Gender and the Historian

Johanna Alberti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317877097
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Why are most famous historians men? How have women changed the writing of history over the last decades? What lives and stories have been hidden from history?

Until recently history was predominantly the domain of men. That men were the authors of our past meant that in many cases only half of the story was told. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the picture changed. Women, and indeed some men as well, started to address gender history. Women had been investigated historically before, but never with such intensity, nor such breadth. The impetus for this writing was both political and academic as feminists were determined to explore lives which until then had been disregarded.

Gender and the Historian charts the entry and development of this new history, showing how such considerations furthered postmodernism and ultimately reinvigorated the very core of History..

CHAPTER ONE Woman as a force in history

DOI: 10.4324/9781315838519-1

This book examines the writing of historians of women from 1969 to 1999. The title of the book reflects a change in the angle from which the history of women has been viewed during this period. Gender, Jane Flax has declared, ‘is a category that feminist theorists have constructed to analyze certain relations in our cultures and experiences. The concept must therefore reflect our questions, desires, and needs’.¹ The questions, desires and needs which led to the widespread use of the word gender in studies by historians of women are varied and complex. Joan Scott suggested that one motivation was the desire to gain ‘academic legitimacy’ because the term ‘women’s history’ contained a threat to the widely accepted view that women were not Valid historical subjects’, and was associated with the assumed stridency of feminism.² Her own use of the term was fuelled by a determination to transform the discipline of history. Later chapters will explore in more detail the emergence of ‘gender history’ from ‘women’s history’.

In this introduction I want to provide some sense of the writing that has preceded the work of historians of women during the past thirty years. The context, in which the wave of writing which this book covers took place, was one in which men dominated writing of history and defined what historians should and could do. The customs of history writing and the justification for the historian’s craft, which were current when the work covered by this book began, will be given a necessarily cursory summary. Alongside this narrative will be placed a selection of the ways early historians of women have been presented to the modern reader by the current generation of historians of women. There is included within this selection a more detailed description of the writings of three women historians of women who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century: Alice Clark, Ivy Pinchbeck and Mary Beard. My purpose is to place some of the ideas put forward by recent historians of women within a broader context.

The form in which history writing has appeared differs from one period to another. History as we practise it today has its roots in the nineteenth century: historians of the generation who were teaching in the sixties – the early period of the expansion of university education in the Western world – based their practice firmly on nineteenth-century traditions. In particular, the historian Leopold von Ranke has cast a long shadow over the work of historians since the second half of that century. Ranke worked at a time when historians were faced with a ‘deluge of information’.³ His most innovative conception for the practice of history was his insistence that historians should use contemporary documents. Reacting against the writing of history which drew moral lessons about the past, he asserted that the task of the historian was to view the past in a detached manner. If this task was rigorously pursued then he believed that it was possible to narrate the events of the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (as they actually happened.) The historian, in this perspective, is simply a mirror for the events of the past, albeit one that selects what it reflects. This approach to history is one that has persisted.

Ranke’s assertion of the ability of historians to reinscribe the past on to the pages of the present co-existed with another way of seeing the work of a historian which has had less of a powerful influence in the last one hundred years, but has never been totally superseded. However, history as a creation of the historian, a story or a tale, literary history, has deep roots in the earliest known human cultures. In this tradition the quality of the telling is vitally important, although no tale is told without a purpose. Usually histories were used by those with religious or secular power to justify their positions. But groups of people without much power could also use the telling of history for their own purposes. This is a tradition to which the writing of the history of women has strong links. Bonnie Smith has written that ‘Without a historian any group remains oppressed, living in “silence”, “bonds, and “suffering”, until that moment when, as in Whig history, a historical narrative reveals its struggle for liberation.’ Smith sees the history of women as ‘sharing many traits with Whig history of the past or working-class and black history today, the history of women maintains its affinity, however, weakened, with an epic or romantic tradition’.⁴

