Discovering Women's History

A Practical Guide to Researching the Lives of Women since 1800

Deirdre Beddoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138180604
• eBook ISBN: 9781317883630
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The highly practical guide introduces the reader to the main areas of British women's history: education, work, family life, sexuality and politics. After an introduction to each topic detailed commentary is provided on a range of primary source material together with advice on further reading. For the new edition the author has written a brand new chapter on how to choose a dissertation subject and the pitfalls to avoid.

Chapter one
Doing a research project: writing a dissertation

Usually, the first occasion when people find themselves conducting a research project is as part of a degree course in History or Women’s Studies or some related subject. Normally, the requirement, or option, to produce a dissertation based on your own researches occurs in the final year of the course. It can be a daunting prospect. You are asked to select your own topic, to do your own research, to organize your own time and to produce a much longer piece of work – often of 8–10,000 words – than you have ever previously undertaken. No wonder people get a bit overwhelmed. But there is no need to be. Doing a research project and writing up your findings can and should be the most exciting and rewarding piece of work which you undertake in your whole undergraduate career. All it takes is a bit of organization. This chapter lays out some guidelines for tackling the task, including selecting a topic, carrying out research in libraries and record offices, organizing your material, and planning, writing and presenting your dissertation.

This chapter is aimed primarily at undergraduates producing a final year History dissertation but it can be adapted and used by others, such as students doing A-level projects and members of Access courses who are carrying out work on local women’s history. Similarly, postgraduate students should find some of the advice given in this chapter of help, as well as being able to draw on the detailed information on sources given in the rest of the book. The guidelines set out here hold good for all students working on any aspect of women’s history but they should be of particular assistance to those who wish to include some element of local women’s history in their work.

Getting started

It is important to be quick off the mark. As soon as you know that you have been accepted for a course which involves writing a dissertation, get started. If the course begins in September, use the summer vacation to do a great deal of preliminary work.

The first thing to do is to find out as much as you can about the dissertation which you will be required to submit. Get answers to your questions. Who will my tutor be? What will be the submission date of the dissertation? How long does it have to be? What is the maximum length? Are there any guidelines – there should be – on presentation and layout of the dissertation, e.g. how to set out footnotes and bibliographies? Go and visit your tutor before the summer break and learn what you can. Take advantage of this visit to request a short letter of introduction, naming you as a student who is writing a dissertation on a particular course and requesting assistance. You can then take this to libraries and record offices: in some cases an introductory note may prove essential but at the least it should ease your passage.

Equipped with this information and your letter of introduction, you will give yourself a head start. Spend the summer vacation sorting out the fundamentals so that you do not turn up at the beginning of the dissertation course without a clue of what you want to do.

Choosing a topic

This will almost certainly be the single most difficult thing you have to do. It causes many students a great deal of agonizing and confusion. But there really is no need for this. The golden rule in doing historical research and for selecting a topic is quite simply this: you can only research topics for which there are sources available. It is the availability of historical sources which will determine what topic you can select. It is no use lying in a darkened room seeking inspiration for a subject. Nor is it any use deciding in a vacuum that you want to research some esoteric topic. You can only decide on your topic when you have found out what historical sources are available to you. This means that you have to do a certain amount of exploratory work before you can come up with your topic.

You have to begin reading books (secondary sources) about various aspects of women’s history and, as you read, make yourself aware of the sources which the authors have used. Follow up references given in bibliographies and in footnotes and you will see that they too have used other general books, books specifically related to the topic, biographies, autobiographies, articles in specialist journals, contemporary newspapers, government reports and document collections. Visit the university library, the library of the major city nearest to your home area, the local public library, the county record office, local museums, and talk to older people. Begin the process of familiarizing yourself with what is available.

Bear in mind throughout these preliminary investigations that your main purpose at this stage is looking for a good, ‘do-able’ research project. I think the main criteria of such a project are as follows.

• It must be something in which you are interested and, indeed, enthusiastic about. You are going to have to work on it for almost a year, so you need a topic which holds your interest.
• It must be a manageable project. Say, for example, from your preliminary reading, you decide you would like to do ‘something’ on women’s waged work or on women and education. Then you must narrow your focus: you will have to impose certain limitations on your inquiries - limitations of time and space. It seems sensible to restrict yourself to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To go back further brings you up against certain problems, most obviously difficulties such as reading old handwriting. If you are writing a dissertation as part of a twentieth-century women’s history course, then it makes sense to choose a twentieth-century topic. Indeed, it may be a requirement of your university or college that the dissertation topic ties in with the taught course.
  But you will have to narrow your focus yet further. You cannot write a history of women’s education or of women’s work in the twentieth century as a dissertation. Narrow the dates to, for example, 1900–1914 or to the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, you need to narrow the geographical space of your inquiry. Even with the narrowing of the time-scale, it would still not be feasible for you to complete a dissertation on the education of girls or on women’s work in Britain between 1900–1914 or in the 1920s. But if you define your area realistically and replace ‘in Britain’ with ‘in my home town’, you are well on your way to selecting a manageable research project, provided you know that there are sources available.

