ABSTRACT

Since the Second Women’s Liberation Movement feminists have increasingly taken issue with the absence of women from history (see, for example, Bonnie S.Anderson and Judith P.Zinsser A History of Their Own, Penguin, 1988). Writing history from a feminist perspective has involved re-telling the past in a way which takes account of women’s lives which were previously undervalued, or, as Sheila Rowbotham has argued, ‘hidden from history’ (Pluto, 1973). In the 1980s and 1990s this has developed into a complex, inter-disciplinary field of feminist cultural history which resists the positivist concept of historical ‘fact’.