Bonnie Smith and other historians of women have been concerned to trace the roots of their practice in an earlier age. Smith’s goal in doing this was to ‘link women scholars to the historiography of women’ by tracing ‘a kind of genealogy of women’s historiography parallel to that of better-known men’. She has provided a thorough and assertive examination of the contributions of women’s historians to history writing. Nathalie Zemon Davis traced the history of women in history back to Plutarch’s ‘little biographies of virtuous women’, a genre of writing on ‘women worthies’ which she followed up to the nineteenth century.⁵ Bonnie Smith agreed that modern historical writing by and about both men and women depended on the biographical mode, but suggested that historians faced problems in writing about great women because their contribution could rarely ‘be narrated by the toting up of achievements’ and tended to be a consideration of their contribution to changing moral standards.⁶ Perhaps as a result of these problems, they ‘found a more sophisticated alternative in social history’, in the exploration of ‘the private space in which women could be found’.⁷ Lucy Salmon, an American historian working at the beginning of the twentieth century, challenged the exclusion of private sources from historical research and used source material found in backyards and kitchens. One study by Salmon examined the fan as a clue to social history.⁸ So historians of women who later studied the domestic and the so-called ‘trivial’ were not breaking entirely new ground. Another social historian, Georgiana Hill, writing Women in English Life from Medieval to Modern Times in the late nineteenth century, anticipated a later debate when she wrote that she found no ‘unvarying progress from age to age’ in the condition of women, despite the progress supposedly characteristic of English political life.⁹ Histories which attempted to assess women’s status within society were considering women in relation to men: Zemon Davis traces the awareness that ‘relations between the sexes should not be perceived as essentially unchanging features of the European past’ to late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century writers, including Engels.¹⁰

In the nineteenth, as in the second half of the twentieth century, the impetus behind writing women’s history was driven by political considerations – whether feminist or socialist – but also by historical curiosity. Georgiana Hill was a suffragist: the Victorian women’s movement, like its successor in the second half of the twentieth century, provided an impetus for historians of women. On the other side of the Atlantic, the women’s movement was stimulating the compilation of women’s ‘contributions’ to history from Margaret Fuller’s Women in the Nineteenth Century (1844) to Frances Willard and Mary Livermore’s American Women (1897). Fuller challenged women’s alleged inferiority by describing the lives of strong and noble women from classical times onwards. Finding heroines from the past was the starting point for a challenge to the dominant ideology which saw women as of no historical consequence. As Anna Davin has put it, this sort of history can ‘serve to provide inspiration, through examples of long injustice, or through evidence which counters stereotypes and assertions of inevitable female destiny, or through golden visions of erstwhile equality or even power’.¹¹ A more academic drive led to the inclusion of women within general studies of the labouring poor or in collections of community rites and custom. Zemon Davis notes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the appearance in Europe of serious studies ‘in which the status, activities, and consciousness of women are examined – and not always just of upper-class women – for a manageable period, such as the Middle Ages or the Renaissance’.¹²

The connection of women with moral developments did not disappear. The suffrage movement led to a degree of panic that women might lose their qualities as moral arbiters and protectors of the home. A book entitled The Women of the Renaissance: A Study of Feminism by a French historian extolled the intelligence and personal force which lay behind the ‘true sweetness, true goodness’ of women, but called upon them to ‘renounce public life!’. He was prepared to ‘Let mannish women, if they must, turn doctors, and womanish women turn priests!’¹³ Biographers of prominent women used their narratives of the moral stance of their subjects to criticise male values. Writers who hypothesised the existence of an idealised matriarchy in the ancient world pushed this perspective back into the past. Here lay the antecedents of the golden age debates which would engage women historians in the 1980s. One such writer was Jane Harrison who did not assert the existence of a full-blown matriarchy, but did suggest that evidence pointed to ‘the presence in the ancient world of a feminine culture of justice and pacifism interwoven with rivalling warlike institutions’.¹⁴

