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needs’ and ‘the body’; it revealed the power of family, rarely treated by historians in those
days” 19 .
Jill Conway put her ideas into practice during the ten years that she served as the President of
Smith College, the first woman to hold the post. 20 She corresponds with Lerner and Davis in that she
did not limit herself to studying the subject of women in an intellectual framework, but rather
undertook initiatives that made it possible to ‘see’ women better. An example of the creation of the
structures that would facilitate the lives of university women was the establishment of a system to
alleviate the quandary that many young women who could opt for a grant to study at Smith College
faced. Because of the prevailing system, if they accepted the grant they lost the social benefits that
they needed to bring up their children. Conway took away the grant concessions, substituting them
by providing assistance with paying rent, organizing discounts in shops, and medical insurance. The
system became so popular that the state of Massachusetts changed the social assistance program so
that the student recipients of grants would not lose their social benefits. 21
Along this line, Conway created the Ada Comstock Scholars Program, a strategy that allows older
women, often with extensive work and family obligations, to study part‐time, so they could take
classes for a Bachelor’s degree at Smith’s at a slower pace over a longer period. For Conway, this
project was a way to remember her mother:
I’d always promised myself that I’d honor my mother’s memory someday, somewhere,
by making academic institution take older women seriously as students, instead of seeing
them as over‐the‐hill fee payers without serious intellectual goals.” 22
A further common feature is their desire “to create a conceptual framework and theoretical
principles for placing women in history.” 23 These objectives were achieved not only through their
research and academic work, but also with the establishment of Women’s History Programs at the
universities in which they worked. Davis and Conway began this work with the aforementioned
course which they started in 1971 in Toronto, Lerner with the MA program in Women’s History at
Sarah Lawrence College, and later at the University of Wisconsin, and later Conway during the years
she ran Smith College, or Davis at Berkeley and Princeton.
All the elements I deal with briefly here converge in this third common feature of the three
autobiographies. All three see the imperative need to design new methodologies and work from a
multidisciplinary perspective. Women’s history can only be written rigorously from multiple
perspectives. This is what they wanted to do in the development of Women’s History Programs.
The subject of gender was impossible to conceptualize without some sweep from
biology to literature. It was also a historiographical stretch, for one was simultaneously
writing women into the historical record (that is, simply finding out what they were
doing), examining the range of relations between and concepts about women and men in
different times and places, and re‐evaluating the meaning of movements like the
Reformation or the French Revolution” 24 .
They expressed, for this reason, the importance of writing interdisciplinary history which would
combine history with anthropology, history of art, ethnography and literary theory. They decided
strongly in favour of the importance of the literary in history, and even of fiction, as an element
which helps better understand historical contexts. Lerner, for example, stated that this was the only
way to write a true history of women, given that the deeds and visions of which women were
protagonists are hidden in the official histories. 25 It was precisely this necessity, of understanding
women’s history from various foci and perspectives, which led Davis and Lerner to break with their
initial Marxist vision of history. For Lerner “historical events were always multicausal. Marxist