by Ellen Carol DuBois (UCLA)

Modern women’s history in the United States is just about three decades old. This is long enough for major changes and what I would regard as near full disciplinary normalization. But it is an amazingly short time for the growth in the field and the magnitude of its impact on American history.

I was part of a small cohort which wrote doctoral theses on of the history of women in the U.S the 1970s. We had some antecedents in the 1920s and 1930s, in the immediate aftermath of what is called the "first wave of feminism,": studies on the female labor force, for instance, or on the achievement of woman suffrage. But women’s history had been largely ignored in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Thus most of us had no teachers in our own departments to guide and oversee us, which may well have been a very good thing. In the entire country, there were two established working scholars who inspired and encouraged us: Gerda Lerner, who wrote initially about white working women; and Anne Scott, who wrote initially about southern white women. Initially, we were very much outside the disciplinary mainstream, drawing energy from the feminist revival in the larger society rather than following careerist aspirations and rewards. From the comfortable armchair of nostalgia, I look back with affection to those times.

Taken as a whole, our researches focused on a reevaluation of women in the (long) nineteenth century. The centerpiece of this first phase of modern US women’s history was the nineteenth century ideology of femininity referred to as "the cult of true womanhood." First we described the ideology, ferreting out its elements from a wide range of cultural products; then we deconstructed it, tracing its multiple and contradictory uses, especially by women to justify and explain their demand for a larger role in civic life and greater power vis a vis men. Contrary to the then dominant version of nineteenth century U.S. history, in which women were almost entirely invisible, this first wave of women’s history research established the tremendous range and impact of women’s public activities from 1830 to 1917, activities which came together in what might aptly be named "the American woman’s era."

Perhaps the most profound impact of the first round of women’s history scholarship has been on the historical understanding of the pre World War I, or Progressive era. Before women’s history, historians’ attitude to the upsurge in government activism and reform energies in these years was fundamentally skeptical, regarding "reform" as a cover for state sponsored "social control." This has changed dramatically with the impact of women’s history. Feminist historical research has shown that figures such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley took a major role in reconstituting American liberalism from a defensive attitude toward government power to a positive understanding of the role of government in establishing basic social and civic standards. In other words, it now seems the basic elements of the American social welfare system were established first in the Progressive Era (later nationalized by the Roosevelt New Deal) and that women were fundamental to the achievement.

My own scholarly focus in this period was on the history of the US woman suffrage movement. In the pre-history of women’s history, up to and through the 1930s, woman suffrage was the centerpiece of all efforts to insert women into the flow of history. Most of what was written, however, was not so much history as participant autobiography. The first important professional history of the woman suffrage movement was written, in the unreceptive 1950s, by the underrated pioneer of women’s history, Eleanor Flexner. Nonetheless, when women’s history revived in the 1970s I was almost alone in my interest in the subject. In the context of American society then, two factors coincided to weaken historians’ interest in suffragism: the sense that there was nothing new to learn about this movement; and American’s general alienation from active political life. Feminists of the 1970s and 1980s made great strides in expanding the definition of the political to include all sorts of power relations in daily life, but they largely ignored the classic stuff of formal, electoral politics.

I worked to recast the issue of woman suffrage as an opening up into (rather than a closing down of) feminist consciousness and female historical agency. I also sought to show the hidden history of the movement, the conflicts about the meaning of and best strategy for winning the vote. As my Dutch colleague Mineke Bosch observed, in the U.S., in Britain and perhaps elsewhere, women’s suffrage movements were not only the first breeding ground for feminism; they were in some ways the most important popular campaigns ever waged for political democracy. Thus the disinterest among U.S. women’s historians on the woman suffrage movement is all the more remarkable. Woman suffrage scholarship in the U.S. did finally begin to grow in the 1990s during the Clinton years, when both the political prominence of particular women and general American political engagement grew much stronger. Women’s historians are now investigating not only the unexplored aspects of the movement to win the vote, but the subsequent political history of women, the complex process by which American women slowly began to make consistent and collective use of this power.

