Women's History Review

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Theorising Feminist History: a thirty‐year

retrospective

Sue Morgan

To cite this article: Sue Morgan (2009) Theorising Feminist History: a thirty‐year retrospective,
Women's History Review, 18:3, 381-407, DOI: 10.1080/09612020902944437

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Women’s History Review
Vol. 18, No. 3, July 2009, pp. 381–407

Theorising Feminist History:

a thirty-year retrospective
Sue Morgan

Since the second wave of feminism, women historians have challenged, debated and trans-
Women’s
10.1080/09612020902944437
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s.morgan@chi.ac.uk
SueMorgan
00000July
and
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Francis
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(print)/1747-583X
Francis
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formed the way history is, and should be, written. This has produced a rich and self-reflexive
feminist historiography. This article examines some of the major theoretical shifts and turn-
ing points in feminist academic scholarship, focusing on four main areas of discussion—
early theoretical developments in feminist and gender history, feminist history’s response to
the ‘linguistic turn’, lesbian history, and the concept of ‘difference’ as examined in the
writings of black feminists, post-colonial critics and Third World scholars. The author
argues that in rewriting historical narratives through the insertion of women’s stories, femi-
nist history must continue to attend to its own need for reinvention and transformation and
retain its fundamentally subversive stance through the perpetual interrogation of dominant
historical concepts and categories

‘[W]omen’s history has revitalised theory, for it has shaken the conceptual foundations
of historical study’1 wrote Joan Kelly-Gadol as long ago as 1976. Over thirty years later
the prodigious growth of women’s, feminist and gender history would appear to have
vindicated that remark. The recovery of women as subjects and agents in the making of
history, and the simultaneous decentring of the male subject, has prompted the wide-
spread re-examination of fundamental historical presuppositions, not least through
vastly democratising the vision of who and what should figure in historical discourse.
Despite the ensuing exchanges between feminists and their male colleagues surrounding

Sue Morgan is Reader in Women’s and Gender History at the University of Chichester, UK. She is the author and
co-editor of several books on nineteenth-century religion and gender and historical theory, including Women,
Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750-1900 (Palgrave, 2002), The Feminist History Reader (Routledge, 2006), with
Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow, Manifestos for History (Routledge, 2007) and with Jacqui deVries, Women,
Gender and Religious Cultures: Britain, 1800-1940 (Routledge, forthcoming December 2009). She is currently
working on a monograph on religion, gender and sexuality in modern Britain. Correspondence to: Dr Sue
Morgan, Department of History, Faculty of Business, Arts and Humanities, University of Chichester, College
Lane, Chichester PO19 6PE, UK. Email s.morgan@chi.ac.uk

ISSN 0961–2025 (print)/ISSN 1747–583X (online)/09/030381–27 © 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09612020902944437
382 S. Morgan
androcentric forms of history-writing, however, it is the internal debates and self-critical
dialogue between women themselves that have done most to engender a richly
theorised, reflexive feminist historiography. How, then, have feminists set about rewrit-
ing historical narratives through the insertion of women’s stories? Through what
categories, questions and intellectual frameworks have they been articulated? And how
have feminists interrogated the ways in which traditional hierarchies of difference—
gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity—have been constituted? This article addresses
these questions through a review of selected theoretical controversies that have
animated feminist historical discourse during the past three or four decades.
I would like to begin with a few prefacing comments. My focus is not on the
historical ‘product’ of feminist scholarship, but rather the main theoretical forms
and directions feminist history has taken. The past does not, of course, present itself
to us in ready-made narrative forms complete with explanations for social change.
All history writing is therefore intrinsically theoretical, organised and formulated
through particular explanatory frameworks or epistemologies (theories of knowl-
edge). Feminist history has been theorised in very distinctive ways through its
commitment to exposing the gendered politics of historical knowledge. Yet, that
women have never united around a single theoretical position or methodological
framework is evident from the multiplicity of approaches—socialist, Marxist, black,
radical, liberal, lesbian, post-structuralist, post-colonial and transnational—that
continue to enrich the field. Nor is this lack of unanimity any cause for concern.
Instead, the consistently self-critical stance so characteristic of feminist historical
practice has been, in my experience, a source of tremendous creativity, optimism
and analytical momentum. If a single common purpose for feminist history were to
be identified, it might be, as Joan Scott suggested in her 1996 collection, Feminism
and History, the inscribing and re-inscribing of what is meant by the category
‘women’.2 Who is included or excluded in this term as the legitimate subject of
feminist history? And what impact has this had upon the theoretical and political
agenda of academic feminism? The heterogeneity of feminist historical theory is
further illustrated in the distinctions often made between women’s, feminist and
gender history.3 Instead of the tendency to present their relationship in terms of a
linear, progressive narrative of the displacement of women’s and feminist history by
gender history, I would argue that these approaches have co-existed alongside each
other in mutually productive ways. Indeed, it is at the various points of intersection
and overlap between these three perspectives that much theoretical controversy and
innovation has taken place. For this reason they are all represented here under the
general rubric of ‘feminist history’. The following discussion is arranged in a four-
part structure which focuses briefly upon early feminist theorisations of history, the
impact of the post-structuralist challenge, lesbian reconstructions of the past, and
debates around ‘difference’. No canon is implied here and many alternative organi-
sational schemas could have been proposed. My criteria for using these particular
areas of examination are the scale of debates they have elicited and the extent to
which they have prompted significant theoretical refinements influencing the future
shape of the discourse.4
 Women’s History Review 383
Bringing the Female Subject into View

The overtly political origins of feminist history and the way in which its uneven devel-
opment was shaped by differing national historiographies and institutional infrastruc-
tures has already been well documented, thus only a brief summary of the main
features of feminist history’s earliest phase is given here.5 What it meant to be a
woman and how best that might be represented historically was played out during the
1970s and 1980s in numerous exchanges around key conceptual categories such as
‘patriarchy’, ‘separate spheres’, ‘women’s culture’ and ‘gender’. Although feminist
history was an international phenomenon from the outset, these debates took place
primarily, although not exclusively, within Anglo-American scholarship, generated by
the desire to produce a recognisable, cohesive historical identity for women.6 Patriar-
chy, feminism’s first attempt at theorising sexual difference, proved persistently
controversial. For the British feminist Sheila Rowbotham, patriarchy was too inflexi-
ble and blunt an analytical tool to do justice to the full complexity of sex/gender
relations.7 Ten years later, in 1989, the US feminist medievalist, Judith Bennett, offset
criticisms of patriarchy’s ahistorical nature by calling for a fully contextualised study
of its multiple historical operations which included the presentation of women not
only as victims and resisters of patriarchal social formations, but also as colluders,
survivors, and beneficiaries.8 Bennett’s influential advocacy of patriarchy as the
theoretical life-blood of women’s history writing, developed most recently in her book
History Matters: patriarchy and the challenge of feminism (2006) , also echoed concerns
prevalent at the time about the meaning and purpose of feminist historical discourse.9
Was the field best served by a political focus upon suffrage and organised feminist
activism, often a fairly narrow cadre of female elites, or upon the quotidian social and
cultural experiences of a wider, woman-centred domain of home and family? Those
complex and often conflicting relationships between politics and culture in feminist
history were the subject of a spirited roundtable exchange in Feminist Studies in 1980
which debated the increasing ‘turn to culture’ in US women’s history pioneered by
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and others.10 As a theoretical framework, ‘women’s culture’
had grown out of one of the dominant organising tropes of modern European and
American women’s history—the ideology of the separate spheres. The methodological
longevity and durability of the separate spheres metaphor has been remarkable,
despite increasing evidence of the permeability and interrelatedness of the spatial loca-
tions inhabited by women and men in the past and compelling critiques of its chrono-
logical and class-based inaccuracies.11 Thus Italian and German feminist research
remained strongly focused around the public/private divide, for example, while a 2003
retrospective of the separate spheres in the Journal of Women’s History illustrated the
benefits of this concept for Middle Eastern and Brazilian women’s histories.12
The theoretical dominance of the ‘separate sphere’ was finally toppled by the arrival
of the concept of gender in the 1990s, although calls for historical analyses of women’s
lives within the broader context of their social and political relationships with men had
occurred since the late 1970s.13 Gender theory’s capacity to intersect with so many
areas of traditional historical enquiry meant that it was heralded by Gisela Bock, Joan
384 S. Morgan
Scott and many others as a powerful means through which to avoid the limitations of
the arguably compensatory, separatist approach of women’s and feminist history and
thus to refigure all history writing.14 As Catherine Hall later explained of Family
Fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780–1850 ([1987] 2002), a book
which exemplified the transformative potential of gender in re-imagining the existing
historical landscape:
we wanted not just to put the women back into a history from which they had been
left out, but to rewrite that history so that proper recognition would be given to the
ways in which gender, as a key axis of power in society, provides a crucial understanding
of how any society is structured and organized.15
Alongside such heady anticipation ran a more sceptical feminist response. An impor-
tant outcome of gender theory was its stimulation of new research into men and
masculinities—not as the naturalised understanding of men that had long formed the
normative subject of historical scholarship but as the culturally specific meanings of
male roles and behaviour. As Japanese historian Ogino Miho observed in 1995,
although omnipresent in history, men as gender, ‘their bodies, minds, feelings, private
lives and sexualities—remain[ed] transparent and unexplained’.16 June Purvis and
Judith Bennett expressed the concerns of many in depicting the shift to gender as a
dangerous ‘malestream incorporation strategy’17 that might once again marginalise
women and deradicalise the original feminist challenge in exchange for a more
academically palatable theory. Gender history could all too easily downplay men’s
privileged access to power, allowing patriarchy, as Lois Banner described it, ‘to engage
in that disappearing act at which it has been so adept’.18
Fears of the undermining of feminist history by gender studies, however, has
remained largely unfounded. Some excellent critical work on masculinity across differ-
ent periods and cultures has been produced in the last twenty years by feminist and
gender historians alike, and for certain national historiographies such as that of Russia
the political neutrality of ‘gender’ and its dissociation from ‘feminism’ (seen as repre-
sentative of the hegemony of western intellectual discourse) has proved extremely
advantageous in developing women’s history.19 And certainly gender history marked a
significant reorientation for feminists in the shift from a history of subjects to a history
of relations. According to Lynn Hunt in 1998, in terms of theoretical innovation gender
history remained unsurpassed:
Gender history is at the forefront of discussion about methods, periodization, the role
of metanarratives, and the epistemological foundations of the discipline—in short,
just about every general issue of concern to historians today.20
Hunt’s reference to periodisation in this quote highlights an area of gender analysis
currently undergoing further debate. In the Gender and History special issue on ‘Gender
and Change’ (2008), editors Alexandra Shepherd and Garthine Walker concluded that
neither women’s, feminist nor gender history had successfully interrogated conven-
tional periodisation despite early recognition of the invalidity of established narratives
of change for women. While feminist historians emphasised the transhistorical nature
of patriarchy and women’s continuity of oppression, gender historians have pursued
 Women’s History Review 385
synchronic rather than diachronic readings of myriad formations of female and male
identities.21 As Jeanne Boydston observes, the ‘primaryness’ of gender has been
invoked almost uniformly everywhere ‘regardless of the time, place or culture under
investigation’.22 As a result, important questions concerning precisely how meanings
of gender might alter over time and/or form part of wider historical processes of
transition and change remain largely unanswered.
Nevertheless, the global expansion of gender history during the past three decades
has been remarkable, with insightful theoretical contributions articulated far beyond
western Europe and the USA, from India, Australia, Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean
and, more recently, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Iran and
Japan.23 From this scholarship it is possible to see how the theoretical dynamism of
early feminist history produced ‘paradoxical results’24 whereby the increasing plurality
of women’s historical experiences destabilised and undermined the original intention
for a coherent, univocal feminist identity. The entry of post-structuralist theories of
identity and knowledge into feminist historical discourse that held out no certainties or
presumptions about the female historical subject came to fuel a particular hostility
towards the concept of gender. It is to these controversies that I now turn.

