Histories of the progress of democracy, of the expanding participation of individuals and groups in social and political life, often assume a kind of mechanical model for change. The emphasis is placed on gaining access to resources, spaces, institutions. Access has a physical connotation—approaching, entering, using. The idea of access is represented metaphorically as passages through doors and gates, over obstacles, barriers, and blockages. Accessibility is most often measured quantitatively—the number of individuals or members of groups who gain entry. While this kind of discussion has been useful and important for detecting discrimination or democratization, it has also drawn attention away from certain qualitative issues. How are those who cross the thresholds received? If they belong to a group different from the one already “inside,” what are the terms of their incorporation? How do the new arrivals understand their relationship to the place they have entered? What are the terms of identity they establish?
These questions assume that entry alone does not solve all the problems of discrimination, that organizations and institutions are hierarchically differentiated systems, that physical access is not the end of the story. The questions are relevant generally for the study of social organization, but they have been posed most forcefully by those interested in gender and race. That ought not to be surprising, since our culture has embodied difference in generative organs and skin color. The experience of the bearers of these marks of difference poses a challenge to physical models of access, for it belies the conclusion that all that matters is getting in the door.
The question of difference is often posed sociologically, but it is also conceptual or cultural. The social practices of the members of a craft or profession are intimately related to the ways they interpret the meaning of their work. The knowledge said to be vested in a profession, such as medicine or history, also helps to inform its structure, organization, and membership. In history, for example, the notion of an archetypical actor, a universal human agent, was usually embodied in a (white) male. Although it was assumed that Universal Man stood for all humankind, in fact this representation created hierarchies and exclusions. Women, blacks, and various others were either invisible as historical subjects or somehow depicted as less central, less important than white men. Until recently, most history written exemplified the centrality of white men and the marginalization of most others. As in written history, so in the organization of the historical profession, white men predominated; women, blacks, and others occupied a clearly secondary place. Since the 1960s, there have been changes both in written history and in the historical profession and these are related. Both developments involve what might be called the fall or, better, the particularization of Universal Man. It has become less possible to subsume historical subjects under a single category of Man, and simultaneously women, blacks, and others have become visible and increasingly important both as subjects of history and as professional historians.
It is through an examination of the articulation of difference, of the hierarchical and unequal relationships among different groups, that the interdependencies of knowledge and organizational behavior are most evident. We can better understand the full meaning of occupational identities when we see not only who is included in them but how differences among practitioners are dealt with, which differences matter, how they are understood, and whether and how they change over time. Difference then provides insight into what might be called the culture of a profession, or the politics of a discipline.
My focus in this essay is on a particular kind of difference—gender or sexual difference. I examine the women historians who, by virtue of holding the Ph.D. in history, an academic position, and membership in the American Historical Association, were recognized as members of the profession of history. Having accepted the discipline in its double sense—as a system of training and a system of rules—they qualified from the beginning as professionals. Their inclusion in an elite body of professionals, however, was not without complications. For while they assumed that access ought to give them full entitlement to professional identity, they regularly encountered reminders of their difference. Their perceptions of and reactions to different treatment varied over time and in accordance with many factors, not the least of which were their understandings of history (their conception of the knowledge they professed) and their definition of who was included as a historical subject. The experience of women historians as they grappled with the problem of difference points up the powerful obstacle to equality posed by concepts of history that posit a unitary process experienced by a representative Universal Man.
[ I ]
When the American Historical Association (AHA) was founded in 1884 women were explicitly included as members. The Executive Council resolved that “there is nothing in the Constitution…to prevent the admission of women into the Association upon the same qualifications as those required of men.”1 In the effort to organize the discipline, women were acceptable especially if they had some university training and self-consciously practiced the scientific method considered so crucial to the new professional history. The fact of holding an advanced degree granted women nominal membership in the tiny elite of scholars who constituted the AHA.2 Even those who did not hold the Ph.D. were considered eligible; for the shared goal of founders such as J. Franklin Jameson and Herbert Baxter Adams was to disseminate history throughout the nation with the help of talented researchers and teachers. Despite this seemingly open policy, however, women were treated differently once admitted to the AHA. The treatment was sometimes subtle, sometimes quite explicitly discriminatory, and it rested always on the assumption that, ultimately, visible bodily difference mattered.