Before leaving this brief overview of the first impact of feminist scholarship on U.S. women’s history, I want to speak briefly about "theory." Feminist historical scholarship in the 70s and 80s has gotten a bad rap from younger scholars for what is considered its theoretical impoverishment. Modern feminist scholarship frequently enhances its own intellectual stature by contrasting itself with the supposedly naive empiricism of older research. I have recently had conversations with your own Berteke Waaldijk about the problem of current women’s studies students tending to consider women’s history as a separate discipline with little to contribute in their work on feminist theory. I want to challenge the assertion that the pioneering generation of women’s history was theoretically undeveloped.

The fundamental goal of our work was theoretical: exploration of the social construction of femininity. If sometimes we misunderstood rhetorical tropes for empirical descriptions, if sometimes we were tempted to a degree of essentialism, nonetheless the basic point was our assertion that what was called "true womanhood" was a cultural framework for organizing fundamental relations of social power. American women’s history in the 1970s drew attention to the centrality of the gender binary in the nineteenth century, within which masculine and feminine were mutually exclusive yet all encompassing terms constituting the entirety of human possibility. Current understandings of the way that systems of class and race social inequality draw meaning from their links to the gender system rest fundamentally on the work of this generation of women’s historians.

So what has changed in the practice of women’s history in the subsequent three decades? Have women’s historians just continued down these same roads, or have they pursued new paths? I want to examine two (three) fundamental developments in the practice of U.S. women’s history in the last decade and a half.

First, the current generation of practitioners is far more likely to call themselves historians of gender than of women. The manifesto for this shift is of course Joan Scott’s 1988 article "Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis." Because historians, at least in the U.S., are so notoriously shy of theoretical formulations, Scott’s theoretically explicit article has had tremendous influence. Scott anchored her argument in both Freud and Foucault, which gave it an intellectual stature that previous work in women’s history lacked. My own judgment is that her call for standing back from women’s history so as to focus on the process by which gender categories have been constructed understates the work that many others have done on this problem. Nonetheless her clear statement of the need to subject the concepts of "womanhood" and "manhood" to historical investigation, and to link them, has been – useful – in making the positioning of womanhood within a gender binary explicit and putting this problematic in the forefront.

The gender historical perspective especially differs from its women’s history predecessor by regularly situating women vis a vis men. Indeed, so successfully have gender historical perspectives been at drawing scholars into the study of men and masculinity, that such work sometimes threatens to drown out historical attention to women altogether. "Crises in masculinity" are now being uncovered everywhere in American history. I want to be clear: it is good that men – both as subjects and as practitioners – are joining women in this enterprise. But I am concerned that in the U.S. scholarship on men and masculinity now appears to have more cache than scholarship on women.

When women’s activism is studied from a gender historical perspective, the emphasis is primarily on how categories of male and female are employed and manipulated so as to provide political leverage, rather than on the political activism itself. [[ An early and important example of this approach is Gail Biderman’s work on the ways that Ida B. Wells used late 19^th century conventions of masculinity to launch a black women’s campaign against the lynching of black men. ]] I like such work very much but I do think that in some ways gender historians have narrowed rather than widened the field of what is considered a politically compelling subject. As an historian of feminism I am particularly concerned that those historical figures whose project to gain greater power for "women," but who did not – to use the contemporary terminology – "problematize" the category of their sex, appear increasingly quaint through such a lens.

I also think that the gender perspective has been important and successful in integrating concerns of women’s history into the larger picture of U.S. history. In a recent advanced survey of general U.S. scholarship on the nineteenth century, I found myself featuring a great deal of gender history. Such work successfully breaches the wall confining women to a ghetto apart from and integrates them into the mainstream of U.S. history. Even so, I must report that my female students were quicker than their male counterparts to appreciate this achievement. The resistance of male historians to the recognition of gender as a useful historical category never ceases to amaze.

