Studying Women

Abstract

Ellen Carol DuBois. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America. Ithaca: Cornell ' University Press, 1978. 220 pp. Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis, eds. Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 250 + xiv pp. Helen Deiss Irvin. Women in Kentucky. Lexington : The University Press of Kentucky, 1979. 134 pp. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. A Generation of Women: Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. 207 + viii pp. How best to study the history of women? Do women need to be a segregated and explicit focus of research, or should they be considered in the context of the institutions with which they were associated? What is gained by studying women as women rather than as reformers, teachers or pioneers who happened also to be female? What are the key aspects of women's pasts on which to focus scholarly inquiry? How do historians' reasons for studying women affect the kind of history they write? These are the sorts of questions stimulated by read- ing four disparate books which in various ways might be expected to illumi- nate something of American women's past. An analysis of what each of the four brings to the study of women should enable us to understand more clearly what can be learned from each type of historical inquiry, although by no means do these books illustrate the entire range of the contemporary study of women's history.