1990s: Foundation, first expansion, publication series

L'Homme. Z. F. G. appeared in December 1990 as the first German-language journal for feminist history.

First Editorial, issue 1/1990 (pdf)

The “founding wave” of new journals

Shortly before, the first journals on women's and gender history had appeared in the English-speaking world (1989 "Journal of Women's History" and "Gender & History"); in the following years, similar journal projects were developed in other countries (1992 "Metis. Zeitschrift für historische Frauenforschung und feministische Studien" and "Women's History Review" in 1992, "European Journal of Women's Studies" and "Arenal. Revista de Historia de las Mujeres", 1995 "Clio. Histoire, Femme et Sociétés", etc.).

The initiative to found L’Homme came at the end of the 1980s from the "Working Group on Women's History" (Arbeitsgruppe Frauengeschichte) at the Department of History at the University of Vienna, in particular from the historian Edith Saurer, who died in 2011. The founding team consisted of eight Austrian academics from Vienna, Salzburg and Innsbruck, including historians, a philosopher and a political scientist. The editorial team has been based at the Institute of History at the University of Vienna from the outset.

The title

The title of the journal was the subject of much debate at the time of its founding. "The combination of L’Homme, Mann, Mensch with feminism was an ironic and precise reference to the need for a correction of theory and practice, not only in historical studies," said Edith Saurer in her speech on the occasion of the journal's 20th anniversary (Rede anlässlich des 20-jährigen Jubiläums). According to the very first editorial, the name made "the postulate of women's and gender history clearly legible: namely, to rewrite history". And it goes on: "There is no doubt that the equation of man and woman in semantics and its general anchoring in all areas of society [...] is subject to a process of erosion". (Editorial, S. 4)

The logo on the cover, designed by the artist Erwin Thorn, also emphasises the aim of correcting the theory and practice of historical science: It depicts Leonardo da Vinci's "homo quadratus" - but without the man/man holding the world's interior together.

Development of the discipline, potential for innovation

The profile of the journal was set out in the first editorial: "The move to the new journal articulates the desire for a discussion that goes beyond the borders of Austria. It expresses the need for the further development of a discipline that is not only linked to the emancipatory approaches of the early 1970s, but is also based on an innovative potential, not least due to its position as an academic outsider" (p. 3).

Focuses of the 1990s

"Religion" was the theme of the first issue, "Nutrition" that of the second – the proximity to anthropological topics was already identified in the first editorial as one of the journal's concerns. Initially, more "classical" topics of early "women's history" such as "care", "cottage industry" or "fornication" were taken up, but also current topics of women's and gender history such as "war", "the body", "violence"; in between there were issues on particularly innovative research topics such as "happiness", "the girlfriend?" or "trade", as well as journal volumes devoted to theoretical debates or concepts of the discipline ("interdisciplinarity", "A thousand and one stories from Austria").

Expansion to Germany and Switzerland

In 1995, German and Swiss academics became part of the editorial team for the first time: Susanna Burghartz, Ute Gerhard, Karin Hausen, Regina Schulte and Claudia Ulbrich. Over time, the team expanded to include today L‘Homme Schriften. Reihe zur Feministischen Geschichtswissenschaft“. The series, which currently comprises 29 volumes (as of spring 2023), publishes monographs and anthologies that present new research in feminist historiography.

Topics range from female partisans in the Yugoslavian resistance to spinsterhood in the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, from a study of the "political community" of German women's rights activists Helene Lange and Gertrude Bäumer to missionaries in South Africa after 1945. The anthologies combine essays on "letter cultures and their gender", "women's movements in post-communist countries" or women's diaries in the first half of the 20th century.