First-Wave Feminist Engagements with History: Introduction

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: First-Wave Feminist Engagements with History Introduction Ann Heilmann This issue is concerned with teasing out aspects of the complex relationship between first-wave feministwriting and history in its broadest definition. History, here, is understood as encompassing historical processes as well as historiography and the historicity of narrative writing and cultural mythologies. The essays included in this issue — originally presented at the international "Hysterical Fictions : Women, History, Authorship" conference hosted by Swansea University, UK, in August 2003 — examine some of me ways in which Victorian and Edwardian women writers and women's rights activists approached "history" from a feminist angle, engaging in what in 1971 Adrienne Rich conceptualized as the feminist project of "re-vision:" "the act of looking back, of seeingwith fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (90). In writing — and writing about — cultural and political history as an act of feminist "rescription," turn-of-the-century women writers were exploring the parameters of what second-wave feminists have termed "herstory." Informed by feminist revisionism, this early herstorical undertaking aimed to problematize the historical roots of women's confinement to patriarchal narratives. As the first two essays suggest, this is evidenced in Mona Caird's interrogation of the Gothic genre and of Classical mythology. First-wave feminists also set out to produce counter-histories whose focus on the women's movement directed readers' attention to the gaps in conventional history writing. Intriguingly , as Maria DiCenzo's contribution shows, these counter-histories Victorian Review (2005) A. Heilmann often involved the contestation of contemporaneous historiographies produced from within the women's movement, as different factions sought to establish their originary status and predominance within feminist history. The issue begins with the prominent turn-of-the-century feminist and New Woman writer Mona Caird, who gained considerable notoriety in the socio-cultural landscape of late-Victorian Britain with the publication of her radical historicist deconstruction of "Marriage" in 18881 and other essays on the subject, later collected in TheMoraäty of Marriage (1897). Caird's journalistic dissection of the history of patriarchal societies and its legacy for Victorian gender relations was complemented by h