Early Modern Notes

Clearing out the drafts folder (so many false starts…), I see that I forgot to post a link to this terrific essay by Keith Thomas last year. (I presume I had plans to write some clever commentary and forgot.) I think it’s still worth linking even though it is six months old and I can’t remember whatever the smart thing it was I wanted to say about it.

Thomas looked back to the TLS 1966 special issue on ‘New Ways in History’, which included Thomas’s own manifesto ‘The tools and the job’ (unavailable online as far as I know), and traced how the discipline of history has been transformed since then, in ways that he anticipated and many ways that he did not. Plus an amusing anecdote about having GR Elton to dinner the week after the issue came out.

(I also forgot to note where I got the link from, so no hat-tip. I have become, truly, alas, a rubbish blogger.)

I was asked: “Is there a difference between local history and national history? (Apart from the scale obviously)”. The quick’n'dirty answer is: it’s all about the scale.

Well, this is how I see it, anyway, if you want to read on for the longer answer…

(more…)

I started this post quite a while ago and never finished it, in part because I discovered that the more I found out about him the more I disliked its subject, Henry T Ford. (And also because I don’t finish a lot of draft posts…) But a comment in one part of Marc’s useful and interesting introduction to historical method series persuaded me to drag it out again. (And thanks to him for spurring me to make the effort…)

Modern critical investigation has actually caused many to question the validity of history as a whole, as seen by Henry Ford’s famous ” History is bunk” statement.

Well… I’d agree with the proposition, but unfortunately the Ford quote’s not a good example of it. It’s one of those quotations everyone knows, right? ‘History is bunk’. Guaranteed to bring out any good historian in a rash, and proof positive of the short-sighted, narrow-minded ignorance of the industrialist Henry Ford, yes?

Not really, no.

He did say those three words in one quoted source (if you rip them out of context), which I’ll come back to shortly. But it isn’t quite what he originally said, in an interview printed in the Chicago Tribune in 1916. And what he really said then, and what he thought about history, is much more interesting than you might expect. The reporter had asked Ford why he opposed the build up of American armed forces, and used the example of British naval resistance to Napoleon’s army more than a century earlier.

I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there (to England) and I don’t care. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.

Ford’s attitude involved, then, an emphatic rejection of using the past to inform and justify present actions (a view with which most modern academic historians would agree). And secondly, he had a real dislike of the narrow political focus of academic history at the time (with which many modern academic historians could also sympathise). Some time after the interview, Ford sued the Tribune for libel (for a different story it had printed about him), and he was subsequently humiliated in court for his lack of formal history book learning (he had had only the most basic school education, after all). After that, he said something that doesn’t get quoted everywhere:

I am going to start up a museum and give people a true picture of the development of the country. That is the only history that is worth observing, that you can preserve in itself. We’re going to build a museum that is going to show industrial history, and it won’t be bunk. [That decision led to the creation of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.]

And here’s another less famous quote to finish:

As a young man, I was very interested in how people lived in earlier times; how they got from place to place, lighted their homes, cooked their meals and so on. So I went to the history books. Well, I could find out all about kings and presidents; but I could learn nothing of their everyday lives. So I decided that history is bunk. (1935)

There’s plenty to detest about Henry Ford - his racism and antisemitism just for a start. (He was a philanthropist, but a conservative, highly patriarchalist one.) But his attitude to history was not at all what is so often assumed on the basis of those famous, misquoted, words.

……………….

Henry Ford’s time machine
Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village
Henry Ford, short biography at Wikipedia

Last week (or the week before?), one of the contributors at C18-L drew my attention to a new piece of medical history research in which I have a certain personal interest: Did all those famous people really have epilepsy?

I’m an epileptic. I haven’t had a fit for a very long time, but I continue to take the medication to make sure that state of affairs continues. I was apparently relatively unusual in that it began well after childhood, and I only ever had a handful of fits, in the space of a few months, before we got the medication right (thankfully). I can’t help suspecting that, unless future historians have my medical records, they might well find it quite hard to determine whether I ‘really’ had epilepsy either. (But it certainly caused more than enough disruption to my life at the time.)

