The Professionalization of History and the Marginalization of Women as Subjects and Scholars

Prior to the late 19th century, women globally were recognized as both subjects and authors of historical works. In 16th-century Mughal India, Emperor Akbar commissioned his aunt, Gulbadan Begum, to write the Humayun-nama, a Persian history drawn from personal experience and domestic relics. Similarly, in colonial America, Mercy Otis Warren single-handedly chronicled the American Revolution, arguing men were too busy making history to record it. Women were traditionally seen as custodians of culture, teaching familial and national history in the home and authoring nationalist textbooks or fundraising for commemorative monuments.

The professionalization of history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, systematically obscured women's longstanding role. The new "scientific" methodology prioritized official written documents, which rarely recorded women's agency due to their limited legal and political status. As history focused on the progressive narrative of the nation-state, credentialed male historians concentrated on political, military, and constitutional realms, rendering women—associated with the domestic sphere—as unremarkable and impossible subjects.

Despite this exclusion, women persisted in writing history outside the academy, often through feminist activism. First-wave feminists like Jenny P. d’Hericourt in France and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in America wrote histories to legitimize women's claims to citizenship. Greek activist Callirhoe Parren embarked on an ambitious global History of Woman, while 20th-century Anglophone scholars like Alice Clark and Eileen Power analyzed women's economic roles. These pioneers understood that contemporary social and economic status was rooted in the past.

American historian Mary Beard extended this feminist agenda, arguing that academic scholarship privileged male primacy. She advocated for a "long view" of history using women's sources to reveal suppressed agency. With Hungarian pacifist Rosika Schwimmer, she founded the World Center for Women’s Archives (1935-40) to collect global evidence of women's contributions. However, her vision, like Parren's, was not fully realized in her lifetime. Post-World War II, academic consensus focused on political regimes and "great men," again excluding women from national narratives.

Consequently, significant post-war women’s history was produced by non-academic radicals. Groups like the Emma Lazarus Federation wrote socially conscious histories, while scholars like Gerda Lerner and Eleanor Flexner exposed exploitative masculine institutions. French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir provided a theoretical breakthrough in The Second Sex (1949), arguing that culture, not biology, positioned women as the "Other." Her social constructivist model was a crucial precursor to modern gender theory.

The political tumult of the 1960s created conditions for the academic study of women. The rise of new social history—embracing sources like diaries, oral accounts, and census data—shifted focus to everyday life. While initially prioritizing men of minority groups, this methodology ultimately enabled feminists to explore the private sphere, where women were most present. Female historians, now products of a democratizing university and radicalized by civil rights and anti-war movements, felt emboldened to study women’s experiences.

Institutional niches for women’s history began emerging in the 1970s, fueled by the broader feminist movement. Organizations like the Canadian Committee on Women’s History and the Berkshire Conference provided bases, while new courses were launched at universities in Toronto, the Sorbonne, and through Britain’s History Workshop. The International Federation for Research in Women’s History revealed divergent national traditions: U.S. historians enjoyed relative academic autonomy, while in Greece, England, Brazil, and Japan, development faced institutional hostility or emerged from outside academia.

National traditions focused on varied questions, shaped by local contexts. American and English historians prioritized suffrage movements, whereas Italian, French, and German scholars studied gendered divisions of labour in early capitalism. Scandinavian work often focused on the Middle Ages, Indian scholarship on antiquity, and Eastern Bloc research on Marxist frameworks. The availability of archives, like London’s Fawcett Library or the Sophia Smith Collection in the U.S., also directed research, leading to uneven global development due to disparities in funding, sources, and institutional support.