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She also experienced the difference at the University of Sydney. Her intellectual curiosity and drive
made it difficult for her to blend in with the others. Only at Harvard, where she went for graduate
school, did she find scholars like herself, who wanted to talk and debate about the projects they
were working on.
I had arrived with all the sensivity and prickliness of the person who hasn’t ever quite
belonged at home –my intellectual concerns real, but defined as an eccentricity in
Australia. Within weeks I began to see myself as perfectly normal, like all the other lively
people around me. These people weren’t the alienated left intellectuals of Australia, or
the wistful exiles from Oxbridge I knew in Sidney. 6
These academics establish a direct relationship between the feeling of being part of a minority
and their desire to study the peripheries, specifically, women’s history. Their own experiences likely
led them to a heightened awareness of the need to discover the hidden or silenced histories of
humanity. Lerner, for instance, noticed the lack, in her select Viennese education, of teaching about
other continents, other cultures: “It was possible in my day to be an European intellectual,
excellently trained and credentialed, and yet to be ignorant of the history and culture of several
continents.” 7 In the United States she also came across a partial vision of history, a vision she
dedicated herself to questioning:
What I was learning in graduate school did not so much leave out continents and their
people, as had my Viennese education, as it left out half the human race: women. I found
it impossible to accept such a version of the past as truth.” 8
Gerda Lerner drew attention to the many women who had really been protagonists in history –
far more protagonists than those—queens or governors—to whom historical narratives describe in a
few pages:
In the twenty‐five years since I had left school in Vienna, I had lived as an unskilled and
later semi‐skilled worker, a housewife, a mother, a community activist. In all these roles I
met an active group of women who worked quietly and without public recognition, usually
without pay and frequently without an awareness of the significance of the work they
were doing. Political organizations were influenced by their work, yet no one would ever
know of their existence through the writings of historians or through the media. 9
Conway approaches the topic of women’s visibility in a similar manner. The lack of attention to
women’s education or their presence in official historical accounts led her to leave Sydney for
Harvard and select to work on the first women graduates in the US for her dissertation. 10
Women figured in this British imperial narrative only as occasional reformer of
prostitutes or as spectacular adventurers, or in the persons of monarchs like Elizabeth I or
Queen Victoria, always treated as under the guidance of their male major political
advisors. 11
Davis took longer to decide to focus on women’s studies. From her time at Smith College, her
interests had centred on social history: “I was focussing on issues on religion and social class during
the Protestan Reformation, specially the urban artisans and workers.” 12 She had even rejected the
possibility of doing her PhD work on Christine de Pizan because that topic “would have taken me into
the rarified circles of the court and the nobility” 13 and, at that point, she was too enthralled by
“turbulent menu peuple of Lyon in the sixteenth century, their grain riots, the strikes of the printing
workers, and the Protestant uprising of 1562, intended to turn the city at the confluence of the