The reader is divided into four sections: Part one contains early feminist historians' writings following the move from reclaiming women's past through to the development of gender history: the second part describes the interaction of feminist history with ‘the linguistic turn’ and the challenges made by post-structuralism and the responses it provoked : Part three examines the work of lesbian historians and queer theorists in their challenge of the heterosexism of feminist history writing: the final part looks at the work of black feminists and postcolonial critics/Third World scholars and how they have laid bare ethnocentric and imperialist tendencies of feminist theory.