Thanks to some 40 years of feminist historical scholarship, the "new" political history is truly "universal" insofar as it can fully embrace the centrality to human societies of the relationships between women and men, including the challenges to male authority in families along with the long-entrenched "male breadwinner" syndrome-all in a framework of developing nation-states and transnational communities. It necessarily expands the very meaning of "political" and of what constitutes "politics."
Thus, the history of feminism is a gendered narrative of political history that goes well beyond the adding and stirring in of an occasional queen, a comment on "new woman" fashion, or a photograph of a demonstration for the right to vote. Feminist claims are primarily political claims for change in specific settings they erupt frequently in times of political unrest. It foregrounds women's concerns, perspectives, and efforts to be recognized as integral members of their respective societies. Once viewed as "social history," and more recently studied through the lens of cultural history, the history of feminism is, in fact, political history, or it is (to put it another way) a more expansive history of politics that incorporates women and analyzes gender politics.
Today, notwithstanding a few skeptics, the answer to that question can be, "No longer only that." Is "real solemn history" constituted of "the quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page.and hardly any women at all," as Jane Austen once characterized it in her novel, Northanger Abbey ? 1 Two hundred years ago, that succinct delineation of political history (and allusion to the absence of women from it) was tellingly true.
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