ABSTRACT
When I first asked this question, in the 1970s, I did so against a background where some male academics seriously asked, ‘is there a history of women?’ Others, while conceding that there might be such a thing, dismissed it as impossible to find out about: ‘there are no sources’, they used to say. Women’s history has come a long way since then. You can study it in colleges and universities; the national curriculum has put it, albeit in a limited way, on the agenda in schools; a whole publishing industry has grown up around women’s studies, of which women’s history is a significant strand: television programmes, too, reflect the public appetite for knowledge about women’s lives in earlier times. The subject has made great advances in a short time but there is still a long way to go. In fact, the question ‘why should we study women’s history?’ is as relevant now as it was then but the answers must be geared directly to women’s situation today. This book invites readers to research local women’s history and, as such, to take on a lot of work. We therefore need to consider a further question: ‘why should we study local women’s history?’ In this chapter I want to address both questions. I also wish to examine the current state of women’s history in Britain and to outline a plan for its future development. Individuals and local groups will see not only how they fit into the scheme of things, but how vital their contribution is.
