Pacheco 2002

Pacheco, Anita, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing. Blackwell, 2002.

Feminist Historiography, by Margo Hendricks (361-76)

Pg 362, recounting early interventions in study of women’s history, beginning with Alice Clark’s working Life of Women in the 17c (1919) — all “increased awareness of women’s lives in Renaissance and early modern England, yet none represented itself as ‘feminist historiography’” (362)

Joan Kelly, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1977) — problem of historiography became a feminist concern

“Second wave” of scholarship on women’s history in 1980s and 90s

Ezell 1994 especially important in challenging feminist historiography to rethink category of woman in early modern period

New questions about gendered identities, sexual identities, and role of race and colonialism

“Feminist historiography has as its theoretical and political obligation the imperative to redress traditional historiography’s gendered oversights. Feminist historians of Renaissance and early modern English culture also have the added imperative of redefining the parameters of feminist historiography so that it is truly representative of ‘women’s histories’. In essence, feminist historiography cannot afford to generate totalizing narratives about women’s existence in Renaissance and early modern England, particularly when a number of these women were from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds. It is important that feminist social historians take the lead in reshaping the redefining categories of analysis in modern historiography.” (374)