The history of women has become a lucrative subject. No historical topic offers a better hope of publishers' contracts, or even, in the United States at least, of academic appointments. Yet if the market is wide, the pitfalls are deep. Some of them have been created by the very forces which have made women's history fashionable. Just when other forms of Whig history have become discredited, sexual Whiggism has become almost compulsory. Women's history easily becomes sectarian history: an enterprise in which the past is studied with the purpose less of enlarging present horizons than of fortifying present prejudices.

LRB 7 June 1984 | PDF Download