Jane Harrison was one of a handful of women scholars in the early twentieth century who held an academic post; in her case in Cambridge. However, it is clear that such a position was not a necessary stepping stone to archival research: June Purvis pointed out that some of the nineteenth-century historians, for example Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland who wrote Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest, based their studies on the original documents.¹⁵ It is too easy to make patronising assumptions about the limitations of an earlier generation of historians. In order to avoid the pitfall of condescension and to clarify the differences between the methods and assumptions of earlier historians, Nathalie Zemon Davis has identified what those historians did and what her own contemporaries would do differently. Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century is a book which very many historians of women, and, of course, in particular early modern historians, have used as a benchmark. Zemon Davis described how Clark ‘went to the sources’ like any historian of the 1970s, including studies of archival material such as judicial, administrative and financial records as well as personal material and prescriptive literature; she ‘spelled out the differences among her working women’; she distinguished between legal and other prescriptive images of women and the experience and behaviour of women, and her work was informed by theory: that a ‘woman’s independence … was a function of the full realization of her productive powers, biological, educational, and economic’. Finally, she respected her subjects, ‘treating them neither as passive victims of historical injustice nor as constant heroines struggling to change society’.¹⁶ Additions to these qualities which Davis argued that a historian of women writing in the 1970s would provide were the use of demography, and in particular the conclusions of studies of the complex and changing nature of families. The use of statistics in general would tighten up Clark’s ‘impressionistic’ use of figures. Davis’s contemporaries would be concerned with the erotic and sexual activities of their subjects. These are additional to the work of Clark: the one significant difference that Davis identified was the need to study men and women together, for her version of the goal of the historian of women was ‘to understand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past’.¹⁷

Any reading of Clark’s work would accord with Zemon Davis’s recognition that she was not only a precursor of the modern historian of woman but also a practitioner of a craft which is very close to that of her successors; indeed, I would argue, closer than Davis acknowledged. She consciously challenged the invisibility of women in history, and shared later perceptions of the reasons for that invisibility, the regarding of women ‘as a static factor in social developments’.¹⁸ She placed her study consciously in what we would call an interdisciplinary location adjacent to sociology and psychology, and she challenged male categorisations of women’s working life, and of ‘organisation for production’.¹⁹ Although she is generally associated with the argument that it was economic forces which changed women’s lives, she stated in her conclusion: ‘If we would understand the effect of the introduction of Capitalism on the social organism, we must remember that the subjection of women to their husbands was the foundation stone of the structure of the community in which Capitalism first made its appearance.’²⁰ She then described a system of male domination to which later historians would give the name ‘patriarchy’. Clark’s analysis led her to conclude that the introduction of capitalism took place within this structure and also changed it, and that the changes affected the consciousness of both men and women. On the final pages of the book she identified the emergence of both the private sphere, and ‘the organisation of a State which regards the purposes of life solely from the male standpoint’.²¹

I have been struck by a strong sense that many of the ideas which gender historians have put forward in the past thirty years have been expressed by historians in the past: as Bonnie Smith put it, the themes of historians of women from the mid-eighteenth century were ‘recapitulated when the history of women received a new impetus in the late 1960s’.²² The factor which is peculiar to the period, which this book will cover, is the way women’s history has become the task of many historians rather than a very select few. The explanation for this lies partly in the fact that many more women were more highly educated than in Clark’s time, but also, as Chapter Two will demonstrate, in the emergence of a strong women’s movement, itself of course part of the process of social change which led to women’s arrival in significant numbers in higher education. The existence of a community of like-minded scholars is also a relevant factor in the development of a new departure in the study of history. It seems unlikely that Alice Clark herself could have done her work without the support of her contem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Woman as a force in history
• 2. A moment in history 1969–75
• 3. Liberating women’s history 1976–83
• 4. Gender, a useful category of historical analysis 1983–7
• 5. A multiple vision 1988–9
• 6. Writing inside the kaleidoscope 1990–3
• 7. The shape of an historical community 1993–9
• Bibliography
• Index