The Annales School and Feminist History: Opening Dialogue with the American Stepchild

Abstract

In this country feminist historians of the late sixties and seventies teethed on the scholarship of the Annales school. Here were historians willing to examine the role of the family, investigate the relationship of the rise of industry to marriage patterns, and link economic cycles with declining food production, late marriage, sexual frustration, hysteria, prophetic religious utterances, and social revolt. Contraception, witchcraft, birthrates, family reconstitution, the condition of the material life, an age's mental equipment and sensibilite were important to them. What did not interest the Annalistes was the traditional narrative history of public events, histoire evenementielle: a political, diplomatic, or military chronology of the centuries. While traditional history rendered