However! the “good continuities” that Notorious PhD flags are important. Yes, absolutely, even within those very bleak timescapes. My women’s history looks for resistance and solidarity and female spheres of power within patriarchal societies. One rich area I’ve been mining for years is women’s spiritual leadership and sodalities. These bridge across all kinds of social systems from the most patriarchal where they are prohibited or repressed, to more egalitarian systems which have formal female offices and organizations–and all the other societies which fall between those extremes. I’m thinking Beguines and beatas, Henan sworn sisterhoods maintained via the Nüshu women’s script, Iroquois gantowisas and Cherokee Beloved Women, Chewa women’s sodalities and female eldership posts, Brazilian maes de santo as socio-political forces, and the medicine women who led indigenous resistance movements in California, Uganda, Somalia, and other colonized countries. Even the Thesmophoria, in spite of “negotiations” that forced it into compliance with masculine state goals, as has been noted. We have to look at patterns of collective female power, without missing how that may be cut into or mediated by male dominance–or whacked down. Further, how it is situated in terms of class and ethnicity, and all the complex interactions that make history.

In my experience, the more local and particular we get, the more interesting stuff surfaces. Folk religion is a very rich vein, and oral tradition, including that written down by colonials like Sahagún.

Or even the inquisitorial archives in Friuli that Ginzburg studied. The benandante (that’s not a typo, but the female plural) are an instructive case, because we can see how a regional folk culture was riven along gender lines, by outside forces and then from within. The male benandanti turned into witch-finders, and the female benandante became the accused, via the torture trials of the late 16th and early 17th century. But before that? the depositions show a female allegiance to the benandante that persisted, even under duress. We aren’t going to get the same level of detail beyond the written record, of course.

But we do get glimpses from the witch trials of women like Gabrina degl’Albetti and Jeanne de Brigue and Scudder of Scotland who dealt in sexual politics, battery and desertion and things of great concern to women in their communities. It’s not all victims, resistors are visible there too, even if they end up going to the stake, or like Gabrina have their tongues cut out.

Looking forward to the next installment.

On the other blog, now closed, Notorious PhD wrote:
“I now see the study of women in particular as a way of uncovering information and introducing perspectives that can in turn be used to reshape the master narrative itself.”

And in fact it has done that. We’re not all the way there, not by a long shot, but we have won, finally, acknowledgment (from many quarters, at least) that a study that ignores women is inadequate, pure and simple. It’s finally hitting them in their reputations, and that makes the recalcitrant sit up and take notice. Of course many have welcomed the inclusion as well.

I like the comments that were made about how women’s history strengthened the hand of social history, and would add that the same is true for interdisciplinarity. Not only because of feminists studies, of course, but also Africana and all the other intersecting subjects whose scholars understood the necessity of reweaving knowledge from all the humanities to get a broader picture.

What concerns me is the way that the theoretical turn in women’s studies has led to near-abandonment of the field of history. Claims seem to require no substantial documentation. Earlier there was discussion of whether there was a “golden age” of women’s history. I don’t have such a rosy view as that, for reasons i won’t go into now, but there was at least a strong sense of solidarity in common enterprise, on an uphill climb, and most importantly, a deep interest in what women’s analysis would look like. Hearing women theorize about what all the data meant, and especially about the patterns.

What i saw happen somewhere in the 90s was an elevation of male theorists and masculine prestige. Foucault, Derrida, even Freud. Somer Broddrib and Tania Modleisky called it. At the same time, the feminist theory that had been done so far, and especailly words like patriarchy, acquired a heavy stigma. It’s one thing to generalize about The Patriarchy at every turn, as has been noted here, and another altogether to shrink from ever using the term–or male supremacy, or male dominance, or similar descriptors. Sometimes you need a word that spells it out. I understand the reasons for timidity; there are real costs. But this goes directly to what you can say–or what you are not saying because of those consequences.

Gotta go. More later.