Scott's discussion of women's history as an evolving phenomenon charts the development of patterns of ideas governing the practice of the discipline. Initiated by the feminist social critique that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement and shaped by the gradual refinement of perceptions of the place of women in history and of women as practitioners of historical commentary, women's history has been redefined and reconceptualized several times. The history of women's history, as Scott explains it, touches not only on events of the past in which women participated but also on the assumptions that historians can or should bring to studying them--and above all on the methods that historians who treat of women's experience can or should bring to the historicizing enterprise. Inevitably, because women's history as a discipline did not take shape in a social or cultural vacuum, the real-world sociopolitical and economic position, experience, and careers of the practitioners of women's history became relevant. Scott cites longstanding "prejudices against women in the learned professions" (45), which was mirrored by contempt for the rethinking of existing issue fronts or the creation of innovative ones in the content of history. Meanwhile, women's history did not evolve into a unitary lump but was fraught with ambiguity, "for it is at once an innocuous supplement to and a radical replacement for established history" (49). Scott insists that the "contradictory logic of the supplement" (50) helps explain the evolution of women's history as knowledge base and discipline.
The dynamics of women's history were in large part confrontational. Women historians and their subjects had to "contend with standards secured by comparisons that are never stated, by points of view that are never expressed as such" (50). The more the knowledge base of women's history grew, the more historians found themselves in the position of "exposing the hierarchy implicit ...