THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING The Osford History of Historical Writings a five-volume, multi-authored scholarly vee See Ml bp as globe. Ie is a chronological tempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with paid to different ‘comparison with Western historiography. Each volume covers a particular period, «with care taken to avoid unduly pri ‘greater geographical range activity around the world Hiszarical Writing is the Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600 Volume 2: 400-1400 Volume 3: 1400-1800 Volume Volume 5: Historical Writing since 1945 oar UMBSETSSS E83 THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING Daniel Woolf The Oxford History of Historical Writing VOLUME §: HISTORICAL WRITING SINCE 1945 Axel Schneider Tan Hesketh OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESSOXFORD UNIVERSIrY Pass rendon Sere, Oxford 0x2 6? department ofthe Univers of Oxford. tive of excellence in tesearch, scolar, by publishing worlwide in| ‘Orford. New York Auckland Cape Town. Dares Salazm Hong Kong, Karachi ‘Kula Lumpur Maded. Melbourne Mexico City Naitobt ‘New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toron IN gtosrones-s tssr9 teas G 2a Tests , wes * The Oxford History of Historical Writing was maule possible by the generous financial support provided by the Offices of the Vice-President (Research) and the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) at the University of Alberta from 2005 to 2009 and. subsequently by Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.Women’s and Gender History 37 through which topics other than women—men, sexuality, race, citizenship, and. nationhood among others—have been seen anew: Gender can serve a8 lens on power—not just between men and women, but also through them and their Chapter 7 cannot be extricated from the story of women’s in the ewentieth century. Although there are men ‘Women’s and Gender History Julie Des Jardins in which women historians felt com- pelled, and ultimately empowered, to explore topics that professional mentors told them were unscholarly, unhistorical, and forge new areas of historical expertise. MAKING A PLACE FOR WOMEN HISTORIANS AND WOMEN’S HISTORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In the late nineteenth century, history-writing in the West started to be perceived asa ‘profession’ —a ‘scientific’ endeavour requiring academic credentials, Before then and outside the West, women had been deemed appropriate subjects and ‘writers of history. Mughal emperor Akbar commissioned his aune, Gulbadan Begum, to write the history of her father and brother's reigns in the sixteenth century; and the resultant text, the Humayun-nama, was a Persian account of het ‘own experiences, recollected with the aid of relics from the domestic sphere. ‘not uncommon for women to write about noteworthy people and. observed intimately. In colonial America, Mayflower descendant Merey Otis Warren insisted that the men around her were too busy making history to be bothered with is recording, and thus the American Revolution and published the man onal rum, er pees considered it Idle to wach loa “amilial, and ure and tradition, women used hisorlal esos to make good cidaeu of thelr clr: Some worsen Weston to write nationalistic textbooks; others raised funds to erect commemorative structures honouring the heroes of the past.” inadeqacy of exiing bodies. beoween women and men, der ae the Polis of History 98) © Mercy Otis Waren, Hisar of the Rise Progres, aad Termination ofthe American Revelation ‘Baym, American Wonen Water and rhe Wark of Histor. 700-80 (New ir Be Ged Ra a Poi of She Cd of yt Woe and il * Joan Wallach Seo Polite of sry (NeveWomen’s and Gender History 99 ied the World Center for Women's Archives al evidence of women's contributions £0 ‘ci professionalization in the la ‘obscured women’s longscan 5-40)—a collection of jon’ all over the world, into the agency of wome propery holes or poll bi gresive story of nat constitutional, and Wester women were entering colleges in greater numbers than ever before, but they left the academy before pursuing scholarly or historical careers. Many women wha had been mobilized into industrial work during the Second World War were encouraged to return home to assume roles as wives and mothers, and they were similarly retrenched in post-war histories. The consensus among academies was to focus on political sand the great individual men who led them. Once again, narratives ofthe state exeluded women as actors who had bearing on national affaits.® should not be surprising that the women’s histories to come out of . By virtue of cork, women were unremarkal to citizens ights.