Women’s History and the ‘Woman Question’

The question of women’s status in society came to provide the basis of a number of historical works by women in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The struggle for the higher education of women and the demand for womanhood suffrage and other campaigns of first-wave feminism informed much historical writing on women. Inspired by the ‘spirit of historical inquiry’ that characterised the Victorian age, women concerned about their declining civil status and their exclusion from higher education turned to the past to understand their present condition. This chapter will explore certain aspects of the ‘woman question’, as it was called, particularly focusing on how it created new interest in women as an historical category. While women mobilised into feminist organisations they looked to the past to detail their oppression and to supplement their arguments for education, social purity, marital equality and suffrage. As the demands of first-wave feminism grew, women’s historical writing came to be framed in light of explicitly feminist arguments. Unlike earlier histories that saw women progress historically towards equality with men, histories of women informed by feminism focused on women’s declining civil status. By the end of the nineteenth century the idea that women were reclaiming rights that had been wrenched away from them became commonplace. Feminist histories of women challenged the celebratory nature of female biography, asserting the importance of the experience of the mass of women over the particular. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.