Talk:Women's history
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[edit] Disambiguation?
I have removed the bolded part of the first sentence of this article:
Women's history is a term that refers to information about the past in regard to the female human being, in contrast to a history from a feminist perspective (called Herstory).
Considering that feminism is a broad movement, one could claim that women's history is history from a feminist perspective. The bolded text that I removed might have been intended to discredit feminism by emphasing extremist feminists. --Kernigh 01:40, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
- I know there is a Herstory page, but I think Women's History is far more common for name of the field. Would anyone mind a disambiguation between the field and the subject itself? -- TheMightyQuill 09:21, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Women's History in other countries
Please see [1] El Jigue 1/19/06
[edit] women's history?
Shouldn't the article on women's history dicussus the logistics of women's history.. prominent women's historians, popular research topics, and that sort of thing rather than lising the history of women? The article on History isn't just a list of every universal historical event that ever happened. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 164.156.66.47 (talk) 16:52, 8 May 2007 (UTC).
- Good question. The title of this article is a little confusing. As it says at the top of the article This article is about the history of women. For information on the field of historical study, see Gender history. - TheMightyQuill 08:30, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
I must respectfully disagree. Speaking as a graduate student in history, I assure you that the field of Women's History is not the same as "gender history" (which isn't an accepted field everywhere). The field of women's history has a tradition and a body of scholars who identify themselves as women's historians. In fact, the American History Association offers a prize every year called the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for Women's History (not gender history).
On another issue, the idea of "herstory" is appropriate to leave in. It is not an "extreme" idea at all. The whole field was created by feminists anyway, and I think we do them a disservice and we distort reality by trying somehow to minimize their influence. In short, it is not historically accurate! :-) Graceful1 06:14, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
- Also speaking as a graduate student in history, I agree that Women's History is not the same as Gender History but insist there is a world outside academia in which "Women's History" the field (which now seems to be using the article Herstory) is hard to separate from the actual history of women. See World History vs History of the world for another example. In fact, when I created Gender History, I described it as an outgrowth of Women's History the field. If, however, you want to move this article to the history of women and rename Herstory to Women's History, I'd support it. Finally, whether or not "herstory" is an extreme idea really depends on your point of view. - TheMightyQuill 19:36, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
The Women's History article really should be about the rise of the field of women's history. It grew out of the contemporary women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was developed by men and women who felt that there needed to be changes in the way history was written, in terms of periodization, social theory, etc. This is why "women's history" is not simply the history of female human beings. Politics were tied up in its creation from the very start. This is not an "extreme" point of view, but indeed a fact that can be verified through many primary sources (such as the oral history project on women's historians which will be made available at Smith College in 2008), and in secondary sources about the rise and development of the field of women's history (which I can list here later.) "Gender history" came about much later with the publication of Joan W. Scott's article "Gender as a useful tool for historical analysis" in 1987 or 1988.
I think we need to be careful about presuming to know what is or isn't an extreme point of view.
Graceful1 (talk) 23:08, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