Deconstructing the Subject: feminist history and ‘the linguistic turn’

Post-structuralism came late to history, yet arguably no approach has stimulated more
controversy or brought the ‘theoretical’ into quite such sharp relief. As an appropriately
evasive concept to define, post-structuralist theory incorporated ideas such as the
decentering of the subject and the abandonment of ‘grand narratives’, but is probably
best known for its affirmation of the centrality of language in the creation of (historical)
meaning. The work of US historian Joan Scott and the British historian/philosopher
Denise Riley quickly became synonymous with this approach as they reconceptualised
existing readings of gender by focusing not on the comparative historical experiences
of women and men but on the way in which gender discourse operated as ‘a primary
way of signifying relationships of power’.25 As Scott remarked in Gender and the Politics
of History (1988):
the story is no longer about the things that have happened to women and men and
how they have reacted to them; instead it is about how the subjective and collective
meanings of women and men as categories of identity have been constructed.26

For Scott, this methodological shift was necessary because current theorisations of
gender had failed to transform the wider discipline as originally anticipated. She argued
that only by deconstructing the most fundamental categories of historical analysis—
women, men, identity, gender, experience, agency, subjectivity—could such a recon-
figuration of history take place. The post-structuralist moment was of a very different
epistemological kind, therefore, to previous feminist critiques, seeking to interrogate
the historical project as a whole and rupturing the assumed relationship between expe-
rience and identity formation. According to post-structuralist feminists, historical iden-
tity could not be simply read off some prior, self-evident social experience because
386 S. Morgan
language simultaneously arose from and was inscribed in ‘reality’. Instead, female
subjectivity was produced by the multiple discourses of gender, class, religion and race
that both valorised and gave meaning to women’s experiential reality. These ideas gener-
ated an extraordinary amount of debate at the time, ranging from the outright hostile
to the more strategically engaged. The fact that most leading post-structuralists were
men—for whom neither gender nor feminism was a primary analytical concern—did
not help. US historian Joan Hoff and British sociologist Stevi Jackson condemned post-
structuralism’s patriarchal, ‘misogynistic’27 origins, and even those relatively sympa-
thetic, such as the Canadian historian Mariana Valverde, commented on Scott’s uncrit-
ical tendency to ‘pull Foucault and Derrida out of the methodological hat as offering
solutions to … women’s history’.28 The vaunted radicalism of many post-structuralist
ideas, it was argued, had long formed part of feminist epistemologies. ‘We did not need
post-structuralism to develop gender as a category of analysis’, observed Catherine Hall,
nor ‘to understand that power operates on many sites, or … that historical writing was
a male centred form of knowledge’.29 Two roundtable exchanges on the impact of post-
structuralism for feminist history appeared in the mid-1990s in the Journal of Women’s
History and Women’s History Review.30 Three main areas of contention surfaced
repeatedly in these and other feminist discussions of post-structuralism: subjectivity
and identity, women’s historical and political agency and the language/experience dual-
ism. The remainder of this section will examine these aspects in more detail.
Although black and Third World feminists had challenged western feminism’s false
universalising of ‘womanhood’ since the early 1980s, the increased plurality of femi-
nist histories had not yet sought to undermine the notion of a coherent female subjec-
tivity or its experiential basis. Yet Denise Riley was to do exactly that. In her book ‘Am
I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988) Riley dismissed
any underlying historical continuity or ontological foundation for women’s identity.
Instead, she argued that the category of ‘women’ was ‘eternally in play’ through a series
of endless discursive characterisations. ‘The only way of avoiding these constant
historical loops which depart or return from the conviction of women’s natural dispo-
sitions’, Riley wrote, ‘would be to make a grander gesture—to stand back and
announce that there aren’t any women’.31 The suggestion that women were simply
effects of endlessly volatile cultural discourses elicited a strong response. Joan Hoff
accused post-structuralists of erasing ‘flesh-and-blood’ women in favour of a series of
disembodied linguistic constructions. Disconnecting women from their material,
experiential base, she argued, deferred feminism in the same way that violent pornog-
raphy objectified women.32 Given the profoundly materialist approach that character-
ised so much feminist historiography, it was hardly surprising that so many historians
maintained that sexual difference could never be adequately mediated by language
alone. ‘If Woman is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone
at Night?’ was the provocative title of an article by Laura Lee Downs, who argued
therein that:

deconstruction … leaves aside the dilemmas of women, who must live as subjects in
time … sexual difference is not something which can simply be argued into a corner
 Women’s History Review 387
and then left behind. Rather, individuals must inhabit those gendered categories, even
as they strive to unmake them.33
So post-structuralism had presented a key dilemma for feminists, namely, how was the
history of women to be written without a shared understanding of ‘woman’ or
‘women’s experience’? Without a unitary identity women’s ability to mobilise them-
selves and to develop strategies for political change was surely compromised? As June
Purvis remarked, ‘the emphasis on difference at the expense of what women have in
common denies the existence of women as a political category and as a subordinate
class’.34 Concerns surrounding the ‘politically paralysing’ impact of post-structuralism
and its denial of women’s historical agency have remained a live issue. In 1997 Chicana
feminist Paula Moya contended that ‘a politics of discourse that does not provide for
some sort of bodily or concrete action outside the realm of the academic text will
forever be inadequate to change the difficult “reality” of our lives’.35 More recently,
Padma Anagol’s examination of writings on sati has also queried the usefulness of
deconstructionism as a means for recovering the suffering experiences and agency of
the dying widow.36 But is it really possible or desirable to separate the discursive and
material realms in this way, to understand language as somehow distinct from social
experience? On my reading, this was certainly not intended by post-structuralists.
Jacques Derrida’s (in)famous phrase ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ was not a denial of the
existence of material reality in favour of the written word but rather an insistence that
the word ‘text’ implied within it all economic, historical and social referents.37
Similarly, in her reply to Laura Lee Downs, Joan Scott pointed out that the seemingly
unproblematic status of a material context always necessitated the selection of key
events or circumstances, ‘and so constitute[d] a textual moment’38 itself. The relation-
ship between discourse and materiality is always a mutually constitutive one; thus,
Denise Riley’s aforementioned declaration that ‘there aren’t any women’ was not a
denial of women’s existence per se but a salutory reminder that female suffering and
oppression in history was invariably the tangible outworking of dominant cultural
discourses on the meaning of what it meant to be a ‘woman’. Post-structuralists may
be anti-representationalists (disavowing any direct correspondence between the world
and representations of it which could be described as ‘true’) but they are not anti-
realists. It is not that women have no existence outside language but, as Louise
Newman has pointed out, that that existence has no ‘determinable meaning’39 outside
language—a quite different emphasis. Feminist historians can reconstruct women’s
pasts with alacrity, therefore, while remembering that such re-presentations will always
be incomplete and imperfect.
In their introduction to Feminists Theorize the Political (1992), Judith Butler and
Joan Scott argued that the refusal to critically examine the category of ‘women’ had
already legitimated many racial and class privileges, ostracising those who did not
conform to or fit in with what was an entirely unexamined notion of sisterhood. Rather
than ‘politically paralysing’, therefore, deconstructionist methods were profoundly
politicising, responsible for exposing the exclusionary operations of conventional
definitions of female subjectivity and agency.40 To date, post-structuralism has left an
as yet incomplete legacy for the writing and theorising of feminist history. We now live
388 S. Morgan
in a more ‘theoretically heterodox era’41 from which there can be no return to the unre-
flexive use of key analytical concepts or, as Susan Kingsley Kent remarked, to a nostal-
gic desire for a unitary female subjectivity.42 The work of Judith Walkowitz, Kathleen
Canning, Mariana Valverde and Lata Mani, amongst others, has explored women’s
historical agency through the relationship between the discursive production of gender
identities and the material context in which these discourses were naturalised and
resisted. And in this way they have rethought what Mary Louise Roberts described as
the ‘smooth surfaces’ and ‘optimism’ of the modernist story.43 Disrupting linear
narratives of progress in favour of histories of contradiction and ambiguity has been
unsettling, but to remain indifferent to the epistemological challenges raised by post-
structuralism is, even now, to risk reproducing, uninterrogated, the most fundamental
of historical categories. The exclusionary consequences of such action are discussed in
the next two sections through the challenges posed by lesbian history and the metaphor
of ‘difference’.

