ABSTRACT
Ruminating in 1929 on the books that had not been written on women in British history, Virginia Woolf suggested that history be rewritten by the students of two women's colleges. '[W]hy not', she quizzed, 'add a supplement to history? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety'? Woolf's rumination, for which she had drawn on two lectures in Cambridge in October 1928 and developed into her famous essay A Room of One's Own, is widely cited. It is worth repeating not only because it is a classical beginning for a survey of the field of women's history, but also for her use of the term 'supplement' to describe the research and writing that would include women in 'any of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historians' view of the past'. 1 This term, as linguists and historians have noted, is equivocal. It denotes an addition of material to the body of knowledge about the past that is relative to that body and perhaps marginal to it, but may also serve to challenge and relativise the very thing that we define as history.
