Women's history
Women's history studies and narrates women's lives, roles, and experiences across time, including how gender shaped societies and historical change.
Herstory: A term for history recounted from women’s perspectives and attentive to women’s experiences. The term captured a challenge to male-centered historical narratives.
Intersectionality: A framework for analyzing how social categories such as race, class, and gender interact. It prevents women's history from treating women as a single, uniform group.
Women's suffrage: The movement to secure women's voting rights. Suffrage campaigns reveal organized political action and changing ideas of citizenship.
Gender history: The study of how gender relations and identities shape historical societies and change. It analyzes gender as a relational system, not women alone as its subject.
Second-wave feminism: A feminist movement of the 1960s through the 1980s that pursued social, political, and cultural equality. Its activism helped establish demand for scholarship on women’s lives.
Social history: The study of societies, social relations, and everyday life across time. Its focus on ordinary lives widened the subjects available to women's history.
Seneca Falls Convention: An 1848 women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Its participants and resolutions provide a landmark case of nineteenth-century activism.
Feminist history: Historical research shaped by feminist questions about power, gender, and inequality. It overlaps with women's history but foregrounds feminist analysis and political critique.
Gerda Lerner: An Austrian-born American historian who helped establish women's history as an academic field. Her teaching and institution-building gave the field a durable academic home.
Oral history: The collection and interpretation of recorded interviews about past experiences. Interviews preserve memories often absent from official records.