Searching for the Subject: lesbian history

Lesbian history, which developed during the 1970s and early 1980s within the emergent
history of sexuality and the political context of the women’s and gay liberation move-
ments, posed a major theoretical shift in the historicising of women’s lives through its
critique of feminist history’s heteronormativity. As Judith Bennett has observed, west-
ern culture’s long-standing willingness to disbelieve in female same-sex love is alive and
well in a women’s history ‘within which lesbianism remains a tricky subject and some-
times an unspeakable one’.44 In her influential 1980 essay, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality
and Lesbian Existence’, the poet Adrienne Rich described heterosexuality as a central
organising principle of patriarchy which prevented women from experiencing ‘primary
intensity’ with other women.45 Since then the historical reconstruction of female same-
sex desire has identified a rich legacy of lesbian-like behaviour and cultures including
romantic friendships, student–teacher ‘crushes’, passing women and cross-dressers,
butch/femme partners, transgender politics and a diverse range of female communities
and networks.46 Unsurprisingly, white middle and upper-middle class women (those
most likely to have left documentary evidence of their desire) have provided the focus
of such narratives. Yet even the ‘outing’ of prominent women couples such as Lady
Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby or Emily Dickinson and Sue Gilbert has proved
methodologically and conceptually complex because of the paucity of unequivocal
records and the effacement or normalisation of surviving accounts by heterocentric/
homophobic biographers.47 The relative absence and ambiguity of historical sources has
thus had a significant effect upon lesbian theorisings of identity formation. Beset by a
sense of ‘definitional uncertainty’, a powerful but problematic politics of identity has
dominated the discourse. As Martha Vicinus commented in 1994, ‘[t]he lesbian is a
popular subject for scrutiny—she exists, but how are we to define her history, who do
we include and when did it begin?’48
A further controversy surrounding the search for a lesbian subject identity was the
significance, or otherwise, of sexual activity. As Sheila Jeffreys asked in 1986, ‘does it
 Women’s History Review 389
matter if they did it?’ In one of the most influential theoretical frameworks in lesbian
history to date, that of ‘romantic female friendships’, the answer to this question was a
resounding ‘no’. Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: romantic friendships
and love between women from the Renaissance to the present (1981) propounded the
existence of a ‘golden age’ of passionate but sexually innocent female friendships which
was ended abruptly by the pathologising male discourse of late-Victorian sexology. The
influence of sexological readings upon modern lesbian identity formation has since
been energetically discussed, most recently in Alison Oram’s Her Husband Was a
Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture (2007).49 But it
was Faderman’s desexualising of lesbian relations that provoked a heated response
from those who felt that her romantic friendship archetype had essentialised passion
between women and erased the particularity of lesbian identity. Lesbian experience
could not be ‘subsumed beneath the good feelings of hand-holding sisterhood’50 for,
as Joan Nestle pointed out, to claim that ‘every woman is a lesbian’, as Adrienne Rich
did so famously, was merely ‘rhetorical posturing that obfuscated the material realities
of all women’s lives’.51
The subsequent shift towards an increasingly sexualised reading of lesbian culture
during the 1980s and 1990s took two main theoretical approaches; butch/femme role-
playing and literary historical representations of lesbian sexual desire. Reconstructions
of butch/femme culture through oral testimonies and community-based projects
featured predominantly in American scholarship, providing an important twentieth-
century working-class counterpart to the leisured, romantic friendships of earlier
periods.52 In the literary historical approach, the class limitations of the ‘romantic
friendship’ model and its tacit cultural acceptance were both challenged. Emma
Donoghue, for example, argued that eighteenth-century writers perceived lesbians as
‘a distinct sexual and social group’,53 borne out by the numerous references to
sapphism, tribadism or cross-dressing in British print at the time, and Lisa Moore’s
work evidenced considerable social wariness towards female intimate friendships,
underlining their culturally trangressive status.54 The recovery of women’s own self-
conscious narratives of sexual desire, as in Karen Hansen’s account of the intimate
references to ‘bosom sex’ between two nineteenth-century African-American women,
Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, provided new ways of theorising lesbianism as a
female, self-fashioned identity rather than the product of a hegemonic, male, medical-
scientific construction of sexual ‘deviancy’.55 Anna Clark’s influential discussion of
the sexually explicit diary of the early-nineteenth-century English landowner, Anne
Lister, presented compelling evidence of a self-conscious lesbian passion, albeit coded,
well before the advent of male sexological categories. According to Clark, although
Lister drew upon the cultural representations available to her at the time, she ulti-
mately ‘invented her own fragmented lesbian identity and confused the categories of
masculinity and femininity’.56 In many ways the recovery of such sexually self-aware
texts could be seen as contributing to a ‘minoritising effect’57 in which ‘confirmed’
lesbians end up as a tiny proportion of women, although the advent of more open-
ended definitions of lesbianism, discussed below, have begun to offset this. Women
like Anne Lister also raise other interesting ethical and methodological questions, such
390 S. Morgan
as to what extent historians privilege self-identification in their definition of who
counts as a lesbian. As Vicinus asks, ‘What kind of ahistorical presumption is it to
speak of “lesbians” before the formation of either communities or individuals who
used this word?’58
Queer theory, which developed in the wake of post-structuralism during the 1980s
and 1990s, provided one way out of the ‘identity dilemma’, not least because it aimed
to dismantle the category of ‘lesbian’ altogether. Whilst cognisant of the expediency of
traditional identity politics, queer theorists such as Judith Butler, Lisa Duggan and
Donna Penn rejected this approach as one which ghettoised theoretical horizons and
replicated oppressive practices under the sign of ‘lesbian’. ‘What, if anything, can
lesbians be said to share?’ asked Butler, ‘And who will decide this question, and in the
name of whom?’59 Instead of reading for identity, queer theorists read for difference and
marginality, queering the history of heterosexuality by examining the cultural produc-
tion of sexual deviance and mapping the diverse resistances to, and subversions of,
hegemonic discourses. Because queer theory encompassed lesbian/gay/bisexual and
transgender studies, some feminist historians expressed the need to remain vigilant
about gay sexism and maintain a distinctively feminist theoretical perspective on
lesbian experience.60 Queer theory’s over-reliance on modern, presentist categories of
sexual identity incurred further critique from theorists such as Martha Vicinus and
Laura Doan for providing an insufficiently historicised account of the sheer variety of
women’s sexual subjectivities and too theoretically narrow an understanding of lesbian
desire. Queer theory, they argued, suffered from its own reifications of identity, contrib-
uting to, rather than dismantling, familiar cultural myths.61 Despite this, queer theory
has considerable potential for writing lesbian history in so far as it has enabled more
incisive interrogations of the heteronormativity of dominant identity categories. It also
embraces a certain playfulness and ‘definitional fluidity’,62 reminding us that sexual
expression and behaviour will always exceed and escape our attempts to categorise it.
The last few years have seen an increased dissatisfaction with a model of lesbian
history based on the language of self-identification, ‘coming out’ stories or distinctive
lesbian markers and performances. As Chesire Calhoun observes, this approach is
based on the problematic assumption ‘that one is definitively and permanently either
a lesbian or not a lesbian, and that real lesbians can never be correctly read for traces of
heterosexuality’.63 Vicinus similarly notes that an excessive concern with ‘knowing-
for-sure’64 has led to a reductionist analysis of women’s sexual practices. In Intimate
Friends: women who loved other women, 1778–1928 (2004), she contends that ‘identity
history can be limiting; more interesting and difficult questions can be asked about
friendship, intimacy, sexuality and spirituality than who had what kind of identity
when’.65 Judith Bennett’s use of the term ‘lesbian-like’ certainly prioritises behaviour
over identity in her analysis of the variety of challenges posed by medieval women to
the dominant sex/gender system. Bennett does not wish to abandon the word ‘lesbian’,
as this defers to homophobia. However, ‘lesbian-like’ both confirms and destabilises
the term, she argues, such that a plenitude of single women—widows, cross-dressers,
sexual rebels and marriage resisters—whose life circumstances rejected patriarchal
norms and were thus full of lesbian possibilities, are included.66 Anna Clark offers an
 Women’s History Review 391
alternative metaphor—‘twilight moments’—as a way of explaining those forbidden
acts of sexual desire that women pursued in secret before returning to their ordinary
lives.67
Such concepts move lesbian historical theory well beyond the problematic (because
quintessentially modernist) notion of identity and, with their more open-ended, fluid
understandings of female sexual subjectivity dramatically undercut the hetero–homo
binary. As Vicinus reminds us, lesbian sexuality can be ‘both a part of and apart from
normative heterosexual marriage and child-bearing’,68 and historians need to find
ways to theorise the experiences of women such as Mary Benson, the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s wife, whose lifestyles continually blurred the boundaries between
conventional and ‘deviant’ sexual practices.69 Sharon Marcus’s book, Between Women:
friendship, desire and marriage in Victorian England (2007) , also provides a powerful
reading of the interrelatedness of hetero- and homosexuality, arguing that despite, or
perhaps because of, the dominant oppositional theory of male and female sexuality,
the Victorians were able to see intimate female friendships as a central and unproblem-
atic feature of lives organised around men.70 Signalling the malleability of women’s
sexuality in this way poses a major challenge to the ghettoisation of lesbian studies as
peripheral to mainstream women’s, feminist and gender history. But feminist histori-
ans need also to consider the ways in which lesbian sexuality has intersected with lived
categories outside of sexuality and gender. Almost thirty years ago the Combahee River
Collective’s pioneering manifesto for black lesbian politics acknowledged just such a
need for a multifocused analysis of oppression.71 As founder member Barbara Smith
later explained, ‘Black lesbians and men are linked by our shared racial identity and
political status in ways that white lesbians and gays are not’.72 Historians Makeda
Silvera and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu have shown how, in the USA, racist representations of
the hyper-sexuality of black women, anti-miscegenation laws and the emphatic heter-
onormativity of many African-Caribbean and Asian-American communities have
made public articulation of homosexuality akin to race betrayal.73 The way in which
dominant discourses of race, ethnicity, nationalism and colonialism have shaped
lesbian experience has also been taken up more recently by historians working on such
culturally diverse contexts as Bolshevik Russia, modern China, medieval Italy and
Australian Aboriginal society.74 This scholarship challenges the prioritisation of sexu-
ality over other complex factors, arguing that in certain circumstances women may
choose to subordinate their sexual identity. As Ruth Ford has argued with reference to
Australian lesbian culture, ‘Koori lesbians are more likely to identify themselves as
Aboriginal survivors of a racist colonial society, defining themselves primarily as Koori
or black rather than as lesbians’.75 Leila Rupp makes clear in an article on global
aspects of ‘same-sex sexuality’ that western dualistic notions of sexuality can all too
often hinder the analysis of homoerotic practices in the past through the privileging of
the sexual.76 Rupp provides examples of male homosexual relations from places and
periods as varied as ancient Athens, seventeenth-century Spain and modern New
Guinea, arguing that genital similarity is often less determinative than differences in
age or status. Without some way of theorising transgenerational sexual practices that
pay due regard to the indigenous cultural, spiritual and historical specificities within
392 S. Morgan
which they take place, asserts Rupp, we run the risk of over-simplifying and misreading
their full significance. Ultimately, the history of ‘same-sex sexuality’ may be able to tell
us just as much about class, age, religion, culture and other significant social forma-
tions as about sex.
Recent assessments of the influence of lesbian theory on the wider realm of women’s
and feminist history remain cautious. In practical terms, Alison Oram contends that,
in British universities at least, lesbian studies continue to be less problematic in
disciplines such as literary criticism, cultural studies and women’s studies than in
history, where it has gained only ‘an insubstantial foothold’.77 Yet even this briefest of
summaries demonstrates the theoretical significance of lesbian history, confronting
women’s, feminist and gender history with fundamental epistemological questions
surrounding identity formation, the ambivalence of historical evidence and the power
of authorial intention. In a discourse characterised by silence, gossip and denial,
perhaps the most provocative and exciting challenge posed by historians of lesbianism
is the exhortation to deconstruct the hidden meanings of historical silences and omis-
sions or, as Vicinus puts it so memorably, ‘the possibilities of the “not said” and the
“not seen” as conceptual tools for writing history’.78 This is a challenge of considerable
magnitude and one which, when fully attended to, could and should locate lesbian
history at both the cutting edge and the theoretical centre of feminist historical theory.

