The History of European Women: A Critical Survey of Recent Research

Abstract

The Women's Liberation movement, which provided the basic impulse for the enterprise of women's history, began in the United States in the 1960s and only later spread to Europe. While work in women's history had already begun to appear in some quantity in America in the early 1970s, it was not until the end of the decade that countries such as France and Germany began to follow suit. Nevertheless, the study of European women and their past formed an essential part of the subject from the very beginning.2 It was in European history, for example, that the most striking examples of women's involvement in revolutionary movements, from Olympe de Gouges to Rosa Luxemburg, could be found:3 and it was also to European history that feminists had to look for the most extreme forms of male supremacy and sexism in the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. It was not surprising, therefore, that European history loomed very large in the seminal book in the field, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics.4 Yet students of the subject were faced with peculiar difficulties. The strength of the feminist tradition in America helped keep the