Diagnosing illnesses of people long dead is frequently difficult and controversial (George III: was it really porphyria? The Black Death: was it really bubonic plague? Nearly forgot: What killed Napoleon?). The external symptoms of epilepsy are pretty varied and often capable of confusion with other conditions; it’s hard to diagnose for certain without scanning technology (as the article points out). Quite rightly, overly confident diagnoses of historical afflictions founded on inadequate evidence can be criticised. And I still don’t think that it’s an acceptable methodology to use references to syphilis in a certain well-known writer’s work to suggest that he suffered from that disease, either.

But it works the other way round too: surely, what this researcher should be saying - particularly of the pre-modern personalities he studied, and more especially since this study seems to have been based purely on secondary sources - is that he doesn’t have the evidence to prove that those people were epileptics, and that we should be cautious in making that diagnosis, rather than that they were all, definitively, not-epileptics. Clearly, researchers with medical expertise have valuable knowledge to bring to the history of medicine. But I do often find myself wishing that they’d take a few lessons on the basics of historical research from us historians.

(Or, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most sceptical of them all?”)

If you have access to the journal English Literary Renaissance, turn to the special issue of June 2003, focusing on early modern ‘rogue literature’.

It has (among other things) an article by Lee Beier (social historian) and one by Linda Woodbridge (a literary scholar), both discussing Thomas Harman’s Caveat or warning for common cursitors (1566) (extracted in this later text, but not easily available online, it would seem. I’ve been looking at the EEBO 1573 edition).

Beier first up:

In contrast to [literary] critics, social historians have been skeptical about the value of the literature of roguery. While A. V. Judges believed in the 1930s that Harman’s was “the best sixteenth-century account of vagabondage and roguery” and that its author had “all the deftness of the trained sociologist,” a later generation has been less impressed. Paul Slack observed that the gangs of vagrants with hierarchies of leaders and followers and a canting vocabulary “were by no means as common as Harman and particularly his later plagiarists suggested.” Still more forcefully, James Sharpe found that “the literary image of the Elizabethan vagrant evaporates as soon as court records are examined.”* My own research indicates that, while legal records were more reliable guides to the vagrants themselves, the literature was still a valuable source, because it crystallized and reflected the discourses of official and learned opinion. Only recently has Harman’s reputation improved among historians, Paul Fideler observing that, despite its limitations, the pamphlet presents a “unique history of the undeserving poor” and a “series of anti-vagrancy ‘moments’ or preoccupations, each shaped by its migratory, able-bodied poor.”
…
Literary critics have done scholars a great service in re-examining Harman’s Caveat. Historians had become skeptical about the literature of roguery almost to the point of denying it any value whatsoever. … But neither the historians’ rejection of the texts nor the new literary
approaches is entirely persuasive. Contrary to some historians’ skepticism, the Caveat is a rich and complex text which, while open to a variety of readings, can still be productively studied with traditional historical methods…

Woodbridge:

In 1972 Arthur F. Kinney noted that scholars were still drawing on Harman: “for years Harman has been considered an early but most successful sociologist, . . . [whose] keen eye for significant detail of dress, food, origin, training, and the sexual life of his subjects . . . [align him] with modern sociology.” In 1977, J. S. Cockburn used Harman’s Caveat alongside
records of court assizes as valid sources of historical information on “vagrant criminals and their methods.” In 1983, David Palliser adduced Harman’s information about rogues when attempting to gauge the number of vagrants on the roads in the sixteenth century and the extent of their criminal involvement; the same year, Peter Burke wrote that Harman was “moved by a curiosity not unlike that of modern anthropologists,” and in 1994—in nearly identical words—Robert Jütte concurred. In 1988 the sole source Roger Manning gave for the information that “there did exist a small hard core of ‘sturdy beggars’ and ‘lusty rogues’ whom no law could compel to do honest labour” was Harman’s Caveat. In 1994, A. L. Beier could still describe Harman as “traditionally . . . the most credible of observers of the canting underworld.” … A fairly regular use of Harman as evidence has continued, then, into our own time…
…
I am a literary scholar, not a historian, and I am going to argue that rogue literature creates a fanciful world drawing fulsomely on comic storytelling and jest books, a creation of imaginative writers that ought to be inadmissible as historical evidence of social conditions in the real world.