Recruiting women to the Association fit with the larger democratic mission of the organization’s founders. They were determined to wrest history from the gentlemen antiquarians whose practice they felt undermined the tenets of science.3 Indeed, they constructed the image of the new professional history in direct opposition to romantic antiquarianism. To an earlier focus on picturesque traditions and romantic incidents, what medieval historian Nellie Neilson referred to scornfully as “the praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,” they opposed the more difficult study of institutions and politics.4 And they attacked as elitist and somehow unscientific the notion that good historians must have classical training and literary sensibility. Jameson articulated the issue clearly in 1891:
Now it is the spread of thoroughly good second-class work…that our science most needs at present; for it sorely needs the improvement in technical process, that superior finish of workmanship, which a large number of works of talent can do more to foster than a few works of literary genius.5
By including women in the AHA, the founders underscored their democratic and leveling impulse, their desire to “bring all the historical resources of the nation within the purview of [the] Association,” and their belief that their science could be mastered by any intelligent person.6 There was, indeed, an important point made by the fact that women practiced scientific history: the power of objective investigation was such that it overcame any feminine predisposition to pursue quaint or esoteric topics. There was as well a complicated symbolic dimension that relied on the oppositions masculine/feminine and male/female. Whatever the sex of its practitioners, the old history was represented as feminine, the new as masculine. By enlisting women on the side of scientific history, its proponents demonstrated that they had vanquished what aristocratic and romantic tendencies remained in their newly organized discipline.
There were, to be sure, also quite straightforward reasons to bring women into the new Association. They represented an important institutional constituency for the creation of history departments and the implementation of standardized history curricula in the high schools, academies, and colleges of the nation. If the new history were to triumph, it must be properly taught; AHA founders therefore approached teaching with missionary zeal. In the 1880s and 1890s, women’s colleges represented a significant component of the academic world and (although headed by men) they were increasingly staffed by female teachers. Women members of the AHA could thus serve the particularly useful function of bringing history into their separate strongholds—the women’s academies and colleges. Nellie Neilson fulfilled that task at Mt. Holyoke College; Lucy Maynard Salmon, whose field was American History, did the same at Vassar. When she was hired in 1887, President James Taylor wrote to Herbert Baxter Adams that the “inadequate provision” for history at his institution would soon be remedied. “The recent appointment of Miss Salmon…will doubtless result in the satisfactory reorganization of the entire department.”7
At one level, AHA spokesmen insisted on a uniform history curriculum, making no distinctions between what was to be taught to women and what to men. They saw no irony in the practice of teaching history, employed in the 1880s and 1890s at Wellesley as at Johns Hopkins, that assigned to students the roles of members of the English House of Commons and had them debate major issues of constitutional and legislative policy.8 (That women had no vote and no formal political role in either the United States or England was apparently irrelevant to the substance and method of this pedagogy.) In addition, women were not excluded as objects of historical interest. Adams, for example, urged that history’s scope go beyond a focus on great men, reminding his colleagues of
The unnumbered thousands, yea millions, of good men and true, and of faithful, devoted women…[who] support good leadership and carry humanity forward from generation to generation. It is often the biography of some plain man, like Abraham Lincoln, or some self-sacrificing woman, like Florence Nightingale, that affords the greatest encouragement and incentive to ordinary humanity. But we must remember that no man, no woman is worthy of biographical or historical record, unless in some way he or she has contributed to the welfare of society and the progress of the world.9
Despite some gestures in the direction of symmetry, however, the history promoted in these years treated men and women asymmetrically. This followed from the way history was conceptualized; from its assumption that processes of change were evolutionary, linear, and unitary. Welfare and progress were essentially political concepts and progress was measured as movement toward democratic self-government. Adams advocated the study of “towns, plantations, parishes and counties” as well as states and nations. Large and small, the units of analysis were polities and the conception of study was unitary and integrated.10 The small units echoed the large; they provided ways of understanding how political organization worked and under what circumstances it progressed.11
The notion of history as the study of progress toward democracy assumed a linear and universal process applicable at different rates and in different forms to all people. The assumption of unity and universality made it possible to include all sorts of different groups in history, but it also made specification of their difference unnecessary. A single, prototypical figure represented the historical subject: white, Western man. The study of history for Adams and his colleagues was the study of politics and this meant the study of “man in organized society.” The purpose of such study was self-knowledge, which “leads to self-determination and self-control.” Beyond that, the teaching of history had important political consequences, for it led to “self-government…the highest and best result of the experience of man in society.”12 In pointing to these examples of Man as the subject of history, I do not mean to say that historians like Adams excluded women from their conception; they did not. Rather they subsumed women, included them in a generalized, unified conception that was at once represented in the idea of Man, but was always different from and subordinate to it. The feminine was but a particular instance; the masculine a universal signifier.
The consequences of such thinking were at once to deny and to recognize difference—to deny it by refusing to acknowledge that women (or other Others such as blacks and Jews) might have a fundamentally different historical experience; to recognize it by somehow disqualifying for equal treatment those different from the universal figure. This double effect was evident in the way history was written: (middle-class) white men were the typical subjects, acting to make things happen, while women were represented (if at all) as “devoted” and “faithful,” ensuring generational continuity through timeless reproductive roles that were outside history. It was also evident in institutional and organizational arrangements, in the leadership structure, for example, of the AHA. For despite the AHA’s gestures of formal inclusiveness, it was simply taken for granted that the members who really mattered, as well as the leaders, were white men. The language of universality rested on, contained within it, differentiations that resulted in unequal treatment for women in relation to men.
