{{Short description|Term for women emphasized history}} {{Italic title}} {{distinguish|Her Story (disambiguation)}} {{for|the South Korean film|Herstory (film)}} {{Feminism sidebar}} '''''Herstory''''' is a term for history written from a feminist perspective and emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman's point of view. It originated as an alteration of 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 male point of view. The term is a neologism and a deliberate play on words; the word "history"&mdash;via Latin ''historia'' from the Ancient Greek word ἱστορία, a noun meaning 'knowledge obtained by inquiry'<ref>[https://www.etymonline.com/word/history Etymology of the word "history"]</ref>&mdash;is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun ''his''.<ref name=mills>Jane Mills, "Womanwords: a dictionary of words about women", 1992, {{ISBN|0-02-921495-5}}, [https://archive.org/details/womanwordsdictio00mill <!-- quote="early 1970s". --> p. 118.]</ref>

[[File:Herstory (32328522111).jpg|thumb|Lesbian Herstory Archives banner]]

== Usage ==

Literature scholar Fritz Fleischmann marks "the first documented instance of the word-play with His-Story/Her-Story" as the title page of the 1817 novel ''Keep Cool'' by early feminist John Neal.<ref>{{cite book | last = Fleischmann | first = Fritz | title = A Right View of the Subject: Feminism in the Works of Charles Brockden Brown and John Neal | publisher = Verlag Palm & Enke Erlangen | location = Erlangen, Germany | year = 1983 | isbn = 978-3-7896-0147-7 | page = 152}}</ref> The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' credits Dr. F.H.K. Green with first using the term "herstory" in print.<ref name="oed">{{cite dictionary |title=herstory, n. |dictionary=Oxford English Dictionary Online |url=https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/243412 |access-date=2017-03-08 |url-access=subscription}}</ref>

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.<ref name="looser">Devoney Looser, ''British Women Writers and the Writing of History'' (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2000). {{ISBN|0-8018-6448-8}}.</ref> The term, intended to be both serious and comic,<ref>Angus Calder and Lizbeth Goodman, "Gender and Poetry", in ''Literature and Gender,'' ed. by Lizbeth Goodman (Routledge: 1996). {{ISBN|0-415-13573-7}}.</ref> became a rallying cry used on T-shirts and buttons as well as in academia.<ref name=Sommers>{{cite book |title=Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women |last=Hoff Sommers |first=Christina |year=1995 |publisher=Touchstone Books |location=United Kingdom |isbn=0-684-80156-6 |chapter=3 (Transforming the Academy) |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/whostolefeminism00chri }}</ref> For example, the linguist and author Suzette Haden Elgin defined {{lang|ldn|dedideheril}} in her constructed language Láadan as 'herstory', specifying it as "the stories women tell of their past; usually based on interpersonal relationships: births; deaths; relocations; marriages; etc.", and contrasted it with {{lang|ldn|dedideherilid}}, 'his-story', being "the stories men tell of their past; usually based on wars; conquests; major disasters; the way the past is told in most late 20th century history books".{{cn|date=January 2026}}

In 2017, Hridith Sudev, an inventor, environmentalist and social activist associated with various youth movements, launched 'The Herstory Movement,' an online platform to "celebrate lesser known great persons; female, queer or otherwise marginalized, who helped shape the modern World History."<ref>{{cite web|last1=Sudev|first1=Hridith|title=The Herstory Movement|url=https://herstorymovt.wordpress.com/|website=The Herstory Movement|publisher=Hridith Sudev|access-date=19 August 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170819150939/https://herstorymovt.wordpress.com/|archive-date=19 August 2017|url-status=dead}}</ref> It is intended as an academic platform to feature stories of female historic persons and thus help facilitate more widespread knowledge about 'Great Women' History.

Non-profit organizations Global G.L.O.W and LitWorld created a joint initiative called the "HerStory Campaign". This campaign works with 25 other countries to share girl's lives and stories. They encourage others to join the campaign and to "raise our voices on behalf of all world's girls".<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.litworld.org/herstory|title=The HerStory Campaign|website=LitWorld®|language=en-US|access-date=2019-11-01|archive-date=2019-11-01|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191101175811/https://www.litworld.org/herstory|url-status=dead}}</ref>

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

This movement has led to an increase in activity in other female-centric disciplines such as ''femistry'' and ''galgebra''.{{clarification needed|reason=Femistry and galgebra are not existing disciplines. Is this sentence trying to say that the fields of chemistry and algebra began using these terms?|date=December 2025}}<ref>{{cite book|title=Words and Women|last1=Miller|first1=Casey|last2=Swift|first2=Kate|publisher=Bantam Doubleday Dell|year=1976|isbn=9780385048583}}</ref>

==Criticism== Christina Hoff Sommers has been a vocal critic of the concept of herstory, and presented her argument against the movement in her 1994 book ''Who Stole Feminism?'' Sommers defined herstory as an attempt to infuse education with ideology at the expense of knowledge.<ref>{{cite book |title=Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women |last=Hoff Sommers |first=Christina |year=1995 |publisher=Touchstone Books |location=United Kingdom |isbn=0-684-80156-6 |page=[https://archive.org/details/whostolefeminism00chri/page/97 97] |chapter=5 (The Feminist Classroom) |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/whostolefeminism00chri/page/97 }}</ref> The "gender feminists", as she called them, were the group of feminists responsible for the movement, which she felt amounted to negationism. She regarded most attempts to make historical studies more female-inclusive as being artificial in nature and an impediment to progress.<ref name="Sommers"/>

Professor and author Devoney Looser has criticized the concept of herstory for overlooking the contributions that some women made as historians before the twentieth century.<ref name="looser" /> Author Richard Dawkins also described his criticism in ''The God Delusion'', arguing that "the word history has not been influenced by the male pronoun".<ref>{{Cite magazine|title=This Is Where the Word 'History' Comes From|url=https://time.com/4824551/history-word-origins/|access-date=2020-12-15|magazine=Time}}</ref> Critics also highlight that herstory, while aiming to prioritize women’s narratives, sometimes excludes non-Western perspectives, pointing out the importance of reconstructing feminist genealogies from a southern perspective, advocating for inclusivity in representing subaltern women’s histories and experiences.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Jofré |first=Alejandra Ciriza |date=2012 |title=Genealogías feministas: sobre mujeres, revoluciones e ilustración: una mirada desde el sur |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0104-026x2012000300002 |journal=Revista Estudos Feministas |volume=20 |issue=3 |pages=613–633 |doi=10.1590/s0104-026x2012000300002 |issn=0104-026X|hdl=11336/67208 |hdl-access=free }}</ref>

==See also== *Feminist history *Gender-neutral language *History of feminism *Radical feminism *Women's history *Womyn

==References== {{reflist}}

==Further reading== *''Herstory: Women Who Changed the World''. {{ISBN|0-670-85434-4}}. *''Daughters of Eve: A Herstory Book''. {{ISBN|1-4140-4356-2}}. *''HerStory''. {{ISBN|978-1-60402-551-4}}. *''Herstory: A Woman's View of American History''. {{ISBN|0882840177}}.

{{Radical feminism}}

==External links== * [https://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/islandora/object/ui%3Aherstory Herstory Committee Digital Collection]

Category:1970 neologisms Category:Historiography Category:Feminism and history Category:Lesbian history Category:Nonstandard spelling