We had one suggestion–and only one–from a student who suggested that next time we might consider offering the course with one man and one woman professor, instead of two women.  Right–because our male colleagues are just lining up to teach this course, and it will be soothing and more objective if a male professor is in the room.  (I occasionally get comments like this about the sex of book authors on my evaluation forms that went something like this:  “I thought that this course was biased because we read mostly female-authored books, but then we read some books by men that seem to agree with the women, so I guess the books in this class aren’t biased.”  I really must ask my male colleagues if they ever are informed that including women-authored books on their syllabi is reassuring because it means that the information presented by a male professor and male authors isn’t biased after all.)

A few students suggested that next time we don’t talk about rape so much, but then they didn’t like the one book we assigned that focused on married heterosexuality either.  But the truth is that none of the books in the history of sexuality are super-sexy, because the historiography of sexuality is very Foucaultian and is therefore about the distribution of and challenges to power, challenges that frequently hurt the challengers more than the reigning system of power distribution.  I think the students were surprised that studying sex could be so depressing, although I warned them from the beginning that I think I teach the most depressing courses in the Baa Ram U. history curriculum.

I think the problem is that most modern college students experience sex as liberating, and they don’t want to think about the constraints on sexuality or even the sexual abuse that was a much more widespread experience of most people transhistorically, even in the present.  (I know that’s how I would have thought about these issues as a 20-year old, so I’m sympathetic to this view.)  I get it that the class turned out to be kind of a bummer for them, even if the reading assignments hadn’t been so heavy.  (But quite frankly, the last thing I’d ever want to be accused of is a lack of rigor when teaching anything, let alone a pilot class on the history of sexuality.)

Fort Number Four, Charlestown, NH

Nick Kowalczk offers us a detailed look at historical re-enacting in “Embedded with the Reenactors,”  in which he ponders the fascination that some Americans have with reliving the bloody, imperialistic wars of the past.  I thought this article was noteworthy too because 1) they’re not Civil War reenactors, they’re  reenactors of the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), and 2) the Seven Years’ War guys (and yes, they’re mostly middle-aged guys, according to Kowalczk’s reporting and my own observations of all kinds of reenactors over the years) have been enjoying their 250th anniversary moment in the spotlight for the past few years. 

I found Kowalczk’s article fascinating, although it’s written in a more “new journalism” style that includes him as both participant and observer, and I kept wishing he would go deeper into some of the questions he raises about reenactors based on his participation in a battle of the Siege of Fort Niagara:

It’s not every 4^th of July you get to be around nearly 3,000 people inhabiting an amalgam of time, and especially in a place as lovely as Fort Niagara State Park. The water in Lake Ontario actually was blue. And the fortification, now known as Old Fort Niagara, has been well-preserved even though it was built by the French in 1726 and took a 19-day pummeling in July 1759, when a few thousand British and Indians out-maneuvered 600 Frenchman sitting pretty in a big castle protected by cannons and stone walls.

But being on the battlefield exactly 250 years later, I couldn’t help but imagine the 348 people who died and the many others who were injured or suffered. When they trembled for their lives could they ever have imagined that a bloodless, G-rated recreation of their deaths eventually would become someone’s hobby?  

Why bother with reenacting a 250-year old war, when Americans in 2009 can just go to Iraq or Afghanistan to see a bloody war for the empire up close?  Kowalczk doesn’t explore these questions, although for me as a seventeenth and eighteenth-century historian, they’re paramount.  It makes me wonder about the future of reenacting North American wars, when we have so many young vets with real-life experience in a war zone, many of whom are still coping with war-related injuries, disabilities, and trauma.

As it is in Kowalczk’s narrative, the reenactors seem a little strange, even almost “queer” for their love of reliving the past and their feelings of always being out of time in the present.  Sometimes his language makes the connection of reenacting as queer explicit, like when he writes about the importance of dress in reenactor events:  “Like drag shows, re-enactments hinge on sartorial panache.”  At other times, he emphasizes the man-out-of-time aspect of a reenactor’s life.  Here, he describes his main connection to the world of reenactors, a Kansas City man he calls “Old Hickory” because of his career as an Andrey Jackson reenactor and model:

He’s never been married or had children or pets. “I don’t think I’ve ever truly been in love either,” he said on the way to Niagara. These days he’s looking for an attractive, independent, middle-aged, single woman interested in history, who reenacts the 18^th century and sews. One imagines he may be looking for a while.

