From “women worthies” to poststructuralism? Debate and controversy in women’s history in Britain

In 1929, the well-known English essayist and novelist Virginia Woolf lamented the fact that so few histories of women had been written:

The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female. Of our fathers we know always some fact, some distinction. They were soldiers or they were sailors; they filled that office or they made that law. But of our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers, what remains?… We know nothing of their marriages and the number of children they bore.2