(I’ve omitted the footnotes in both cases. But plenty of names are being named, so you get the picture. As Beier’s argument develops, by the way, his main targets seem to be Stephen Greenblatt and William C. Carroll.)

Discuss.

…

Update
* This is from Sharpe’s textbook, Crime in early modern England, at p. 143 (2nd edn. 1998). But 3 pages later, Sharpe tells us:

Something of the mentality of these marginal people is conveyed in the Kentish JP Thomas Harman’s report of an interview with a ‘walking mort’ in the 1560s. The justice upbraided the girl for her ‘filthy living and wretched conversation’, and advised her to seek employment. ‘God help!’ she replied, ‘How should I live? None will take me into service. But I labour in harvest time honestly’.

OK, this quoted passage is great; it even sounds plausible in relation to evidence from archives, compared to many of Harman’s caricatures. But why should it be any more reliable than the rest, especially as evidence for the views of the vagrant poor themselves? It gives the distinct impression that historians pick and choose from this sort of source material arbitrarily, uncritically using it when it suits their argument and rejecting it when it doesn’t.

….

I should add that I read these while preparing next week’s class on ‘respectable fears and myths’, looking at crime in cheap print sources. I may assign an extract from Harman as a primary source (unless I go for a ‘Last Dying Speech’ - I have a real corker, classic Sabbath-breaking and dice-playing –> murder –> the gallows. Fab stuff).

It’s over 80 years since Alice Clark wrote what is recognised as a classic work of women’s history: Working life of women in the seventeenth century (1919). However, it’s spent long periods since then out of print - and it’s out of print again at the moment (as far as I can tell), despite having been republished by Routledge in 1992 with a splendid new introduction by Amy Louise Eriksson. There was also a 1982 edition introduced by Jane Lewis and Miranda Chaytor, and a 1960s reprint of the first edition. I thoroughly recommend it, but you’ll have to try the library or hunt down a secondhand copy, I’m afraid.

In addition, there’s very little about Clark online (she is mentioned here), which is my excuse for writing this. I have a soft spot for Alice Clark (not least for her maxim that “those who don’t make mistakes don’t make anything”). This was her only book. She wasn’t a conventional academic historian; rather, a feminist and businesswoman whose life encompassed many other activities and who only began historical research at the age of 38. In fact, she was a member of the Clark family, who were Quakers, of shoemaking fame (you know, those horrible sensible shoes you wore as a kid because your mum made you, except they recently got all trendy and cute).

Born in 1874, she was strongly influenced by the ‘first wave’ of feminism, particularly by debates about female economic dependence and ‘parasitism’ on men and its negative effects on women and society as a whole. She also needs to be understood in the context of early 20th-century concerns about the social effects of industrialisation and pioneering sociological investigations into contemporary conditions of the poor, and increasing interest in what was then called ‘economic history’ (it would now be termed social history). The contribution made to that historiography by women was subsequently ignored by many historians; feminist historians have in more recent decades worked to reconsider their significance.

Indeed, women were significant participants in what we might justifiably call the ‘first wave’ of (academic) social history in the early 20th century, only some of them writing women’s history. For its practitioners, it was just as important as the predominant political histories of states. But both social history and women’s history remained at the margins of the discipline.

This was in part because many of the practitioners were at the margins, or ‘amateurs’ working outside academic institutions, to which women were only just being admitted. Some universities were more welcoming than others. The London School of Economics was co-educational from its founding in 1895; women as both staff (including history professors such as Lilian Knowles and Eileen Power) and students constituted a significant minority presence. It was prepared to include unconventional students like Alice Clark, who was probably attracted by its concerns for contemporary social policy issues as much as the space it gave to economic history.

But before she went to the LSE, she spent much of her adult life (despite long periods of illness) working in the family factory, starting with an informal apprentice, to become a director in 1904. She was active in the suffrage cause, as a Liberal and on the Friends’ Committee for the Relief of War Victims. She originally took up a studentship to research women’s history in 1913 during one of her enforced breaks for illness, and completed her research after the war. After Working life of women was finished, she returned to the family business; she died in 1934.

