he terms history and her-story name not merely two ways of narrating the past, but also two different orientations toward knowledge, power and representation. While history has long presented itself as a neutral, universal account of past events, feminist scholars in the late Twentieth Century introduced her-story to expose the gendered assumptions embedded in traditional historiography and to recover women’s experiences systematically excluded from the historical record. The dialogue between history and her-story thus unfolds at the intersection of politics, epistemology and theory. Situating these concepts in their historical development and theoretical elaboration makes visible the stakes involved in how the past is known, narrated and authorised.

The word history derives from the Greek historia, meaning inquiry or investigation. Classical historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides framed history as a rational account of human actions, privileging political events, wars and the deeds of notable men. This orientation was reinforced through medieval chronicles and, later, through Enlightenment historiography, which emphasised empiricism, archival documentation and linear progress. By the Nineteenth Century, professional history—epitomised by Leopold von Ranke — claimed scientific objectivity, aspiring to recount the past “as it actually happened.” This positivist ideal shaped modern academic historiography, with its reliance on state archives, official documents and public actors.

Although later developments such as Marxist historiography, the Annales School and social history broadened the scope of inquiry to include class, economy and everyday life, the discipline remained structurally andro-centric. Men’s experiences, institutions and voices continued to function as the implicit norm. Conceptually, history thus positioned itself as universal while being grounded in particular social locations—predominantly male, elite and Western. Its authority rested on claims of neutrality and methodological rigor that often masked the exclusions built into its sources, categories and periodisations.

It was against this backdrop that her-story emerged in the 1960s and 1970s alongside second-wave feminism, functioning both as a linguistic provocation and as a methodological intervention. Popularised by feminist activists and scholars such as Gerda Lerner, Sheila Rowbotham and Joan Kelly, the term was intended to highlight the absence of women from historical narratives and to challenge the supposed neutrality of what feminists provocatively named “his-story.” At a conceptual level, her-story asserted that women have histories — that their labor, creativity, resistance and social roles are historically significant and worthy of systematic study.

Early her-story projects focused on recovery: uncovering women’s contributions in politics, art, science and social movements that had been ignored or marginalised. Diaries, letters, oral histories and material culture became crucial sources, expanding what counted as legitimate historical evidence. Yet her-story was never merely additive. It questioned the very frameworks through which historical significance was defined. Why were wars privileged over care work, revolutions over reproduction, public life over domestic spheres? In this sense, her-story functioned as a critique of historiographical values rather than simply an alternative archive.

The distinction between history and her-story, therefore, is not merely one of subject matter but of orientation. Traditional history has tended to privilege public, institutional and political events; linear chronology and narratives of progress; individual (often male) agency; and written, official sources. Her-story, by contrast, fore-grounded everyday life, embodiment and social reproduction; non-linear, cyclical, or fragmented temporalities; collective and relational forms of agency; and marginalised, informal and experiential sources. While history presented itself as universal, her-story was explicitly situated, naming gender as a structuring principle of historical knowledge.

Feminist historians soon recognised, however, that “women” were not a homogeneous category. Early critiques of her-story pointed out its tendency to centre white, Western, middle-class women, prompting the incorporation of race, class, sexuality, caste and coloniality into feminist historiography. This shift aligned her-story with broader developments in feminist epistemology, particularly standpoint theory. Thinkers such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway argued that all knowledge is situated and that marginalised standpoints can offer epistemic advantages by revealing structures of power invisible from dominant positions. From this perspective, traditional history’s claim to objectivity appears less as a neutral ideal than as a “view from nowhere” that reflects dominant social interests.

Her-story, conversely, embraced reflexivity and partiality, acknowledging the historian’s positionality and the power relations shaping archives and narratives. It also destabilised hierarchies of knowledge by treating oral testimony, memory, affect and embodiment — often dismissed as subjective or unreliable — as vital epistemic resources. This did not entail a rejection of rigor, but rather a redefinition of rigor to include critical attention to exclusion, silence and absence.

By the late Twentieth Century, the binary opposition between history and her-story was itself subject to theoretical scrutiny. Influenced by post-structuralism and thinkers such as Michel Foucault, many scholars shifted from women’s history to gender history. Joan Wallach Scott’s influential argument that gender is a primary way of signifying power redirected feminist historiography away from recovery alone and toward an analysis of how historical meaning is structured through gendered binaries and hierarchies. Gender history demonstrated that power operates not only through exclusion, but also through the production of norms that shape institutions, symbols and subjectivities.

Intersectionality further transformed historical analysis by challenging the implicit universalism of both traditional history and early feminist scholarship. Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the context of Black feminist legal theory, the term intersectionality refers to the idea that social identities such as gender, race, class, sexuality, caste and nationality do not operate independently of one another. Instead, they intersect and overlap, producing specific and historically situated forms of advantage and disadvantage. A woman’s experience of the past, for example, cannot be understood through gender alone, but must be analysed in relation to other structures of power that shape her life chances, visibility and vulnerability.

For historians, this insight destabilises the category of “woman” as a singular or universal analytical subject and demands attention to the concrete social contexts in which historical actors are embedded. Intersectional historiography shows that systems of oppression — racism, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism—are interlocking rather than discrete, and that historical archives themselves reflect these hierarchies. Certain lives are documented, preserved and narrated more readily than others. As a result, both traditional history and early forms of her-story often privilege the women closest to dominant social locations, while marginalising the experiences of racialised, colonised, working-class or otherwise subordinated groups.

Queer theory introduces a related but more radical challenge by questioning the assumptions about time that underlie historical narration itself. Much historical writing, even when critical, relies on a linear model of time organized around ideas of progress, development and succession—from past to present to future, often tied to family formation, reproduction and social advancement. Scholars such as Carolyn Dinshaw and Elizabeth Freeman argue that these models are deeply hetero-normative, meaning they take heterosexual life patterns as the implicit standard.

Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of chrono-normativity names the ways in which time disciplines bodies and lives by organising them into socially approved schedules — education, work, marriage, reproduction, retirement. Carolyn Dinshaw’s notion of queer historical touch, by contrast, emphasises affective and non-linear connections to the past, in which historical moments resonate across time rather than following a straight chronological line. Jack Halberstam’s idea of queer time extends this critique by foregrounding lives that unfold outside normative timelines of marriage, reproduction, and career success. Together, these concepts invite historians to rethink not only who appears in history, but how historical time itself is structured, narrated and valued, unsettling both traditional political history and feminist narratives that rely on developmental or emancipatory timelines.

History and her-story, then, are best understood not as opposing camps but as moments within an evolving critical tradition. History’s claims to universality and objectivity have enabled powerful narratives, but also enduring silences. Her-story emerged as a feminist challenge to those silences, recovering marginalized experiences and reshaping the criteria of historical significance. In conceptual terms, her-story broadened what counts as history; epistemically, it exposed the situated nature of historical knowledge; theoretically, it catalysed shifts toward gender, intersectional, and queer analyses. In this expanded field, history appears as a plural and contested terrain — one in which the feminist impulse of her-story persists as an ongoing challenge to how the past is conceptualised, periodised and authorised.

The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.