.       .       .       .       .

“In real life I’m just a wallflower,” he once confessed to me, before adding, on a brighter note, “but when I found reenacting everything changed.”

In 1992, at age 44, he took up black powder shooting and visited a War of 1812 site in Kansas called Fort Osage. There he met some F&I reenactors (anachronistic, yes, but who really cares), and he barraged them with questions. He bought clothes, a musket, and slept in his car at events. Some considered him “a suit” and “a mooch,” given his white-collar job and healthy diet, his constant requests for help and lack of handyman skills, but he paid those criticisms little mind. At events he was approached by the public, asked questions, even photographed. For the first time in his life he felt appreciated, like he had something to offer the world.

“Now when I’m in my street clothes I don’t feel like that’s my identity,” he said when I once asked him, Who are you outside of this?

In that conversation I drew a circle in my notebook and asked him to fill in the elements of his life — family, hobbies, friends, the job he’d quit, whatever — and to shade in the categories that involved reenacting. The exercise perplexed Old Hickory; he pushed my notebook away. “I don’t need to do that,” he said. “Reenacting is the circle. That’s it. There isn’t anything else anymore.”

Fort Number Four, Charlestown, NH

In Kowalczk’s telling, reenactors really are different from you and me, but does that explain the popularity of reenacting?  Some enthusiasts might make it their whole lives, but it strikes me that the desire to live in the past (if only on weekends and special occasions) is a wish more widespread among white men in particular than among others.  Something that I and others have observed before is that only some Americans romanticize the past, because the rest of us recognize how much more awful our lives would have been (holding race and gender constant).  For example:  Chauncy DeVega  at We Are Respectable Negroes wrote recently about a story in which a white woman expressed a wish to live in the time period in which Gone with the Wind was set, saying to her African American friend, “Wouldn’t you have loved to be there?”  Only after a few startled moments did the African American woman point out the obvious:  “Cindy, I would have been a slave.”  Romaticizing the past, like reenacting, is a White thing. 

Perhaps this is what makes me uncomfortable about reenactors–their interest in reenacting violent events (warfare, principally) which from the first Anglo-Indian wars of the seventeenth century through our modern wars, were either explicitly racialized wars (most Anglo-Indian wars, the Mexican War, and the wars waged by the Frontier Army against Native Americans) or wars that mobilized ethnic difference and white racism in the war effort (as in World War II and the war with Japan, the Vietnam War, and Iraq and Afghanistan). 

It’s not that reenactors have an uncomplicated view of the past–I’ve gone to several historical reenactments over the past 15 years, in every place I’ve lived, and for the most part I’ve been impressed with their research and knowledge about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  I’ve been to a reenactment of the Boston Massacre at the old Customs House in Boston; a reenactor camp in Eaton (near Greenville) Ohio, with a focus on the frontier wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (including reenactors for both the U.S. troops and Shawnee families); King George’s imperial troops and their Indian allies and enemies at a reenactor camp in Brooklyn, Michigan; black powder gun enthusiast-reenactors of the fur trade days here in Colorado; and I photographed some Seven Years’ War reenactors at Fort Number Four in New Hampshire when I was there to take some pictures for my book.  But while complex, their vision of history remains blinkered and segregated, not because they exclude reenactors of color now (they don’t) or because they themselves have explicitly racist motivations, but because of the stories they choose to tell, and the stories they’re leaving out.

Re-enactments of slavery times and of slave auctions have come in for both criticism and praise from all quarters–praise for their attempts to depict the history of slavery honestly, and criticism for being extremely (and some would say gratuitously) explicit.  But there are plenty of heroic moments in women’s history, African American history, Latin@/Chican@ history, and Native American history that aren’t being reenacted.  Might we see a future in which African Americans re-enact the major struggles and violent confrontations of the Civil Rights era?  Are there women’s groups who regularly dress up in hundred-year old clothing styles and re-enact the violent climax of the suffrage movement?  Personally, I would turn out as a spectator for these events–and I might even be persuaded to get into costume and participate myself–but who will play the thugs with the torches, guns, clubs,  firehoses, chains, and gavage equipment?  Will middle-aged white men be persuaded to cede the heroic roles to other reenactors?

