Feminist Microhistory as a Nordic way of Microhistory

I present a feminist reading of microhistory the focus of which is on microhistory as a critical knowledge production. Read through the Feminist Standpoint Theory, microhistory is a standpoint to expose the experiences and views of those from the margins of history. Due to the structural barriers related to the sexual division of labour in the 1970s and 1980s, Standpoint feminism initially challenged men’s experience as the taken-for-granted universal premise and focused on women’s experiences. However, today the focus is not on the experiences of one sex, but rather on the knowledge produced from hierarchical peripheries. What these peripheries are is an open, contextual question, that microhistorians should be able to answer. The potential of such knowledge lies in its epistemic privilege – people who have lived without political-economic privilege are more likely to understand social reality in ways which can refine our historical understanding, and challenge taken-for-granted concepts, historical ideas and theories. Second, finding such knowledge can mean critically addressing broader mechanisms of knowledge production, as in Halgrímsdóttir’s wonderful microhistory: Tale of a Fool? A Microhistory of an 18th-Century Peasant Woman (2019). Feminist ideas are well grounded in Nordic soil, would this be one of the strands defining Nordic microhistory?