Adams worked hard to keep women as members of the organization, but it was always clear that they were women, special individuals differentiated not by achievement or training but by their presumed “natural” endowments and by their association with women’s colleges. At AHA meetings, for example, there was an annual smoker for “the men of the Association.” The ladies—wives of historians and female historians—attended a Colonial Dame’s Tea. Women protested against this practice, but their objections were ignored. Lucy Salmon wrote in 1905, for example, “We do not care for afternoon teas where we meet society women, and deprecate entertainments that separate the members into two classes, men and women.”13 The AHA never went beyond tokenism when it came to including women in leadership positions. Lucy Salmon was the sole woman to serve on special committees (including eventually the Executive Council) in the early period, but when she urged Adams to include another woman on the Committee of Seven (the group concerned with the teaching of history), he wrote to a friend that he was “inclined to think that one woman is enough!”14 In 1919, then a member of the Council, Salmon lamented her inability to increase the numbers of women sharing power in the AHA:
I do not wish to seem to press the names of women for membership on any of these committees; and yet, as I think I have written more than once before, I can but feel that the Association has by self-denying ordinance been deprived of the services of a good many women.15
This situation, so evident at the outset, continued well into the 1960s. Arthur Link has noted that for most of the AHA’s history “women were given short shrift in positions of leadership and governance.” He cites as evidence the facts that only five women were included among the 96 members of the Executive Council before 1933 and that women were represented on committees in a ratio of about one to nine, an underrepresentation in relation to female membership in the Association.16
Although there were high and low points for women in the AHA, these never resulted in a clear end to discriminatory treatment. The 1920s and 1930s, for example, saw an increase in the numbers of women receiving the Ph.D. and employed in history departments (especially in women’s colleges). Yet as the prestige and power of research universities increased in this period, women were increasingly marginalized by their confinement to undergraduate faculties and female institutions.17 Within the AHA they constituted about 19 percent of members in 1920, but not 5 percent of the leadership.18 The prevailing tone was of an elite male club whose formal structure and informal social practices marginalized women. The patterns continued with little variation into the postwar period. Howard K. Beale, writing in 1953, noted that “discrimination against women is persistent,” and he linked it to a larger set of biases “against Negroes, Jews, Catholics, women, and persons not ‘gentlemen’” that operated throughout the profession of history.19 The effects of these biases were systematically documented as they affected women, by a special committee set up in 1970 in response to demands by women historians for a change in treatment. These women argued that the recruitment of large numbers of women to the field of history, in process since the mid-1960s, would not itself guarantee equality; rather there had to be explicit attention to eradicating discrimination.20 The committee report, known as the Rose Report (for its chair, Willie Lee Rose), provided extensive evidence of the long history of the systematic underrepresentation of women within the AHA and the profession as a whole, and it recommended the creation of a standing Committee on Women Historians to provide advocacy and to monitor statistics in an effort to “secure greater equity for women as prospective students and teachers of history.”21 By appointing this committee, the AHA formally acknowledged the persistence of gender differentiation and the need to attend to it as a long-term structural problem.
In the history of women in the AHA, one moment does stand out as a distinct exception to otherwise exclusionary practices at the leadership level. In 1943 a woman became President of the Association. Yet the election of Nellie Neilson to the AHA presidency did not signal the beginning of a new era. Instead it indicated the brief triumph of what seems to have been a coalition of “progressive” historians and organized feminists, in the larger context of coalitions and popular-front mobilizations against fascism on the eve of America’s entry into World War II. Neilson’s nomination as second vice-president (putting her automatically in line for the presidency) came in 1940, a year that was particularly auspicious for its attention not only to women but to other previously neglected groups. Under Merle Curti’s chairmanship the program committee arranged several sessions on the theme of the “Common Man.” Selig Perlman spoke on “Class in American Labor History,” W. E. B. DuBois chaired a panel on “The Negro in the History of the United States,” and Mildred Thompson, of Vassar College, presided over a session on women in history—the first time a full session was devoted to women’s history at an AHA conference.22 The attention to women’s history and the election of Neilson came as a result of years of lobbying by women, some of them organized in the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (founded in 1929), others simply acting on deeply held feminist commitments. They were active enough in 1939 for the chair of the Nominating Committee to note in his report the existence of a “feminist block [sic]”23 Their pressure coincided with the determination of “progressives” like Curti and Beale to practice democracy within the Association, symbolically and actually to assert history’s connection to the democratic processes it chronicled—at the very moment that constitutionalism and liberalism were under seige in Europe. The committee was explicit about its goal of including women and wrote to all AHA members in May 1940 urging them to nominate and vote for “women of distinction” who “have not had sufficient recognition among the Association’s officers.”24
The election of Neilson, however, did not constitute or even set in process an evolution toward equality for women. The general pattern of underrepresentation persisted even under her presidency and, as the war came to an end, it was intensified by a decline in the numbers of women receiving Ph.D.’s and jobs in history.25 In addition, a new discourse emerged that emphasized the masculine qualities of the historian, associating them with the preservation of national traditions and democracy, scholarly activities that evoked renewed commitment to the heroism of the war effort, though now in time of peace and Cold War. Calling for greater appreciation of businessmen’s efforts to build America, Allan Nevins suggested in 1951, for example, that historians abandon “feminine idealism” and portray businessmen in “their true proportions as builders of an indispensable might.”26 (The contrast between idealism and materialism, sentimentality and “might” was presented as a contrast between femininity and masculinity; and, although it did not speak about women directly, it had clear implications for the association of Cold War ideology and gender in the depiction of the typical historian.)