If you have any interest in historical reenactors, go read Kowalczk’s article.  For all of my quibbles, it’s a really thorough overview of historical reenacting, and a rare view of reenactors doing something other than the U.S. Civil War.  He captures in many respects the regional flavors of reenacting that go beyond the Civl War-era.  Furthermore, his interest in masculinity and gender evident in this article aren’t accidental–Kowalczk has written elsewhere on these themes as in this essay, “Manhood, Lorain-style,”  about growing up in the Rust Belt and picking a fistfight to prove he wasn’t “gay.”  This essay might also be of interest to readers of this blog, so print up a copy or zap it onto your e-reader. 

Kowalczk concludes “Embedded with the Reenactors” with an explicit point about the gendered and even childish nature of the fantasies at work in reenacting.  He writes:

Among them was an attractive young mother with two little boys. One of them sat in a stroller and the other ran around pretending to be a soldier. Despite being in uniform, so to speak, I explained to her what I was doing and asked why she brought her family to a battle reenactment given the kind of message it imparts. She answered, “It’s just something to do. And this is what boys do anyway. They’re conquerors — they think they’re born to be conquerors. I used to get tired of them playing war games, but then I got tired of trying to redirect their imagination.” And together we watched her son pretend to kill an imaginary enemy as we walked off the battlefield.

The Aftermath

Later, and mildly depressed, I went to an ice cream shop inside the fort. As luck would have it, I sat beside two other mothers and their four little boys who were arguing. Naturally I eavesdropped.

They were civilians, and I assumed the mothers also had brought their children to foster an all-American, male fascination with fighting and war. But these boys didn’t care at all about the battles, the reenactors or the fort. Like the reenactors, but also unlike them, these children were somewhere outside of real life and real time.

“I’m Mario,” one of the boys yelled.

“No, I’m Mario,” another said.

“OK, can I be Luigi,” the third asked.

The whole thing went on for five minutes, until one of the exasperated mothers put down her fudge sundae and snapped. “Half a day! Just half a day,” she pleaded. “Can you guys please go one day without arguing who’s who in the video game world.”

Still, electoral racism cannot be reduced solely to its most egregious, explicit form. It has proved more enduring and baffling than these results can capture. The 2012 election may be a test of another form of electoral racism: the tendency of white liberals to hold African-American leaders to a higher standard than their white counterparts. If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.

The relevant comparison here is with the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Today many progressives complain that Obama’s healthcare reform was inadequate because it did not include a public option; but Clinton failed to pass any kind of meaningful healthcare reform whatsoever. Others argue that Obama has been slow to push for equal rights for gay Americans; but it was Clinton who established the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy Obama helped repeal. Still others are angry about appalling unemployment rates for black Americans; but while overall unemployment was lower under Clinton, black unemployment was double that of whites during his term, as it is now. And, of course, Clinton supported and signed welfare “reform,” cutting off America’s neediest despite the nation’s economic growth.

.       .       .       .       .       .      .       .       .      

In 1996 President Clinton was re-elected with a coalition more robust and a general election result more favorable than his first win. His vote share among women increased from 46 to 53 percent, among blacks from 83 to 84 percent, among independents from 38 to 42 percent, and among whites from 39 to 43 percent.

President Obama has experienced a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans—from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected. The 2012 election is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent. If he is, it may be possible to read that result as the triumph of a more subtle form of racism.

There’s a lot going on in her column–go read the whole thing.  I agree with her suggestion that a lot of white liberals were completely turned on by the (delusional) fantasy that the election of Barack Obama as President would expiate centuries of violent and persistent racism.  That fantasy was in my view a terrific example of racialist thinking among the flatteringly self-styled “reality based” community.  But it strikes me as circular reasoning to suggest that giving up this racialist thinking and coming to a different conclusion than Harris-Perry about the President’s achievements or failures is itself “a more subtle form of racism.”

