http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/interactive/2011/jul/06/un-women-vote-timeline-interactive?INTCMP=SRCH

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

‘Without question, our first inspiration was political. Aroused by feminist charges of economic and political discrimination . . . we turned to our history to trace the origins of women's second-class status.’

Hildegard von BingenRupertsberg Manuscript, 12th century

A.S. Byatt, Possession (1990)

‘Why do you think she wrote the journal, Dr. Nest? In order to have someone to talk to? As an examination of conscience? Out of a sense of duty? Why?’

‘I do have a theory. It’s far-fetched, I think.’‘What is your theory?’‘I think she wrote it to baffle. Yes. To baffle.’

They stared at each other. Maud said,‘To baffle whom? His biographers?’‘Just to baffle.’

Maud waited. Beatrice described helplessly, her true experience:‘When I started on it, I thought, what a nice dull woman. And then I

got the sense of things flittering and flickering behind all that solid—oh, I think of it as paneling. And then I got to think—I was being led on---to imagine the flittering flickering things—and that really it was all just as stolid and dull as anything. I thought I was making it all up, that she could have said something interesting—how shall I put it—intriguing—once in a while, but she absolutely wasn’t going to. It could be an occupational hazard of editing a dull journal, couldn’t it? Imagining that the author was deliberately baffling me?’

Gerda Lerner

‘When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.’

Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’ (1986)

Gender is:

‘a social category imposed on a sexed body’.

Stuart Hall

Identity might be considered:

‘a narrative, a story, a history. Something constructed, told, spoken, not simply found’.

-------GO SEE ‘An Unfinished Conversation’—about Stuart Hall—at the Mead Gallery!!

Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’ (1986)

‘Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.’