Theorising Feminist History: a thirty‐year retrospective

Abstract

Since the second wave of feminism, women historians have challenged, debated and transformed 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 turning 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, feminist 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