aboriginal, or subaltern, or preliterate, or non‐Western women made sense of their gendered pasts when they had not shared Western categories for organizing experience

Judith Butler wondered if being female constituted a ‘natural fact’ or ‘cultural performance’.

enabling of relational analysis and its applicability to discourses, institutions, and abstractions,

making women relevant to historians of other subjects.

women assumed responsibilities ‘outside’ the home as breadwinners, house builders, skilled artisans, spiritual leaders, and heads of state

The presumption that men and women occupied dichotomous spheres was helpful for organizing women’s experience and explaining their perpetually lower status. But the model was rigid, leaving little room to imagine women as anything but victims of patriarchal forces.

no theoretical accounting for why more women appeared in some realms of activity than others, and why those realms continued to relegate women to secondary status. How were gender hierarchies constructed in the first place, and how did they change over time? It was not enough to trace women’s subjection in the past.

masculinist prescriptions of historical practice

Rigorous history

Literate women of the middle and upper classes had long written diaries, journals, and personal correspondence and maintained family relics and keepsakes. Monarchs, professionals, and social reformers revealed themselves readily, while illiterate and labouring women proved to have little time or inclination to save papers.

‘contribution history’

The first British women’s history courses emerged through History Workshop—a vehicle of new social history growing steadily feminist in its aims.13

anti‐war, civil rights, black power, New Left, Maoist, and countercultural movements, they were inspired to reorient their research both in content and perspective

official, written documents; but few of these sources provided insight into the agency of women, since most women, as yet, had no legal status as property holders or political beings

bscured women’s longstanding relationship to the historical enterprise—not just as historians but also as subjects of history.

unscholarly, unhistorical, and off limits to legitimate scholars.

rise of gender history cannot be extricated from the story of women’s history