History and Difference

This chapter focuses on women in the male-dominated profession of university teaching in America. The author, in analyzing how women have been treated in that profession, is concerned not so much with the barriers established to impede their entry as with how those fared who managed to make their way in. Examining the situation in one specific discipline, history, she recognizes that women were once considered marginal; white men dominated not only the historical profession, but also the histories that emerged, even when those histories purported to treat humankind. The author discusses the creation of the subfield of "women's history" and argues that the story of women in the field of history should be incorporated within a larger context that treats humanity as a diverse concept.