Challenging Orthodoxies

This is a collection of essays presented to Hilda L. Smith, Emerita Professor of the University of Cincinnati and pre-eminent feminist historian, whose works, such as Reason’s Disciples (1982; rev. ante, cccxcvii [1985], 893–4) and All Men and Both Sexes (2002) have defined a generation of feminist scholarship in early modern English women’s history. The collection is edited by Sigrun Haude and Melinda Zook, who, in her introduction, speaks of ‘Hilda Smith’s extraordinary life journey’ (p. 4), and concludes with an epilogue by Berenice Carroll, Smith’s collaborator on Women’s Political and Social Thought (2000) and a co-founder with her in 1969 of the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession (p. 211). By the 1980s, Smith was part of a feminist ‘full-frontal assault on the historical profession’ (p. 1), challenging the orthodoxy of old periodisations and conceptualisations of the historical subject and generating ideas that ‘have led to a fundamental redirection in the way scholars do history and consider women’ (p. 9). Smith ‘set the questions’ (p. 123), comments Judith Zinsser—just one of the powerhouse contributors to this volume. The key questions for Smith have always lain in the social construction of power, in language and political thought, and the main purpose of much of her intellectual and professional work has been to demonstrate that the apparently powerless in society (women) have considerable cultural purchase and historical significance (p. 216)

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