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In the theoretical turmoil surrounding us, feminist historians are having to recast some of their questions and conceptual categories. As practitioners of feminist history know, an historical approach that focuses on social relations based on sex and gender is consistently troubled and stimulated by other kinds of opposition. For the last two decades these’other oppositions’ for English-speaking feminist historians have very often been those of class, while more recently oppositions based on race, ethnicity, and nation have been major preoccupations. Yet the historiographical traditions concerned with gender and those concerned with colonialism, racism, and the imperial past have remained remarkably distinct. Whether we seek a truly feminist perspective on the colonial and national past, or a rigorously postcolonial analysis of feminism itself, we are having to bring distinct traditions of thought, research, and debate into …