History and Historigraphy: The Treatment in American Histories of Significant Events Concerning the Status of Women (original) (raw)
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Reflections on Twentieth-Century American Women's History (1)
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The Big Tent of U.S. Women’s and Gender History: A State of the Field
In October 2010 the journalist and author Susan Faludi incited a major controversy in feminist blogospheres, lecture circuits, and college classrooms with a provocative article in Harper's Magazine about generational splits among feminists. In Faludi's rendering, members of a young, tech-savvy generation embrace deconstruction theory, popular culture studies, and analyses of "the body" while celebrating their empowerment through high-heeled shoes and Lady Gaga. These priorities outrage an older generation, which focuses on the persistent structural oppression of women and does not consider blogging a valid form of political organizing. In 2009 this generational struggle came to a head in the highly contentious election for the National Organization for Women's presidency, which thirty-two-year-old Latifa Lyles lost by a razor-thin margin to Terry O'Neill, who was older by more than two decades. While many commentators have challenged Faludi's analysis, particularly her suggestion that young feminists are uninterested in questions of inequality and political organizing, most agree that significant tensions exist over the future direction of feminist politics. 1 The field of U.S. women's and gender history emerged out of the women's movement in the 1960s and has retained close connections to feminism. Yet in recent years the field has not been visibly riven by generational divides. Many trends in twenty-first-century feminist politics are reflected in women's history scholarship: growing emphases on cultural representations and "the body" and a broad agenda in which feminists train their lenses on subjects not associated only-or even primarily-with women. At the same time, scholarship on topics that have long been staples of women's history, such as politics and labor, continues to thrive, pursued by historians from all generations. Despite periodic expressions of concern over possible fragmentation, depoliticization, and lost Cornelia H. Dayton is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut; Lisa Levenstein is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.