“I have seen in my generation the rise, and now the beginning of the closing of doors to women,” wrote Beatrice Hyslop, a historian of the French Revolution, as she contemplated retirement from Hunter College in 1969.27 Hyslop’s comments referred to the 1950s and early 1960s in contrast to the years of her doctoral work in the early 1930s. Ironically, she wrote just as a great transition began, but it would still be many years before women were regularly included in positions of power in the AHA and not until 1987 that a second woman assumed the office of President.28
[ II ]
The AHA formally endorsed inclusiveness and spoke a language of universality that nonetheless rested on differences. Representing the typical historian and the typical historical actor as a (white) male made women a particular and troubling exception. Their likeness to the universal type could not be taken for granted; rather it had to be demonstrated, proven, in the behavior of any individual woman. Thus, whatever their skills and training, women had the further challenge of repudiating the disabilities assumed to attach to their sex. This was no easy task, whatever strategy was adopted. One could choose to ignore systems of differentiation, accepting their limits and operating within them; but this, of course, left the systems in place and often placed a great burden on the individual woman, who attributed the treatment she received to her own failings. One could attribute specific instances of discrimination to individual misogyny, and thus avoid a systemic analysis. One could acknowledge the way gender differences led to unequal treatment and condemn them as violations of democratic principles either individually or collectively. One could affirm the difference of women and elevate it to a position of complementarity or even superiority to men. Either in the name of equality or in the name of difference, collective action by women could be politically extremely effective; but it carried with it the potential for underscoring the fact of women’s separate and different identity, of pointing up rather than playing down the contrast between historians and women historians.
The history of professional women historians since 1884 illustrates all of these strategies. Sometimes, in fact, individuals used combinations of them in the course of their lives. It is interesting to examine some of them in detail because they provide another way of grasping the operations of a profession as a differentiated system and we can understand the effects of such a system on the individuals perceived to be different. Here I will focus on those strategies that recognized and sought to combat discrimination; they enable us to see how professional women historians formulated their critiques in relation to prevailing concepts of history.29
Lucy Salmon’s strategy was to insist that women be included in the universal idea of humanity. If this were the case, then the practice of excluding women contradicted notions of universality and equality and led, as she made clear to the AHA, to a waste of available talent. She believed firmly in coeducation (she held her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan), though she always taught at a women’s college. While she accepted the limits of available employment, she constantly battled President Taylor’s attempts to regulate women faculty members’ lives at Vassar.30 Women, she felt, ought to be treated no differently from men. They were, after all, meant to be included in the universal figure of Man; any other interpretation was irrational or unjust.
It was precisely because Salmon considered women part of the definition of the human that she actively campaigned for the vote. For her, suffrage would be a way of furthering equality, of granting women full membership in society. In fact, society would be the ultimate beneficiary because so many more talented and able people would be formally involved in the business of politics. Once won, the vote would guarantee the full participation of women in a variety of political institutions, including, undoubtedly, professional associations.
