Herstory to Gender History: The Evolution of Feminist Historiography

The primary project of early women’s liberation, during the 1960s and 1970s, was ‘herstory’—a term with multiple connotations. In 1975, historian Gerda Lerner critiqued its compensatory tone, labeling it ‘contribution history’ that failed to challenge male conceptual frameworks. Nonetheless, most scholars agree this phase was a necessary precursor to more sophisticated conceptions of women’s history. It represented an essential first step in making women visible within the historical narrative, setting the stage for future theoretical advancements.

Fundamentally, herstory was a reclaiming of a masculinist enterprise; feminists argued that history had always been ‘his story’, written by and for men. The operative term, aligned with new social history, was agency. Objectives included relating male-centered history from a female viewpoint and privileging women’s experiences so they featured as historical actors. At this stage, the priority was retrieval—discovering women in both male spheres and uniquely feminine realms—with analysis of their positioning left for later. This work inherently revealed women’s exclusion from notable public events, highlighting their lives in the everyday, domestic, and private sphere.

Feminists hoped herstory would perform consciousness-raising. As contemporary women acquainted themselves with the past, they would identify with a shared plight, fostering a sense of connection across time and culture. This was intended to create a sense of an oppressed but awakened social class. To facilitate identification, historians presented historical women in recognizable terms, often using accepted historical categories. However, this prompted early questions about periodization, such as whether the Renaissance or the Age of the Common Man held the same significance for women.

Much early work involved retrieving historical sources. In 1970, a collective founded the Feminist Press, republishing forgotten works by women. Publishers like Virago and the Woman’s Press revived both ‘women worthies’ and everyday women. Dedicated archives, such as London’s Fawcett Library and Washington’s National Archive of Black Women’s History, housed original documents and new scholarship. Titles like Becoming Visible (1977) and Hidden from History (1973) explicitly declared the intention to recover and maintain women’s visibility as historical agents.

Source retrieval proved easier for some groups than others. Literate, middle and upper-class women left diaries, letters, and keepsakes, while monarchs and reformers were well-documented. In contrast, illiterate, laboring, and enslaved women rarely left written records. Historians of African-American women found their subjects often dissembled or avoided writing. Brazilian historians noted a similar scarcity, where female experiences were often filtered through men’s bureaucratic petitions, making direct recovery of thoughts and sensibilities nearly impossible.

This scarcity extended to Latin America, Africa, and ‘subaltern’ societies, challenging historians seeking to give voice to non-literate women. In Imperial China, while short poems by women existed, few produced wenji (prose) or formal essays, appearing mainly as nonentities in official texts. Historians like Nigeria’s Bolanle Awe turned to oral traditions, mythology, proverbs, and folk tales. It was not until the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s that issues of perspective and the articulation of subaltern experience gained widespread critical attention.

Pioneering historians wrote about both exceptional and typical women, but this created a dichotomy. Exceptional women seemed enigmatic, while typical women appeared as historical oddities. Women were imperfect substitutes in narratives still focused on politics, business, and battlefields. Furthermore, herstory often pulled women from their gendered and historical contexts, isolating and peculiarizing them rather than integrating them understandably into the broader historical fabric.

The tactic of ‘add women and stir’ was insufficient without challenging masculinist historical practice. A sustainable history required new lenses and metanarratives where women appeared as collective, empowered agents rather than individual tokens. Until then, women remained at the historical fringes, not integrated into mainstream scholarship. The project, while a crucial consciousness-raising step, lacked tools to explain emerging patterns of oppression or the construction of gender hierarchies.

Seeking explanatory models, historians borrowed the concept of ‘patriarchy’ from social sciences to account for women’s collective oppression. Theories varied, locating its impetus in men’s alienation from reproduction or in women’s sexual objectification. Both focused on the family as the primary site of power differentiation, which then extended into politics, the workplace, and legal systems. The apparent universality of women’s circumscribed domestic ambit versus men’s broader public sphere made patriarchy a compelling, if broad, explanatory framework.

The separate spheres paradigm helped organize women’s experience but was rigid, often casting women solely as victims. In response, historians like Barbara Welter and Carol Smith-Rosenberg reevaluated women’s domestic culture on its own terms. They argued women consciously shaped this sphere for autonomy, moral authority, and informal power, using it as a base to subversively influence the public realm. This nuanced the victim narrative, suggesting separate spheres could explain both women’s historical absence and their agency.

However, these models lacked precision in identifying patriarchal forces and failed to account for differences across class and culture. Historians grew anxious to understand change in gender relations and moved beyond biological sex to examine constructed masculinity and femininity. While useful, the separate spheres model primarily framed experiences of well-to-do Western women, prescribing a womanhood inflected by race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity. Although feminist historians would later critique this binary as a construct of liberal political thought, it remained largely unchallenged through the 1970s.

As feminism diversified, historians addressed issues like birth control, radicalism, homosexuality, prostitution, and imperialism. Coverage of non-white, poor, and Third World women revealed the separate spheres ideal empowered some at the expense of others. For example, applying a Western model to Imperial China ignored how its inner (nei) and outer (wai) spheres were fluid, complementary, and sometimes bolstering of women’s relative status, unlike rigid Western dichotomies.

Other historical contexts further limited the separate spheres model. In some Jewish and indigenous societies, women held roles as breadwinners, artisans, spiritual leaders, and heads of state. North American Indian women found the imposition of Western spheres by missionaries stifling; converting to “civility” meant relinquishing political and economic power derived from diplomacy and agriculture. These examples underscored the model’s cultural specificity.

Debates made it clear Western historians could no longer ignore differences among women. The rise of transnational and multicultural consciousness prompted questions about universal oppression. Scholars like Chandra Mohanty urged skepticism toward a common category of “woman,” emphasizing the ‘politics of location’. As Estelle Freedman noted, oppression and liberation looked different across continents and socioeconomic contexts, necessitating a range of perspectives in women’s histories (plural).

Consequently, scholars from ethnic minorities, lesbians, and the working class challenged unity-forging paradigms. The slogan ‘sisterhood is powerful’ was later countered by analyses of internal division. Scholar bell hooks highlighted Western feminism’s racist, nationalist legacy. Historians documented how class, religion, and racism divided women, causing them to sometimes identify more with men of their group. White suffragists lobbied against black women’s rights, and privileged women exploited working-class women, acting as agents of imperial conquest that decimated indigenous cultures.

Historians also engaged in debates endemic to second-wave feminism. Radicals questioned whether seeking equality within masculinist institutions was desirable. Historians debated whether to argue for women’s inherent sameness or difference. A pivotal 1986 U.S. trial, where historians Rosalind Rosenberg and Alice Kessler-Harris gave opposing testimony on workplace discrimination, highlighted these tensions. The case underscored that if women’s history was to espouse feminist politics, there was no singular politics to follow, reflecting the field’s complex evolution from herstory to a multifaceted, critical gender history.