Secondly, Harris-Perry’s history of the Clinton administration is damned unfair and misleading on the question of the Big Dog and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  Why does no one seem to remember that DADT was a compromised forced on President Clinton after he tried to integrate the military in 1993, but was rebuffed and humiliated by fellow Democrats like Sam Nunn, not to mention the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell?  (Powell’s history of antigay activism was forgiven awfully fast, wasn’t it?)  Yet here we have Harris-Perry telling the world that DADT was a prejudicial scheme dreamed up by “the Clenis.”  Now, we can certainly argue about whether or not it was a useful expenditure of his political capital to push for military desegregation immediately upon his inauguration in 1993, but that’s what in fact he tried to do.  Is there really any question about the amount of political courage it took to attempt desegregation in 1993 versus 2011, now that the majority of Americans as well as the majority in military service supported the repeal of DADT, and now that it’s been years since some U.S. states began marrying gay couples? 

Is it “a subtle form of racism” for me to ask these questions?

Presidents are responsible for their own successes and failures.  (Put another way, while presidents are of course not all-powerful, no one has as much power as a president himself to shape his electoral destiny and presidential legacy.)  If liberal support for Obama has waned–and by all accounts it has–then it seems more reasonable to ask what Obama might do to win liberals back, if in fact this is something he’d like to do, rather than pre-blaming racism for the possibility that Obama won’t be re-elected in 2012.  Don’t get me wrong–racism is still an enormous problem in this country.  Each new generation of Americans manages to keep racism alive in terribly inventive ways.  I just don’t think that the President of the United States can be convincingly portrayed as racism’s most concerning victim.

If Obama doesn’t win re-election, the reasons will be many, varied, and hotly debated by contemporaries and historians for decades to come.  Racism will likely be part of the reason that individual voters might not support him when they supported Clinton in 1996–but it seems that there are lots of more significant reasons for Obama’s potential troubles next year, such as 1) Bill Clinton is a better politician who knew how to connect to people emotionally and with convincing warmth and sympathy, and he gave great speeches, 2) Clinton had a much more beatable, clownish, Republican nemesis in the form of Newt Gingrich, 3)  Gingrich compromised and otherwise worked with Clinton in ways that the Republicans won’t work with Obama, 4)  Bob Dole was a humorless stiff on the campaign trail, 5) Clinton was always a centrist, so liberals never believed he was one of them anyway, 6) Clinton had been the Governor of Arkansas for 10 years before becoming president, whereas the presidency is the first executive office Obama has held, 7)  Obama’s hold on his own party has been shakier from the start–more Democrats voted for Hillary Clinton than for Obama in the primaries, and Obama has had notably poor relations with Democrats in Congress, even for a Democratic president.

Above all, we have 8) The economy was booming and gas cost less than a dollar per gallon in the mid- to late 1990s.  And so, once again, we can debate his relative skills and political merit, but we must acknowledge that Bill Clinton is just about the damned luckiest man in the history of American politics.  There are a lot more one-term presidents than two-term presidents in American history, after all.

‘Cos it’s a steady job
And it’s the only thing that makes me money
And it gives me something to laugh about. . .

The last time I learned about the Columbian Exchange was in high school. Learning dates and the sequence of events, and getting familiar with maps and geography, was central to my high school history experience. As a history major in college the emphasis on maps, dates, and events diminished, as the work in primary sources came to the forefront.

I can’t imagine 1493will be much required in college history courses, as this type of historical narrative for a popular audience (written by a journalist and not a historian) probably does not conform to how postsecondary history is taught. This is perhaps too bad, as I just did not know most of the history of Columbian Exchange described in 1493.

Learning how to “do history”, to work like historians, is probably not a bad thing. But most history undergraduate students will not go on to graduate school. A book like 1493, a book with strong opinions and lots of dates, geography, people and events, might be an example of the kind of works we should make room for in our history courses.

Kim is probably right that a synthetic work aimed at a popular audience probably won’t be on a whole lot of college and university syllabi.  But why should books aimed at a general audience be taught by professional historians, when students might instead read a more challenging book with a professor on hand to guide them through it?  Students are perfectly free at any point of their college or post-collegiate lives to pick up a book like 1493 and read and enjoy it, just as Kim did.

