Comments on: Is women’s history necessarily feminist history?

By: The Empire Bites Back « Tangerine and Cinnamon

The Empire Bites Back « Tangerine and Cinnamon — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 07:43:48 +0000

[...] diets and explaining how tastes and food preferences change over time. Like environmental and women’s history, then, the origins of food history overlap to some extent with a kind of activism. This is [...]

By: If A Lesbian Fell In Hollywood, And No One Were There To Hear Her, Would She Make A Noise? - Tenured Radical - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 21:32:47 +0000

[...] friend at Historiann meditates today on the practice of women’s history and why feminism matters. “Women’s [...]

By: Thinking about women’s history | Tanya L. Roth

Thinking about women’s history | Tanya L. Roth — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 23:28:25 +0000

[...] and think “feminists!”? Once upon a time, women’s history was a feminist project, but as Historiann pointed out this summer, that correlation no longer necessarily applies: “For the past twenty years, we’ve seen a [...]

By: Foxes and Hedgehogs; or, An Excess of Guilt and What to Do About It « Worthless Drivel

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:08:07 +0000

[...] areas; and hedgehogs, who burrow deeply into one subject area and become experts in that subfield. Across the historians’ blogosphere in the past couple weeks, there’s been a lot of discussion [...]

By: Pink and Personal, Dialogue Part II | Scholaristas

Pink and Personal, Dialogue Part II | Scholaristas — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 05:57:46 +0000

[...] women’s history might be an inherently feminist endeavor; thanks to Rachel C. for the link), I hope the other ladies would agree (I know Amanda would), that it includes a complete [...]

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:52:29 +0000

I’m advised by a colleague who knows a lot more French than I do (not a hard circumstance to find yourself in, I should say) that the French term of choice for “troll” is, in fact, “troll,” although she’s not sure that it’s yet migrated to metaphorical usage in the blogosphere.

By: Mariella

Mariella — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 22:48:06 +0000

I have to agree with you completely here. The field of Labor and Working Class History trained Joan Scott but she quickly lost a place in the scholarship when she kept on talking about gender as a category of analysis. My colleagues are still plugging away at reminding us about class, and I could point out too many examples than I care to remember of how prioritizing “importance of class as an analytical category” is really used as an excuse to forget about gender (and sometimes even race, too). We’re taught in graduate seminars about doing it all- class, race, gender, religion, empire, the body– but then on our proposal defenses we’re told to cut everything back and just focus on a couple of things.

By: Knitting Clio

Knitting Clio — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:01:43 +0000

Hey, not all of us contemporary historians are Whigs! Perhaps you’re confusing us with sociologists?

By: Shane

Shane — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:02:09 +0000

I’ve done my training as an Americanist in a very small program, and for several cohorts before and after me (at least) I don’t think it was possible for any student to escape a class with at least 1, if not 2, specialists in women’s/gender history, of rather different scholarly generations. Everyone I took classes with had to read historical works that took women/gender seriously as categories of analysis. Because of the structure of our general exams, I think it would have been very difficult for anyone to get through without reading (at a minimum) 10-20 books on women/gender/sexuality. I’m only just beginning to understand how unusual that is.

This experience, like my undergrad education, has been wonderful, but it’s apparently given me a skewed sense of what “the profession” as a whole takes seriously. (Silly me, thinking about history as if women’s lives mattered….)

By: JoVE

JoVE — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:26:36 +0000

I’m not a historian but I think similar things happen in other disciplines. One thing I noticed a couple of years ago in relation to a senior political science scholar I knew was that he was quite sympathetic and even supportive of those who studied women in politics and even feminist politics. But when it came to hiring, those were always treated as an “extra”. You’d never advertise for such a specialist. Nor would you consider someone qualified if that was all she did.

I wondered at the time if this was a generational thing, since the first generation of women scholars who studies women (in history, politics, or wherever) would have been trained in a recognizable field within the discipline and then have veered off into women/feminism. (That’s put somewhat crudely but I hope you get the idea.)

What I wondered about was what seemed to be happening to the students of that first generation. The women whose PhD supervisors were women’s historians or feminist historians. Whose dissertation project was a women’s history project.

And, sadly, I think mostly what happens confirms your view that the historical profession per se (and similar things apply in political science and sociology) has not assimilated the idea that it must include women.