Centres of ‘Difference’: decolonising theory, rethinking boundaries

The concept of ‘difference’ has proved axiomatic for feminist history as a means of
deconstructing essentialised categories of ‘women’ and ‘race’. Over the past three
decades a flourishing literature on ‘difference’ has revealed the way in which western
feminism’s theoretical imperialism has figured in black and Third World women’s
histories, as Mahua Sarkar has observed, ‘as the epistemic ground that defines, indeed
monopolises, the very terms within which we are obliged to pose questions of women’s
agency in any context’.79 What Elizabeth Spelman has incisively described as femi-
nism’s ‘white solipsism’ (the unexamined assumption of whiteness as normative) has
produced a monolithic analysis prioritising gender and relegating race and class to
subsidiary and therefore ‘inessential’ components of identity.80 Arguably, black and
Third World women’s most radical legacy for feminism has thus been their denial of
the pre-eminent status of gender in terms of its adequacy for theorising the complexi-
ties of black women’s simultaneity of oppressions. According to the Africanist, Cheryl
Johnson-Odim:

gender discrimination is neither the sole nor perhaps the primary locus of the oppres-
sion of Third World women for these women’s struggles are inextricably linked to
those of their particular communities against racism and imperialism.81

How, then, has feminist history set about ‘decolonising’ its theory so as to find new
ways of historicising women’s pasts that emphasise particularity and difference? In this
final section I want to consider the theoretical implications of racial and ethnic differ-
ence for women’s history, illustrating how such debates have altered the theoretical
 Women’s History Review 393
trajectory of the field. Because of the sheer range and volume of scholarship I have
structured my discussion around three main sites of analysis: the black feminist chal-
lenge (located mainly in the USA and Britain), post-colonial feminist scholarship and,
finally, transnational and comparative approaches to feminist history.

African-American Feminist History

Debates over racial difference were first substantially played out in the USA and Britain
from the 1970s, catalysed by the emergence of the American civil rights movement.
Scholars such as Hazel Carby, bell hooks, Valerie Amos and Prathiba Parmar were quick
to point out that in privileging a white, middle-class norm of women’s experience, femi-
nist historians had failed ‘to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson’,82 replicating the
exclusionary practices of traditional history. As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham later
reflected, the ethnocentrism of women’s history combined with the androcentrism of
African-American history meant that the black woman’s voice went ‘largely unheard’83
in this period. Early attempts at recuperating black women’s pasts often reinforced their
‘otherness’, presenting them as victims of extreme suffering or examples of female exot-
icism. The black lesbian poet and writer Audre Lorde made clear in her ‘Open Letter to
Mary Daly’ (1979) that this was a fundamental distortion of black women’s words and
heritage that left white feminist theoretical frameworks securely in place.84
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s African-American women scholars exposed the
long-standing racism of the women’s movement in a series of penetrating critiques,
arguing that the ‘triple jeopardy’ of black women’s identity—the simultaneity of being
poor, black and female—had never been a strategic priority for first or second wave
feminism.85 Black feminists felt unable to ally themselves with a number of major
feminist strategies surrounding male/female relations, family life and sexuality. The
importance of racial solidarity with black men, for example, meant that the separatist
rhetoric of radical and/or lesbian feminism was problematic, as were white feminist
historical analyses of rape and contraception which ignored the racist connotations of
the late-nineteenth-century lynching campaigns and twentieth-century experiments
with population control.86 Women’s right to a professional career outside the home
was also extraneous to the circumstances of many black women for whom family life
had been a key historical site of emotional strength and survival during slavery. As lead-
ing black feminist theorists bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins noted, it was doubly
ironic that the liberation of middle-class women from the private sphere should be
achieved upon the domestic labours of their black and working-class counterparts.87
Compelled to reconceptualise some of the most basic categories and assumptions of
feminist history, therefore, black feminists enacted what Darlene Clark Hine has
referred to as ‘a quiet intellectual transformation’.88 Studies of black women’s experi-
ence of slavery, religion and family life, labour participation, philanthropy and suffrage
have recovered numerous black women orators and activists from historical silence
and identified the distinctiveness of their political and social strategies.89 More
recently, the construction of black manhood and masculinity has also been explored.90
Theorising ‘difference’ through the concept of racial solidarity has generated exciting
394 S. Morgan
scholarship although, as Michelle Mitchell’s overview of African-American historiog-
raphy makes clear, black solidarity has prevented as well as promoted theoretical
innovation: ‘writing about clashes between black women and men remains somewhat
prickly’, she remarks, ‘because themes of collective survival, community mobilisation
and institution building are of signal importance to the field’.91 Women of colour have
revolutionised previous assumptions not only of the historical agency of black women
and men but also of the way in which gender formation rarely pivots around a simple
oppositional binary of male and female. The recognition that a woman’s identity
formation takes place not just in contrast to that of men’s but over and against women
of other racial and class-based statuses has transformed feminist historical thinking on
‘difference’ and produced important theories on the need for more relational analyses
of gender. Elsa Barkley Brown’s proposal of the African-American practice of ‘gumbo
ya ya’ (everyone talking at once) as a radically new way for all feminists to write history
underlines this relational emphasis. ‘Gumbo ya ya’ as a method has much to offer femi-
nist history argues Barkley Brown, for it eschews western linear, historical narratives in
favour of the ‘multiple and asymmetrical stories’ of women in simultaneous
dialogue.92 In 1992 Hine suggested similarly that feminists disassemble the boundaries
between black and white women’s lives and undertake what she called ‘crossover
history’. In defence of why black women should abandon the historical recuperation of
their own foremothers in favour of yet more research on white women, Hine
contended that it was only by examining each other’s history that women would
‘register meaningful progress in the war against racism, sexism and class oppression’.
‘In any event’ she adds, ‘the time for cussing is past, now let’s get busy’.93

