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Br'er Rusticus

Br'er Rusticus got it in his head yesterday to attack the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women and some of the female bloggers who were there:

It is difficult to think of anything more depressing than a conference of female historians or more irrelevant to the future of the discipline of history. None of these figures has ever appeared on any work of early modern history that I have ever read or is likely to figure on any reading list I see. Historians are and should be concerned with the past of humanity, with men and women, old and young alike: being female is not a prerequisite for such studies and women's history like the histories of gender, sexuality and the family is a transient, ephemeral phenomenon.

Br'er Rusticus subsequently deleted his (one would assume) post. Smart move.

Update: Well, now bro has put up a revised version of the original. It includes this elaboration:

The sad truth is that universities across the advanced countries of the world have succumbed after c.1970 to pressures from the so-called women's movements to include in their syllabuses courses on women's history for which there was and is little justification. Intellectual fashions and fear of contemporary interest groups have led to the traditional focus of the subject being fundamentally altered to appease these interests. It is no surprise that it has been followed by demands for the composition of the profession to be altered too. Both developments have, in my view, done a disservice to the discipline. But intellectual fashions change as those attending this conference appear to have divined. That is a good thing. I hope to see the tide of women's history, gender history and the history of sexuality recede until it is a tiny creek flowing into the broad river of history. Then we shall have them in proper proportion.

Further Update: Rusti plays hide-and-seek with us by taking the revised post down again. It's an example of the cowardly use of pseudonymity. Meanwhile, Claire Potter, "As Catharine McKinnon Would Say, ‘Are Women Human?'" Tenured Radical, 17 June, replies for those he attacked. Historiann to Rusticus: "K*ss m* *ss." See also: Anne M. Boylan, "The Fourteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women," HNN, 17 June.

Posted on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 12:25 AM | Comments (5) | Return

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