Re‐Embodying History's ‘Lady’: Women's History, Materiality and Public Space in Early‐Twentieth‐Century Vienna

In ‘The Disembodied Lady’, neurologist Oliver Sacks recounts the case of Christina, a woman who suddenly lost her corporeal sense of self. This article uses this case as a metaphor for the state of women's history at the turn of the millennium. With the turn to discourse, even the so‐called ‘lady’ within the academy had become disembodied. As Christina mouthed to Sacks, however, to be disembodied is awful. The purpose of this article is to follow the more recent trend in scholarship that has sought to re‐embody the ‘lady’ of history. The article begins by tracing the development of women's history and how its subject, the ‘lady’, came to disappear. It then draws on the ‘material’ turn in feminist theory to consider the implications of this vanishing act by looking, first, to lived experience, and second, to materiality/discursive production. I argue that Women are not only a matter of language, but a matter of matter, and further, that matter itself must be re‐evaluated as agential and entangled with discourse. Finally, an example from my research on street walking in early‐twentieth‐century Vienna illustrates how to bring this new women's history to life.