Women Writing History

Mary Spongberg. Writing Women's History Since the Renaissance. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xii + 308 pp. ISBN 0-333-72667-7 (cl); ISBN 0-333-72668-5 (pb).

Antoinette Burton. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. x + 202 pp. ISBN 0-195-14424-4 (cl); ISBN 0-19-514425-2 (pb).

As befits a field with the maturity of more than thirty years as an organized specialty (as some history departments have recently celebrated), women's history is accruing a substantial body of historiographical analysis. A number of scholars have contributed to our growing understanding of the emergence, efflorescence, theoretical and political struggles, and complex provenance of women's history. Recent historiographical studies have especially challenged what Mary Spongberg describes as the dominant 1970s attitude that the field was radically new, replete with "pioneering tropes of discovery and exploration," a desire to distance itself from earlier historical writing by women, and a marked lack of interesting in such earlier writings (2). For various reasons, including historians' increased interest in interdisciplinarity, a higher general level of comfort with linguistic theory and the significance of the discursive, and an apprehension of the importance of traversing cultural boundaries and therefore genres of evidence, women's history has become a more self-consciously diverse field. Not only are we more ready to claim progenitors who may not have passed every litmus test for empirical or academic history, a greater inclusiveness regarding historical evidence (from the oral, to the visual and material, to historians' own stories and memories) has broadened at least some shared definitions of what counts as history. The work of scholars such as Bonnie G. Smith has expanded our understanding of the material conditions of the production of history in the past, and complicated the category of "historian."¹ Feminist theory has helped us to recognize the power dynamics involved in the masculinization of the category "historian" and the exclusion of women who also participated in history writing. The two books under review are remarkably complementary contributions to this current larger project of questioning who counts as a "historian," how gender ideologies and patriarchal relations have directly shaped the writing and reception of history, the meanings of the contexts of historical production, and the sources, genres, and vehicles that have constituted history writing.

Mary Spongberg has produced a marvelously rich history of Western women's history writing, and the surprising number of women who compiled histories from the fifteenth century onwards. Writing Women's History Since the Renaissance is informed by a broad historical understanding, and is concise and lucid in its prose. It deserves to be an assigned text for seminars in historiography and women's history, but it is also simply a real pleasure to read, fulfilling one of the original and enduring goals of women's history: to inform us of the amazing range of past women's contributions and creativity, a range so long obscured. But the book is far more than a compilation of the fascinating lives and works of an array of women in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Australia, and Canada from the fifteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Spongberg reveals and analyzes the workings of patriarchy and misogyny in Western culture, documenting a powerful history of the exclusion of women from historical subjectivity and from the category of those who wrote works recognized as "history." Spongberg builds upon the work of many other scholars who have studied particular periods and topics within her long framework, perhaps most particularly drawing upon Smith's pioneering work that has shown us the complex workings of gender in relation to historical writing from the end of the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. While this is largely a work based on secondary sources, Spongberg's interpretation and analysis, the sheer scope of the book, and its coherence and lucidity make it an important contribution. Moreover, she mounts...