Post-colonialism and Feminist History

During the 1980s and 1990s, feminist considerations of ‘difference’ also took place
between European, Indian, African and Caribbean scholars as part of the wider intel-
lectual movement of post-colonial studies. In contrast to the predominantly experien-
tial readings of difference utilised by African-American scholars, post-colonial feminist
analyses were more influenced by post-structuralist writers such as Edward Said and
Michel Foucault.94 Here, as Himani Bannerji explained, ‘difference’ was read as a
discursive act of colonial power, understood ‘not as what people intrinsically are, but
what they are ascribed in the context of domination’.95 In Clare Midgley’s valuable
overview of the new imperial histories, feminist historians emerge as significant
contributors.96 Initial research on colonial wives, female missionaries, nurses, travellers
and educators certainly revised masculinist notions of empire, but it failed to engage
with the substantial racial privileges enjoyed by British and European women in the
colonies.97 Western women’s intellectual and political enmeshment with the civilising
mission of empire became the new critical orthodoxy for post-colonialist feminist
histories. This was witnessed in Antoinette Burton’s Burdens of History: British feminists,
Indian women and imperial culture (1994) and the scholarship of Kumari Jayawardena,
Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel amongst others, propounding feminism’s
‘complex dynamic of complicity and resistance’98 with regard to imperialist values.
 Women’s History Review 395
The last twenty years has seen a prodigious body of work by Third World women
scholars concerning the problematic nature of historical knowledge under the colo-
nising influence of western thought and the discriminatory power of the patriarchal,
colonial archive.99 Central to these debates have been the difficulties of rehabilitating
the subaltern female, often discussed through the figure and practice of sati (Hindu
widow sacrifice). Gayatri Spivak’s acclaimed essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988),
became an influential counterpoint to Anglo-American feminist theories of agency
and representation due to Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern woman could not
speak, or, more accurately, her speech could not be heard such was her cultural over-
representation and over-determination at the time by British colonial and Indian elite
discourses.100 Ten years later Lata Mani’s study, Contentious Traditions: the debate on
sati in colonial India (1998), sought to modify Spivak’s thesis of the subaltern female’s
disappearing act:
The issue … may not be whether the subaltern can speak so much as whether she can
be heard to be speaking in a given set of materials and what, indeed, has been made of
her voice by colonial and postcolonial historiography. Rephrasing Spivak thus enables
us to remain vigilant about the positioning of women in colonial discourse without
conceding to colonial discourses what it did not, in fact, achieve—the erasure of
women.101
These theoretically sophisticated re-imaginings of the female subject in an anti-
colonialist context have continued apace. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri’s
important collection, Nation, Empire and Colony: historicizing gender and race (1998),
for example, rejected the analytical dominance of the coloniser/colonised binary, shift-
ing from a single focus upon imperialism (which sustained the intellectual dominance
of the west) to greater awareness of the impact of particular regional conflicts or
nationalist agendas upon the lives of indigenous women. The ways in which feminists
have begun to think beyond the bifurcated coloniser/colonised paradigm so as to
further decolonise theory can be illustrated through two main approaches; first, new
research agendas that decentred imperialism in favour of analysing the gendered
politics of national identity formations and, second, feminist histories that have argued
for the reciprocal shaping influences of metropole and colony.
As Mrinalini Sinha’s wide-ranging essay on ‘Gender and Nation’ makes clear, histo-
ries of gender and national identity, although not exclusive to black and Third World
scholarship, have reinforced the analytical significance of difference by asserting that
‘gender is always already constituted by other forms of difference, such as those of class,
race, ethnicity, religion and sexuality as well as of course, the nation’.102 Contrary to
western feminism’s tendency to present itself as somehow transcending national bound-
aries, Third World scholars have shown that feminism has never been autonomous from
the national context out of which it emerged. Although the historical relationship
between feminism and nationalism belies any unitary analysis, certain patterns have
emerged, such as the tension between the ubiquitous female iconography in nationalist
discourse and women’s thwarted claims for the right to full citizenship.103 Historically,
nationalist movements have made extensive use of gendered imagery. Women—their
behaviour, dress codes and, quite literally, their bodies—have often become eulogised
396 S. Morgan
as bearers of authentic, national or pre-colonial tradition, as in the aforementioned
contestations over sati or in Muslim debates over the hijab.104 Yet, all too often nation-
alist discourses have castigated feminism as antithetical to national independence. As
Hilary McD. Beckles has observed, in the masculinist Caribbean construction of the
nation, ‘radical feminists were prominent occupants of a discredited community that
included Rastafarians, religious fundamentalists, communists, black power chanters
and other advocates of allegedly “untenable” causes’.105 Feminist historians have also
shown that where women have been involved in militant nationalist activity the
ambiguities of gender norms will always dictate cultural and historical responses. Thus,
women have successfully mobilised themselves in various national political contexts
around traditional female symbolism such as motherhood, as in the Argentinian Madres
de la Plaza de Mayo or the Sri Lankan Mothers’ Front.106 The more violent, transgressive
female insurgent has posed a greater challenge to accounts of national independence,
however, as Louise Ryan’s work on women’s involvement in the Irish militant nation-
alist campaigns between 1919 and 1923 shows. Women’s continued exclusion from Irish
republican histories indicates that these remain quintessentially male narratives.107
Post-colonial and feminist scholarship on gender and national identity has long
recognised that nations are neither fixed nor originary points of historical identity but
‘imagined communities’ whose traditions are reciprocally created and performed.
Thus, Ann Cooper and Frederick Stoler have argued that the single most determining
‘tension of empire’ was the mutually shaping influence of metropole and colony
through which ‘a grammar of difference was continually and vigilantly crafted as
people in colonies refashioned and contested European claims to superiority’.108 The
influence of indigenous cultures upon the development of imperial policies in London,
Paris or The Hague meant that the sites of metropole and colony were each affected by
the other in radically constitutive, though not equal, ways.109 The metropolitan, impe-
rial sense of self-identity was rarely as secure as its public façade appeared to suggest.
Instead, as Anne McLintock and Ann Stoler have argued, the racial and sexual values
of the European bourgeois order were repeatedly constructed over and against the
working classes at home as well as the colonised subjects of British India, French
Indochina and the Dutch East Indies.110
Historians such as Antoinette Burton, Clare Midgley, Susan Thorne and others have
rethought the narratives of metropole and colony in important ways, exploring the
impact of empire ‘at home’. British feminist scholarship, for example, has examined
the presence of Asian and black communities in the metropole as well as the impact of
imperialism upon the formation of English/British identity.111 Midgley’s most recent
book, Feminism and Empire: women activists in imperial Britain, 1790–1865 explores
the relationship between the development of British imperialism and the origins of
the nineteenth-century women’s movement, examining the opportunities that the
Empire provided for female agency and its influence upon ‘the woman question’.112
The work of Mrinalini Sinha and Catherine Hall has been important in tracing
simultaneous colonial and indigenous formations of masculinity. Sinha’s important
work, Colonial Masculinity: the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the
late nineteenth century (1995) illustrated the perpetual negotiations between colonial
 Women’s History Review 397
and national elite discourses of gender.113 Hall’s long-standing examination of the
interconnected histories of Jamaica and England has similarly revealed how colonial
encounters have shaped imperial readings of masculinity, and in her Civilising Subjects:
metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (2002) Hall developed her
influential thesis that English identity and ‘whiteness’ were thoroughly imbricated with
the culture of empire.114 Indeed, although a major moral imperative in the imperial-
ists’ civilising mission, whiteness was a peculiarly volatile category. In the case of
Australian women, settler societies ‘attached special significance to the status and
meaning of “whiteness”’115 because of their dual identity as both colonisers and
colonised. Racial mixing, the most intimate manifestation of the interrelatedness of
metropole and colony, was the greatest challenge of all to whiteness and, as the critical
work of Hall and others in the field have shown, a profound threat to the maintenance
of imperial authority.116

Transnational, Comparative and Global Feminist Histories

Most recently, analyses of ‘centres of difference’ have been prompted by the renewed
desire to build transnational alliances and solidarities between women across national
borders and boundaries. The rapid global expansion of technology and communica-
tion systems, major demographic shifts due to economic migrations and political
diasporas, and the rise of (often unstable) multinational forms of capitalism have
altered our political and intellectual landscape dramatically. Such developments pose a
number of urgent theoretical and methodological challenges for feminists in the
twenty-first century, demanding new formulations around comparative global
perspectives in women’s history that capture the radically asymmetrical power
relations between nations.
Feminists have a sound history of organising internationally around issues such as
socialism, sexuality, citizenship rights, health and pacifism.117 Sanjam Ahluwalia’s
study of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century birth control movement is a
good illustration of the extent to which social reform movements have frequently
brought together local, national and international forms of knowledge and activ-
ism.118 African diaspora studies has also produced interconnected histories that
dismantle national boundaries. In 1995, for example, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn proposed
a cross-cultural African feminist theory that might encompass the experiences of
people of African descent throughout the Caribbean, Brazil, the USA and Africa
itself.119 Such analytical ‘border crossings’ can just as easily occur between women
within a single continent. As Asuncion Lavrin has commented, twentieth-century
Latin American feminism has demonstrated a ‘strong vocation for international-
ism’120 as a means to confronting political regimes of immense diversity. According to
Ahluwalia, this shift towards more interconnected global histories is a significant
theoretical development allowing Third World scholars to interrogate western femi-
nist political strategies and propose fully historicised, context-specific alternatives. Yet
it is an approach fraught with difficulty. Transnational feminist histories require
innovative comparative scholarship that neither diminishes ‘difference’ in the name of
398 S. Morgan
a falsely universalised feminism nor reifies it by taking refuge in relativist platitudes. In
a response to Ahluwalia, Antoinette Burton agreed that the nation was often an ‘insuf-
ficient investigative category’, not least because national boundaries were so often ‘a
lingering effect of imperial power’.121 But in the rush to tell transnational histories,
new forms of discursive colonisation are waiting just around the corner. How, then, to
rethink a feminist history of ‘solidarity across borders’ that is firmly grounded in the
local and particular experiences of women? This is the central theoretical challenge for
a transnational feminist practice.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s recent revisiting of her classic article ‘Under Western
Eyes’ almost twenty years after it was first published provides an interesting case study
of the shift in emphasis from, as the title of her book suggests, decolonising theory to
practising solidarity.122 The discursive colonisation of Third World women still
continues, she explains, but, confronted by the dominance of global capitalism and the
normalisation of its increasingly oppressive values, it is time to move on from critique
to reconstruction. What Mohanty refers to as the ‘feminist solidarity’ or ‘comparative
feminist studies’ model provides us with one useful agenda for future feminist histori-
cal considerations of ‘difference’. As she observes:

differences are never just ‘differences’. In knowing differences and particularities, we

can better see the connections and commonalities because no border or boundary is
ever complete or rigidly determining. The challenge is to see how … specifying
difference allows us to theorise universal concerns more fully.123

Mohanty advocates a materialist analysis of the marginalised communities of women

from the Third World/South as a starting-point for this challenge since it is on ‘the
bodies and lives of women and girls from the Third World/South … that global capi-
talism writes its script’.124 Such women constitute a privileged site of reflection on
difference and solidarity, providing the most ‘inclusive paradigm and expansive vision
for thinking about universal social justice’.125 The prodigious growth of alternative
histories by black and Third World scholars has transformed the theoretical landscape
of feminist history since Audre Lorde first wrote in 1979 that ‘the oppression of women
knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries … but that does not mean it is identical within
those differences’.126 ‘Difference’ has proved to be a potent signifier for the inequitable
power relations between women, and binary narratives of white women/women of
colour, coloniser/colonised or First World/Third World women have done much to
expose and delimit the intellectual imperialism of western feminist thought. These
models are not without their limitations for, as Susan Stanford Friedman has pointed
out, ‘white’ and ‘western’ are not unitary categories either, and all too often the heter-
ogeneity of non-white women has been premised on a monolithic assumption of
whiteness which badly needs deconstructing.127 Accordingly, an array of new theoret-
ical challenges faces feminists as they move towards the production of increasingly
global, transnational forms of history-writing in the twenty-first century.
In conclusion, Joan Scott’s retrospective essay on ‘Feminism’s History’, published in
2004, raises some thought-provoking reflections on the equivocal nature of feminist
history’s journey from the academic borderlands into the disciplinary mainstream and
 Women’s History Review 399
its future critical potential.128 Put simply, how possible is it to continue the project of
transformation, of revisioning and rewriting history, from the ‘safer’ terrain of the
centre? It is no coincidence that to date much critical and innovative analysis has come
from those not yet in possession of the centre ground. According to bell hooks, margin-
ality is not something to surrender in haste as part of a move to the centre, but a condi-
tion to remain in, in so far as it nourishes a critical stance of resistance. ‘I make a definite
distinction’, she writes, ‘between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive struc-
tures and that marginality one chooses as a site for resistance—as a location of radical
openness and possibility’.129 The development and growth of feminist history over the
past three decades has been due to precisely such a location of marginality, not neces-
sarily as a physical space (although it has been and still is this for many feminist scholars,
as a 2007 roundtable on ‘Gendering Trans/National Historiographies’ makes clear), but
as a theoretical position.130 As we look to the future of feminist history it becomes clear
that it can never inhabit the mainstream in any epistemological sense, for that would
be a disavowal of its fundamentally subversive practice. What characterises feminism’s
history and its perpetual interrogation of dominant categories is, as Scott notes, its ‘radi-
cal refusal to settle down’ and to call anywhere ‘home’.131 This is the radical openness
of feminist history’s future, which accepts that, in rewriting and retheorising traditional
history, it must look simultaneously to its own transformations and its own re-imagin-
ings. ‘Passion after all’, as Scott argues, ‘thrives on the pursuit of the not-yet-known’.132

