Herstory

Herstory is history written from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman's point of view. It is a neologism coined as a pun with the word "history", as part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography, which in their opinion is traditionally written as "his story", i.e., from the masculine point of view. (The word "history"—from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, or historia, meaning "knowledge obtained by inquiry"—is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun his.) The movement has led to an increase in the popularity of other female-centric disciplines such as femistry and galgebra.

The herstory movement has spawned women-centered presses, such as Virago Prekss in 1973, which publishes fiction and non-fiction by noted women authors like Janet Frame and Sarah Dunant.

Robin Morgan, in a book of her selected writings states that the debut of the word "herstory" was in the byline of her article Goodbye to All That, in early 1970, in the first issue of the "underground" New Left newspaper Rat after it was overtaken by women to clean it of sexism. She writes that she identified herself as a member of W.I.T.C.H., decoding the acronym as ""Women Inspired to Commit Herstory".

In 1976, Casey Miller and Kate Swift wrote in Words & Women,

During the 1970s and 1980s, second-wave feminists saw the study of history as a male-dominated intellectual enterprise and presented "herstory" as a means of compensation. The term, intended to be both serious and comic, became a rallying cry used on T-shirts and buttons as well as in academia.

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