* In 1889 ‘wcite a History of Woman from the Beginning ofthe World to Today, which taken to completion, would have covered women in China, India, Persia, an Greece and Rome, Asya, Egypt and the North tative workings of masculine institutions, even if not yer defined explic~ patriarchal cerms.” French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir helped to ize women’s oppression by providing an historical model in. The Second the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the her analysis of French women resonated all over the world asserted primacy over women. She believed that ‘lon, Lory retrieved through women’s sources and. seen through women's eyes—would show that men had been denying the reality of women's agency and accomplish ment in the modem age. Aided by Hungarian pacifist Resika Schwimmer, sh sin Vincent, Aids Horie Research (New Yor, 1934) 27,104; Heber B Ad nachng of Htory (Richmond, 143); and Des Jains, Women andthe Hi omar Pha of Woman or Women Afened (New Yo hist Coty Sano and Macs Ia Gos, Hy40 The Osfardl History of Historical Writing ‘Student protests sprang up on college campuses in Tray, France, England, ‘Germany, and the United States. As historians became swept up in anti-war, ¢ rights, black power, New Left, Maoist, and countereulrural movements th were inspired to reorient their research both in content and perspective. influx of scholars who were non-white, ethnic, and working class into i fous decades. In Australia inary people. tory—the Annales scholarship in France, Alltagrgeschichte i aria in Italy, and ‘bottom up’ history in. North: America ¢ set of sources and suppositions about wh Working Class coming-of-age narratives, and indeed several histo reinstated the black man as empowered historical agent at the sl the highlighting of social experience through the ts the means to reveal women like they had nor revealed th before, Rather than focus on sweeping politcal events, the new breed of historian looked at phenomena in microcosm and made groundbreaking 4 sphere, where women would " Spongbene, Wing Wome Hiaony 76-m: and Georg G. Tg, Hizorieapl in the ror it i Gps wt Pees Change (ia Ca hse 77.0 Women’s and Gender History ut tion as a women's historian—one increasin ive to issues of and the construction of gender.'? oinren 5 history growing steadily feminist in is story internationally was the tise of the iberal, radical, isory (IFRWH) charted both similar and. divergent national ions in these years. Historians of Western countries, and the United ind elsewhere have, by contrast, worked closely wit ‘programmes that also came out of second-wave fe 's history has been consciously employed to combat sexism in the ity as well as in present-day society.142 The Osfrd History of Historical Writing 1ed for feminist ends, histo history generally came out of Maxis scho heavily informed by that nation’s philosophical tradition. availabilty of ecclesiastical sources led scholars to write historic and nineteench-century women informed heavily by demographic data. Us nately this also made it i 19 be seen autono from social and fami {(Gith College) and Schlesinger Library (Radcliffe College) near Boston ee cael ocsnctcsot fed peice diene ‘women’s pasts has not been uniform: researchers have enjoyed var source materials, funding, and institutional support for their projects. EARLY FEMINIST HISTORY: THE PROJECT OF HERSTORY. \With few exceptions the primary project of early women’s liberation inside and outside the academy was ‘Herstory’—a term thar acquired connotations. In 1975, Gerda Lerner would be one of the first to crit compensatory tone, ic ‘contribution history’ tral conceptual frameworks for viewing the past m to ‘wae anecessary precursor to the new conceptions of women's history to come: Tn the most obvious sense, herstory was. reclaiming of a masculinist enterprise history was and always had been his story, feminists insisted—written by mal Marty Finds Tr Pus (New Yor. Women’s and Gender History ie. about man, ultimately in the service of man over woman. ‘The operative term associated with herstory, asin new social history, was agency. Objectives of herstory ‘were to relate traditionally male-centred history from the female point of view,and to pri ‘experiences of women so that they finally featured as historical actors. At this stage, historians did noc make too many distinctions between retrieving women ftom male spheres of influence oF from uniquely feminine realms; the prerogative was ro discover them, reveal them, and leaveany evaluation well as everyday women. Feminist libraries, archives, and reading rooms—the Faweett Library in London, the Jesie Street Library in Sydney, and the National Archive of Black Women's History in Washington, among others—eventually housed original documents and newly published scholarship in the burgeoning field. The titles of compiled and edited academic works that appeared in these44 ‘The Oxford History of Historical Writing Bue the retrieval of written texts by or about women proved easier fo than for