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Comment on Tilly: Who Asks the Questions for Women’s History?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Judith M. Bennett
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Extract

In her complex and subtle paper, Louise Tilly raises a host of intriguing, debatable issues. She tells us, pace Joan Scott, that women’s history has “arrived” in terms of both institotionaliza-tion within the academy and development into a separate historical specialty. She tells us that we must strive towards a women’s history that is not only descriptive (seeing the task “of retrieving women’s lives and achievements ... as sufficient unto themselves”) but also analytical (“connecting its problems to those of other histories”). She tells us, again pace Joan Scott, that a literary approach to gender downplays human agency and offers no constructive means of historical explanation. And she tells us that social history, as it has been informed and altered by women’s history in the last twenty years, is the best place for connection between women’s history and “the agenda of history as a whole.”

Type
Comment and Debate
Information
Social Science History , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , Winter 1989 , pp. 471 - 477
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1989 

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References

Beard, Mary Ritter (1971 [1946]) Woman as a Force in History. New York: Collier Books.Google Scholar
Bennett, Judith M. (1989) “Feminism and history.” Gender and History 1: 251–272.Google Scholar
Kelly, Joan (1984a [1976]) “The social relation of the sexes: Methodological implications of women’s history,” in Women, History and Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1–18.Google Scholar
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Koonz, Claudia (1989) “Gender and the Politics of History” [review]. Women’s Review of Books 6(4): 19–20.Google Scholar
Scott, Joan Wallach (1988) Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar