Challenging Masculinism: personal history and microhistory in feminist studies of the women's suffrage movement

Abstract

This article begins by discussing ‘masculinism’ in the field of history in terms of gender blindness. It then looks at a more particular usage of the term, as a resort to the ridiculing and demeaning of women historical actors, not least in some influential treatments of the twentieth-century campaigns in Britain for women's suffrage. It argues that masculinist history rests upon the use of stereotypes of women that, when they do not mock, either marginalise or altogether refuse them a place in the larger narratives of community, state and nation. It then looks at the adoption of various forms of ‘personal history’ in much of the ‘new women's history’, including feminist histories of the women's suffrage movement, forms which generally rely on private papers: letters, diaries, memoirs and other life-writing. Finally, it looks at the practice of ‘microhistory’ and suggests that the value of such forms and methods lies especially in their capacity to challenge the stereotypes on which masculinism rests, through a focus on the particular that aids recognition of the varieties and differences to be found among women within their shared subordination as a sex.