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Alice Kessler-Harris: Worries that gender studies are eclipsing women's history

[Alice Kessler-Harris is a professor of history at Columbia University and also a professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is, most recently, the author of Gendering Labor History, published by the University of Illinois Press (2007), and is working on a biographical study of the playwright Lillian Hellman, to be published by Bloomsbury Press.]

From the perspective of the profession, the study of gender offers a different set of temptations. It immediately removes the taint of bias, the political association with feminism, from those who explore its history. Unlike historians of women, historians of gender comfortably shelter within a widely accepted analytic focus. For young women, who sometimes fear that doing "women's history" will disadvantage them in the job market or when they come up for tenure, clothing themselves in the garb of gender provides welcome cover. For others, the possibility of marketing themselves more broadly is sufficient incentive to abandon women's history; yet others hope to find a broader audience for their first books by seeming to address more-pertinent or more-relevant issues. The idea of "gender" frees young scholars (male and female) to seek out the ways that historical change is related to the shape and deployment of male/female relations, and to search for gender implications in and around such topics as foreign policy, presidential history, and the economics of taxation.

And yet I am left to wonder what we have lost as we turn our attention to gender, for even as I embrace gender fully, I do not wish to abandon the history of women. I share the suspicion of many of my colleagues that gender obscures as much as it reveals: that in seeing the experiences of men and women as relational, we overlook the particular ways in which women — immigrants, African-Americans, Asians, Chicanas — engaged their worlds. That is particularly true in areas where the history of women is still being excavated. A glance at the two-volume compendium of Black Women in America, edited by Hine makes the point. Here the range of black women, their concentration in certain areas, and the force of their accomplishments offer powerful testimony to how our ignorance of their existence has skewed our efforts to comprehend the way in which black communities lived and thrived.

Above all, lacking a women's history, we lose the power of the individual to shed a different light — sometimes a liminal light — on historical processes. I decided to explore where that would take me in turning to a biographical study of the American playwright Lillian Hellman for my next book. Hellman was an enormously controversial figure in her day, and never more so than when she accused the liberals of the 1950s of betraying the victims of McCarthyism by not speaking up for them. The virulent attacks on her at the end of her life reflected the suspicions of a generation of intellectuals about the meaning of communism for American freedom; the attacks also illuminated the tensions of a world that was, by the 1970s, struggling to make sense of a woman who loudly and insistently claimed access to moral truth. Attention to Hellman, as a woman, reveals something about the tensions within the American left, with its anticommunist wing, that would otherwise remain obscured.

Insofar as the concept of gender masks a continuing hostility to the notion that women were actors in history, a resistance to the idea that women's activities, interests, and ideas constituted a significant portion of the motivation for organizing societies, waging wars, constructing particular kinds of economic systems, abandoning women's history would simply feed the hostility. If gender history succumbs to the temptation to see the world through the eyes of men eager to defend their own honor or establish their manhood by reserving to themselves the skilled jobs that enabled them to provide for their families, it loses the impetus to see women as agents in their own right. Unless gender history challenges the normative view of the world through the eyes of men, unless it continues to build on a growing knowledge of how women thought and acted, it could kill the goose that laid the golden egg....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)