At the request of PHR, the four historians in this forum discuss methods for feminist history. Drawing on their experiences as scholars and individuals, each author considers their personal experiences with creating feminist history, given their unique fields and positionalities; and they also offer prescriptions for future scholars. In the opening essay, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu discusses methodological insights gleaned over multiple projects as a biographer in Asian American women’s history and lesbian history. Y. Yvon Wang discusses large-scale historical trends that have led to the present moment in the history of trans people, the way that the Internet provides a place everyone to act as their own historians, and the opportunities that transgender auto-historiography offers to feminist and gender scholars. Natalie J. Marine-Street discusses her methodology as a public historian who takes a feminist approach to oral history at a large university—particularly her efforts to involve the wider university community in the project of creating an inclusive and multi-perspectival institutional history. Finally, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela offers a primer for activist scholars, eight insights for those who seek to contemplate, and question, scholarly convention rather than uncritically uphold it, drawing on the author’s experience as a health activist and her writing on the history of fitness.
This forum is part of a PHR special issue on Feminist Histories, with additional articles and essays by Katherine M. Marino, Renee C. Romano, Kim Cary Warren, Cameron Blevins and Annelise Heinz, Nicole Martin, Brenda D. Frink, and Estelle B. Freedman.
University of California Press