Women’s scholarly lives: weaving the narrative

This special issue illuminates the risky, contested and often hidden spaces in which the first generations of academic women negotiated and crafted a scholarly life. Taking a longue durée approach, it traces the complex contours of the scholarly trajectories of a range of academic women internationally whose lives straddled the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, providing key insights into the shifting dynamics of acceptance and resistance across time, region and discipline. Recasting universities as critical sites in which academic women taught, organised and advocated for wider social, political, economic and educational change, it foregrounds the collective, negotiated and historically contingent nature of women's scholarly lives, shaped by networks, spaces and the temporal conditions in which their careers unfolded.