March was National Women’s History Month, and so it is appropriate at this time to consider how scholarly appreciation of history as observed through women’s eyes has grown. It was not until the 1970s and the resurgence of feminism that scholars gave extensive attention to women’s history. In that decade, history — as well as other disciplines such as literature and sociology — underwent significant change as the passionate desire of feminist scholars to analyze as well as protest women’s unequal status fueled an extraordinary surge in research exploring women’s experiences. Feminist theorists began to use an obscure grammatical term, “gender,” to distinguish “sex,” meaning biological differences between men and women, from cultural differences situated in and changing through history.
The concept of gender and the tools of history go together. If we are to move past the notion that what it means to be a woman is an unchanging essence, we must look to the varying settings in which people become men and women, with all their attendant expectations. Definitions of masculinity and femininity, family structures, what work is considered female and male, understandings of motherhood and of marriage, and women’s involvement in public affairs, all vary tremendously across time, are subject to large forces like economic development and warfare, and can themselves shape the direction of history. Even the degree to which men and women participate in and experience social reality differently can itself vary over time, as the distinction between male and female gains greater or lesser weight and different meanings in various historical contexts.
The field of U.S. women’s history has particularly struggled to come to terms with the structures of racial inequality so central to the American national experience. Modern scholars have learned to think about race and gender in similar ways, no longer treating either as unchanging biological essences around which history formed, but as historically specific cultural constructions that, while long-standing, changed meaning and content over time. Building on nearly a century-long scholarly tradition in African-American history, black women scholars explored the interactions between systems of racial and gender inequality. Other scholars of color made it clear that their histories could not be understood within the prevailing black and white model of racial interaction. The necessity for a multivocal and multicultural narrative of U.S. women’s history that acknowledged women’s diversity in terms of race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation has been advanced on many fronts, and includes explorations of Native American, Mexican, Asian, black, as well as Anglo women.
Despite all these achievements, teachers and writers of women’s history continue to confront the response that women’s history is nothing more than a supplement to “real” history. The challenge of fully integrating women’s history into the national narrative involves insisting that family life was as important as military strategy, that women’s-rights movements belonged up there with abolitionism and trade unions. To bring women’s history and the traditional narrative of American development into a single field means recognizing and reconciling the different emphases and concerns of the two accounts. As U.S. women’s history has been written, it has developed its own historical pacing and chronology, its own must-tell incidents and not-to-be-missed heroic figures. How to present these historical discoveries in all their richness and depth while at the same time giving a comprehensive and balanced account of our national experience: This is the big challenge.
As one example, consider the period from 1965 to the present. In most U.S.-history texts, the chapter on the ’60s reliably includes a section on the women’s-liberation movement. Indeed, this is one of the two or three places in the standard U.S.-history narrative where the reader can count on finding some concentrated discussion of women’s historical experiences. But in the women’s-history account, the rise of the second wave of feminism plays a far larger role, initiating a rapid and epochal shift in the social and personal meanings of femaleness, the character of gender relations and the range of women’s public possibilities. To give the feminist second wave and its aftermath full historic weight, yet to avoid the temptation to see all subsequent women’s history only as a reaction to or an elaboration of this historic watershed, is a formidable task.
In writing about the last third of the 20th century through the eyes of women, there is a strong tendency to write triumphantly. Paying attention to the differences and tensions — race and ethnicity, class, sexual preference — within the feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s helps to counter this inclination, as does exploration of later feminist writings of the 1980s and ’90s.
Finally, the changes and gains in women’s lives must be situated within larger economic shifts such as deregulation, deindustrialization and globalization, emphasizing the emergence of a distinctive “post-feminist” class gap between those working women with professional or corporate positions and those working women, increasingly immigrant, who take up the domestic and familial obligations of wealthier women.
When U.S. women’s history first emerged as a new, exciting field, scholars debated at what point it would no longer be necessary to study women separately from men. Now that the field has developed, we see that the more we learn, the more there is to learn, and that women’s history is not a finite field of scholarly possibilities that will one day be exhausted. But it is also true that as the discoveries of women’s history multiply, scholars should attend to the details of integrating our findings within the larger tale of U.S. history. Since women were always there, women’s history can be integrated into all historical subjects, from industrialization to globalization, from manifest destiny to the Cold War. As a scholar in this field, it has been a truly illuminating experience to revision U.S. history through women’s eyes.
