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Date:         Sat, 5 Oct 2002 11:27:15 -0400
Reply-To:     "History of Feminist Movements in the U.S."
              
Sender:       "History of Feminist Movements in the U.S."
              
From:         Jane Gerhard 
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Given the threads have quieted down of late, I thought I might
introduce a new subject. I often puzzle over the implied and explicit
connections between women's history and feminism.  We all know the
literal connections between waves of feminism, increases of women
entering professions, and more historical work on women being
produced. But I'm thinking more along the lines of feminism as a
politically engaged project about expanding women's opportunities and
its place in a field called women's history.

I wrestle with some of the foundational assumptions of feminism when
I teach women's history-- for example, the story of the uncoupling of
sex from reproduction, the movement of more women into paid work,
women taking on more public and publicly political roles. These are
some of US feminism's primary  objectives. These can be cast as part
of a history of feminism. but they also act as paradigms for the
telling of US women's history. I wonder about that slippage. To put
it another way, are we always writing feminist histories of women?

Jane Gerhard

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Date:         Mon, 7 Oct 2002 09:54:27 -0400
Reply-To:     "History of Feminist Movements in the U.S."
              
Sender:       "History of Feminist Movements in the U.S."
              
From:         John McClymer 
Subject:      feminism and women's history

Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 12:30:27 -0700
To: FEMINISMFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
From: jmcclyme@eve.assumption.edu (John McClymer)
Subject: feminism and women's history

        I am writing to applaud Jane Gerhard's post on this topic. The
issues she raises were brought home to me in an especially acute
way
recently. I am co-directing an NEH education project on American
History
and Culture and the Web which focuses upon the 1770s, the 1850s,
and the
1920s. Its unifying question is the famous "Who Is This American?" +
How Do
Various Groups and Categories of People, Previously Excluded from
the
Category "American," Manage to Get Themselves Included, If At All? I
apologize for the clumsiness of the second question but I am
confident
everyone reading and contributing to this forum will understand what
we are
getting at.
        In working on the 1920s, in the context of a project which also
looks at the 1850s and which hopes to include the 1960s in a
subsequent
iteration, I was struck by how the histories of women and of woman's
rights
(as the phrase then was) converge in the 1850s to a truly remarkable
extent
but do NOT, to anything like the same degree, in the 1920s. The
twenties
were a tumultuous time, including in women's history. But the
relationships
between the changes that charged the debate over the flapper and,
later,
the modern young woman, so-called, and feminism are highly
complicated.
Many women of the 1920s saw themselves as seeking, and
achieving, new sorts
of freedoms, especially behavioral, that bore little resemblance to the
agendas advanced by women's rights activists. Further, these women
often
showed little interest in women's rights organizations. Yet many
contemporaries saw the flapper as a product of the women's suffrage
campaign, at least in part.
        Given all of this, I hope we spend some time discussing
Gerhard's post.

John McClymer
Assumption College

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Date:         Fri, 11 Oct 2002 20:21:31 -0700
Reply-To:     "History of Feminist Movements in the U.S."
              
Sender:       "History of Feminist Movements in the U.S."
              
From:         Estelle Freedman 
Subject:      Re: feminism and women's history
In-Reply-To:  
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Dear Forum,

        Before we official move from active to archives, I wanted to thank all who
participated, especially those who offered their thoughts in writing for
the group.

        We leave a thread hanging: what is the relationship of feminism to women's
history? When does our treatment of women's history focus on feminism
(e.g., the convergence in the 1850s that John McClymer mentions) and when
does it diverge (I would question the 1920s on this point - see Nancy
Cott's GROUNDING OF MODERN FEMINISM and my discussion of the "seedbed" era
in NO TURNING BACK)? By telling the history of women's movement into the
public sphere, are we telling only the "feminist" version of women's
history, as Jane Gerhard suggests?

        These are challenging questions, worth pondering. It strikes me that
perhaps only in U.S. history can we slip so easily into this convergence,
since our national history and the history of feminism coincide so
closely.  Clearly, there are many centuries of women's history before
feminism, whether in the Americas or in Asia, Africa, and
Europe.  Historians who study the complexities of gender and gender
relations in these "pre-feminist" periods have shown that (in contrast to
the rhetoric of the Declaration of Sentiments), we cannot generalize about
this long past as an era of male tyranny over women!  And for both pre- and
feminist eras, public sphere activity is not the only focus of women's
history, nor the only valuable activity to be studied historically (as the
social historians who pioneered the history of "private" life
illustrated).   We can, of course, ask feminist questions of the past, and
of the relation of public and private.  But a theme that runs through our
forum, I think, is that we have to be careful about judging the past in
terms of contemporary politics.  But asking of the past "how have we come
to debate these feminist politics in our time?" can keep us all very busy
as teachers and scholars.

        Again, my thanks for taking the time to think about teaching the history
of feminism. A reminder that I have placed historical documents and
contemporary web links on the Feminist Resources pages at:
http://noturningback.stanford.edu.  You can send ideas for other links and
documents on the page.

        Have a great academic year.


Sincerely,

Estelle

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