ABSTRACT
The goal of historians of women, even as they established the separate identity of women, was to integrate women into history. Historians of women themselves found it difficult to write women into history and the task of rewriting history called for reconceptualizations that they were not initially prepared or trained to undertake. Yet the concept of experience has been rendered problematic for historians and needs to be critically discussed. Not only has poststructuralism questioned whether experience has a status outside linguistic convention, but the work of women's historians, too, has pluralized and complicated the ways historians have conventionally appealed to experience. Poststructuralism is not without its dilemmas for feminist historians. The author thinks those who insist that poststructuralism can't deal with reality or that its focus on texts excludes social structures miss the point of the theory.
