WOMENS HISTORY IN BRITAIN - AN OVERVIEW

This article gives an overview of the development of women's history i n Britain from the nineteenth century to the present. The lives of ill ustrious women were a common focus for historians of women in the nine teenth century although from the 1890s and into the early twentieth ce ntury academic women historians in the universities began to research the everyday lives of 'ordinary' women, especially under capitalism. T his research, however, was largely ignored or represented in sex-stere otypical ways in most subsequent mainstream histories which focused on men's activities in wars, politics, business and administration. The rise of the Second Wave of the women's movement in the USA and Western Europe in the late 1960s sparked renewed interest in women's pasts an d feminists set the pace for the emerging field of women's history. Th e fragmentation of the women's movement in the 1980s, the increasing a wareness of 'differences' between women and the current vogue for post modernism and poststructuralism within feminist circles, especially in the USA, has not left women's history in England unscathed. It is arg ued that the move towards focusing on 'gender' in feminist history may deradicalize our politics and run the risk of 'women' being subsumed within a male frame of reference. A plea is made for bringing 'women' hack into feminist women's history.