ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, women’s history has sought to discover women’s place in history, to give women a voice, and to make them visible. It has sought to examine history as a site of female, specifically “other” experiences and thus not simply to add women to historiography as it had been conceived up until then, but also to confront and challenge the historical record with the specific difference of female experiences and perceptions. This “other” historical discourse was intended not only to bring forth new questions, approaches and methodologies along with new fields of research, but also to read traditional historical fields against the grain of an inherently masculine viewpoint. Finally, with “gender history”, women’s historians left the separate “room of one’s own” 1 that had been important for consolidating their research and feminist interests, in search of a more general discourse aimed at undermining the apparently natural polarity of the sexes in history, by historicizing it.
