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Recent studies of women's employment in the United States, recognizing that the past has shaped – and constrained – the present, have turned to historical evidence for answers to pressing questions about gender inequality in the economic arena. These carefully designed and methodologically sophisticated projects, often based on newly discovered primary sources, have greatly illuminated the processes, institutions, and social groups which have interacted to produce persistent inequality despite substantial change.

Judith Bennett has persuaded me that in the oral version of this paper I conflated five points: (1) All women's history has a feminist motivation and message. (2) Descriptive women's history has discovered valuable evidence about women in the past; this has now been accepted as historical "fact." (3) Sociological use of gender as a concept adds an analytical edge to descriptive accounts. (4) Social history that makes gender and women's experience problematic and analyzes it systematically can add to the achievements of descriptive/interpretive women's history. (5) Both types of women's history (descriptive/interpretive and analytical) can only benefit from explicitly demonstrating the ways in which their findings contribute to answering questions already on the historical agenda. I have revised my paper somewhat to clarify these points.

Although the intellectual projects of women's history and family his tory have been diverse, there have been some fruitful interrelationships as well as continuing disagreements about conceptualization and method. A systematic exami nation was carried out of the content of articlespublished in the period 1976-1985 in the Journal of Family History, in three self-defined feminist or women's studies journals, and in four general historical journals. Definitions of the two fields were derived from this exercise. These show that women's history, unlike family history, is movement history; it is closer to more central historical fields in the kinds of questions it asks and in method. Because of its role in placing women as a group into a context of family relationships, family history has an important contribution to make to women's history. To the extent that diversity among women, institutions and informal politics become more central to women's history, it will come closer to family history.