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The complaint of Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey , that history has 'hardly any women at all' is not an uncommon one. Yet there is evidence to suggest that women have engaged in historical writing since ancient times.

This study traces the history of women's historical writing, reclaiming the lives of individual women historians, recovering women's historical writings from the past and focusing on how gender has shaped the genre of history. Mary Spongberg brings together for the first time an extensive survey of the progress of women's historical writing from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating the continuities between women's historical writings in the past and the development of a distinctly woman-centred historiography.

Writing Women's History since the Renaissance also examines the relationship between women's history and the development of feminist consciousness, suggesting that the study of history has alerted women to their unequal status and enabled them to use history to achieve women's rights. Whether feminist or anti-feminist, women who have had their historical writings published have served as role models for women seeking a voice in the public sphere and have been instrumental in encouraging the growth of a feminist discourse.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Acknowledgements(p. x)
• Introduction: 'Hardly Any Women At All?'? Women Writers and the Gender of History(p. 1)
• Gendering History(p. 1)
• Gender and Genre(p. 5)
• Women Writing History(p. 8)
• Part I Men's History
• 1 The Classical Inheritance(p. 15)
• The Classical Heritage(p. 16)
• Ancient Historians and the Gendering of History(p. 20)
• 2 'All Histories Are Against You': Women and the History Men(p. 34)
• Reforming History(p. 35)
• The Historical Defence of Women(p. 38)
• The Science of History(p. 44)
• Enlightened History?(p. 46)
• The Romantic Reaction(p. 51)
• The History Men(p. 57)
• Part II Women's History
• 3 'Above Their Sex'? Women's History 'before' Feminism(p. 63)
• History as Feminine Pedagogy(p. 64)
• Before Feminism(p. 65)
• Reforming Women(p. 67)
• Local Heroines(p. 77)
• The History Women(p. 80)
• 4 History's Romantic Heroines: Women's History and Revolutionary Feminism(p. 86)
• The Salon(p. 87)
• Revolutionary Feminism(p. 89)
• Foreign Correspondence(p. 93)
• Romantic Revolutionaries(p. 101)
• The Staelian Legacy(p. 105)
• 5 'Heroines of Domestic Life': Women's History and Female Biography(p. 109)
• Domestic Woman(p. 110)
• Domestic Heroism(p. 113)
• Female Biography(p. 115)
• History as Domestic Science(p. 118)
• Feminising History(p. 124)
• 6 Women's History and the 'Woman Question'(p. 130)
• Women's History and Feminist Consciousness(p. 131)
• Before Suffrage(p. 134)
• First-wave Feminism(p. 136)
• First-wave Feminism and the Social Sciences(p. 142)
• The Social Sciences and Social History(p. 145)
• 7 Amateurs or Professionals? Women's History in the Academy(p. 150)
• Women and Higher Education(p. 151)
• The European Experience(p. 155)
• The Impact of War(p. 160)
• Women's History in the Academy(p. 165)
• History and the Feminine Mystique(p. 167)
• 8 'Clio's Consciousness Raised'? Women's Liberation and Women's History(p. 172)
• The Emergence of Women's Liberation(p. 173)
• Radical History?(p. 176)
• Women's Historians and Women's Liberation(p. 179)
• Clio's Consciousness Raised?(p. 184)
• 9 Liberating Women's History? Feminism and the Reconstruction of History(p. 189)
• Radical Feminism and the History of Women's Oppression(p. 189)
• Victim History?(p. 192)
• The Culture of True Womanhood(p. 194)
• The Class Challenge(p. 199)
• Women's Culture and Cultural Feminism(p. 203)
• 10 Surpassing the History of Men: Women's History and Lesbian History(p. 209)
• Sex Wars(p. 209)
• Women's History and the Lesbian Continuum(p. 212)
• The Elusive Qustion of Female Friendship(p. 213)
• Lesbian Sex and Sexology(p. 217)
• Sex Radical, Butch/Femme(p. 221)
• Doing 'It'?(p. 225)
• Making Things Perfectly Queer?(p. 227)
• Conclusion: Dealing with Difference(p. 229)
• All the Women Were White?(p. 231)
• Dealing with Difference(p. 236)
• Poststructuralist Postscript(p. 239)
• Notes(p. 241)
• Index(p. 293)

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Following in the footsteps of Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (CH, Sep'93) and Bonnie G. Smith's The Gender of History (CH, Mar'99), Spongberg (Macquarie Univ.) traces the history of women's historical and biographical writing from the 15th century to the present, focusing on how gender has shaped the genre of history. Initial sections examine how men portrayed women in history and the first efforts of women to write their own history. The author varies from traditional feminist historiography in her attempts to elevate the historiographic reputation of 18th- and 19th-century "heroic domestic feminism." The last section ventures into new territory, particularly in the summary of the ironic complexities brought to feminist historiography by the challenges of queer theory, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. Having successfully argued that differences of experience due to sexualities, race, and class obviated an essential notion of "women," these scholars challenged the very notion of "women's history" by the end of the 20th century. Spongberg gives readers a brief but thorough tour, but offers no answers to the troubled question, "Can Western historiography produce alternative narratives?" ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels and collections. S. S. Arpad emerita, California State University, Fresno

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Mary Spongberg is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.