The second development that distinguishes the recent generation of historians of women is their increasingly successful racial diversification of the field, to the point that feminist scholars can really begin to speak of a truly multiracial, multivocal history of American women. Nothing could be more crucial, not only to the academic discipline of women’s history, but also to the feminist political movement to which it is always connected.

Again, I need to be clear. The American women’s history revival of the 1970s, growing as it did out of the final stages of the civil rights movement, was aware of and attentive to racial differences of power, to the history of black oppression in this country, and to the necessity of researching the history of African American women. Again, younger scholars have a tendency to exaggerate the difference between their racial awareness and the previous generation’s racial blindness, but even the most casual examination of the foundational texts will challenge this. The consciousness of the importance of incorporating racial diversity in 1970s women’s history was all the more striking because it was in complete contrast with the traditional perspective of the American feminist movement. During the high point of women’s activism in the 1910s, attention to class differences among women was very high, indeed central to that movement’s political goals. But the racial situation was the opposite: the feminism of the 1910s coincided with one of the low periods in the history of American racial relations. The racial record of the last generation of suffragists was abysmal. Women’s historians of the 1970s had to reach far back, to the abolitionist feminism of the 1840s, for their inspiration.

Nonetheless, in the 1970s, the women’s historians who were doing their best to incorporate women of color into their scholarship, were almost all white women and both their energies for and insights into this project were limited. The racial integration of scholarship in women’s history had to await the emergence of a professionally trained corps of female scholars of color, for whom the diversification of U.S. women’s history was not just desirable, but a top priority. In my own judgment, this process began with the publication, in 1984, of Where and When I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, by Paula Giddings. Interestingly, Giddings did not then hold a professional degree, but wrote – [[like Eleanor Flexner in the 1950s]] – from outside the academy. Nonetheless her work broke many new barriers. She identified a long tradition of feminist writing and activism among African American women, reaching back at least to the 1890s. She established the centrality of the issue of lynching to its emergence. She investigated the history of discrimination by white feminists of black feminists. She moved past heroic individuals to consider the larger social forces shaping the lives and consciousness of African American women. Perhaps most important, the end of slavery was the starting point of her history, not the end. Giddings’ book was followed by the work of other, more professionally trained African American women historians[[, such as Darlene Clark Hine, Deborah White and Brenda Stevenson]].

So far I have been speaking exclusively about African American women’s history. But US historians now recognize that racial awareness also must involve Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. This important shift reflects both the revival of mass immigration after 1965 and the growing importance in American self-understandings of California and the southwest, with their own multiracial histories. While the scholarly traditions in black history reach back over a hundred years, these other fields are much, much newer and so in some ways the challenges are even greater. The first books in Mexican American (Ruiz), Japanese American (Matsumoto), and Chinese American (Yung) women’s history have only appeared in the 1990s.

The shift towards multiracial scholarship in women’s history is of great importance for bringing a broader range of women on to the historians’ screen. Historians increasingly understand that it will not do to make simple generalizations about "women" on the grounds of scholarship limited only to white women; or even to use research on women of color merely to modify generalizations made about white women. Women of color need to be at the very center of the claims we make about women’s history.

This scholarship is also important from an analytic as well as a documentary perspective, because it has contributed greatly to new understandings of the wellsprings of racism itself. Increasingly we understand that the construction of invidious racial distinctions rests on the sexual and reproductive policing of women, on the establishment of boundaries surrounding whom they have sex and children with. Increasingly, in the literature on racism in the U.S., race and gender, racism and sexuality, are being brought into a single field of scholarly inquiry, with rich analytic results. As I indicated before, I regard this development as one of enormous importance for the future of feminism. Feminists have been speaking of the oppression and liberation of women for hundreds of years but their actual purview was usually limited to those of their own social stratum. I believe that, in the United States for the first time, feminists have come to understand that a truly comprehensive feminist politics must be heterogeneous, capable of tolerating different as well as similar experiences and perspectives. Feminism is now being "spoken" and claimed by a wider range of women, especially with respect to race and ethnicity, than ever before.

