It is precisely in the acknowledgement of its complexity and confusions that one finds both an understanding of women’s history and also the basis for critical evaluation of it.1
Writing women into European history directly confronts a number of ideas about what constitutes Europe, how its history is written and how this history relates to the emerging meta-narratives of global or world history. European history has relevance in the face of a trend toward global or world history. It can, and should, ask what Europe’s relationship is to other models of history and to the colonial and post-colonial worlds, yet, there are clear and identifiable historiographic traditions in Europe, which have shaped the paradigms within which we work. For us as historians there is still a disciplinary and historiographical frontier around Europe, even while the concept of Europe has expanded to encompass the Nordic countries and eastern Europe. How should we as European women historians respond to the challenges of changing ideas about frontiers and the concept of Europe as an entity, and to a growing awareness that England, France and Germany are not ‘Europe’? One approach is to ask questions about the relationship between national boundaries - the idea of nation and nationstate - and how citizenship is constructed within a gendered narrative. Another approach is to question the position from which we write, as English-speaking historians using a European approach, in order to think more carefully about assumptions derived from English experience. And clearly we need to expand our thinking beyond the ‘big three’: England, France and Germany.2
Nevertheless, the rise of the nation-state is relatively recent and such states never have operated in isolation. As Fiona Montgomery and Christine Collette argue, ‘The history of Europe is a complex one: its existence as an entity has been, and is, a matter of controversy. Its boundaries are as fluid as are those of the various states within it’.3 In fact, for most of the period covered by this book, Germany was not a nation, and for a while it was actually two. Just as importantly, intellectual, political and economic developments have not respected national boundaries, neither has the story of women’s past nor the interplay of gender and culture. Within European women’s history, there has been a move to be sensitive to region and local experience, something which at once creates new boundaries while possibly breaking down old ones. To some extent,
This reflects current political developments in Europe, which value regional interests and which, in parts of Europe, have created devolved power structures. By questioning the spatial paradigms within which we implicitly write, this book has helped us reflect on how new frontiers and borders produce other narratives, narratives that cross national borders and that seek respondents outside Europe. As a group of feminist historians from a number of countries, with diverse research interests both thematically and geographically, we have been in conversation about how we relate to history and how the history we write deals with the issues of geographical and methodological boundaries. We are writing women in modern Europe.
World History
