Women’s Past and the Currents of U.S. History

Less than half a century ago, the subject of women and gender barely registered in the scholarship and teaching of American historians. In remarkably short order, uncovering women’s past became a political imperative and intellectual passion, and then emerged as a legitimate area of professional inquiry and research. With some distance from its origins, it is now possible to consider women’s and gender history as particular forms of knowledge production that grew out of broad intellectual, social, and political developments in the post-World War II period. This chapter focuses on four conceptual “turns” in the field, and how they have