That said, I want to end this section with a final caveat, lest the interest that historians of gender have taken in race crowds out their attention to the structure and workings of gender. In the 1910s, progressive era feminism concentrated its policy concerns on the needs of working women and made great breakthroughs in recruiting wage earning women and aiding in the development of female leadership from that class. However, so heightened was their attention to the differences of class, that for some the commonalities of gender began to fall away. The younger and more advanced sector of early twentieth century feminists came to regard special pleading for women as women to be unnecessary, indeed backward, as class became their priority. I worry about a similar development in our own time with respect to race. The attention to racial difference among women’s historians takes place against an appreciation for gender commonality that needs to be emphasized. We should beware of taking for granted the entire context of women’s history which makes the multiracial scholarship of the last decade possible. A similar and related danger is that so much attention is being paid to bringing out and criticizing the racist ideologies and actions within the history of white women – although this of course is very important to getting past those traditions – that we will paint a picture in which the only feminist legacy is racism, and students will learn the (distorted) lesson that feminism is virtually inherently racist. Starting with great figures like Sarah and Angelina Grimke in the 1840s, there is a steady (if at times thin) stream of anti-racist awareness and activism within the US feminist tradition, awareness of which can be empowering and salutory.

I want to end with one final dimension of contemporary women’s historical practice, less developed than gender and race but very promising for the future: the internationalization of American women’s history. In women’s studies (vs women’s history), transnationalism and its close cousin postcoloniaism is the new, new thing. This is appropriate because the field of women’s studies is itself so transnational, so fueled by the exchanges of people and experiences and ideas, so built on the inspiration of women’s lives in countries different than our own. Indeed, we now know that previous feminist were also built on communication across national boundaries. In the mid nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century, ideas, individuals, ideologies circulated widely within and across continents. Confined within our own societies, women tend to experience the acceptably female as unchanging, limited and rigid; thus knowledge of other societies, with different standards and systems, even if no more flexible than our own, can come as a revelation.

On the other hand, U.S. history, including U.S. women’s history, is beset by long traditions of isolation and exceptionalism. Americans, including American historians, too often see their country developing according to its own internal logic, shaped by forces which they regard (incorrectly) as uniquely American, notably the frontier, slavery. This long-standing tradition has only been exacerbated by the relatively new phenomenon of the U.S.’s unchecked global power. An approach which sees the U.S. as part of a world system, as acted upon from outside its national boundaries, and not just acting upon the rest of the world, does not come naturally to Americans. Due to a deliberate effort on the part of the U.S. organization of American historians, this is beginning to change. International conferences and special journal issues have presented scholarship resituating some of the classic issues of U.S. history – Atlantic slavery, the nature of the frontier, the impact of immigration – in a transnational context.

Oddly I think U.S. women’s history is a bit behind in this internationalization of American studies. There are a handful of women’s history subjects that have been resituated in a more global perspective: the role of women in the emergence of modern systems of social welfare and labor legislation; and the subject on which I am working, the global dimensions of the campaign for women’s rights. But U.S. women’s history overall has stayed too confined to national boundaries. Usually, the American impulse to national exceptionalism is explained by reference to the prominence of the question/assertion: "why has the U.S. been uniquely resistant to socialism?" It occurs to me that as scholars of American women, we must challenge a companion assertion: "why has feminism flourished uniquely in the United States?" Because feminism has not of course flourished uniquely in the United States and that is why the resituating of U.S. women’s history in a global perspective is so important. As an American feminist venturing out into the larger world, I am more and more aware that for the time being, the flourishing of feminism is centered here in the new transnational Europe, very much in Asia, and in its heroic first stages in the Middle East and Africa. To an important degree, the future of the history of the women of the U.S. lies outside of our national boundaries.

Thus the importance of the crucial work of people like you: scholars of the U.S. working from outside the boundaries of the country, teaching students and addressing audiences which are not American, in changing the questions and perspectives of U.S. history, in pointing the way to the future.