others, Literate women of the middle and upper classes had long. diaries, journals, and personal correspondence and maintained family keepsakes. Monarchs, professionals, and social reformers revealed the readily, while illiterate and labouring women proved o have lite inclination to save papers. Historians of African-American women that their subjects often dissembled rather than put thoughts and feelings to fans, too, complained thar written sources were: NOE their field: ‘We cannot ditecdy women’s thoughts and sensibilities during three and 2 haf centuries of Brazilian history. Female desices, decisions and complaints can only be guessed at through the bureaucratic language of pections written by men." “The scarcity of sources has been a problem elsewhere in Lavin America, and it 0 give voice to Aftican, “Third World’, and ‘subaltera! wuchored written texts themselves. Historians of Conf ems by women, but found me ten and Ives or red cian-influenced 1 that their autho: i (prose) or writings in essay form, Like women in mos appeared only as nonentities in government docur Historians studying women in non-literate societies have had to rely more: heavily on oral traditions and techniques borrowed from anthropology and: sociology. Nigerian historian Bolanle Awe insists thar though her methods may bo imperfect, she has enlisted mythology. proverbs, praise poems, and folk cles (on to asking new questions of conventional texts. Historians of women ‘under imperial regimes would eventually concede that mn articul in ways they could noe engage—but not yet. Few worried al perspective or the ability to articulate experience until the icicism and the ‘cultural curn’ of the 1980s."" Pioneering feminist historians wrote about both the exceptional and the typical woman, but the fo i and the larer an oddity to into narratives of profession ° See Dalene Clack Hine, ‘Rape and th orah Gray White, 1g (ed). Under Conficion Se: Writing on Gender i Chin oF ie tn tof Coursey Rana Ga Women's and Gender Histry shor and in hee they did not appear. ‘women by pulling them from their contexts—borh gendered and historical—and placing ca xaesaeaigonstie isolated and peculiarized, rather than made them understandable, in relation 1 men and other women. So long ais no one challenged. the mase practice, the tactic of ‘add women and st sustaining history would require an which would combine to make new hi which women appeared collectively as empowered agents rather tons Ud henprocnen would collar tc hic eg the rest: As subjects, they would never be i sciousness-aising first step, is nck ala jan focactlagorone in aey for explaining the patterns of oppression that increasingly came fo view. Ie provided no theoretical accounting for why more women appeared some realms of activity than others, and why those realms continued: to legate women to secondary status. How were gender hierarchies constructed in the first place, and how did they change overtime? [twas not enough to trace ion in the past. Historians like Natalie Zemon Davis and Joan eniewassngrcftbnoomsctin fee re whl ie meng ell species hen sheen ond see pnestompent In search of explanatory historical models, historians began borrowing con- cepts of ‘patriarchy’ from women’s studies and other Sao Rests ig f0 account for women’s collective oppression over time. Some scholars ly where a diferential oF power betwee ses fin teria! blr eee in ont — the workplace, the market, legal systems, and so on. Indeed, if there was a smpared with men’s broader public sphere. Patriarchy seemed to 's pervasive domesticity as more than mere coincidence, % Seon ‘Gender’ 33-4.146 ‘The Oxford History of Historical Writing “The presumption that men and women occupied dichotomous spheres was helpful for organi s experience and explaining their perpetually lower status. But the model was leaving litle room to imagine women as anything but victims of patriarchal forces. Some historians viewed these ‘vic. timologies’ as no more effective tools of liberation than were unproblematized Celebrations of women, and hence changed tack co: evaluate the culture of women's domestic sphere on its own terms. Barbara , and others came to regard icas something wome for heightened stature and autonomy. Their hi structed base of operations from which women en} . Tove, and fulflment—and subversively influenced the public sphere. They sug- gested that the paradigm of separate spheres could explain women's absence in {he historical record (which had privileged the public realm), while aso revealing ‘women as empowered agents. ‘Such projets lent nuance ro the overly bleak or celebratory tone of histories of women, but they did not identify patriarchal forces with much precision, nor did they account for women experiencing them differently across class and éomtext Historians grew ansious to account for change in relations berween men and