In recent decades, the feminist challenge to a male, ruling class dominated genre of history-writing from above has moved quickly from the 1960s' paradigm of women purely as "victims of patriarchy", through underscoring women's scope for autonomous counter-activity, to extricating "herstory" from "history" as virtually the only true and valid account. Today, though a re-integration is under way, focusing not on a separate "women's history" but on women in history - or even better, on historical women, whose real lives may be seen to have comprised a dimension of sharing and co-existence as well as a dimension of oppression and resistance. In HIST 223, all such issues and debates form part of the theoretical background that frames an empirical investigation of women's position, roles, and modes of activity in kin-based societies, in the early empires of Antiquity, in India and the Far East, in Greece and Rome, in medieval Christendom and Islamdom and in the Ottoman Empire.