American women's history

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1. History" as in : "the past"

What was it like to be an American woman in colonial times, or in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries? How did the various positions, roles, representations and struggles of women evolve through time ?

The overarching theme will be the exploration of women as "a force in history", women as active agents of historical change rather than passive victims : particular attention to the fights that had to be fought so that more and more women might reach a more equal position (to that of men) in society. Central question : what makes social movements and social change possible?

one major objective of this course is to highlight the diversity of American women's experiences.

2. History" as in : "the narrative of the past"

The History is subject to constant revision and reinterpretation. Each generation looks at the past through its own eyes.

History itself has a history, and the study of how history is written differently in different times and by different historians is called historiography.

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So, how were women's experiences in the past accounted for in history books?

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1. FROM HIS STORY TO HER STORY TO THEIR STORY

1. Hidden from History” (Sheila Rowbotham, 1973)

In her now classic essay, A Room of One's Own (1929) , Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a twentieth-century English authors, explains how she went to the British Museum to do research on women and fiction, and was discouraged by the dearth of information there about the history of women in the past centuries. Indeed, until very recently women were just not seen as subjects worthy of historical inquiry.

Traditional history focused primarily on “great” men (presidents, politicians explorers...), and on “great” events (conquests, wars, battles...).

women were not considered agents of historical change, and their past was largely left unrecorded.

biographies of famous women, privileged ladies or queens, had been written and published, but those women were hardly representative of the majority of their female counterparts, history was primarily an account of his story .

Traditional history tended to be an optimistic history of social and political progress.

Also, traditional history tended to conceal conflicts and struggle for power in society : thus, one would read that "American women were given the right to vote in 1920", as if it had been bestowed by a benevolent entity instead of being the hard-fought victory after decades of struggle in which more and more American women had taken part. American women were not "given" the vote : they fought hard for it.

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2. Becoming Visible” (Renate Bridenthal and al., 1977)

Various factors came together in the 1960s and 1970s which fuelled the growth of women's history.

the 1960s were years of dissatisfaction, hope and struggle that brought about many important changes in popular culture and society.

In the United States, various waves of social protest had been set in motion by the Civil Rights movement for Black rights in the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, what is usually called the second wave of feminism was beginning to emerge. (the first wave, which developed in the second half of the nineteenth century and culminated in 1920 )

Women activists demanded full equality in all aspects of life, present and past. Reclaiming women's past was considered by many a primary tool of emancipation : isn't knowledge power ? The androcentrism of history -viewing man as the universal historical subject- was exposed and denounced.

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women's history emerged as an academic discipline in the early 1970s. From then on, it grew dramatically , fuelled as it was by the demand of increasingly numerous female students and female academics on American university campuses.

3. “Gender and the Politics of History” (Joan Scott, 1988)

Then, women's history evolved very quickly.

Historians explored the various aspects of ordinary women's lives in the past and soon realized that “adding” women to the picture was in fact leading to a reassessment of history in general : rethinking and rewriting the whole story. The framework, which had been male-centered, often turned out to be inadequate :

For example, the traditional labelling of the 1820s in the United States as the “age of democracy”, because white American men were enfranchised, was of course meaningless for women, who did not get the vote until a century later . [It was of course just as meaningless for most free black men, all slaves and Indians (who were considered "other nations", at the time).]

By the 1980s, the concept of gender was considered as a major tool of historical investigation. Gender was originally a term used in grammatical analysis to classify words into different categories : masculine, feminine.

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The word sex refers to the biological differences and attributes of women and men, which are presumed to be innate and unchanging, the word gender refers to the social constructions assigned to a sexed body, that is : the "feminine" and "masculine" characteristics.

Those constructions are consequently subject to change over time and space.