Quite frankly, I don’t think I need to show my students how to read a book like 1493 or celebratory biographies of the so-called “Founding Fathers” by David McCullough.  (I think I personally might die of boredom–and my number-one criteria for selecting books for my syllabi is whether or not *I* think they’re exciting or interesting and can stand to read them again.)  Student can find and read the popular books on their own, and perhaps my former students will get a little more out of them because they’ve had to read other books about the eighteenth century by (for example) James Sidbury, Clare Lyons, Sharon Block, Kirsten Fischer, Jon Sensbach, and Annette Gordon-Reed.

Finally, I disagree with Kim’s construction of popular history versus academic history–a history “with strong opinions and lots of dates, geography, people and events” on the one hand, as opposed to the dull, primary-source based history that professional historians write and teach on the other.  (Wait a minute–I thought one of the problems with academic history is that it’s all just facts and dates and geography.  Clearly, history is too important to be left to the historians, but we’ll go with Kim’s complaint that there aren’t enough strong opinions, facts, or dates in academic histories.)  As I suggested above, strong opinions are central to my interest in books and in assigning them to students.  How much stronger an opinion can you find than (for example) Ramon Gutierrez’s forceful argument that berdaches are not early modern heroes of gay liberation but rather were more likely conquered enemies and victims of rape?  How about Annette Gordon-Reed’s awesome smackdown of the Thomas Jefferson biography industry of the past two centuries?  I don’t know what Kim read as a History major in college, but maybe he should have looked for more interesting or more challenging courses.

Kim should perhaps hie himself over to a history classroom at Dartmouth, where he is not a History professor but rather “the director of learning and technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science Program at Dartmouth College” and “has a Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University.”  I’m pretty sure that the History faculty over there would be surprised to hear Kim describe their work in these terms.  They probably think that showing students how to “do” history with primary sources is important for developing their students’ critical and literary faculties as well as central mastering the discipline even as an undergraduate major.

Why do we never hear calls for science faculty to ditch their lab sections?  Does anyone seriously think that books by Atul Gawande and Robert Krulwich should supplant the lab- and research-based curriculum in science department, in spite of the fact that few science majors will go on to earn Ph.D.s in their fields?  I mean no disrespect to these authors, whose work I enjoy.  But I don’t for a minute think that they are working scientists.  And if I were a student or a parent of a college student, I’d sure as heck want to be trained (or have my child trained) by a professional, not by a collection of popular books on the subject.

The whole thing is worth a considered read, especially if you serve as a professor or advisor of graduate students and/or if you’re interested in dysfunctional departmental dynamics.  (Like most of us, she’s like a neurologist:  more certain on the diagnosis than on ideas towards a cure.)  While it won’t be a surprise to any nonwhite readers, perhaps some white readers will be taken aback by her frankness in discussing white privilege among so-called “white allies:”

Here’s what I want to say. I learned through these interactions that the vast majority of white people in the academy are absolutely clueless when it comes to race. Not race as some abstract category of analysis “out there,” but race as it is manifested daily in their/our own subject position and actions.

One archaeology colleague remarked to me at a cocktail party, . . . “Too bad for you cultural anthropologists. You should be like us in archaeology. We don’t have any race problems. Because all of our students are white!” I gamely tried to explain to this colleague that the absence of students of color in her program was actually a more profound sign of a “race problem” than any visible conflict could be, but she was unmoveable.

.       .       .       .       .       .      .       .       .      

Anyway, it goes without saying that graduate students of color so often feel heartbreakingly isolated in their departments and completely without a friend or ally. That when they try to talk to white faculty about race—not so much as an analytical concept, as a systematic source of blindness about how syllabi are written (ie, with exclusively white scholarship) or how classroom discussions are conducted (ie, when the tentative critiques of students of color are instantly and angrily shot down by defensive white students and faculty), they are met with on one end, bewilderment, in the middle defensiveness, and on the other end, hostility. That when they try to engage their white graduate classmates in a collective intervention, the white graduate students are often MORE defensive, angry, and hostile than the faculty members themselves, probably because of their own status insecurity.

