Women's History in Many Places: reflections on plurality, diversity and polyversality

Abstract

ABSTRACT This piece addresses the key questions posed by Chen Yan and Karen Offen in their joint position paper on the current state of women's history and its place at the cutting edge of historical practice. Having made the case that women's and gender history has had a significant and multi-level impact (empirical, conceptual, methodological and theoretical) on that practice, my article observes that acknowledgement of this is still very limited among those not centrally involved in the field. It notes the tensions between the aspiration both to identify and pursue women's and gender history as discrete fields of scholarly endeavour and the aspiration for women and gender to be treated as topics/categories which should be constitutive of all historical inquiry. It goes on to consider the relationship of women's history to gender history, to post-colonial and cross-cultural scholarship, and to recent work in spatial histories. It argues that in the first case the two approaches are mutually reinforcing, and that in the other two cases women's and gender history has been at the leading edge of these developing fields and is uniquely positioned to make innovative contributions there. The capacity of women's and gender history to continue as a leading edge area of historical practice will be grounded in its ongoing commitment to reflexivity about problems and limitations in the field, and to sustaining its key insights into the links between the personal and the structural, the global and the local, and the material and the cultural.