What the findings of the new feminist scholarship now make possible is documentation that this happens not because of some mystical, cyclical, and inexorable principle or “fate” (e.g., Adams’s juxtaposition of the “Virgin” and the “Dynamo”). It happens for a very simple and practical reason that would have been apparent to historians had they included women in the history they studied. In times and places when women are not strictly confined to the private world of the home—in times when they can move more freely into the public world en masse, as carriers and disseminators of the “female
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