I had the same problem with a listView inside of tabs.  I wanted to store the currently selected tab in the request session, but there is no facility to do that in Salesforce.  Here's the idea for it: http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/10093905/Visualforce_support_for_session_scoped_data
 
It's not a perfect solution, but I ended up making a custom object (Page_State__c) that held a user (or user id) and the currently selected tab (mentioned in http://community.salesforce.com/sforce/board/message?board.id=Visualforce&thread.id=16883) .  Also note that I had to use the recordSelectedTabNeeded variable because DML is not allowed in getters/setters.  Here is the code...
 
<apex:page controller="ThisController">
   <apex:tabPanel id="tabPanel" value="{!selectedTabName}">
      <apex:tab label="1" id="Object1">
         <apex:ListViews type="Object1__c" />
      </apex:tab>
      <apex:tab label="2" id="Object2" >
           <apex:ListViews type="Object1__c" />
      </apex:tab>
   </apex:tabPanel>
   <apex:form >
      <apex:actionFunction name="recordSelectedTabFunction" action="{!recordSelectedTab}" reRender="false"/>
   </apex:form>
   <script type="text/javascript">
    
     if ({!recordSelectedTabNeeded}){
         recordSelectedTabFunction();
     }
   
  </script>
</apex:page>
 
public with sharing class ThisController {
    
    String selectedTabName = null;
    Id currentUserId;
    Boolean recordSelectedTabNeeded = false;
    
    String defaultSelectedTabName = 'Object1';
    
    public ThisController(){
        this.currentUserId = UserInfo.getUserId();
    }
    
    public String getSelectedTabName() {
        
        if (this.selectedTabName != null){
            return this.selectedTabName;
        }
        
        Page_State__c pageState = findPageState(this.currentUserId);
        if (pageState == null || pageState.SelectedTab__c == null){
            return defaultSelectedTabName;
        }else{
            return pageState.SelectedTab__c;
        }
    }
    
    public void setSelectedTabName(String currentTabName) {
        this.selectedTabName = currentTabName;
         this.recordSelectedTabNeeded = true;
    }
    
    public Boolean getRecordSelectedTabNeeded(){
        return this.recordSelectedTabNeeded;
    }
    
    public void recordSelectedTab(){
        
        Page_State__c pageState = findPageState(this.currentUserId);
        if (pageState == null){
            pageState = new Page_State__c();
            pageState.UserId__c = this.currentUserId;
            pageState.SelectedTab__c = this.selectedTabName;
            insert pageState;
        }else{
            pageState.SelectedTab__c = this.selectedTabName;
            update pageState;
        }  
        
        this.recordSelectedTabNeeded = false;
    }
    private Page_State__c findPageState(Id userId){
        List<Page_State__c> pageStatelist =
            [Select p.UserId__c, p.SelectedTab__c, p.IsDeleted, p.Id, p.Name
                From Page_State__c p
                Where p.IsDeleted = false
                and p.userId__c = :userId];
        if (pageStatelist.size() == 1){
            return pageStatelist.get(0);
        }else{
            return null;
        }        
        
    }
}