women and berween themselves, But they also grew tired of fxating solely on biological sexs they wondered how they could accor ‘constructed sex— masculinity and femininity—and its change over time. Patriarchal models were fine as far as they went, but could they shed light on women without particular- ising them, both to their advantage and detriment? ‘The separate-spheres para digm worked well co frame the experiences of well-to-do Western women, ‘asting them as empowered agents of a newly valued realm of influence, bus it {grew apparent that it also prescribed a brand of womanhood inflected by race, ass, sexuality, and ethnicity. Though feminist historians would become some of theories of private and public spheres (many recogni ublian pola As as well as varied issues shaping, among others. Cover- ality, prostitution, immigration, age of non-white, poor, Third World, and ho Women’s and Gender History ie revealed an ideal of separate spheres that empowered some wome ene SF or ls sree ncn ven 52 understood sexual oles in ther societies. On the surface, women of Imperi China, for example, appeared the quinressencal vicdims of eas ideology. Western historians pointed to arranged marriage, patilocalty. son preference fooe binding, concubinage, sex segregation, and any: number of patriarchal practices ro make the cave for their victimization. But was it proper to impose this model of sexual organization on a society that viewed sex roles in diffeeoe term? Indeed the Chinese conceived of ‘inet’ (ne) and ‘outer’ (i) ‘spheres of influence that belonged to women and men respectively, but they were notanlagos to Western notions of he prinate and pubic sns the dari eeween them were more Aud, complementary, ovelappi ioe arguably Belnesion etn cae lat hee eae explanatory and prescriptive models. Various Jewish and indigenous women ive lied ere hich rsrbers dlned aes nlc cal as women assumed responsibilities ‘outside’ the home as breadwinners, house and. agricultural prod economic power. feminists could the commonality of the category of women with scepticism. Increas- ties demanded more sensitivity to the ‘politics of location’. Estelle Freedman expins tha ‘cithereppresion oor liberation loked the sme from the perspective of women in Asis, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle American Women and Agriculture: Sin A Multculwral Render US.claiming to bring ‘ci tions of sexuall P i veil-wearing were hall : 7a jces of her ‘own.7? In fact their patriarchal systems utilized catego Uifference berween women—a sort of divide and conquer technique—to m in the primacy of men overall, : veils engaged in other debates endemic w@ second-vave feminism i ments within the movement wondered if liberal goal of egal desirable when women took no instiutions. Likewise radical and liberal historians debated about whether the histories should make the ease for women’s and difference, as well as sexintegrated or separatist pol ule Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminion and the Faure of Women (New 7e'TellPetdiman, “Separassay ak Feminism, (870-1990 Femi Studies 5 Women's and Gender History 49 questions came to-a head in the United States when 1wo historians of women, Rosenberg and Alice Kessler-Harris, served as expert witnesses in atrial cover discrimination in the workplace. Harris used her knowledge of women's ny to determine that the Sears Corporation had in fact created FY glass ceilings for women managers in the present day. Rosenberg, sted that the history of women's different intentions in the work- pI inco account, for women have not always acted like men nor desired the same concept of professional promotion.*! The tensions chat ensued coure case revealed how seriously historians of women took the business of revisiting the past for feminist ends, Regardless of where one fell on the issue, a politics, there was not a singular politics to espouse GENDER HISTORY AS COMPLEMENT AND CORRECTIVE By the mid-1980s, historians of women felt hamstrung by the theoretical limitae tions of their field. They lacked explanatory models, bue also ways for making istorians working in differene fields find easy t0 Canning recalled this crossroads and the eventual transformation |. A gradual breakdown of the category woman as subject, object, ith political identity had begun to propel the turn to gender: even Developenens”, 49. ings. Methods, and Metnarative’, in ead150 The Oxford History of Historical Writing Women's and Gender History 1st experience. While this modified approach provided a sense of historical time and pbcew onpredony ais} aseemmnda! eon of ceca en Jig women's experience, it still made gender apparent almost exclusively as a manifestation of the material world.”