There is a great deal to be said for researching your own home area, for ‘digging where you stand’. Newspapers and records are available locally, older people are available for interview and you have local knowledge. Students who are studying in colleges a long way from home will need to think carefully about which area to select if there are problems in getting back to sources at home.

The tutor

Your tutor is your single most useful resource and you should make full use of her or him throughout the whole process of creating a dissertation. Ask advice from your tutor at every key stage of your work – in selecting your topic, in locating sources, on planning, in writing up your work and on the presentation of the final dissertation.

Most institutions allocate time for tutors to discuss work with their dissertation students but the actual time allocation varies. Make the most of these sessions. Always keep your appointment and try to submit work beforehand to enable your tutor to read through it before you meet. Be prepared to take advice and keep your tutor informed of your progress. Your tutor, another member of the internal staff and the external examiner will mark your dissertation, so it is very important that your tutor knows the full details of your scheme of work and the efforts which you are making to complete it.

The historical sources

The great bulk of this book is devoted to the sources of women’s history, where to locate them and to an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. I cannot go into detail about individual sources at this stage but it is important to stress that sources fall into two main categories – primary and secondary. Broadly speaking, and there are some grey areas, primary sources are contemporary records: they emanate from the period under study. They can be handwritten such as diaries, memoranda, census schedules, parish registers, school log books and shopping lists, or they can be printed such as newspapers, Parliamentary Papers, magazines and autobiographies. Similarly, contemporary paintings, photographs, cartoons and maps are primary sources. Documents which were originally handwritten but which have later been printed remain primary sources. The acid test of a primary source is the date at which it was produced. Secondary sources, on the other hand, are books or articles written about the past at a later date. Historians use primary sources to write their secondary sources about the past. The chief repositories of secondary and primary sources are libraries and record offices.

Libraries

Familiarize yourself with the libraries you wish to use and how they organize information. There is actually no surer way of doing this, while at the same time learning a lot about women’s history, than browsing through a library. Walk around, locate the shelves where the women’s history books, general history books and women’s studies books are stored, establish where the local studies collection, the reference section, bibliographies and town directories are kept, look at the range of current journals on display and, if they are accessible, go through the ‘stacks’ of back numbers and read some of the articles. Not all libraries allow you to do this. Some operate on a system whereby you place an order for a book on a slip of paper and it is delivered to you, but where there is open access to the shelves, as in most college or university libraries, make the most of it. I have made some of my best finds through browsing.

You may already be familiar with the workings of your own university library but you will need to learn new skills to conduct your research. The most useful libraries for research purposes will be university libraries and the main public library of the area in which you are interested. In women’s history, the best resource is the Fawcett Library, which is part of Guildhall University in the East End of London. Whichever libraries you use, the best way to find out how to make the most of them is to ask the librarians and to read the library guides. Within the library your key resources will be catalogues and bibliographies.

Catalogues

Catalogues are a list of the resources a library actually holds and many are fully computerized now so that you can conduct your search by author, title, subject and key word. (It helps to have thought out your key words in advance – don’t put in ‘history’ on its own or you could end up with millions of references.) You will also find catalogues on microfiche and on card indices. You can also use databases to search for recent journal and newspaper articles on specific subjects on BIDS (CD Rom): consult the librarian on this. The Fawcett Library’s catalogue Bibliofem – is available on microfiche in many university libraries.

Bibliographies

Bibliographies are lists of books and articles on a particular subject and are not necessarily held by the library. I have provided bibliographies of secondary sources for women’s history, arranged by topic, in each chapter of this book. These provide a good starting point but it is essential in writing a dissertation to do a good literature search and to consult specialist bibliographies, which will be found in the library’s reference section. See in particular:

• June Hannam, Ann Hughes and Pauline Stafford (eds), British Women’s History: A Bibliographical Guide, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995. (Excellent guide to British and Irish sources.)
• Women in Scotland: An Annotated Bibliography, Edinburgh, Open University Press, 1991. (Good, but more recent work has been published.)
• Constance Holt, Welsh Women: An Annotated Bibliography of Women in Wales and Women of Welsh Descent in America, Metuchen, NJ, and London, Scarecrow Press, 1993. (Useful starting point.)

In addition to the bibliographies, there are also some regional guides. Two useful guides are:

• Manchester Women’s Histoty Group, Resources for Women’s Histoty in Greater Manchester, Manchester, National Museum of Labour History Publications, 1993.
• Project Grace, Welsh Women’s History. 10 units. (Photocopied materials including documents, articles and bibliographies. Produced by extra-mural departments of the University of Wales, 1994, and available in Welsh university and college libraries.)

Literature searches

Postgraduate students can ask their tutors to request the University Library to instigate a ‘computerized literature search’ based on key words. This can come up with thousands of references or none! This facility is not normally availab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of illustrations
• Preface to the third edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: why should we study women’s history?
• 1 Doing a research project: writing a dissertation
• 2 The changing image
• 3 The education of girls
• 4 Women’s waged work
• 5 Women and family life
• 6 Aspects of sexuality
• 7 Women and politics
• 8 Sharing your findings
• Appendix: some useful addresses
• Index