She began her book with a forceful rejection of any notion that women were “a static factor in social developments” and therefore unimportant in historical study. On the contrary, she argued, they changed considerably over time with changing environments, and those changes require careful study because of the close bonds between women and men and women’s (indirect) social and moral influence. And she saw the seventeenth century as a period of profound change in English women’s lives; not perhaps in terms of most women’s actual experiences of change so much as in underlying trends - the forces represented by ‘capitalism’.

She used a wide range of sources (most of them in printed editions rather than directly in the archives): letters, diaries, wills, account books, magistrates’ wage rate assessments, parish records, guild and municipal records, tax returns, workhouse records, as well as prescriptive literature, pamphlets and literary sources. They were often quoted at length, employing a technique of building up a larger picture through details about and by individuals.

She traced a three-stage process of change in the organisation of work, particularly affecting women:

1. “Domestic industry”: all production takes place within the family, which is entirely self-sufficient.
2. “Family industry” (existing alongside 1. during the middle ages into the 17th century): the family is the key unit for the production of goods for sale (or exchange). While some household members might work for wages, most of the work was carried out within the household, and its income belonged to the whole family rather than to individuals.
3. “Capitalistic industry or industrialism” (first introduced in the 13th century, but not significantly expanding until the late 17th century): production takes place outside the household, controlled by the owners of capital while labourers receive (and compete for) individual wages.

Different groups of women were, however, affected differently by these changes:

1. “Capitalists”, including both the aristocracy/gentry and nouveau-riche;
2. The “common people”, small farmers, independent tradesmen/artisans etc (whom Clark saw as both the largest group and the most vigorous and worthy)
3. Pitiful “wage earners”, trapped in poverty, a small but growing group.

Among women of the first group, activity and hardiness gave way to idleness, pleasure and parasitism; equally affected but in a very different way were women of the wage-earning group who were dependent on incomes insufficient to support families. Women who had worked in higher-status, economically rewarding crafts and trades and professions were increasingly squeezed out by demands for capital and/or specialist training, and forced into insecure, low-paid and low-skill sectors. Everywhere, she argued, the consequence was the diminishment of women’s roles and status within the household and with it their influence on society in general, as this period saw a fundamental transition from a society which did not rigidly distinguish between domestic occupations and other work settings, to the modern division between ‘home’ (for women) and ‘work’ (for men).

So, what do historians make of it 80+ years later? It would be surprising, really, if 3 decades of research since the 1968 reprint had not led to considerable modification of Clark’s work (she herself foresaw the possibility of it being discarded “when a deeper understanding of history becomes possible”). In some ways, it remains virtually unrivalled as a broad-ranging survey, since recent research has tended to be more specialised and narrowly focused. Many modern historians of work, including women’s work, would not argue with Clark’s broad conception of economic life and production. Research has more than demonstrated the key importance of the household and domestically-organised production in the early modern economy and society (and Clark was right: the ‘housewife’, whether you think of her as parasitic or an essential, unpaid service worker, is a modern invention). And her book, with its remarkable range and imaginative use of source materials, continues to stimulate research and ideas.

However, it’s agreed that her chronological framework was unsatisfactory and too simplistic. A number of developments she associated with the seventeenth century (such as the ‘masculinisation’ of professions like midwifery, and the removal of most production from the domestic environment) properly belong to the later 18th century or even later. She equated ‘capitalism’ with ‘industrialism’, but the former undoubtedly preceded the latter by some centuries. Further, subsistence household economies were already extremely rare by the 17th century.

Clark’s pessimistic view of modernisation has been criticised in view of long-term continuities in women’s work (low-paid, unskilled, casual, etc), and her emphasis on capitalism as the primary driving force with overwhelmingly negative effects has been challenged. Capitalism, from ‘putting out’ industries to the new factories of the 19th century, could equally offer women new working opportunities. The average differences between men’s wages and women’s wages have remained virtually unchanged since the middle ages. The single line downwards from a past ‘golden age’ has been rejected. Equally, though, its opposite, ‘whiggish’ celebratory accounts of ‘progress’ for women into modernity, are treated with much more caution too. Clark’s research reminds us that there are alternative, more sobering, interpretations.

