The turmoil in the universities in the later 1960s produced, among other things, an addiction to so-called minority history – history seen through the eyes of minority groups and rewritten to suit their supposed needs and interests. Of the specialities then introduced only women's history has survived as a serious academic preoccupation. Neither gays' nor blacks' history, for instance, ever settled into a regular part of the curriculum, whereas women's history has become an accepted feature in many American institutions and in publishers' lists. Nor is this surprising. Women, after all, are the only human minority that forms a majority of the population, and – however fiercely feminists may deny this –they started from a position of power not available to other groups. The men whose supposed distortion of history they attacked could hardly avoid frequent contact with them. Moreover, men (especially American men) had for long regarded women as a sex with a mixture of respect and apprehension which reflected their understanding of female power and induced them to accept the often unrestrained criticism hurled at them. The common reaction of the liberal mind is to feel guilty when accused, and most historians, especially in the United States, are of a liberal mind. Women's history also benefited from the contemporaneous and powerful swing towards social history, as it is called – the somewhat static study of social groupings in the past and their relationships to one another. Thus women's history had little difficulty in achieving academic recognition.

The combination of passionate assault and conscience-stricken response produced, predictably, a state of affairs in which women's history has received little serious criticism.