Salmon based her argument on her general belief (shared with her professional colleagues and evident in all the history she wrote) that history meant progress toward democracy and equality. She saw prejudice against her sex as a matter of individual attitudes, the relic of a less civilized past destined eventually to disappear, or the result of insufficient experience, intelligence, or education. Thus, she wrote of Woodrow Wilson, with whom she had studied for the Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr, that his life was governed by narrow and self-serving ambition. Furthermore, he did not like teaching and
he was singularly ill-adapted to teaching women. He had apparently never had any of the normal relationships of life with women, he assumed that women were quite different from men, and he made, I felt, no effort to understand them. He always assumed that they were intellectually different from men and that, therefore, they would not interest him. I am quite sure that he never whole-heartedly believed in college education for women. He once said to me that a woman who had married an intellectual, educated man was often better educated than a woman who had had college training. All of this used to amuse me and I never presented any other side of the subject to him or stated my own views—it would have been useless to do so. I felt that his opinions were simply derived from a limited educational and social experience and hoped he would some time learn better!31
Like many of her contemporaries, Salmon participated in professional life assuming (even as she recognized discrimination) that equal treatment was her due. For her, “progress lay in the direction of obliterating rather than emphasizing the differences between men and women.”32 Salmon’s biographer notes that she “distrusted any movement which recognized a special ‘woman’s sphere’” and she refused to acknowledge it in her writing, in her professional and political activities, and in her personal deportment.33 Such recognition would only perpetuate the false idea that biological differences between the sexes could be the basis for educational or professional distinctions. Individual efforts to remove prejudice were, in Salmon’s view, preferable to collective action because such action inevitably accepted difference. “Do not think,” she wrote to a colleague, “that…I am not interested in the work that women are doing, I am intensely interested in all good work, but not specially because it is done by women.” She conceded that women labored under many disabilities, but insisted that these “must be removed…by women individually rather than collectively.”34
Lucy Salmon succeeded in gaining professional prominence during her lifetime; by her own standards she had individually removed obstacles that lay in a woman’s path. She increased the participation of women on AHA committees and she also encouraged women students to become historians, relying on a women’s network of contacts to nurture and support them. When she died, she was eulogized as an “original” thinker by Edward Cheney, who urged the publication of an unfinished manuscript of hers because “we ought not to allow anything she wrote to disappear.”35 Arguably her work was more serious and profound than that of many of her male associates, including Herbert Baxter Adams. Yet her name virtually disappeared from accounts of the history of the profession, such as John Higham’s celebrational History, published in 1965. Indeed Higham’s History, a story of the discipline from its institutionalization in 1884, demonstrates the workings of gender difference and the limits of individualized strategies to deal with it. Not only is Salmon absent from these pages devoted to the leading historians in America, but so are virtually all women (and blacks). No works by women are included in any of the summaries of historiographic debates; Mary Beard appears in two footnotes as the author of a book about her husband and as a co-author with him of a book entirely credited to him in the text; and Nellie Neilson’s presidency is not so much as acknowledged even in passing.36 The invisibility of women in this book is not the result of their absence from the ranks of practicing historians and active AHA members; rather it follows directly from the assumption that a universal male figure (white, Anglo-Saxon) can be used to typify the historical subject and that those different from him are insignificant, less important, because at once represented and excluded by him. To insist, as Salmon did, on the irrelevance of gender difference in the face of this kind of thinking was to attack the effects but not the source of differentiations, exclusions, and discrimination.
Another set of strategies involved explicit reforms of the institutional exclusion of women, sometimes by individuals, sometimes by collectively organized groups. These emerged most forcefully in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of great ferment nationally and within the discipline of history.37 There were, for example, chairs for women endowed at the research universities in attempts to rectify the virtual absence of women faculty in these male strongholds. George Herbert Palmer was probably following his wife, Alice Freeman’s, wishes when he left money to establish a full professorship for a woman in the University of Michigan History Department. Similarly, Florence Porter Robinson, herself employed to teach Home Economics at Beloit College though she held the Ph.D. in History, left her estate to the University of Wisconsin for a chair in History for a woman. In both cases, the donors stipulated salaries and terms of employment identical to men’s.38
The issue of positions for women at universities was also taken up by the Berkshire Conference, an organization founded in 1929 by professors at East Coast women’s colleges, who wished that “we scattered women historians could get together oftener to exchange ideas.” Returning on a train together from an AHA meeting, a group of women discussed the possibility of creating a “greater sense of comradeship in our craft.” According to Louise Loomis’s recollection, the point was to provide an informal opportunity for discussion and “social contact” among themselves.39 There was also resentment against a new practice among male historians to gather for informal “conferences” that explicitly excluded women. The Berkshire group implicitly recognized that as women these historians had something in common. Although they insisted they were not a “pressure group,” they were in fact an interest group and they exerted pressure in the name of women on the AHA.