Reading

Alice Clark, Working life of women in the seventeenth century, intro and ed by Amy Louise Eriksson (3rd edn, 1992 [1919])

Judith Bennett, ‘ “History that stands still”: women’s work in the European past’, Feminist Studies 14 (1988)

Maxine Berg, ‘The first women economic historians’, Economic History Review XLV (1992)

Maxine Berg, A woman in history: Eileen Power, 1889-1940 (1996)

Lindsey Charles and Lornal Duffin (eds), Women and work in pre-industrial England (1985)

Michael Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes: women’s work and men’s work at harvest time’, History Workshop Journal 7 (1979)

Michael Roberts, ‘Women and work in sixteenth-century English towns’, in Penelope Corfield and Derek Keene (eds), Work in Towns 850-1850 (1990)

Olive Schreiner, Women and labour (1911)

Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres: a review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’, Historical Journal 36 (1993)

* For those with access, Alice Clark is in the Online DNB *

(And after all this activity in the last couple of days, I think I might just go into blogging hibernation for the rest of week…)

Some women have never lacked historians: usually unusual women of high social status (who had some influence on the ‘male’ political world): queens, mistresses of kings, that kind of thing: what Gerda Lerner called ‘compensatory history’. The goal of women’s history as practised today, however, is to attend to and assert the validity of the experiences and roles of many kinds of women; to challenge perceptions that these were somehow a) ahistorical (biologically determined, therefore unchanging) and b) unimportant, not Real History.

Still, it should be remembered that women’s history is not something invented in the 1970s. (At Oxford University around 1960, a young early modernist, Keith Thomas, offered a series of undergraduate lectures on the history of women. His colleagues found the idea bizarre; the students stayed away in droves. Yet it must have seemed practicable to him - and he was prepared to try.)

To stick with research since the 19th-century emergence of the academic discipline of history, the ‘first wave’ of western feminism was accompanied by important work on the history of women in the early 20th century: in Britain alone, for example, work by Eileen Power (medieval history), Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck (women’s work), Ray Strachey and Sylvia Pankhurst (the women’s suffrage movement). Yet much of this was neglected for decades until the take-off of women’s history associated with the ’second wave’ of feminism and, more broadly, with the expanding horizons of history writing from the 1960s. That brought research on an unprecedented scale, and with larger ambitions to achieve a fundamental rewriting of all History.

There have been a wide variety of approaches to the history of women, and nearly all have had to grapple with particularly acute problems of evidence and interpretation: discovering new or neglected sources, approaching old ones in new ways, often borrowing methods and techniques from other disciplines. The growth of social history, another challenge to the primacy of political history narrowly defined (states, rulers, governments) cannot be disentangled from this; it offered new methods and perspectives, and often emphasised subjects of key importance to women’s history. (This was true in the early 20th century as well as the 1960s and 70s, although what we’d now think of as social history was then usually called economic history; this was long before the statisticians got in on the act.)

Some key ’second wave’ pioneers of women’s history, like Sheila Rowbotham, were socialists as much as feminists. But the relationship was not always an easy one; social history could all too easily continue to marginalise women. Labour history, for example, could be overwhelmingly masculine, narrowly focused on institutions; defining ‘work’ and ‘labour’ in particular ways, this kind of labour history tended to overlook the vital contributions of female labour, the variety and significance of the paid work that women have always done, and to entirely exclude any consideration of their unpaid work. And the relationship between Marxism and feminism was strikingly summed up as an unhappy marriage.

An important strand in women’s history has documented their struggles to win admittance to the ‘public sphere’ and to be placed on equal terms with men when it came to legal status, work opportunities, voting rights. This is a key constituent of what was dubbed ‘herstory’: retelling history from women’s perspectives, aiming to recover women’s experiences, ‘women’s cultures’, to document a distinctive female past. Women had been, in Rowbotham’s words, Hidden from History, and it was time to put that right. It’s still going strong too! And it was, and still is, also often about personal reclamations of history far beyond the academy.

Still, while it went far beyond the biographical ‘women worthies‘ or ‘compensatory history’ type of approach, herstory still tended to focus on histories of exceptional women, forms of rebellion against patriarchal norms, whether ‘public’ political activism or ‘private’ feminine desires and friendships. And how were ‘women’s worlds’ to be related to the world of mainstream history? It was not so clear how this approach could (on its own) ever be more than a supplement to Real History, all too easily ignored or, at best, accorded a token presence around the margins.

