Smith's own career parallels the growth of feminist influence in the historical profession. When the feminist movement began in the sixties she was a graduate student at the University of Chicago where doing research on women was distinctly not encouraged. She is now an editor of the Journal of Women's History, which is publishing its' fourth volume. Women's history has also been a commercial success. The growth of women's history was aided by changes within the study of history itself.
Every academic discipline is subject to trends and changes in emphasis.
Although women were academic historians during the Nineteenth Century Woman Movement, as well as the Twentieth Century Suffrage Movement, then the emphasis in the historical profession was on the study of elites, events and institutions. Women were underrepresented in what historians studied as well as in the studies themselves. In the sixties historians became more interested in social history, or looking at the experiences of ordinary people. The convergence of opportunity and demand has meant there are incentives to fill in the gaps in women's history. Anyone doing research on women twenty-five years ago found little published historiography and most of that made broad generalizations about broad topics, usually on the national level.