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.
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