Women's History

Just if ye are interested. This is an essay justifying the study of women's history. It is a preliminary work that will be expanded upon for, hopefully, inclusion in a Historical Journal. Any thoughts and/or suggestions welcome to PM me.

Link to the essay is here.

Hope ye enjoy.

Pyjamarama

Just had a quick skim there. I assume you've read Margaret Ward 'Unmanageable Revolutionaries'? Fantastic book that's out of print now, one of the only books charting women's role in Irish history and it's out of print, so bloody typical :rolleyes:

I've read it all now - so are you proposing to do a history of Ireland or a particular timeframe? Just interested because I've studied in this area! How would you propose to get around the lack of information recorded? Using anecdotal, life stories etc?

History is always written by the powerful, the Great Men of History approach and the less powerful are not represented - thus very little about women, poor people etc (this is changing these days though well hopefully!). If you are looking at it from an Irish perspective and generally looking at the power-relations involved in the recording of history some authors that might be useful could be the likes of Sean O'Casey and Brian Friel (play Freedom of the City especially). From a female perspective Marina Carr could be good also

You probably know all this stuff already but thought I'd suggest it anyway!

To be honest the final paper will be a historiographical analysis of the way in which women's history is written. It is a critique of feminist history as much as a critique of male dominated history. In general the more refined historians have eschewed the great men approach to history anyway but my paper is more an argument for why studying women's history in more depth is vital to future historical research.