I first came to feminist history in the 1970s as a way of reconciling my two full but contrary identities at the time. In one, I was a lesbian feminist, absorbed by activism at home and in the streets. In the other, I was a studious medievalist, training under the guidance of male professors, most of them priests, at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Radical feminist by night, medievalist by day; feminist history brought my two selves together. As I recall, the reconciliation was less than perfect. Among some feminists I felt awkward about the elitism of my education,...

In 1405, Christine de Pizan, an Italian humanist who spent most of her life in France, set out to rebut the misogynistic literature of her time. Crafting what was to become the first major feminist tract in the Western tradition, Christine de Pizan turned, again and again, to the feminist promise of history. In The Book of the City of Ladies, she described a city populated with the great women of the past—Queen Esther, who saved the Jews; the Sabine women who solidified peace between the Romans and their neighbors; Clothilda, who brought Christianity to the Franks; and of...

In 1979, Judy Chicago premiered The Dinner Party, an exhibition of a grand banqueting hall that celebrated women of the past. Visitors to the first showing in San Francisco walked on a floor of porcelain tiles inscribed with the names of 999 great women from history; in the center of the floor, they found a triangular table with place settings for 39 diners; and at each place-setting, they could examine a celebration in ceramic and cloth of a woman from the past; starting with Primordial Goddess, these place settings took visitors, in a steadily ascending incline, through Hypatia, Eleanor of...

In women’s history, the distant past tells a story of enduring patriarchy, a story that poses two challenges to our field. The first challenge is the long-standing and baffling job of locating the historical origins of patriarchy. From J. J. Bachofen and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century to Gerda Lerner in 1986, the search for the origins of patriarchy has been compelling and inconclusive.¹ It has not been a fruitless search—we have learned a great deal—but it is doomed in both conception (there was almost certainly no single original site of patriarchal power) and execution (the sources...

Women who work in England today share an experience with female wage earners seven centuries ago: they take home only about three-quarters the wages earned by men. In the 1360s, women earned 71 percent of male wages; today, they earn about 75 percent. Of course, no parallel across six centuries can be quite this precise. The medieval figure draws on one particularly detailed list of wages paid to harvest workers in the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1363–64, whereas the contemporary wage gap is estimated from datasets for all of Great Britain in 2002.¹ Medieval wageworkers were paid in...

In the early 1990s when I first began talking about the L-word in women’s history, some people expected me to be speaking about “liberal.” With the 2004 debut in the United States of the lesbian soap opera The L Word, what was once obscure is now likely much clearer. By “L-word,” I mean to evoke the lesbians and lesbianisms that are so often effaced in the writing of women’s history. This effacement is a long-standing part of Western culture, which, in the words of Judith Brown, has adopted an “almost active willingness to disbelieve” in female same-sex love.¹ It is...

When women’s history began to take root in the 1970s, history departments in the United States and Europe were places where men communed with one another about the histories of other men, most of them well-born, Christian, and of European descent. These stag affairs are blessedly rare these days. More women and more people of diverse races, faiths, and social origins now populate history departments, and in at least some contexts, the practices of history now broadly consider women as well as men, poor as well as rich, and the full diversity of the human past. But the practices of...

Like most historians, I feel more comfortable thinking about the past than speculating on the future. This book began with recollections of my first encounters with women’s history in the 1970s, and it has built its argument around both history per se (especially medieval history) and the history of feminist history-writing in the last thirty years. I know how to do the past; doing the future is much harder. But if you have come this far with me, you know that this book is not about nostalgia or melancholy; it is about assessing what we have done right, where we...