IF THE PAST IS LIKE A FOREIGN LAND, the history of women is not only foreign but largely uncharted. This is especially true of women's historiography where no guidebooks provide topographical information showing monumental works, schools of interpretation, trends in research, and amateur histories. Yet a tradition of historical writing exists in this field, and women have contributed most to its development, which is hardly surprising. As Natalie Z. Davis has shown for the early modern period, women from Christine de Pisan to the Duchess of Newcastle practiced what is usually considered a male craft.' Like their male counterparts, they produced some great writing but also much that was mediocre and of little value today. Still, the sum of their historical endeavors has relevance for contemporary research and its problems. So also do the works of women historians who wrote during the two centuries subsequent to the period of Davis's essay. A topographical and topical analysis of their writings will link women scholars to the historiography of women and will connect their accomplishments to present inquiry. Women scholars have, of course, long concerned themselves with conventional political history. Within the space of a few decades Catharine Macaulay (1731-91), Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), and Marie de Lezardiere (1754-1835) produced distinguished narratives that gained them lasting, if uneven, reputations. Among women historians, however, these three were exceptional in that they generally ignored the history, though not necessarily the cause, of women. Macaulay's ambition to challenge David Hume's version of English history never prevented her from writing tracts about the condition of her sex, and Warren, while charting the course of the American Revolution, was certainly aware of lost opportunities for women in that struggle for liberty.2 Yet most women historians wrote at least one