Women Historians and Women's History: An Organizational Guide (original) (raw)

Perspectives of Women as Historians: an exploration of women's learning and historical practice

2008

This research emerged from a desire to undertake a feminist exploration of academic debates in History Theory, postgraduate studies in History and the legacy of this learning in historical practice. I have examined the development of historical consciousness, the historicised self and historical scholarship. My research acknowledges an intellectual and historic sisterhood and its associated cUlnulative body of feminist knowledge and practice. This thesis was centred on the stories of a group of women, with whOln I studied postgraduate history at the University of New England in the early 1990s. This research process was largely shaped by feminist poststructural methodologies and incorporates interdisciplinary writings highlighting the alternate ways \ve can examine the past. I was interested in the ideas of a developing historical consciousness, historical scholarship and practice. The findings demonstrate the benefits of adopting a multifaceted approach to the study and practice of...

Women's History Review

This discussion explores some of the ways in which historical narratives can emerge from gaps in the evidence and in our ways of thinking about the past, with reference to the writer, feminist activist and Shakespearean scholar, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1841-1929). A considerable body of manuscript and other archival material relating to the Stopes family is held in public hands. However, key items, including Charlotte Stopes's own correspondence with prominent people of her time, have been lost or destroyed. This article aims to address the tensions between private and public aspects of Stopes's life as a way of exploring ways in which the absence, as well as the presence, of evidence can influence historical accounts. As the discussion sets out to show with reference to Stopes, historical attention may be drawn to certain kinds of evidence in accordance with dominant cultural narratives, allowing these narratives to be repeatedly rehearsed across generations of scholarship. This process may then produce a discursive gap, a failure to recognize marginal or unfashionable contributions to public culture, which in turn produces distortions in the record of the past. As researchers, historians, biographers and writers, we work with the evidence we gather about our subjects through books, manuscripts, images, ephemera and objects of various kinds; often through repeated visits to a library, museum, archive or personal collection. Even as a by-product of research, these entities of knowledge can be irresistible: a worn fragment of soap kept in a wooden box, the flair and density of handwriting in ink, or a rare bound volume which always opens at a certain yellowed page. The impression of intimacy that the researcher gleans from these materials can create a sense of relationship with the subject; a glimpse of what Jorge Luis Borges described as the 'extravagant joy' of a belief in the possibility of a complete body of knowledge, a whole story, a whole life. 1 As I will suggest in this article, however, it may be within the gaps and absences of public and historical record, the incomplete manuscript, missing photograph, lost or censored personal correspondence, or amongst forgotten and unpopular themes and figures, that some of the most fruitful territory for historical writing and research can be found. As Carolyn Steedman observes, the archival historian must, in part, 'read for what is not there: the silence and the absences of the documents always speak to us'. 2 As this article

Women and History: Preserved and Preserving

Journal of Historical Geography, 2005

It is oddly appropriate that the term 'preserve' should figure so prominently in these two recent edited volumes on women and the making and spatializing of public history. After all, 'putting up preserves' is a mundane act of traditional women's work, one that is deeply implicated in the gendered processes of domesticity and family nurturing. As Carolyn Merchant argues, the related processes of preserving and conserving are historically inherent in feminine gender roles; and the reasons for this arise from women's traditional relationship to material production in the physical environments of human habitation. 1 Charles Hosmer began to describe some 40 years ago in an early account of America's preservationist movement that women have long asserted an active voice in America's historic preservation debate. 2 However, the notion sustained throughout these two volumes is that of preserving women as historical subjects. As Hosmer states, 'We cannot crystallize or pickle the past' (p. 13). Thus, it is vaguely troubling that in our desire to advance historic preservation projects that maximize women's significance in the historical record, women themselves as historical subjects might become fixed, contained, and sealed off from further intervention, like specimens in a canning jar. These two volumes issue like-minded calls both to locate women's history anew and to reinterpret existing public history projects so as to highlight the overlooked contributions of women. Both pairs of editors e Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer Goodman with Restoring Women's History through Historic Preservation and Polly Welts Kaufman and Katharine T. Corbett with Her Past Around Us: Interpreting Sites for Women's History e bring together two groups of mostly women historians, museum and public history professionals, and academics. The resulting sets of essays cover similar ground and rally around comparable themes: that history has been a white male dominated enterprise with the contributions of women ignored, suppressed, or under-interpreted; and that women's history can emerge from anyone's everyday surroundings, if we apply the proper intellectual tools to its detection and interpretation. The two volumes strike many of the same empirical chords. Each, for example, has chapters devoted to the need for reinterpretation in the typical 'house museum' e historic restorations of homes devoted to the

History. CUNY Panel: Rethinking the Disciplines. Women in the Curriculum Series

1997

This collection of five essays examines the ways in which history, as a discipline, currently reflects ongoing scholarship on g.nder, race, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation. In "Rethinking History," Carol Ruth Berkin reviews the incorporation of social history into elementary, secondary, and postsecondary textbooks. In "History-Writing from the Margins," Martha C. Howell examines the effects of social history on the profession and the interdisciplinary nature of much of the scholarship on gender, race, ethnicity, and social class. In "Puerto Rican Women's Historiography and the Inclusive Curriculum," Altagracia Ortiz traces the development of Puerto Rican women's history over the last several decades and notes the lack of inclusion of Puerto Rican history into the curriculum. In "American Social History," Myra B. Young Armstead argues that the study of issues surrounding gender, race, ethnicity, and social class have directly challenged conventional historical wisdom and augmented historians' understanding of the past. In "Measuring Impact," Judith P. Zinsser argues that while the field of women's history has grown exponentially over the last several decades, women's experiences continue to be subsumed under men's history or fall prey to old denigrating prejudices. Most essays contain references. (MDM)

Making women's histories: beyond national perspectives

Journal of Gender Studies, 2014

Through the work of Joan Wallach Scott in the 1980s, gender emerged as a useful category of analysis for many historians, in North America and across the world more broadly. Scott's seminal essay "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" appeared in the American Historical Review in 1986 and, with its publication, the discipline of history was forever changed.[1] Almost thirty years later, however, historians still grapple with how to approach women's and gender history, especially their global developments and intersections with di erent social, political, and economic currents. 3/31/2021 Making Women's Histories: Beyond National Perspectives-{essays in history} www.essaysinhistory.net/making-womens-histories-beyond-national-perspectives/ 5/5