From the first meeting, they discussed ways of improving the situation of women historians. They began with a plan to establish a program of exchange professorships so that women could have varied experiences outside the confines of their own institutions. This plan never was implemented, because of the impact of the Depression and because of other more pressing concerns. In the 1930s, in the face of informal discrimination—the preference for hiring men in women’s colleges, for example—and of outright discriminatory laws against married women enacted by state and federal legislatures, the Berkshire Conference turned to “the professional outlook for women,” examining the comparable hiring patterns, rank, and salary scales for women and men.40 Emily Hickman, of the New Jersey College for Women, seems to have been the most outspoken and imaginative of the leaders. At one meeting she suggested that the American Association of University Women (AAUW) make “a statistical survey of the possibilities in academic life for women.” She also thought that “biographies of eminent women” should be published “with a view to disproving rumors that none is suitable for a [college] presidency.” And she turned the group’s attention to the inclusion of women in positions of power in the AHA, sending in nomination after nomination, lobbying sympathetic men and urging them to support the nominees.41
The Berkshire Conference represented an organized effort to improve the situation of women historians, though it was confined to the East Coast. Acting with a sense of commitment to a feminist cause, women in other regions—sometimes clustered in women’s colleges, sometimes isolated in coeducational institutions—also organized campaigns to place women in positions of power. An example is Mary Williams, a Latin American historian who had received the Ph.D. from Stanford in 1914, taught briefly at Wellesley and then at Goucher College, and who began agitating in 1933 (the year Louise Phelps Kellogg—a member of one of several informal women’s networks—served on the Nominating Committee)42 for the nomination of Nellie Neilson to the presidency of the Association.43 The detailed story of these highly political efforts has yet to be written, but even a glance at them suggests a widespread and determined self-conscious effort by women to challenge the inequities they experienced because of their sex.44 Unlike Lucy Salmon, these women advocated and undertook collective action to challenge structures of differentiation within their chosen profession.
Clearly, the general ferment of the 1930s contributed to the kinds of action they took. Not only were interest groups a visible part of social and political life during the New Deal; they were increasingly the focus of historians’ attention. John Higham has characterized the “new history” that came into full prominence in the 1930s as “progressive history.” It focused on conflicts between sections and economic groups; “rather than unity, [it] emphasized diversity.”45 The story of the American heritage told by progressive historians was one of social protest, of the organization of movements that struggled in the name of the less privileged for improvement and change. The idea that there existed a universal human subject did not disappear; indeed, the appeal for equality was made in the name of inalienable human rights. Neither was there change in the optimistic belief that the story of history was a story of progress toward (now social as well as) political democracy. The story was, however, increasingly complicated by the play of competing interest groups.
In this context, women identified themselves as an interest group. Their interest came not from some inherent need or sameness but from the experience of an externally imposed discrimination: shared negative treatment constituted them as a group. They argued that irrelevant biological differences had been invoked to deny them jobs, leadership positions, and power; intellectual capacity and professional ability, they insisted, had nothing to do with sex. Yet if the disabling effects of differentiation were to be fought, collective action by women, as women, was necessary. The point was to include women in whatever was considered human, to insist on the androgyny, as it were, of Universal Man.
Not only did women press their interest as members of the profession of history, they assembled archival sources and a few also wrote histories of women. The creation of new knowledge about women in the past had many goals, the chief of which was simply to establish the fact that women were, as Mary Beard’s book title put it, “a force in history.”46 The stress was on women’s positive contribution to the building of societies and cultures, a challenge to the presumed passivity or irrelevance of women and therefore to their invisibility in the historical record. Almost by definition, visibility would confer humanity, making self-evident the terms on which equality ought to be practiced.
Feminists of the 1920s and 1930s appealed to democratic principles and the belief in the literal universality of Man to justify their right to full participation in the profession. They assumed their interests were those of all historians; only prejudice prevented their fulfillment for women. On one level, there was nothing in the masculine representation of the historical subject to prevent women’s identification with it; they thought of themselves as viable actors capable of effecting change. Yet equality proved more difficult to procure than to demand or organize to achieve, at least in part because Man was less susceptible to pluralization then it seemed. The claim to universality rested on an implied contrast with difference and particularity; as long as Man was universal, the mere existence of Woman demonstrated her specificity. This proved repeatedly to be the case in the AHA, despite articulate and forceful pressures brought to bear by feminists. Beatrice Hyslop pondered the frustrations of the situation in these terms:
…but where a woman has the ability to be a prominent historian, why should there be discrimination just because she is a woman? A young man starting on a career wants an even chance to show his ability and to compete for rewards. Women historians ask for the same equality of opportunity. Too many times they are not even given a chance…. Is there something about history…that excludes competence on the basis of sex?47
Hyslop thought not, but I would suggest there was: differentiation on the basis of sex was implicit in the abstract, but no less gendered, concept of Man as the representative human subject. As long as historical actors and historians were represented as “he,” it would be difficult for women to put into effect the equality they believed was their due.
[ III ]
The 1970s brought another kind of collective strategy by women historians. Committed to equalizing conditions for women and men, the new approach nonetheless emphasized difference in a way that some earlier feminists found discomforting, if not unacceptable. For attention to the interests of women as professionals, the organization of women’s caucuses, the publication of separate journals, and the writing of a women’s history, all ran the risk of validating, even if only inadvertently, the difference of women from men.
