2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel focuses on members of that generation of early women historians from 1880-1950, seeking to identify the intellectual milieu and professional realities that framed their lives. It seeks to move beyond treating them as simply individuals and looks to the social and intellectual forces that encouraged them to study history, and at the same time, limited the reach and defined the nature of their study. They had their status as historians questioned and worked in an atmosphere in which the visual image of the historian was male, as was that of the college professor. While producing important and influential works they were simply not thought of as historians in ways their male colleagues were. Even so, these women were there as well—in the archives and libraries—and produced groundbreaking studies