The process is usually not actively sexist. My guess is that it’s linked to that whole invisible women syndrome which you learn a lot about just by reading blog comments threads on the Internet.

“…public memory can be established by 1) forgetting about or excluding an alternative past, 2) creating and reinforcing patriotism, and/or 3) developing a sense of nostalgia to legitimize a particular heritage.”

He specifically addresses African Americans working to revise the official memory of the Civil War. I though it was an interesting comment on the current discussion, esp. Quixote’s last point — the idea of an official, public memory tied so very tightly to how we see ourselves. No wonder students have such a time with it. (Can I say structural one more time?)

Thanks for your thoughts on the Soviet women. My sense from the historiography is that in the Cold War–as in the “hot” wars I write about in the 17th and 18th centuries in North America–both sides used rhetoric about gender and family life to build themselves up and to make an invidious contrast with the other side. So, brave Soviet women who were officially liberated from lawful discrimination were portrayed as Communist drudges who weren’t treated like “ladies” by the U.S., and American women who were allegedly so free were portrayed as trapped by consumerism and rendered consumer objects themselves by capitalism (from the Soviet perspective.) Of course, both critiques are pretty insightful, but as we saw with George W. Bush’s “feminist” critique of the Taliban in 2001, it’s only useful for mobilizing political support or popular support for a military invasion. No one really cares about liberating women in a genuine fashion. That’s too threatening to contemplate. We just want to liberate women so they’ll fit in with OUR economic and political system (whatever “OUR” economic and political system is.)

This has not translated into women’s rights, on the whole. Domestic abuse and violence against women were and are epidemic in Russia. That may seem strange, given that people usually assume that physical power is all that counts, but don’t forget Steve Biko’s saying: the first weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

So there was a strong cultural tradition of accepting women in physically very demanding jobs. Put that together with the Communists early insistence on women’s rights on paper, and the occasional female astronaut (Tereshkova was her name) makes sense.

“it evaporates because the culture has a stake in erasing women from history and denying that their participation or leadership ever mattered”

led to an Aha! moment for me. It’s true. This stuff isn’t just a by-product of attitude. It’s essential to the attitude. To forget a thing once could be a symptom. To forget the same thing twice, three times, then it’s accidentally-on-purpose.

I think maybe one of the biggest conceptual problems is that the evidence says it was purposeful, but there’s no person visibly and consciously flushing things down the memory hole. That’s why things like LBJ’s note are so valuable. You don’t often get to see any of the individual drops that wear away the rock.

Digger and Gavin, good points. I think it was Susan back in one of those Judith Bennett threads who said something about emphasizing that change was not synonymous with progress, and that she uses several examples to make that point. (She’s also an unmodernist.) If I can find it I’ll link to it–very smart, insightful, and sensible, as Susan always is!

And of course the things the Civil Rights movement fought against were also contingent and not inevitable. The Jim Crow laws didn’t always exist. People made and enforced them, and did so as a response to new circumstances (a kind of racist equilibrium?). You could even say that there was some kind of civil rights movement in the period between the end of slavery and the start of Jim Crow, but it was defeated. (I don’t know very much about this period but I’m thinking particularly of Adelbert Ames in Mississippi.) In that case you’re all the more right to ask why a civil rights movement didn’t re-appear sooner.

Indyanna: It probably looks like I was ignoring your comment because you posted it in between me starting and finishing mine! You’re dead right about the demographic impact of the Second World War and it might have looked like I was downplaying it more than I should have. But I’m just wondering if that’s the whole story. Maybe demographic crisis plus different attitudes to gender? Not necessarily more feminist attitudes, but a different (non-western, non-liberal) approach to exploiting female labour for the benefit of patriarchy. Britain had a demographic crisis in the First World War but didn’t put women into combat roles. Maybe the Soviet Union was more genuinely functionalist, whereas in the west pseudo-functionalist arguments have been used to support what are really just ideological assumptions about what women can/should do.