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Her story is history

BY ELLEN DUBOIS

When the mother of women’s history in the United States, Mary Ritter Beard, assembled the book “America Through Women’s Eyes” in 1933, so little had been written about women’s history that she had to present her bold vision of a woman-centered American history from the colonial era to the Great Depression entirely as a collection of excerpts from original sources and selections from a handful of other historians’ writings. In fact, not until the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s did scholars give extensive attention to women’s history. It was in that decade that feminist theorists began to use an obscure grammatical term — “gender” — to distinguish biological differences between men and women from cultural differences.

Since then, scholarship in the history of women worldwide has been prodigious, and it has come to be widely recognized that the concept of gender and the tools of history go together.

After all, if we are to move past the notion that what it means to be a woman is an unchanging essence, we must observe the varying settings in which people become men and women, and take note of their attendant expectations. Definitions of masculinity and femininity, family structures, what work is considered female and male, understandings of motherhood and of marriage, women’s involvement in public affairs — all these vary tremendously across time, are subject to large forces like economic development and warfare and can themselves shape 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 the concepts of male and female gains greater or lesser weight and acquires different meanings in various historical contexts.

The concept of gender can also help explain how different societies understand what they take to be the fundamental differences in gender, and how these distinctions can legitimate other hierarchical relations of power.

The field of women’s history has particularly struggled to come to terms with the structures of racial inequality. 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.

There are many definitions of “feminism,” a term that arose in the early 1900s but which reaches back to the 19th century. A simple one is the tradition of organized social change by which women challenge gender inequality. Historical research has unearthed diverse campaigns and protests through which women have faced myriad challenges, expressed their discontent with the social roles allotted to them and pursued their ambitions for wider options, more individual freedom and greater social authority.

Feminism and women’s history are mutually informing. Feminism is one of women’s history’s important subjects, and history is one of feminism’s best tools. Knowing what the past has been for women is a necessary resource in pressing for further change.

But feminism is also a method by which women’s historical experiences are examined in terms of their efforts to challenge, struggle, make change and — yes — achieve progress in the options left to them. A women’s history informed by feminism is not a simple exercise of celebration. It’s an evolving effort — a continuing critical examination of what we look at and how we do it.

DuBois is professor of history and co-author of a new book, “Through Women’s Eyes: An American History With Documents.”