Recovering Women’s Histories: An Enquiry into Methodological Questions and Challenges

Abstract

Born out of women’s struggles for equality, women’s studies have challenged the process of knowledge construction in social sciences and humanities. Indicating the ‘politics of knowledge generation’, feminist scholarship has contended that mainstream social sciences/humanities do not articulate women’s knowledge or their experiences of reality. This struggle to integrate women’s voices/experiences raises serious epistemological questions that fundamentally alter our understanding of social reality. Further, as there is an intimate connection between theory and method, feminist research has—in its quest for recovering and articulating women’s experiences—experimented with innovative research techniques. Focusing on women’s writing of history, this discussion points out the ways in which attempts to recover women’s historical presence fundamentally alter our understanding of history.