Feminist history

Understanding feminist history

Feminist history combines the search for past female scholars with a modern feminist perspective on how history is affected by them. It is not solely focused on retelling history from a woman's perspective, but rather interpreting history with a feminist frame of mind, and is not to be confused with the history of feminist movements. Feminist historians include cultural and social investigations in their work, and the field emerged as women began writing accounts of their own and other women's lives, with figures such as Susan B. Anthony and Audre Lorde documenting histories of their feminist movements.

These historians collect to analyze and analyze to connect, allowing a link with public history, though problems remain in integrating this history into curricula. Feminist historians now must also understand digital humanities involved in creating online databases of primary sources and published works, with feminist digital humanists working to reveal an online integration of the two histories. Harvard's Women's Studies Database contains sources like the Gerritsen Collection that enable scholarly papers and publicly convey that there is more than one history.

Relations to women's history

Feminist historians use women's history to explore the different voices of past women, gathering information with the help of experts who have dedicated their lives to this pursuit. This provides primary sources vital to the integration of histories, such as firsthand accounts like Fiedler's And the Walls Come Tumbling Down? (A Feminist View from East Berlin), which recounts the daily lives of past women and how their lives were affected by government laws.

Women's historians interpret how laws changed these women's lives, while feminist historians rely on this information to observe the 'disappearing woman'. Fiedler noted that feminists were disappointed when they met ordinary eastern women who were good housewives while enjoying outside work, because these feminists only knew the public history of the German Democratic Republic and projected themselves into the imaginary. Investigation of eastern women's lives revealed that although the GDR's socialist policies encouraged women in the labor force, no women had created these policies, showing that the patriarch had created a public history in which women were cut out.

Such neglected cultural accounts allow women's historians to create large databases for feminist historians, who analyze these sources and compare them to scholarly works from the same period, facing the challenge of combining what they learn from the source with what they know from the works.

Integrating histories

Feminist historians see two specific histories: the public, singular history composed of political events and newspapers, and the second made up of women's history and analyzed primary sources. Integrating these helps historians look at the past with a more feminist lens. Professor Peter G. Filene of the University of North Carolina recounted in his paper Integrating Women's History and Regular History that his purpose is to help students understand the values and behavior of people unlike themselves, entering other lives and analyzing the forces that shaped them.

When asked to teach a course on the history of American women, Filene recognized he was learning not heroine history or herstory, but a compensatory history, which limited his studies by thinking of women's contributions to what men had already written. He concluded that the line between the 'public' and 'domestic' sphere is imaginary, as boys are raised in the domestic sphere and men return to it daily in private homes. President Theodore Roosevelt stated that no man can be a good citizen who is not a good husband and a good father.

Just as history needs domestic history incorporated, men's history cannot be understood without their private experiences, and women's history needs their private experiences combined with their public ones. To successfully integrate these histories, the world must not have male and female spheres as synonyms for private and public; the connections found in public and private men's and women's history need systematic synthesis, and the idea of just two histories creates the challenge most feminist historians face.

Feminist historiography

Feminist historiography is a notable facet of feminist history. Judith M. Bennett, in her book History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, writes on the importance of studying a 'patriarchal equilibrium'. Cheryl Glenn also writes that writing women into the history of rhetoric can be an ethically and intellectually responsible gesture that disrupts frozen memories to address silences, challenge absences, and assert women's contributions to public life. This facet inspects historical writings typically assumed to be canon and reinvents them under a feminist lens.