Despite its relatively short life, gender history (and its forerunner women's history) has had a rather significant effect on the general study of
history. Since the 1960s, when the initially small field first achieved a measure of acceptance, it has gone through a number of different phases, each with its own challenges and outcomes, but always making an impact of some kind on the historical discipline. Although some of the changes to the study of history have been quite obvious, such as increased numbers of books on famous women or simply the admission of greater numbers of women into the historical profession, other influences are more subtle, even though they may be more politically groundbreaking in the end. By 1970, gender historians turned to documenting ordinary women's expectations, aspirations and status. In the 80s with the rise of the feminist movement, the focus shifted to uncovering women' oppression and discrimination. Nowadays, gender history is more about charting female agency and recognizing female achievements in several fields that were usually dominated by men. , author of a founding article for the discipline in 1986
Within the profession According to historian
Joan Scott, conflict occurred between Women's History
historians and other historians in a number of ways. In the
American Historical Association, when
feminists argued that female historians were treated unequally within the field and underrepresented in the association, they were essentially leveling charges of historical negligence by traditional historians. Notions of
professionalism were not rejected outright, but they were accused of being biased.
Supplementary history According to Scott, the construction of Women's History as "supplementary" to the rest of history had a similar effect. At first glance, a supplement simply adds information which has been missing from the greater story, but as Scott points out, it also questions why the information was left out in the first place. Whenever it is noticed that a woman found to be missing from
written history, Women's History first describes her role, second, examines which mechanisms allowed her role to be omitted, and third, asks to what other information these mechanisms were blind. , a figure in the emergence of gender history as a discipline in France, here in 2016.
Gender theory Finally, the advent of
gender theory once again challenged commonly held ideas of the discipline, including those scholars studying Women's History.
Post-modern criticism of essentialising
socially constructed groups, be they
gender groups or otherwise, pointed out the weaknesses in various sorts of history. In the past,
historians have attempted to describe the shared experience of large numbers of people, as though these people and their experiences were homogeneous and uniform. Women have multiple identities, influenced by any number of factors including
race and
class, and any examination of history which conflates their experiences, fails to provide an accurate picture. ==History of masculinity==