ABSTRACT
Women's history bridges the scholarly and political, weaving their disparate visions into one. The political feminism of the 1960s and 1970s drew scholars and students to the field of women's history, informing the questions women's historians first addressed. The daughter of political feminism, women's history played a critical role within the growing sophistication of contemporary social history. The New Social History popularized techniques developed by French historical demographers in the 1950s and 1960s that encouraged social historians to turn from a study of the notable and public to an analysis of the hitherto largely overlooked domestic world of the inarticulate, the black, the working class, the immigrant – and even of women within these groups. In this sense women's history challenges traditional history in a far more basic way than do any of the other new subspecialties in conveniently labeled 'minority history'.
