The Troubled Relationship of Feminism and History

REVIEW OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

The Troubled Relationship of Feminism and History
Janaki Nair

Why has history remained somewhat impervious to the questions raised by feminist interventions, while other disciplines have felt the imperative of a turn to history in general and feminist historiography in particular? This paper reviews both older and more recent contributions to the field of history to trace the dominant frames within which the methods and critiques of feminism have been accommodated.

as it an exaggeration when Andre Beteille (1995:112) had this to say about the impact of feminism in the academy: “…the space within the academic world dominated by ideas about the unity of theory and practice was occupied for some time by Marxism. That space is now increasingly being taken over by feminism.”? In his short comment on feminism in academia, Beteille noted the excitement that feminism had generated within the Indian academy, although it was not without dismay that he also pointed to the pernicious effects that the political mission had on the intellectual practice, for “every craft has its own conventional methods. Feminism tends to make light of those demands as being artificially constraining in the context of its larger moral and political demands” (ibid).1 Towards the end of the short comment, he also noted the changing gender composition of Indian campuses, sounding a dark warning about the threat posed by women’s studies’ exclusionary tendencies to the very institutions in which they had “lodged themselves”.

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1 Introduction
Practising feminist historians in university and research institutions today, more than a decade after this prophetic comment, would be hard put to find evidence of either such a successful “occupation/lodging” or of declining standards that have been the singular achievement of the moral/political burdens of feminism. If anything, there is a sobering realisation that feminism faces a new kind of challenge both within the

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