Notes
[1] Joan Kelly-Gadol (1976) The Social Relations of the Sexes: methodological implications of
1

women’s history, Signs 1(4), p. 809. This article draws upon, revises and updates my earlier
introduction to The Feminist History Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–48. Because
many of the works discussed here also appear in the Reader, I have referenced the original
publication source each time, citing relevant republication details in the Reader only where
the item is older and perhaps more difficult to obtain.
[2] ‘The unresolved question of whether “women” is a singular or radically diverse category,
2

whether “women” is a social category that pre-exists or is produced by history, is at the heart
of both feminist history and the history of feminism’, Joan Scott (Ed.) (1996) Feminism and
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 4.
[3] See Jane Rendall (1991) Uneven Developments: women’s history, feminist history and
3

gender history in Great Britain, in Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson & Jane Rendall (Eds)
Writing Women’s History: international perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press),
pp. 45–57 and June Purvis (1995) From ‘Women Worthies’ to Poststructuralism? Debate and
Controversy in Women’s History in Britain, in June Purvis (Ed.) Women’s History, Britain
1850–1945: an introduction (London: UCL Press), pp. 1–22.
[4] A selection is always a series of exclusions of course, and there are many innovative methods
4

that have not been included here such as psychoanalytical and auto/biographical approaches
to writing feminist history. My thanks to Liz Stanley for her helpful comments on this and
other points. Liz Stanley (2008) Review of The Feminist History Reader, Feminist Review, 89,
pp. 159–160.
[5] See Mary Spongberg (2002) Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance (London: Palgrave)
5

for the political context of the development of feminist history. For wider international
perspectives see Offen, Pierson & Rendall (Eds), Writing Women’s History, pp. xix–xii.
400 S. Morgan
[6] Given the global profile of current feminist history, I am acutely aware of the Anglo-American
6

emphasis of many of the controversies referred to in this article. This is due, in part, to the
limitations of my own expertise (nineteenth and twentieth century British gender and
religion) and to the predominance of western anglophone scholarship in shaping many of the
debates that governed the early development of the field.
[7] Sheila Rowbotham (1989) The Trouble with ‘Patriarchy’, and Sally Alexander & Barbara
7

Taylor, In Defence of ‘Patriarchy’, New Statesman, republished in Morgan, Feminist History

Reader, pp. 51–58.
[8] Judith M. Bennett (1989) Feminism and History, Gender and History, 1(3), pp. 251–272.
8

[9] Judith Bennett (2006) History Matters: patriarchy and the challenge of feminism (Manchester:
9

Manchester University Press).

[10] Ellen DuBois, Mari Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lerner & Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
9

(1980) Politics and Culture in Women’s History. A Symposium, Feminist Studies, 6(1), repub-
lished in Morgan, Feminist History Reader, pp. 87–103.
[11] See Amanda Vickery (1993) Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and
10

Chronology of English Women’s History, Historical Journal, 36(2), pp. 383–414.

[12] Sandra Lauderdale Graham (2003) Making the Private Public: a Brazilian perspective, and Eliz-
11

abeth Thompson (2003) Public and Private in Middle Eastern Women’s History, in Women’s
History in the New Millennium: rethinking the public and private, Journal of Women’s History,
15(1), pp. 11–69. See also Linda Kerber (1988) Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Women’s
Place: the rhetoric of women’s history, Journal of American History, 75(1), pp. 9–39; Silvia
Mantini (2000) Women’s History in Italy, Journal of Women’s History, 12(2), pp. 170–198; and
Lynn Abrams & Elizabeth Harvey (Eds) (1997) Gender Relations in German History: power,
agency and experience from the sixteenth to the twentieth century (London: UCL Press).
[13] See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis (1976) ‘Women’s History’ in Transition: the European
12

case, Feminist Studies, 3(3/4), pp. 83–103 and Joan Kelly (1979) The Doubled Vision of
Feminist History, Feminist Studies, 5(1), pp. 216–227.
[14] See Joan Wallach Scott (1986) Gender: a useful category of historical analysis, American
13

Historical Review, 91(5), pp. 1053–1076 and Gisela Bock (1989) Women’s History and Gender
History: aspects of an international debate, Gender and History, 1(1), pp. 7–30.
[15] Catherine Hall (1992) Feminism and Feminist History, in her White, Male and Middle Class:
14

explorations in feminism and history (Oxford: Polity Press), p. 12. Leonore Davidoff & Catherine
Hall (Eds) (2002) Family Fortunes: men and women of the English middle-class 1780–1850
(London: Routledge).
[16] Ogino Miho (1995) Writing Women’s History in Japan: traditions and new trends, Historical
15

Studies in Japan (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansa), pp. 17–32, cited in Andrea Germer (2003)
Feminist History in Japan: national and international perspectives, Intersections: Gender,
History and Culture in the Asian Context, 9, http://www.sshe.murdoch.edu.au/ intersections/
issue9_contents html (accessed 9 April 2007).
[17] See June Purvis & Amanda Weatherill (1997) Playing the Gender History Game: a reply to
16

Penelope J. Corfield, Rethinking History, 3(3), pp. 333–338 and Bennett, ‘Feminism and
History’.
[18] Lois Banner (1989) A Reply to ‘Culture and Pouvoir’ from the Perspective of United States
17

Women’s History, Journal of Women’s History, 1(1), 101–107.

[19] See Irina Korovushkina (1999) Paradoxes of Gender: writing history in post-communist
18

Russia 1987–1998, in Leonore Davidoff, Keith McClelland & Eleni Varikas (Eds) Gender and
History: retrospect and prospect (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 151–164.
[20] Lynn Hunt (1998) The Challenge of Gender: deconstruction of categories and reconstruction
19

of narratives in gender history, in Hans Medick & Anne-Charlotte Trepp (Eds) Geschlechterge-
schichte und Allgemeine Geschichte: Herausforderungen und Perspektiven (Gottingen), p. 59.
[21] Alexandra Shepherd & Garthine Walker (Eds) (2008) Gender and Change: agency, chronology
20

and periodisation, Gender and History, Special Issue, 20(3), pp. 453–462.
 Women’s History Review 401
[22] Jeanne Boydston (2008) Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis, Gender and History,
21

20(3), p. 559.
[23] See, for example, Louise Tilly (Ed.) (1996) Women in Central and Eastern Europe, Special Issue
22

of Women’s History Review, 5(4); Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton & Barbara Bailey (Eds)
(1995) Engendering History: Caribbean women in historical perspective (London: James Currey);
Susan Brownell & Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Eds) (2002) Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculin-
ities. A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press); Wendy Z. Goldman (2002) Women at
the Gates: gender and industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
Asuncion Lavrin (1995) Women, Feminism and Social Change: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay,
1890–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press); Afsaneh Najmabadi, (2005) Women with
Mustaches and Men without Beards: gender and sexual anxieties of Iranian modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press).
[24] Hunt, ‘The Challenge of Gender’, p. 62.
23

[25] Scott, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, p. 1067.

24

[26] Joan Scott (1988) Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 6.
25

[27] Stevi Jackson (1992) The Amazing Deconstructing Woman, Trouble and Strife, 25, p. 25.
26

Joan Hoff (1994) Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis, Women’s History Review,
3(2), p. 151.
[28] Mariana Valverde (1990) Poststructuralist Gender Historians: are we those names? Labour/Le
27

Travail, 25, p. 232.

[29] Catherine Hall (1991) Politics, Post-structuralism and Feminist History, Gender and History,
28

3(2), p. 209.
[30] Joan Hoff (1996) ‘Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis’, with responses by Susan
29

Kingsley Kent and Caroline Ramazanoglu, Women’s History Review, 5(1), pp. 9–23, and Sonya
Rose, Kathleen Canning, Anna Clark & Mariana Valverde (1993) Gender History/Women’s
History: is feminist scholarship losing its critical edge? Journal of Women’s History, 5(1),
pp. 89–125.
[31] Denise Riley (1988) Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History
30

(London: Macmillan), p. 18.

[32] Hoff, ‘Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis’, p. 154.
31

[33] Laura Lee Downs (1993) If ‘Woman’ is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to
32

Walk Alone at Night? Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 35(3), p. 436.
[34] Purvis, ‘From “Women Worthies” to Poststructuralism?’, p. 13.
33

[35] Paula M. L. Moya (1997) Postmodernism, ‘Realism’, and the Politics of Identity: Cherrie
34

Moraga and Chicana feminism, in M. J. Alexander & C. T. Mohanty (Eds) Feminist Genealogies,
Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (London, Routledge), p. 135.
[36] Padma Anagol (2008) Agency, Periodisation and Change in the Women’s and Gender History
35

of Colonial India, Gender and History, 20(3), pp. 603–627.