The new emphasis on difference took shape in a national context generated by government policies of affirmative action that established and legitimated movements of organized “interest” groups, of women, blacks, and others. For feminists, the creation by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 of national and state commissions on the status of women set in motion processes that resulted in, among other things, the founding of the National Organization of Women in 1966.48 Within the AHA, the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession (CCWHP) emerged in 1969 as the explicit voice of women’s interests.49 Its pressure led to the formation of the AHA committee that issued the Rose Report in 1970. That report opened a new era for women’s participation in the AHA: after 1970 patterns of exclusion began to be reversed, women were appointed to key committees, they were elected to the Council, and they had a significant impact on Association policies, producing guidelines for departments of history, for example, on fairness in hiring and tenure.50 The standing Committee on Women Historians (CWH), established in the wake of the Rose Report, was the motor for these changes (which were not necessarily permanent.) This committee had enormous practical and symbolic effects. It not only designated women a separate constituency, requiring an advocate of their own, but it gave them access to high-level policy deliberations.
The existence of the CWH at once acknowledged and sought to change the fact that gender differences were used to differentiate and thus to discriminate among historians; at the same time it furthered a separate collective identity for women historians. Women attained undeniable visibility as a definably different group and they won important concessions because of that visibility. Indeed, visibility made it possible to identify the negative operations of differentiation and thus to counter discrimination; it also enabled positive political action by women, as women historians. The difficulty came in establishing the terms of identity: did one simply reverse the valence, accepting differences already assigned to women but assessing them positively, did one substitute other unifying female traits, or did one define the common interest as a rejection of the terms of difference others had imposed? If the last, in what name could difference be refused? Humanity? Didn’t that then return to issues of “Man,” to women’s always problematic relationship to that representation?
These questions (by no means yet answered) were posed even more acutely by another aspect of the feminist politics of the 1970s: the emergence of women’s history as a major field of scholarly inquiry. The organizational visibility of women enabled their appearance as historical subjects in association with a general reconceptualization of history itself. Evident by the early 1960s, the new vision of history challenged earlier notions. It was preoccupied, according to Higham’s account, “with the tendency of stable structures to break down,” with “the disastrous erosion of all institutional authority.”51 It turned away from formal politics to various areas of human experience, including work, family, and sexuality. It questioned the single narrative line of history as progress toward democracy, as well as the accuracy of representing humankind in unitary terms. Historians wrote books about conflict and struggle, about changing modes of domination, social hierarchy, and resistance. In the process they introduced a plurality of historical actors whose special point of view, whose different story, had to be told because its contents and outcome were not the same as that of “typical” white men. Indeed, these formerly typical figures themselves became particularized as only one group among many. The Renaissance was not a “renaissance for women”; the discovery of America became, in part, a story of Indian removal; Manifest Destiny was exposed as an ideological justification for imperialist expansion; and slavery became not a “peculiar institution” but a chapter in the continuing story of American racism.52 The different stories of women, blacks, the poor, and the colonized were not reducible to a single narrative line about the “American Man.” But how could they be told?
For the most part histories of these different groups were necessarily written as separate narratives alongside or in opposition to what was dubbed “mainstream” history. Women’s history became a sub-field within the discipline, generating a prodigious new scholarship on the lives and experiences of women in the past. The new knowledge demonstrated what previous accounts implicitly denied: women were significant actors, and the history of their lives yielded insight not only into hitherto unstudied realms of human existence but also into well-studied processes of change such as industrialization and urbanization. At the same time, the new knowledge was often cast in terms that affirmed the separateness and difference of women in implicit contrast to the world of man or men already known to history: they had a separate “culture,” distinct notions of the meaning of work or family, identifiable artistic or literary signatures, and “female” forms of political consciousness.53 The documentation of this women’s world could become an end in itself; simply establishing its existence was thought to be a sufficient challenge to the “mainstream.” Historians assumed they knew what the category “women” was and spent little time investigating its production; rather they ascribed its negative aspects to “patriarchy” or male dominance, its positive aspects to women’s resistance or “agency,” without in either case examining how “women” acquired social and political meaning in particular contexts.54 This kind of women’s history provided the evidence for the existence of something that could be dubbed, indeed already was assumed to be, a separate female sphere. Having made women visible, historians had also established their difference. This at once could challenge and confirm the established narrative—challenge it because its typicality was no longer assured; confirm it because the different stories were so different as to be inconsequential, trivial, parallel but not central to the received story of American democracy.