® Psychoanalytic theory, in stark contrast, into the representational and subconscious. Both Anglo-American object- relation to the experiences of men and other women, and that representations had to be analyzed and understood. If there we ushering in the ‘age of gender’ among English-speaking historian Joan Wallach Scott's ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical later included in her Gender and the Politics of History (1988) form, psychoanalytic theory left something to be desired, since penis ‘complex, or any number of masculinist concepts supposed tha its uses. ‘What separated ‘gender’ from ‘woman’ ‘enabling of relational analysis and its appli and. abstractions, regardless of the existence of fications of this relational history wel before she died in bring women out of obscurity. and also redefine chronologies and master narratives chat historians absolute.” Scott agreed, and called for scholars in all historical fields to. an historical category to discourses, i relations berween the sexes, her ‘expand its meaning ro include the symbolic system 0 ‘operated, By the end of the decade, scholars dedicated to gender as subject ‘ool founded the journal Gender and History (1989), figuring thact pages would be endless. wuraged the postmodernist curn to meanings in language, buE before assessing the strengths and limitations of other existing feminist proaches, We've already seen that ii to aid in understanding change in gender ‘Though a helpful poine of deparcure, it largely limited analysis to biological sex. Marxist theory, = had been derived from conditions too circumscribed to be applied broadly to women. How co ing been taught that meaning was transparent and Knowable through unchanging material evidence.®” And yet Scott challenged ‘oppression that women experienced in other fo sm orthodox theory to conclude that economic and. ely autonomous, but interacted to create his Scots Gender an he Pali of His 4s 2 Br pot 8 Tant noc referring othe yar reseich basal method tt ™ Joun Kelly ‘Did Women Have « Renaissance12 The Oxford History of Histrical Writing them to wonder at the extent to which meaning was obtainable at all. Man was fact, nor was woman, Nor only were the human beings who gendered, but so were the institutions through which they operated and the conventions by which they were made known to present-day observers. Increasingly historians were forced to contemplate the extent to which their own genderedness had bearing on the histories ce. Hiscory itself is not exclusively ‘the record of change in the social organization ofthe sexes’ Scott ‘a participane in the production of knowledge about sexual is true, said detractors, then the historian has lost his razon ruck a nerve, particularly among scholars for whom omniscience and were reinforcing claims. Bur, over time, more historians, if not completely engaging postmodern ideas, have become reflective of the culeural biases they bring to their histories. For historians of gender theory has added to their analytic arsenal and allowed them to of meaning in multiple ways—including in the practice of hi have traced masculinise notions about what constitutes the laws, and statesmanship—all the way back to Classical tims shown that in the antebellum United States various forms and commemoration were ance the preserve of women, while Bonnie Smith has revealed how only decades later history's academization became a masculinii process. Well into the twentieth century, professional and amateur history ( historians) acquired identity by becoming associated with concepts discursively as masculine and feminine: scienticity,disinterestedn i individualism, and exceptionalism ivi dailyness,erivilty, and impression ‘we can move beyond the compens altematives 10 the maseulinist con Finally, we ee women collectively as they had been operating under some GENDER: THE FEMINIST PROJECT AND BEYOND. gos gender serviced feminism but also shed light on other categories von. Scholars revisited race and class anew through the lens IWhtng Wore’ Hing. Baym, Americon Women rite and the Work of thr The Gone of ag td Des Jains, Women and he Histor Eris Women's and Gender History 153 homosexuality, queemness, and transsexuality could better reveal its constructed conflation with sexuality over time. Sex and gender are not part and parcel, they came to insist, hough deviant and normalized conceptions of both have shaped cach other before, and especially since, the rise of sexology in the twentieth century. Mauch of the work in the history of sexuality has followed. on the heels of aul’ explication of power and its dissemination through sexual repres- sion.” He and others since have revealed sexuality—as well as male and female se, for phallogocen ram and compulsory hetroseni= ality were, a6 a result challenged as default modes of operation. ‘Woman!