[37] Discussed in Simon Critchley (1999) The Ethics of Deconstruction, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh:
36

Edinburgh University Press), pp. 31–44. Thanks to Keith Jenkins for this reference.
[38] Joan Scott (1993) The Tip of the Volcano, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35(3),
37

p. 442.
[39] Louise M. Newman (1991) Dialogue: Critical Theory and the History of Women: what’s at
38

stake in deconstructing women’s history, Journal of Women’s History, 2(3), p. 62.

[40] Judith Butler & Joan Scott (Eds) (1992) Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge),
39

pp. xiii–xvii.
[41] Laura Lee Downs (2003) From Women’s History to Gender History, in Stefan Berger, Heiko
40

Feldner & Kevin Passmore (Eds) Writing History: theory and practice (London: Hodder
Arnold), p. 275.
[42] Susan Kingsley Kent (1996) Mistrials and Diatribulations: a reply to Joan Hoff, Women’s
41

History Review, 5(1), pp. 9–18.

402 S. Morgan
[43] Mary Louise Roberts (1998) Review Essay: Only Questions to Offer, Journal of Women’s
42

History, 19(3), p. 180. See Judith Walkowitz (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: narratives of
sexual danger in late-Victorian London (London: Virago), Kathleen Canning (2006) Gender
History in Practice: historical perspectives on bodies, class and citizenship (New York: Cornell
University Press), Lata Mani (1998) Contentious Traditions: the debate on sati in colonial
India (Berkeley: University of California Press) and Mariana Valverde (1991) The Age of Light,
Soap and Water (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart).
[44] Judith Bennett (2006) History Matters: patriarchy and the challenge of feminism (Manchester:
43

Manchester University Press), p. 108.

[45] Adrienne Rich (1980) Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, Signs, 5(4),
44

pp. 631–660.
[46] Lack of space prevents a complete listing but see Martha Vicinus (1992) ‘They Wonder to
45

Which Sex I Belong’: the historical roots of the modern lesbian identity, Feminist Studies,
18, pp. 467–497 for a useful overview of the field in the early 1990s, and Rebecca Jennings
(2007) From ‘Woman-Loving Woman’ to ‘Queer Theory’: historiographical perspectives on
twentieth-century British lesbian history, History Compass, 5(6), pp. 1901–1920 for more
recent perspectives.
[47] See Blanche Wiesen Cook (1979) The Historical Denial of Lesbianism, Radical History Review,
46

20, pp. 60–65 for a pioneering analysis of the heterocentric suppression of lesbian relations.
See also Estelle B. Freedman (1998) ‘The Burning of Letters Continues’: elusive identities and
the historical construction of sexuality, Journal of Women’s History, 9(4), pp. 181–200.
[48] Martha Vicinus (1994) Lesbian History: all theory and no facts or all facts and no theory?
47

Radical History Review, 60, p. 57.

[49] See Lillian Faderman (1986) The Morbidification of Love between Women by Nineteenth-
48

Century Sexologists, Journal of Homosexuality, 4, pp. 73–91, and Lucy Bland & Laura Doan
(Eds) (1998) Sexology in Culture: labelling bodies and desires (Cambridge: Polity Press). Alison
Oram argues that the influence of sexology was not present in the humorous and often
sensationalist media accounts of cross-dressing women in inter-war Britain. See Alison Oram
(2007) Her Husband was a Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular
Culture (London: Routledge), pp. 1–13.
[50] Sheila Jeffreys (1986) Does it Matter if They Did It? in Lesbian History Group (Eds) Not
49

a Passing Phase: reclaiming lesbians in history 1840–1985 (London: The Women’s Press),
p. 22.
[51] Joan Nestle (2003) Wars and Thinking, in Leila Rupp, Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, Judy Tzu-
50

Chun Wu, Mattie Richardson & Alison Kafer (Eds) Women’s History in the New Millenium:
Adrienne Rich’s ‘Compulsive Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’: a retrospective, Journal
of Women’s History, 15(3), p. 52.
[52] See, for example, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeleine Davis (1993) Boots of Leather,
51

Slippers of Gold: the history of a lesbian community (Harmondsworth: Penguin), which exam-
ined butch/femme roles in the New York bar communities of the 1940s and 1950s.
[53] Emma Donoghue (1993) Passions between Women: British lesbian culture, 1668–1801
52

(London: Scarlet Press), p. 2.

[54] Lisa Moore (1992) ‘Something More Tender Still than Friendship’: romantic friendship in
53

early nineteenth century England, Feminist Studies, 18(3), pp. 499–520. See also Lisa Moore
(1997) Dangerous Intimacies: toward a Sapphic history of the British novel (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press).
[55] Karen Hansen (1995) ‘No Kisses Is Like Youres’: an erotic friendship between two African-
54

American women during the mid-nineteenth century, Gender and History, 7(2), pp. 153–182.
[56] Anna Clark (1996) Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity, Journal of the History of
55

Sexuality, 7(1), p. 50.

[57] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
56

California Press), p. 40.

 Women’s History Review 403
[58] Martha Vicinus (2004) Intimate Friends: women who loved women, 1778–1928 (Chicago:
57

University of Chicago Press), p. xvi. Judith Bennett dates the provenance of the term ‘lesbian’
from the tenth century, but this is less a debate on origins and more to do with the need for
heightened theoretical and methodological reflexivity. As to whether or not it is ahistorical or
unethical to define women as lesbians who would not have defined themselves as such,
Bennett reminds us that ‘it is common practice [for historians] to use modern words [and
categories] to investigate past times’, hence feudalism and capitalism. Bennett, History
Matters, p. 115.
[59] Judith Butler (1991) Imitation and Gender Insubordination, in Diana Fuss (Ed.) Inside/Out:
58

lesbian theories, gay theories (New York: Routledge), pp. 14–15.

[60] Rosemary Auchmuty, Sheila Jeffreys & Elaine Miller (1992) Lesbian History and Gay Studies:
59

keeping a feminist perspective, Women’s History Review, 1(1), pp. 89–108.

[61] See Vicinus, ‘Lesbian History: all theory and no facts’, pp.61–64, and Laura Doan (2007)
60

Lesbian Studies after the Postmodern: toward a new geneaology, Journal of Lesbian Studies,
11(1/2), pp. 19–35.
[62] Bennett, History Matters, p. 114.
61

[63] Cheshire Calhoun (1995) The Gender Closet: lesbian disappearance under the sign ‘women’,
62

Feminist Studies, 21(1), p. 21.

[64] Vicinus, ‘Lesbian History: all theory and no facts’, p. 57.
63

[65] Vicinus, Intimate Friends, p. xxiii.

64

[66] Bennett, History Matters, pp. 108–127.

65

[67] Anna Clark (2005) Twilight Moments, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14(1/2),
66

pp. 139–160.
[68] Vicinus, ‘Lesbian History: all theory and no facts’, p. 58.
67

[69] Martha Vicinus (2002) ‘The Gift of Love’: nineteenth-century religion and passion, in Sue
68

Morgan (Ed.) Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave),
pp. 73–88, and Vicinus, Intimate Friends, pp. 85–112.
[70] Sharon Marcus (2007) Between Women: friendship, desire and marriage in Victorian England
113

(Princeton: Princeton University Press).

[71] Combahee River Collective (2002 edition) A Black Feminist Statement, in Cherrie L. Moraga
69

& Gloria E. Anzaldua, (Eds) This Bridge Called My Back: writings by radical women of color
(Berkeley: Third Woman Press), pp. 234–240.
[72] Barbara Smith (1998) African-American Lesbian and Gay History: an exploration, in Barbara
70

Smith (Ed.) The Truth that Never Hurts: writings on race, gender and freedom (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press), p. 84.
[73] See Makeda Silvera (1992) Man Royals and Sodomites: some thoughts on the invisibility of
71

Afro-Caribbean lesbians, Feminist Studies, 18(3), pp. 521–532, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
(2003) Asian American History and Racialized Compulsory Deviance, in Leila Rupp et al.,
Women’s History in the New Millenium, pp. 58–61.
[74] See Tze-Ian D Sang (2003) The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China
72

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Ruth Ford (1996) Speculating on Scrapbooks, Sex and
Desire: issues in lesbian history, Australian Historical Studies, pp. 111–126; Dan Healey (2001)
Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Judith C.
Brown (1986) Immodest Acts: the life of a lesbian nun in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford
University Press).
[75] Ford, ‘Speculating on Scrapbooks, Sex and Desire’, p. 125.
73

[76] Leila Rupp (2001) Toward a Global History of Same-Sex Sexuality, Journal of the History of
74

Sexuality, 10(2), pp. 287–302.

[77] Alison Oram (1997) ‘Friends, Feminists and Sexual Outlaws’: lesbianism and British history,
75

in Gabrielle Griffin & Sonya Andermahr (Eds) Straight Studies Modified: lesbian interventions
in the academy (London: Cassell), p. 179.
[78] Vicinus, ‘Lesbian History: all theory and no facts or all facts and no theory?’, p. 58.
76
404 S. Morgan
[79] Mahua Sarkar (2004) Looking for Feminism, Gender & History, 16(2), p. 324. I use the terms
77

‘black’, ‘women of colour’ and ‘Third World’ throughout this discussion not on the basis of
racial identifications, but as political categories forged out of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty
has described as a ‘common context of struggle’ against western colonial exploitation and
racism. See Mohanty (2003) Feminism without Borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidar-
ity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press), pp. 43–84. It is worth noting that
theoretical imperialism can also operate between white western feminists, as in the dominant
anglocentrism of British scholarship with regard to the Celtic ‘fringe’ of Wales, Scotland and
Ireland. See also Ruth Roach Pierson (1992) Colonization and Canadian Women’s History,
Journal of Women’s History, 4(2), pp. 134–156.
[80] See Elizabeth Spelman (1988) Inessential Woman: problems of exclusion in feminist thought
78

(London: The Women’s Press), pp. 114–132.

[81] Cheryl Johnson-Odim (1991) Common Themes, Different Contexts: Third World women
79

and feminism, in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo & Lourdes Torres (Eds) Third World
Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 315.
[82] Valerie Amos & Pratibha Parmar (1984) Challenging Imperial Feminism, Feminist Review, 17,
80

republished in Morgan, Feminist History Reader, pp. 284–294.

[83] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1989) Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American women in
81

history, Gender and History, 1(1), p. 50.