There was another problem. Who were these ‘women’ in ‘women’s history’? White, middle-class women? Women are not all alike (and no woman is only a woman). What of the influence of class, race, religion, nationality, sexuality, other social/cultural group identities, on women’s historical experiences?

The identification of these issues fostered the rise of ‘gender history’. Gender, it needs to be noted, is a concept that can be used in more than one way. Sometimes, it can simply refer to studying the relationships between women and men, and the ways in which ‘gender roles’ are socially conditioned. But there is a more theoretical/intellectual history approach, associated with ‘poststructuralism’, and perhaps most famously formulated by Joan W Scott, who argued that gender was a key ‘category of historical analysis’, and that it was vital to study how ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ were culturally constructed in relation to each other in different societies. The category ‘women’ itself had to be deconstructed (as did that of ‘experience‘).

The enquiry was no longer so much ‘What did women experience, and what did women, do in xth century in y culture?’ but rather ‘How (and by what processes) in xth century in y culture did gender help construct distinct masculine and feminine meanings and identities?’ [link may be dead: try archive version if it doesn’t work]

This was both stimulating and controversial, for much the same reasons that poststructuralist or postmodernist theories applied to history have been stimulating/controversial more generally. But it was, perhaps, felt to be particularly threatening to a field of history that was relatively new and politically engaged:

The deconstruction of the term ‘women’ and the emphasis on the differences between women at the expense of what they have in common, denies the existence of women as a political category and as a subordinate class.

Other concerns about gender history focused on the decentering of women as its subject. The history of masculinities is a fast-rising field; some (like Joan Hoff) worried that this lets men take over centre-stage again and that women’s history will get lost in the process. (I personally think that Hoff did not help her cause by calling male feminists ‘Tootsie men’.) Others disagree with those fears (I agree with them). The new histories of men are not like the old history of men; histories of women continue to be written; the boundary between ‘women’s history’ and ‘gender history’ is not a clearly-defined one, and nor (as this blogger would attest) do these varying approaches exclude each other.

It is impossible to summarise what’s going on in women’s history or gender history right now; it’s just too vast and diverse. Just take a look at the TOCs of some main journals and you’ll soon see what I mean. I think that in my area, early modern social history, there is currently a particular interest in ‘agency’ - exploring the ways in which ordinary women lived their lives within the constraints placed upon them, survived, negotiated with the system for a better deal without rebelling against it - and how ‘practice’ related to ‘prescriptions’. We ask about both ‘experiences’ and ‘meanings’. There have been some marvellous recent studies of early modern English masculinities; of crime and gender; splendid surveys unashamedly about women; and textbooks that make no mention of women or gender in the title at all - but they’re in there.

I’ll leave you some links to explore, anyway.

And feel free to contribute in comments (or indeed to blog about this yourself?)…

… What’s the current state of affairs in your own subject areas? (Period, place etc)
… Thoughts on your own research/teaching practice
… What are your favourite books? Which do you think are the most important, must-read works for people interested in learning more about women in the past and/or about the development of women’s history? I may well put together a bibliography of some kind.
… Favourite online resources and blog posts

………

Gateways and general stuff

BBC Women’s history
SOSIG: Women’s history
History in Focus: Gender
About Women’s history
Women’s history teaching resources

Essays, debates, etc

Myth and memory: old passions, new visions
History, she wrote
The challenge of opinionative assurance
Raising Clio’s consciousness: the writing of women’s history in the US
Integrating men’s history into women’s history: a proposition
Leeds gender studies e-papers
A group of one’s own: filling the gaps in women’s history
To feel a part of history: rethinking the US history survey
Women’s History Review (all issues more than 2 years old are free to access)
Gender as a postmodern category of paralysis (by Joan Hoff)
Unravelling postmodern paralysis
Mistrials and diatribulations: a reply to Joan Hoff
A reply to my critics (Joan Hoff)
Women’s history and poststructuralism
Women’s history: continuity, change or standing still?
History, feminism and gender studies [try archive version if that link doesn’t work]
How did Women’s History Month come about?