(OUCH on that last point, as someone who was once a very defensive undergraduate and graduate student, and who struggles with defensiveness even today.)

I appreciated that cocktail party anecdote in the middle paragraph.  I’m sure that all of you white readers have been in on conversations with other white people in which you were presumed to be an ally with an essentially racist opinion or point of view.  (If not an ally, they didn’t think we’d ever tell on them, right?)  Do you think white disciplines and white departments really want to change?  What are effective strategies for making non-white students and non-white perspectives part of the way we do business? 

This is a question that feminists should be in sympathy with, because it’s undeniable that the influx of women into the academy is clearly linked to the production of feminist scholarship.  In my experience advising M.A. students, I’ve personally seen how gay graduate students have come up with fascinating questions and innovative ideas for coming to new conclusions in their research in the history of sexuality.  Our departments and our disciplines have a long way to go, but at least in the humanities departments I know of, they are much more inclusive of white women and white gay faculty and graduate students than they are of faculty and graduate students of color.

What do you think?

Every year some female graduate students tell me that they feel overlooked, marginalized, silenced in some seminars. They paint a picture of classrooms where the alpha males—so-called “theory boys”—are encouraged to hold forth in impossibly obscure language, but where their own interventions elicit no response. These women, in short, say that they are not listened to, that they are not taken seriously, and that they get the impression that their perceptions of the matter at hand are of no interest to anyone else. 

Such experiences tend to reproduce a particularly clichéd ideology in which theory and abstract thought are thought to belong to men and masculinity, and women are imagined to be the bearers of emotional, personal, practical concerns. In a system that grants far more symbolic capital, far more intellectual power, to abstract theorizing than to, say, concrete investigations of particular cases, these women lose out in the battle for symbolic capital. This is bad for their relationship to the field they love, and it is bad for their careers in and out of graduate school. This is sexism, and all this goes to show that sexist effects often arise from the interactions of people who have no sexist intentions at all.

But there is another side to this. Sometimes I have a conversation with someone who has been described to me as a theory boy. Then I invariably discover that the theory boy doesn’t at all sound like an intellectual terrorist. He is, simply, profoundly and passionately interested in ideas. He loves theory and precisely because he loves it, he has strong theoretical views.

Moi concludes that faculty play a critical role in encouraging dialogic conversation rather than monologic performance, and that “[s]ome of us—professors and graduate students—need to learn to stop being so touchy, vain and self-regarding, so that we can listen to well-founded criticism without becoming defensive. Others need to learn to become more assertive and how to stand their ground when their views come under pressure. We all need to care more about formulating our thought precisely and less about the impression we make on others.”  But the point about faculty leadership is key, I think–it’s fun to engage in a lively discussion with passionate students, but we need to consider why some may not want to engage in the conversation, and how we can ensure that the ideas of those students get a full and fair hearing.

Moi’s article struck me as relevant because I’ve had a few interesting conversations recently that suggest that faculty play a role in perpetuating this division by using different language and different standards in evaluating their women versus men graduate students.  First, a friend at another university remarked on the fact that one of the graduate students in her department is roundly praised as among the strongest and smartest graduate student in the program, but professors (including some from feminist scholars) also emphasized how they thought she needed to be more humble, to tone down her intellectual dominance, and to not think so highly of herself.  Maybe this is true–no one likes an a$$hole, right?–but my friend thought it was potentially a very gendered reaction to this student’s sex and clear feminist perspective.  Would a male student so highly rated be told to tone it down and to be more humble?   

Then last week, I had a telephone conversation with a former student who has just finished her first year in a doctoral program, and she reported getting almost exactly the same message, but this time directly from the faculty she’s working with.  This student has a Master’s degree already, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to them that she’s got some opinions about the kind of coursework that she wants to do or that she’s very adept at working with university faculty.  My former student has remarked on how submissive and non-confrontational student culture is at her new uni compared to Baa Ram U., so there is also the issue of institutional culture to consider here.  And yet, she is taken aback by the fact that her new proffies have understood her boldness and her confidence as a problem, at least initially.  They’ve permitted her to take a stronger role in her curriculum, but several have commented to her that they didn’t know what to make of her until they got to know her a little better.  It left me wondering:  would a male graduate student with her exact record of achievement be met with such surprise that he had his own opinions and shared them with his professors?

