Women's Culture and Women's Power: An Attempt at Historiography

Abstract

The trials and tribulations of women's history and its current forms clearly show its place within the discipline of history. They explain in part the current choice of topics studied by historians and the specific methods used by them. For the past ten years important shifts in how to identify and analyze historical material have taken place. Within this large movement, so far hardly subjected to critical analysis, women's history has met with different systems of exclusion, tolerance and, today, banalization which should be brought to light. Doing so would achieve two objectives: to remain critical towards women's history's own formulations and to approach the necessary relationship between this particular field and history as a whole differently. This represents an ambitious project whose difficulty we acknowledge, for it is always easier to ask questions than to answer them. But history is not just the production of new knowledge, it is also the formulation of questions. The questions which it raises and which are asked of it constitute a specific area of research which needs to be urgently and openly discussed. The choice of Annales as a forum is neither fortuitous nor indicative of a desire to carve a niche in a journal which at first did not readily accept women's history, although it did not ignore it.1 Rather, it is an opportunity to openly question the methods used to analyze gender roles, methods often expounded in Annales, and to ask oneself how a certain recent type of historiography has managed to make its own the study of female-male relationships. Here is a brief description of the history of women's history whose twists and turns have not been perceived by everyone. Women's history really took off in 1970, with the realization that it had been neglected and denied. It was helped along by the explosion of the feminist movement, the progress made by anthropology and the history of mentalitA©s,* the new knowledge brought by social history and the new studies on popular consciousness. This represents a key period when feminist activists were writing women's history before women historians themselves. After this