Both effects are evident in current professional practice. On the one hand, there are historians like Carl Degler who recognize the need for a new concept of history. He writes:
What is meant by history or the past will have to be changed before [women’s history] becomes a part of it…since the conventional past was not only conceived (invented?) by men but includes almost by definition, only those activities in which men have been engaged, while ignoring almost entirely the historical activities of women…. The challenge is now to rethink our conception of the past we teach and write about so that women…are included.55
On the other hand, departments of history, for the most part, reject Degler’s challenge and treat women’s history as a separate field of study, hiring for positions in nineteenth- or twentieth-century social history those who have written about miners or railroad workers, but rejecting as “in the wrong field” those who have written about seamstresses or (female) textile operatives. The common explanation for this kind of action is that “we already have a women’s historian.” The subject of women for these historians is by definition a particularized subject that lies outside traditionally established fields. What is at stake is a refusal to recognize the particularity and the specificity of men—an inevitable consequence of the “fall” of Universal Man. In the face of this refusal, which evokes tradition, the legacy of civilization, and the return of narrative on its behalf, integrating women into history, just as including women as equals with men in the concept of humanity, is a daunting task.
The various strategies of women historians have all foundered on the issue of difference as a conceptual and structural phenomenon. How to recognize and refuse terms of discrimination, how to act collectively on behalf of women without confirming the “reality” of a separate female sphere—these have been persistent dilemmas, never fully resolved. Indeed, debates about how to resolve them are at the center of current theoretical discussions among feminists—historians and others. The questions posed by women’s history are the same as those posed by women’s collective action in the profession of history: Can the historical narrative—the great story of Western Civilization or American Democracy—sustain the pluralizing of its subject? Can we conceive of a notion of humanity that is not embodied—not, that is, constructed in gendered terms? Can we expand the concept of the human to include different embodiments of it? Is it possible to think about difference without reference to a standard or norm, without establishing a hierarchical ordering? Not easily or, at least, not yet. The ideal of democracy as the extension of rights (or access) to ever greater numbers of people is confounded by the history of the continuing inequality of different groups. Pluralism as a theory of democratic inclusion ignores the problem of power and the ways in which difference establishes and institutionalizes the various meanings of power. It has been impossible to demand equality without somehow recognizing difference; but too much insistence on difference (as Lucy Salmon pointed out) undercuts claims for equality. This conundrum is the result not of faulty strategies by those seeking equal treatment but of the inability of certain theories of liberalism to take difference—even as it defines equality—into account.56
The way out of the equality-difference dilemma seems to me to lie in another direction, one that critically analyzes the categories we most often take for granted: history, women, men, equality, difference, the terms of political theory itself. Instead of assuming we know the meaning of these terms, we need to examine them as they have been developed and used in specific historical contexts, as the products of culture, politics, and time. We cannot write women into history, for example, unless we are willing to entertain the notion that history as a unified story was a fiction about a universal subject whose universality was achieved through implicit processes of differentiation, marginalization, and exclusion. Man was never, in other words, a truly universal figure. It is the processes of exclusion achieved through differentiation that established man’s universal plausibility that must, to begin with, constitute the focus for a different, more critical history. One aspect of those processes involved the definition of “women,” the attribution of characteristics, traits, and roles in contrast to “men.” The difference historians have documented in so much of women’s history was produced by these processes, they did not arise from some essential quality inherent in the female sex. Thus “women’s experience” or “women’s culture” exists only as the expression of female particularity in contrast to male universality; each is a concept by which a certain vision of social life is implemented. Another aspect of these processes of differentiation involved the constant readjustment of the relationship between equality and difference. Equality has never been an absolute practice, rather it is the suspension for certain purposes in certain contexts of the exclusions enforced against certain differences; historically some differences have mattered more than others at different moments in time. Thus for purposes of access to the profession of history differences of sex were formally discounted; while for purposes of establishing leadership and allocating power within the AHA, differences of sex were taken into account. Gender seems to have been a crucial way of establishing hierarchy explained in terms of difference, though its definition and use have varied—as the history of women professional historians demonstrates.
The problem of difference complicates the story of democratization as a story of access, for it suggests that inequities persist even if physical barriers have been removed. It also calls attention to power relationships within persumably homogeneous organizations and indicates that these are related not only to sociological distinctions among practitioners but also to the very conceptions of knowledge produced and protected by a discipline or profession. This is not to say that access and concepts of difference are distinct issues, for there is clearly a relationship between them: lines of inclusion and exclusion are drawn in terms of difference, as are internal hierarchies, and the terms used are often similar if not the same. Still, it seems useful to distinguish different kinds of differentiation and not to conflate such questions as access and internal hierarchy, even when both involve drawing lines according to sex. These related processes have a history that requires precise recounting. Precision of focus and close analysis permit deeper appreciation of how varied and yet how persistent are the interconnections between gender and the politics of a discipline such as history.