Response

Extract

Judith Bennett has persuaded me that in the oral version of this paper I conflated five points: (1) All women’s history has a feminist motivation and message. (2) Descriptive women’s history has discovered valuable evidence about women in the past; this has now been accepted as historical “fact.” (3) Sociological use of gender as a concept adds an analytical edge to descriptive accounts. (4) Social history that makes gender and women’s experience problematic and analyzes it systematically can add to the achievements of descriptive/interpretive women’s history. (5) Both types of women’s history (descriptive/interpretive and analytical) can only benefit from explicitly demonstrating the ways in which their findings contribute to answering questions already on the historical agenda. I have revised my paper somewhat to clarify these points.