ABSTRACT
REWRITING HISTORY IS IN THE JOB DESCRIPTION OF THE HISTORIAN, WRITES Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in her article about Harvard’s “womanless” history (1999). At first blush that seems rather unorthodox, but that is what historians, and especially historians of women, do when they add new perspectives and interpretations to existing accounts of the past. According to Joan Wallach Scott (1996), women historians of the early 1970s “set out to establish not only women’s presence, but their active participation in events that were seen to constitute history” (2). The goal of these early feminist historians was to make women visible. Scott points out however that making women a part of historical accounts also created “new knowledge, another way of understanding . . . and another way of seeing and understanding what counted as history” (3).
