The 1980s were marked by the emergence of a different kind of cultural history, “microhistory,” which consists essentially of a story about a person or persons. Two famous examples are Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980), about the unorthodox cosmological and theological beliefs of a 16th-century Italian miller, and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), a scholarly treatment of a famous true story about an imposter who took over the farm (and bed) of a substantial peasant in 16th-century France. Typically, microhistories featured central characters who were socially marginalized—exactly the sort likely to be overlooked by social history no less than by orthodox political history. Nevertheless, the marginal can be defined only relative to the typical, and the latter is something that only social history can provide.
Cultural history can be applied to nearly anything, and it has enriched understanding of a wide variety of phenomena. A good illustration is the French Revolution, one of the most intensively studied events in European history. For at least a century after it took place it was treated as a political breakdown of the ancien régime, facilitated by the spread of the Enlightenment. Later, the economic and social organization of 18th-century France was studied—first by Marxists who saw it as a classic “bourgeois revolution” in which a feudal order was overthrown by a more progressive capitalist one and then by more-nuanced investigators who analyzed the various social and interest groups within the bourgeoisie and nobility. A cultural-historical approach emphasized the important role of cultural symbols—the Great Fear (prompted by rumours of an aristocratic conspiracy to overthrow the Third Estate), the Phrygian cap (an emblem of liberty during the revolution), the planting of “liberty trees,” the great revolutionary festivals (such as the Festival of Federation, held in Paris in 1790 on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille)—and denied that they could be reduced to underlying inequalities and social tensions. Women’s history
In the 19th century, women’s history would have been inconceivable, because “history” was so closely identified with war, diplomacy, and high politics—from all of which women were virtually excluded. Although there had been notable queens and regents—such as Elizabeth I of England, Catherine de Medici of France, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Christina of Sweden—their gender was considered chiefly when it came to forming marriage alliances or bearing royal heirs. Inevitably, the ambition to write history “from the bottom up” and to bring into focus those marginalized by previous historiography inspired the creation of women’s history.
Queen Elizabeth of England, portrait in oil by an unknown artist, English, 16th century; in the Pitti Palace, Florence.Carlo Bevilacqua—Scala/Art Resource, New York
One of the consequences of the professionalization of history in the 19th century was the exclusion of women from academic history writing. A career like that of Catherine Macaulay (1731–91), one of the more prominent historians of 18th-century England, was impossible one hundred years later, when historical writing had been essentially monopolized by all-male universities and research institutes. This exclusion began to break down in the late 19th century as women’s colleges were founded in England (e.g., at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge) and the United States. Some of these institutions, such as Bryn Mawr College in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, had strong research agendas.
Although the earliest academic women’s historians were drawn to writing about women, it cannot be said that they founded, or even that they were interested in founding, a specialty like “women’s history.” Alice Clark wrote Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1920), and Eileen Power wrote Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 (1922), a definitive monograph, and Medieval Women (published posthumously in 1975). Many women (including some in the early history of the Annales) worked as unpaid research assistants and cowriters for their husbands, and it is doubtless that they were deprived of credit for being historians in their own right. An exception was Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958), who coauthored a number of books with her more famous husband, Charles Beard, and also wrote Women as a Force in History, arguably the first general work in American women’s history.
Since it was still possible in the 1950s to doubt that there was enough significant evidence on which to develop women’s history, it is not surprising that some of the earliest work was what is called “contribution history.” It focused, in other words, on the illustrious actions of women in occupations traditionally dominated by men. The other preoccupation was the status of women at various times in the past. This was customarily evaluated in terms of comparative incomes, laws about ownership of property, and the degree of social freedom allowed within marriage or to unmarried women. In The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), Gerda Lerner, whose work chiefly concerned women in the United States, examined Mesopotamian society in an attempt to discover the ancient roots of the subjection of women. Explorations of the status of women also contributed to a rethinking of fundamental historical concepts, as in Joan Kelly’s essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1977).
Another area of study, which was curiously slow to emerge, was the history of the family. Since in all times most women have been wives and mothers for most of their adult lives, this most nearly universal of female experiences would seem to dictate that women’s historians would be especially interested in the history of the family. Yet for a long time few of them were. The history of the family was inspired primarily not by women’s history but by advances made in historical demography, whose heavy quantification women’s history generally avoided.
This partly explains why the majority of works in women’s history have dealt with unmarried women—as workers for wages, nuns, lesbians, and those involved in passionate friendships. Evidence concerning the lives of these figures is in some ways easier to come by than evidence of maternal and family life, but it is also clear that feminist historians were averse to studying women as victims of matrimony—as they all too often were. There are, however, intersections between history of the family and women’s history. A few historians have written works on family limitation (birth control) in the United States, for example; one of these scholars, Linda Gordon, raised the important question of why suffragists and other feminists did not as a rule support campaigns for family limitation.