—her representations, her sexuality, and her body—had been desta- able ways. It was nor a eoineidence, they noted, that a disproportionate number of scholars interested in such topics were white men who had no perceptible stake in changing the status quo. Others disagreed, insisting tha che very actof laying visible what lurks imperceptibly, historians invite masculinity to be scrutinized and reworked. Constructs of manhood selectively empower, but they alsoWomen's and Gender History 154 The Oxford History of Historical Writing pressure and constrain men who, like women, fall prey to social prescrip ‘which they cannot measure up. Since the mid-t990s, studies on the fo i the present, have In probing the cultural and discursive construction of sexual historians have been able to decentse the masculine subject, to ques appears transparent about masculine inst patriarchy in the past. With the other, they cautioned historians not coin ‘meaning on what they discovered. While new paths of exploration ‘opened by the cultural turn, historians are now in the uncomfortable having to problematize what they thought was transparent abot 1960s, based their brand of herstory on a concept of experience that was emit cally knowable. In 1991 Joan Wallach Scort, roo, challenged the authority of ceategory of ‘experience’, was not lived reality buc a linguistic ld not oceur ourside esta ation believe thatthe efforts they initiated in the 19708 have not concluded; they continue to defend a brand of | wry chat brings real, not symbolic, women out of the shadows to remind they share. And yet while younger historians ience, they increasingly look ro uncover «tle about women themselves. jtable confrontation between scholar- cs and gender history (as opposed to or subaltern, or pr! pasts when they had nor shared Western categories for organizing experi resented in a subject's 0 should be Western discourse at all. Chroniclrs, historians, and agents of the state have made meanings of practices thar could never be those of the widows themselves, The colonial subject will always become constituted im “Amecan Meas History and sh Big Pi, Gonder and ater 1 Harvey and Aleandte Shepard sors Done jane on Five Cennes of Briton Hitoy, cic 300-1950 Journal of Bh “te Evidence of Experience’, Creal dnguiny 7 (191). 778-97Women’s and Gender Histary 37 (Cli: Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on rican Women's History inthe A Multiculeural be practised outside the academy and px ‘Cereainly the analytic category of gender has become a often chan Beard’s preferred historian gender will share ates experience and explaining the mechanisms that shape it and give: KEY HISTORICAL SOURCES a, Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic Histor Woman Az Foree in History A Study in Tr ; : cl nd Stuard, Susan ( ’ Koon ud Stuard, Susan (ed) 5 of the Rise, Prores, and Termination of the American American Quarta 8 BIBLIOGRAPHY and Hunt, Lynn, Telling the Truth about Hiory Women Writers and the Wark of History, :7p0-1860 : 3 Hisry in Practice: Historical Pepectiver on % ara Le Downs, Wrtng Gonder History (London, 2009); John Ton Rese a es species om Boe, Clas, and Gonder Hayy Lu Lee Dns, Cooder ad itor 8 (2008), 458-665 0 ue ‘Sed Scab Ting the Trac abo ry 336.8 The Oxford History of Historical Writing an the Hierical Enterprise n America: Gender, Race Chapter 8 The Historiography of Cars eee me a Lemer, Gerda, Fireweed: A Political Aobiggraphy (Philadelphia, 2002) Environmental History ‘Mann, Susan and ar Yu-Vin (eds), Under Confucian Eyer: Writings on JR MeNeill eth century originated in Europe. Italians launched microhis an anthropological social history. Most influential ed the famous Annales approach, what they sometimes called a total Critiques Wierling, Dorothee, and Historiographi Reconstructing Hi of Everyday Life and Gender Relations: On ips in AI Ludke (ed), The Hisory of Everyday ence and Way of Life Peinecion. 995) 149-8. communities that somehow achieve of environmental 1 US scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, US environmental fi from those developed forthe US context WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY? Like every other subset of history, environmental different people. My preferred definition is * A longer ba sow roe ‘Observation on the Neue Among professional historians most of che influential innovations of the rwenti- Britons United State, This chaper wil carr he evolution of and growth, is flaws and of its most active arenas. has fiom time to time national international. influence than ‘others. That prominence rarely lasts for more than a Few decades. In the sphere ys especially the American West, achieved such rominence. [nthe ealy twenty-first century they appear to have ign of the robust health and maturity ofthe fed: environmental history 1980 has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different cory is different things to ory of the relationship elberavon on these and related themes J. R. MeNell, ‘of Environmental History ior and Ter, 4 (2003),