The Work of Feminist History (original) (raw)
Related papers
McGrath, A. “The Loneliness of the Feminist Historian”. Australian Feminist Studies 29, no. 80 (2014): 204-214. Feminist historians in Australia have achieved the critical mass that means that they no longer need to be the sole woman’s voice pleading to get women into the history corridors and inside the books. By looking back at recent history reflexively, this article celebrates the achievement of feminist historians over the past four decades in making profound impacts on mainstream historical writing and understanding. Engaging in particular with the work of feminist historians Joan Scott and Joy Damousi, ‘The Loneliness of the Feminist Historian’ considers whether feminist history has a future. It also reflects upon the author’s memories of the feminist history movement from the 1970s and 1980s—its aims, its achievements and its significant successes, especially compared with other social science disciplines. It explains how certain ‘great (female) historians’ made courageous efforts to internationalise and pluralise feminist history. It also probes the meaning and relevance of ‘professional masculinities’, pointing out that feminist historians were supported by key male historians, who backed them in gaining career and publishing opportunities. Additionally, the challenges of Indigenous scholars led to a sharpening of critical approaches to colonialism. This article argues, however, that feminist historians cannot afford to cling to the excitement of the early conferences of the 1970s and 1980s, for if they expect their practice to thrive, they must constantly critique it, using the most innovative and best tools of our era, including the empirical, the reflexive, the whimsical and the theoretical.
Women’s accounts and caribbean history
Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe, 1997
There is a continuing discourse on the engendering of history of the Caribbean. As a part of that discourse, leading historians such as Bridget Brereton and Blanca Silvestrini suggest that the process should include the texts and testimonies of women 1. In this way the writers of Caribbean history can move beyond using a feminist construct to analyze traditional sources. Such sources are usually about men's lives and what they did in the public sphere. Examination of those sources invariably limits the findings to what amounts to contribution history 2 ; women's role in society will continue to be judged according to the male derived instruments of analysis. Thus women's perception of their society is needed to give balance to the androcentric approach to the study of Caribbean history. 1
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
Surely using different kinds of sources results in different kinds of writing? Of course it is a matter of degree with both imagination and empirical research informing novels and biography on a continuum: sometimes novelists research and historians sometimes imagine. Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley (1849) was based on her research of the Leeds Mercury newspaper of 1814 to 1816. 2 Some historians, while wary of crossing genres and writing fiction, have no problem using contemporary historical literature. Thomas Carlyle wrote a novel in 1836 before writing biographies of great male leaders and lesser ones on his friends and relatives. 3 Certainly, different kinds of biography tend to rest more heavily on different kinds of sources. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Lucy Frost observed that convict biography based on fragmentary and biased sources involves epistemological concerns:
(2003) Writing Feminist Genealogies
Journal of Gender Studies, 2003
"Abstract: In this paper I consider the critical role of auto/biographies in the writing of a Foucauldian genealogy of women teachers at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain. In isolating points of convergence between feminist theories and the Foucauldian genealogical project, I explore the deployment of self-technologies of women teachers in a particular historical stage and geographical site, which I have identified as having a particular genealogical significance. What I suggest is that a genealogical approach to women teachers' auto/biographical writings at the turn of the century, creates new perspectives from where to theorise the different modes in which they chose to mould themselves and calls into question given discourses surrounding the persona of the woman teacher."
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
Rereading and Rewriting Women's History (thesis)
Utah State University, 2008
In Margaret Atwood's nonfiction book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), Atwood discusses the importance of the female writer's responsibility, that to write as a woman or about women means that you take upon yourself the responsibility of writing as a form of negotiation with our female dead and with what these dead took with them--the truth about who they were. By rereading and rewriting our communal past, women writers pay tribute to our female ancestors by voicing their silent stories while also changing gender stereotypes, complicating who these women were, and acknowledging their accomplishments. In her 1999 novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier revisions the unknown object of Vermeer's famous painting of the same name. By so doing, Chevalier takes a painting created from a male point-of-view and brings the historic female in the painting to life by giving her a backstory. In Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue, published in the same year, Vreeland also follows this female framework as she writes of a woman named Saskia who discovers a Vermeer painting and who invents and imagines the female perspective behind the artwork's female subject. In so doing, Saskia finds value in remembering the life of another woman and hope that someone will remember her life as well. In Willa Cather's 1931 novel Shadows on the Rock, Cather depicts female characters who challenge traditional stereotypes while also rereading women's objective historical past. 'Toinette Gaux, prostitute and descendent of King Louis XIV's filles du roi, and Jeanne Le Ber, Quebec's religious recluse, have historical credibility as the unappreciated mothers of Canada through their defiance of the use of their bodies as colonial commodities within revolutionary gender roles. And in Cather's short story 'Coming, Aphrodite!' (1920) she includes characterization and imagery recollective of French artist Fernand Léger depicting artist Eden Bowen as another female who owns her sexuality and body and will not let herself be objectified by the painter Don Hedger. Atwood, Chevalier, Vreeland, and Cather all demonstrate rereading and rewriting of women in women's history in order to add missing female perspective to our male-authored past while also giving voice to female dead who need to have their stories told. (85 pages)