Intersections: gender, history and culture in the Asian context
Recovery and revision: women’s history and west Virginia
Gendering modern German history: rewritings of the mainstream
Feminist knowledge (African women’s history)
Feminist history in Japan

Bibliographies, reading lists

Short bibliography
ViVa bibliography of women’s history
Feminist history bibliography
Annotated bibliography of feminist historical theory
Women’s history bibliography

Book reviews

Writing women’s history since the Renaissance
Gender in history
Worlds between: historical perspectives on gender and class

Courses, syllabi

MA in women’s history (Liverpool)
MA in Women’s history (Royal Holloway)
Women’s history, feminist history and gender history (course unit)

… And bloggers!

Women’s History of Philosophy (Siris)
The search for agency (East Asian history) (Muninn)
This one’s for Dr Crazy (student whines spark great discussion), (New Kid on the Hallway)
Women, studying of (The Little Professor)

OK, around here it’s always women’s history month. (My MA at the University of York was in Women’s and Gender History; it seems not to be running now, although they still have a Women’s Studies MA.) Sometimes I focus specifically on women/gender; sometimes I don’t. It runs right through my PhD thesis although you won’t find it anywhere in the title or the chapter titles. And that’s increasingly true in academic history (in my period anyway), I think.

And so, I don’t take that much notice of Women’s History Month each year. (Well, look on the web, and it doesn’t get seem to get that much attention outside north America anyway.) The idea of “recognizing and celebrating women’s accomplishments” is nice, of course. This year’s theme is “Women Change America“, apparently. Hmm. And the National Women’s History Project has a press release. Feel good, sisters.

Learning about the extraordinary achievements of women helps diminish the tendency to dismiss and trivialize who women are and what they accomplish. In celebrating women’s historic achievements, we present an authentic view of history. …

Thus, women’s history becomes a story of inspiration and hope. A story of courage and tenacity. A story of promise, possibility and purpose.

I know, this is an awareness-raising thing, not an agenda for research. But me, I’m interested in women who weren’t extraordinary, too - or at least, no more extraordinary than anybody is. And it seems to me that the NWHP doesn’t really go any further than ‘celebrating’ a handful of ‘extraordinary women’ - leaders, activists, exemplars.

Which is hardly an innovative way of inserting women into history; what’s called the “women worthies” tradition has been around as long as the writing of history. (Anybody got a good link to some of Plutarch’s lives of women?) Writing biographies of exemplary or notable women is interesting and stimulating, of course. (I’ve done it here a few times, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to the rich and famous.) But it is only a beginning - and it never changed the overwhelming historiographical emphasis on men in previous centuries, so why would it do so now?

So anyway, I’m going to try to put together a few posts over the coming days about recent developments in histories of women and gender. (I might even get some modern history in, if I can remember what it looks like.)

You can help. Send your comments. Are there online resources and books that you’d particularly recommend? WHM events that you’d really like to tell us about? Classroom experiences of women’s history (learning or teaching) you want to share?

I don’t think Elya will mind if I post this link, which refers to an email conversation she and I had last week following my exercise in emotional rhetoric and the foregoing and ongoing debate on history, philosophy and historiography. (It’s not going away just yet, folks…) I’ll quote part of what Elya writes (but go read the whole thing, including the comments thread):

I was reading a collections of essays on the historiography of ancient Israel, and this reminded me of something I read much longer ago by J. Maxwell Miller on history as “conversations between the past and the present” …

A slightly different approach to simply being “true” to the subject needs to be taken in the history of history. We’d probably agree that (rightly or wrongly) two of the basic assumptions of historiography is that (1) one human society is analogous somehow to the next, and (2) that our current interpretations of reality are superior to what came before, dictating what is acceptable to us. We reject the 19th century Hegelian trend because their ontologies are - to us - not reflective of the world as we understand it. The early humanists and some of their predecessors (Spinoza) themselves rejected the theology-driven official church histories (like Luther’s “four monarchies”). Nicolas of Cusa gives us an interesting early naturalistic look at the Qur’an (and his reasons for rejection) in _cribriatio Alcoran_. Syncellus (Eusebius?) rejected the “lies” (chronologies) of Berossos and Manetho because because they were irreconcilable with his “truth” (Biblical chronology). This is what happens at the level of “truth” however defined, though we are now able to better appreciate their other qualities by treating them on their own terms. How do we justify that we are correct in rejecting Manetho’s god-pharaohs, Eusebius’ chronology, Nicolas of Cusa’s “Jewish influence” on the Qur’an, Luther’s “4 monarchies”, or the Hegelian impulse, except by reference to our reality?

