This paper examines approaches to historicising domestic violence in the period 1986-2000. These developed in relation to debates seeking to define feminist history in the context of continuing questions about difference and emergent questions about the utility of post-structuralist and intersectional frameworks. In the late 1980s a number of key histories of domestic violence in the US and Britain appeared, including Pleck’s Domestic Tyranny (1987) and Gordon’s Heroes of their own lives (1988). Grand in scale, these works addressed questions of class, ethnicity and women’s agency over periods of a century or more. While no such overarching works appeared in Australia, Allen’s Sex and Secrets (1990) considered domestic violence in a study of white women and crime since 1880. A year earlier in the US, Crenshaw’s game-changing article on intersectionality demanded greater attention on the effects of a broader and more complex range of subject positions in feminist accounts of experience. In Australia, the 1990s produced scholarship that spoke directly to Indigenous and migrant experiences of domestic violence, pointing to similar issues of representation in feminist histories here. In charting these developments, I pay particular attention to the temporal, geographical and archival scale of histories emerging in this period.