Papers furnishing a review and critique of past work in women's history are combined with selections delineating new approaches to the study of women in history and empirical studies considering ideological and class factors. Contents: Part I. On the historiography of women -- Women in society : acritique of Frederick Engels / Ann J. Lane -- Mary Beard's Woman as force in history : a critique / Berenice A. Carroll -- The invisible woman : the historian as professional magician / Dolores Barracano Schmidt and Earl Robert Schmidt -- Historical phallacies : sexism in American historical writing / Linda Gordon ... [et al.] -- The problem of women's history / Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Schrom Dye -- Part II. On ideology, sex, and history -- Gynecology and ideology in seventeenth-century England / Hilda Smith -- Education and ideology in nineteenth-century America : the response of educational institutions to the changing role of women / Adele Simmons -- Feminism and liberalism in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890-1918 / Amy Hackett -- Feminism and class consciousness in the British and American women's trade union leagues, 1890-1925 / Robin Miller Jacoby -- Latina liberation : tradition, ideology, and social change in Iberian and Latin American cultures / Ann M. Pescatello -- Racism and tradition : black womanhood in historical perspective / Joyce A. Ladner -- The politics of cultural liberation : male-female relations in Algeria / Kay Boals -- Part III. On class, sex, and social change -- A classical scholar's perspective on matriarchy / Sarah B. Pomeroy -- The Cheshire cat : reconstructing the experience of medieval woman / Kathleen Casey -- Women in covenents : their economic and social role in colonial Mexico / Asunción Lavrin -- Sex and class in colonial and nineteenth-century America / Ann D. Gordon and Mari Jo Buhle -- Beyond kinder, küche, kirche : Weimar women in politics and work / Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz -- Women, work, and the social order / Alice Kessler-Harris -- Part IV. Toward a future human past -- New approaches to the study of women in American history / Gerda Lerner -- Placing women in history : a 1975 perspective / Gerda Lerner -- Feminism and the methodology of women's history / Hilda Smith -- Four structures in a complex unity / Juliet Mitchell -- "Herstory" as history : a new field or another fad? / Sheila Ryan Johansson.