The Unseamed Picture: Conflicting Narratives of Women in the Modern European Past

Abstract

This article is about the tension between the grand narrative of modern European women's history and the micro‐study of a particular place and experience. Adopting a perspective far removed from the metropolitan heart of Europe forces one to think differently about the prime motors of change and the chronology of that change. I ask how we can write meaningful and recognisable histories which simultaneously are recognisable to those whose voices are represented and which also contribute to the (re)writing of the bigger picture. I conclude that an alternative history can only emerge from a historical practice which privileges a social memory crafted around narratives of women whose sense of the past included themselves.

Global Trends: Gender Studies in Europe and the US

“…Yet, in highlighting a quest for competing histories and dissonance between local and global narratives, Britain and its margins seem to occupy the stage; no mention is made of Central Eastern, Scandinavian or Mediterranean Europe. 31 On the other hand, Padma Anagol convincingly deconstructs the national imperial paradigm of the Indian nation by looking at women's political agency in pre-Gandhian reform movements, thereby introducing a new periodization which takes fully into account women's agency as a constitutive element of change. 32 Her use of juridical sources and analysis of the language of rights, as spelt out in Indian women's appeals to public institutions in the nineteenth century, strongly reminds one of early modern research on women in process of state formation in Italy and France.…”