(N.B.:  I told her to get used to being called a pushy b!tch.  It’s just what happens when you’re a woman with an opinion, so do what you need to do for your education and don’t let it hurt your feelings.  I also told her that her program and her professors were commendably flexible when it counted, so she just needs to focus on her coursework and excel.  I’m sure she’d appreciate any other advice the rest of you might have for her in the comments below.)

Now, these stories amount to N=2 and they leave me with more questions than answers, so I want to hear from the rest of you–graduate students and faculty alike:  what have you seen and heard lately with respect to gender, graduate school, and the equitable or inequitable evaluation of men and women?  What about race or sexuality, or other aspects of students’ identities?  I’m teaching the introduction to graduate school course for our incoming Master’s students this fall, so I want to be extremely vigilant about evaluating all students fairly and equitably.  I agree with Moi that faculty have a critically important role to play in creating classrooms and grad school environments that encourage vigorous open discussions where everyone’s ideas get a critical but fair hearing and every student is evaluated on the strength of hir work. 

It’s fashionable to pretend that “the ivory tower” is a world apart from “the real world,” but faculty evaluations (formal or informal) have direct, material consequences for others:  the way graduate students react to the contributions of other students can either inspire their peers to further study and achievement, or it can disillusion and discourage them.  The way faculty evaluate first-year graduate students and react to their work inside and outside the classroom eventually will make it into letters of recommendation for further graduate study, for fellowships and prizes, and eventually for jobs.

Maybe it wasn’t all of a sudden–maybe it’s a process that has happened over the last few years, or maybe I was born this way, but I find myself wanting to align myself with the queer bloggers ever more closely.  The queer bloggers I read and feel a comradeship with don’t think that there is only one way to be a good lesbian or gay man.  They don’t police the language that other gays and lesbians use to write about or talk about their own experiences.  We sometimes disagree, but they don’t feel the need to lecture me about daring to write about queerness or question the authenticity of my queer sensibilities. 

Some of you heterosexualists, especially some of you who identify online as mothers:  not so much!  Quite frankly, I’m tired of my comments threads being jacked by people claiming to be mothers who are offended by this or that thing that I wrote about motherhood.  Although Historiann is not a blog about motherhood, I will talk about motherhood whenever I like because I am an American women’s historian, and motherhood is something about which women’s historians in general have had a lot to say.  Feel free to disagree with anything I write–but don’t bother with the complaints about “hurt feelings” and the insistance that your subjectivity is the only one that counts.

Dr. Crazy has written about the ways in which the interests and views of one subset of women–mothers–come to dominate conversations in the feminist blogosphere.  For example, conversations about improving workplaces for women come to be about maternity leave and child care, as though the careers of non-mothers are somehow perfectly free of institutionalized bias against all women.  She writes:

But don’t tell me what I should think or what words I’m allowed to use. Don’t expect me to believe that the needs of parents are somehow more important than the needs of other workers. Because I just don’t believe that.

Giddyap!

Some conversations here this summer have followed a familiar trajectory–like yesterday’s post in which I made an aside about how I didn’t think motherhood should qualify one for an exemption from jury duty.  The comments degenerated into accusations that I’m smug and not authentically feminist because I wasn’t sympathetic to the difficulties of finding child care, the frustrations of women who care for their own children, etc., when I thought it was clear that I criticized *one* woman in particular for mobilizing motherhood as a strategy for avoiding the responsibilities of citizenship.  (As I said in the comments there–I’m sure Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of seven, is spinning in her grave!)

So if this is what some readers think it means to be an authentic straight mother/feminist  blogger, I want off this wagon train.  And if anyone asks, tell them that I just went gay all of a sudden! Now, which of you gay bloggers is going to fix me a drink? (I’ll bring the steaks, obvs.!)

Women in Early America is an anthology on women in America from contact through the Revolutionary era. Proposals for essays that employ a transnational approach and that rewrite master narratives are especially encouraged. As the volume is largely intended for use in undergraduate courses, essays that are written for that audience and that address major themes in women’s and gender history courses are also particularly desirable.

