ABSTRACT
Historians - the vast majority o f them male - in looking for a justification for the study o f history make grand claims. History, we are told, is concerned with ‘the totality o f man’s past experi ence’ . That totality apparently does not extend to women. History gives a society ‘a sense of its own identity’ . Yet women are only now beginning to discover theirs. History ‘tells us about man in his various activities and environments’ .1 Women are seen as unchanging in history, their activities much the same whatever the environment. They play no part in that grand advance o f history. O f course, if one substitutes ‘men and women’ for ‘man’, the claims are right. This is what history should be, but it is not the history that so far has been written.