[84] Audre Lorde (1984) An Open Letter to Mary Daly, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Ten Speed
82

Press), pp. 66–71, republished in Morgan, Feminist History Reader, pp. 295–299.
[85] See bell hooks (1981) Ain’t I a Woman?: black women and feminism (Boston: South End
83

Press); Paula Giddings (1984) When and Where I Enter: the impact of black women on race and
sex in America (New York: William Morrow); and Angela Davis (1981) Women, Race and
Class (New York: Random House).
[86] See, for example, Angela Davis (1981) Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist, in
84

Davis, Women, Race and Class; Darlene Clark Hine (1989) Rape and the Inner Lives of Black
Women in the Middle West: preliminary thoughts on the culture of dissemblance, Signs, 14,
pp. 912–920; Lourdes Beneria & Gita Sen (1981) Accumulation, Reproduction and Women’s
Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited, Signs, 7(2), pp. 279–298.
[87] See bell hooks (1984) Feminist Theory: from margin to center (Boston: South End Press) and
85

Patricia Hill Collins (1990) Black Feminist Thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of
empowerment (New York: Routledge).
[88] Darlene Clark Hine (1992) Black Women’s History, White Women’s History: the juncture of
86

race and class, Journal of Women’s History, 4(2), p. 126.

[89] See Jacqueline Jones (1985) Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: black women, work and the family
87

from slavery to the present (New York: Basic Books); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore (1996) Gender
and Jim Crow: women and the politics of white supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (1998) African-
American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press).
[90] See Gail Bederman (1995) Manliness and Civilization: a cultural history of gender and race in
88

the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) and Darlene Clark Hine
& Earnestine Jenkins (Eds) (1999) A Question of Manhood: a reader in US black men’s history
and masculinity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
[91] Michelle Mitchell (1999) Silences Broken, Silences Kept: gender and sexuality in African-
89

American history, in Davidoff et al. (Eds) Gender and History: retrospect and prospect, p. 22.
[92] Elsa Barkley Brown (1992) ‘What Has Happened Here’: The politics of difference in women’s
90

history and feminist politics, in Feminist Studies, 18(2), pp. 295–312.

[93] Hine, ‘Black Women’s History, White Women’s History’, p. 132.
91

[94] For helpful overviews of the significance of Said and Foucault to post-colonialist feminist
92

theory and the role of the influential Subaltern Studies Group in the development of post-
 Women’s History Review 405
colonial studies see Clare Midgley (1998) Gender and Imperialism: mapping the connections,
in Clare Midgley (Ed.) Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press),
pp. 1–18, and Catherine Hall (2000) Introduction: thinking the postcolonial, thinking the
empire, in Catherine Hall (Ed.) Cultures of Empire. A Reader: colonizers in Britain and the
Empire in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (Manchester: Manchester University
Press), pp. 1–33.
[95] Himani Bannerji (1998) Politics and the Writing of History, in Ruth Roach Pierson & Nupur
93

Chaudhuri (Eds) Nation, Empire, Colony: historicizing gender and race (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press), p. 289.
[96] See Midgley, ‘Gender and Imperialism: mapping the connections’.
94

[97] See Jane Haggis (1990) Gendering Colonialism or Colonising Gender? Women’s Studies Inter-
95

national Forum, 13(2), pp. 105–115 for an influential critique of the field at that point.
[98] Antoinette Burton (1994) Burdens of History: British feminists, Indian women and imperial
96

culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press). Nupur Chaudhuri & Marga-
ret Strobel (Eds) (1992) Western Women and Imperialism: complicity and resistance (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press), p. 7; Kumari Jayawardena (1995) The White Women’s
Other Burden: western women and South Asia during British colonial rule (London: Rout-
ledge).
[99] See Antoinette Burton (2003) Dwelling in the Archive: women writing house, home and history
97

in late colonial India. See also her ‘Thinking beyond the Boundaries: empire, feminism and the
domains of history’, Social History, 26(1) (January 2001), pp. 60–67.
[100] Gayatri Spivak (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? in C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds) Marxism
98

and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan), p. 295.

[101] Mani, Contentious Traditions, p. 190.
99

[102] Mrinalini Sinha (2004) Gender and Nation, in Bonnie Smith (Ed.) Women’s History in Global
100

Perspective (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press), p. 233.

[103] See Kumari Jayawardena (1986) Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed
101

Books); Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities (1993), Gender and History themed
issue, 5(2); Margot Badran (1996) Feminists, Islam and Nation: gender and the making of
modern Egypt (Cairo: American University Pres); Ida Berg, Karen Hagemann & Catherine
Hall (Eds) (2000) Gendered Nations: nationalism and gender order in the long nineteenth
century (Oxford: Berg).
[104] For discussion of the hijab see Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation; Hammed Shahidian
102

(1995) Islam, Politics and Problems of Writing Women’s History in Iran, Journal of Women’s
History, 7(2), pp. 113–144; Bronwyn Winter (2005) Fundamental Misunderstandings: issues
in feminist approaches to Islamism, Journal of Women’s History, 13(1), pp. 1–22; Lama Abu
Odeh (1993) Post-colonial Feminism and the Veil: thinking difference, Feminist Review, 43,
pp. 26–37; Leila Ahmed (1993) Women, Gender and Islam: the historical roots of a modern
debate (New Haven: Yale University Press).
[105] Hilary McD. Beckles (1998) Historicizing Slavery in West Indian Feminism, Feminist Review,
103

59, pp. 48–49.

[106] See Rita Arditti (1999) Searching for Life: the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the disap-
104

peared children of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press) and Malathi de Alwi
(1997) Motherhood as a Space of Protest: women’s political participation in contemporary Sri
Lanka, in Amrita Basu & Patricia Jeffrey (Eds) Appropriating Gender: women’s activism and the
politicization of religion in South Asia (New York: Routledge), pp. 185–202.
[107] Louise Ryan (2001) Splendidly Silent: representing Irish republican women, 1919–23, in
105

Anne-Marie Gallagher, Cathy Lubelska & Louise Ryan (Eds) Re-presenting the Past: women
and history (London: Longman), pp. 23–43.
[108] Ann Cooper & Frederick Stoler (1997) Between Metropole and Colony. Rethinking a
106

Research Agenda, in Cooper & Stoler (Eds) Tensions of Empire, Colonial Cultures in a
Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp.3–4.
406 S. Morgan
[109] See Julia Clancy-Smith & Frances Gouda (1998) Domesticating the Empire: race, gender and
107

family life in French and Dutch colonialism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of
Virginia).
[110] Anne McClintock (1995) Imperial Leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial context
108

(New York: Routledge); Ann Laura Stoler (2002) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race
and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press).
[111] Antoinette Burton (1994) Burdens of History: British feminists, Indian women and imperial
109

culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press); Antoinette Burton (1998) At the
Heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late Victorian Britain (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press); Clare Midgley (1992) Women against Slavery: the British campaigns,
1780–1870 (London: Routledge); Susan Thorne (1999) Congregational Missions and the Making
of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
[112] Clare Midgley (2007) Feminism and Empire: women activists in imperial Britain, 1790–1865
113

(London: Routledge).
[113] Mrinalini Sinha (1995) Colonial Masculinity: the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate
113

Bengali’ in the late nineteenth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

[114] Catherine Hall (2002) Civilising Subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination,
110

1830–67 (Cambridge: Polity Press). Catherine Hall (1998) Going-a-Trolloping: imperial

man travels the empire, in Midgley (Ed.), Gender and Imperialism, pp.180–199, and
Catherine Hall (1992) Competing Masculinities: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and
the case of Governor Edward Eyre, in her White, Male and Middle Class, pp.255–295.
[115] Marilyn Lake (1993) Colonised and Colonising: the white Australian feminist subject,
111

Women’s History Review, 2(3), pp. 377–386.

[116] See Hall, Cultures of Empire, pp. 1–33, and Adele Perry (2001) On the Edge of Empire: gender,
112

race and the making of British Columbia 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) for
discussions of racial mixing.
[117] See Leila J. Rupp (1997) Worlds of Women: the making of an international women’s movement
113

(Princeton: Princeton University Press), and Bonnie E. Smith (Ed.) (2000) Global Feminisms
since 1945 (London: Routledge).
[118] Sanjam Ahluwalia (2003) Rethinking Boundaries: feminism and (inter)nationalism in early-
114

twentieth-century India, with a response by Antoinette Burton, in Journal of Women’s History,

14(4), pp. 187–200.
[119] Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (1997) Through an African Feminist Theoretical Lens: viewing
115

Caribbean women’s history cross-culturally, in Shepherd, Brereton and Bailey (Eds) Engen-
dering History: Caribbean women in historical perspective, pp. 3–19; See also Sandra Gunning,
Tera Hunter & Michele Mitchell (2003) Gender, Sexuality, and African Diasporas, Gender and
History, 13(3), pp. 397–408.
[120] Asuncion Lavrin (1998) International Feminisms: Latin American alternatives, in Mrinalini
116

Sinha, Donna Guy & Angela Woollacott (Eds) Special Themed Issue: Feminisms and Interna-
tionalism, Gender and History, 10(3), p. 520.
[121] Antoinette Burton (2003) South Asian Women, Gender and Transnationalism, Journal of
117

Women’s History, 14(4), pp. 196–201.

[122] Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: feminist solidarity through
118

anticapitalist struggles, in her Feminism without Borders: decolonising theory, practicing

solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 221–251.
[123] Ibid., p. 226.
119

[124] Ibid., p. 235.

120

[125] Ibid., p. 231.

121

[126] Lorde, ‘Open Letter to Mary Daly’, p. 70.

122

[127] Susan Stanford Friedman (1995) Beyond White and Other: relationality and narratives of
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race, Signs, 21, pp. 1–49.

[128] Joan Scott (2004) Feminism’s History, Journal of Women’s History, 16(2), pp. 10–29.
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[129] bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), p. 153.
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[130] See Karen Hagemann & Maria Teresa Fernandez-Aceves (Eds) (2007) History in Practice:
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gendering trans/national historiographies: similarities and differences in comparison, Journal

of Women’s History, 19(1), pp. 151–213.
[131] Scott, ‘Feminism’s History’, p. 21.
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[132] Ibid., p. 24.

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