New York University Press has expressed strong interest in publishing this project. I’m in the process now of soliciting proposals for chapters so that I may put together a book prospectus within the next few months to secure a contract. If you are interested in proposing an essay for this volume, please send an abstract and cv to tfoster4 AT depaul DOT edu. 

Recently, I edited New Men: Manliness in Early America which explored how manliness was defined and redefined in the context of colonial and Revolutionary America. This volume is a companion volume and uses the same starting point as New Men which began as follows: “In 1782 when J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur published his description of American society and wrestled with what it meant to be an American he articulated a question that many were asking: ‘What, then, is the American, this new man?’ For every generation that followed, the question has resonated.” Women in Early America takes up Crevecoeur’s question and applies it to early American women using the insights of women’s and gender history.

For the record:  I was a reader consulted on his proposal for New Men back in 2008, and I thought it was a strong proposal.  The completed book is even stronger than the proposal was, as it features the cutting-edge scholarship of emerging scholars like Benjamin H. Irvin, Carolyn Eastman, Tyler Boulware, and Natalie A. Zacek, while also offering essays by senior early Americanists like Kathleen Brown, Trevor Burnard, Ann Marie Plane, and Janet Moore Lindman.  (I see that many–but not all–of these scholars have a Johns Hopkins U. connection.)  Bookended by a preface by Mary Beth Norton and an Afterword by Toby Ditz, Foster has produced a collection that should command respect and a wide readership. 

I think it’s high time for a new collection of essays on early American women, especially since the number of us working on black and brown women’s history and/or on women who speak Spanish or French or Nahuatl instead of English has expanded a bit so that a collection these days could be published in which white, English-speaking women are not the subject of the majority of essays. I also think that it would be terrific to see the book incorporate the new emphasis we’ve seen recently on material culture as a way of understanding women’s lives, as we’ve seen in books by Marla Miller and Laurel Ulrich, and in essays by Sophie White and Linda Baumgarten, for example.

Some of you may recall that we had a rip-roaring discussion on the state of early American women’s history at the Omohundro Institute conference in Salt Lake City in 2009, and early American women was the subject of the William and Mary Quarterly-Early Modern Studies Institute workshop at the Huntington Library last month.   Those of you who contributed to those conversations should consider sending Foster a proposal!  I’m assigning many of the essays in Long Before Stonewall in the History of Sexuality in America course that I’m co-teaching next fall with Ruth Alexander, and I certainly will consider adopting Women in Early America for my American Women’s History to 1800 course.

I once gave a conferece paper titled “Fields of Screams,” after an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon on an old episode of The Simpsons.  It was about borderlands warfare and masculinity, and although I discarded the specific argument in that paper it helped me work out some ideas about space and gender.  Recently, I’ve been having fun shocking people with Judith Bennett’s “lesbian-like” interpretive frame for understanding eighteenth-century Ursulines.  I’m not sure where this idea is going, but it’s fascinating to see some people react so strongly and so negatively to the use of the word “lesbian” to talk about the eighteenth century!  (Bennett’s lesbian-like women is in fact a very nuanced concept.  It’s not so much about a particular sexuality but more a critique of the heterocentricity of women’s history, and an argument about creating space for imagining women-centered women’s communities in the distant past.  Still, many people can’t get beyond their very fixed notions of what “lesbian” means.)

One of the things that I think was so desctructive of the controvery surrouding Michael Bellesiles’s book Arming America a decade ago is that it fed the popular notion that professional historians dig up allegedly objective facts and simply report them.  We do that–but anyone who has worked in an archive and thought for about 4 seconds about hir sources knows that there’s no such thing as an “objective fact.”  And furthermore, the art of history is in the assembly and interpretation of problematic individual facts.  I think it’s perfectly fine for historians to be wrong, and that it’s not evidence of professional misconduct to make an argument that the consensus of our peers judges incorrect. 

I like Bennett’s idea of experimenting with interpretations of history in “playful, wise, and careful ways.”  Why shouldn’t we?  What do the rest of you think?