matured late. Scottish women's history took shape only in the 1980s, and most work on women before 1700 dates from after 1980, drawing on letters, memoirs, poetry and court records. In Ireland such studies were rare before 1990 and now number some 3,000 books and articles. France produced heavy research output with almost no dedicated university departments, fuelled by strong public interest.
The research reveals how narrow many lives were. Before the 19th century a young woman lived under her father's authority until marriage transferred her to her husband, and a decent match required a dowry that poorer women had to earn themselves. German law did let women keep property rights over dowries and inheritances, valuable when high mortality meant repeated marriages. Enlightenment thinkers largely saw women as destined to be wives and mothers, and in the German state founded in 1871 unmarried women were mocked, with work as governesses or nuns among their few respectable options.
Wartime drafted women into jobs reserved for men, only for peace to push them back into domestic and service work.
Source: Women's history