…

The second thing that springs from this is that we could also characterize history as a conversation between the past and the present… What we think reflects in what we say about the past, and future historians will look upon us with hopefully the same respect and wonder that we look upon our predecessors and how they perceived their past. When I read Hesiod, I am constantly filled with the wonder that was his world, whether or not I accept that anything he describes actually happened. This tells me, perhaps, that what we are working on may some day be of great interest to our descendants (there’s that analogy again), and that our duty as historians is to record our understanding of the world for them. Being “true” to the people we study is still constrained by the same sort of difficulties anthropologists have with their subjects. We’re not talking about the totality of what happened in the past of course, but we seek the past through our histories to give us bearings in the present, and maybe inform the future. Our assumptions will be laid bare in the next generation, but for now, putting it down as a record is what is important - this is history as dialogue. We are our own subjects.

I might add some comments here later. At the moment, I should get back to the chapter I have to revise.

Some of you will be aware of the at times bad-tempered debate about history and philosophy that has been going on amongst bloggers in the last few weeks. The latest post by Brandon at Siris helped me to get clear in my mind certain things that I’ve been worrying over for a while. In short: historians don’t really need to beat themselves up about whether their accounts correspond to ‘what really happened’, so long as they correspond to the evidence relating to what happened, however problematic that relationship. And that means that we can continue to make judgements about the quality of our interpretations of the evidence - and, indeed, our interpretations of the likely (never certain) relationship between the surviving evidence and the lost ‘reality’.

And I have something more to add. As historians, we’re not trying to get at the abstract ‘truth’ of some abstract ‘past’. What we’re really doing is trying to do justice to the people who made those traces. It was they who made ‘the past’, just as we in the present make what in the future will be the past. I look at a document in the archives: say, one of these. It’s a real, fragile, physical object; it was created, painstakingly, by real people who were trying to communicate to other people something that was to them ‘real’ and important. I can’t know exactly what. They might have been dishonest, they might have been trying to be truthful but have been mistaken, or at best selective; they probably had only a limited view of what was going on; they were biased and frequently in dispute (these are records of conflict and contestation almost by their very nature). Now, post-structuralist theoretical perspectives have greatly helped us as historians to see these documents afresh, as constructed narratives, little exercises in story-telling. So, with Natalie Davis, we can put their “fictional” aspects at the centre of analysis: “By ‘fictional’… I mean their forming, shaping and molding elements: the crafting of a narrative… the artifice of fiction did not necessarily lend falsity to an account; it might well bring verisimilitude or a moral truth.”* Can I begin to convey the sense of wonder and delight that that new perspective gave me as a student? The new vistas that opened up to me - thanks to that dreaded thing ‘postmodernism’?

The people concerned in creating the document I have linked were nonetheless not writing novels (a very different kind of truth-telling through artifice). There are some basic ‘facts’ about that document: a man went before a magistrate and made a statement; something had happened to that man, something that made him turn to the forces of law and order in response. That was his reality (whatever difficulties I might have in interpreting the accuracy of what was subsequently written down). It mattered to him. Therefore, it matters to me.

These were not necessarily ‘good’ people; they were as flawed and mixed-up and complicated as we are now. They were like me and yet not-like me. I care about them (which is not the same as ‘empathy’, a touchy-feely woolly concept I don’t have too much patience with). And so, long before I have any obligations to other historians or to philosophers, I am beholden to them. They cannot come back to life and read what I write and say: that’s a lie! or, that’s so true! or, you just got that so wrong, you fool! Other historians may check me up to a point, dispute my interpretations, call me an idiot (or worse, a liar, a cheat, a fraud), but those people of the long-ago past, the actual subjects of my enquiry, cannot hold me to account. So, if we’re talking about ‘truth’, my goal is to be true to them as best I can. To be ‘right’ is the historian’s hope and at the same time (we well know) an impossible dream; to be honest, through all our own weaknesses and prejudices, is something we all can and should be.

…………………

* Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the archives: pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (1987).

I came across this list of Simon Schama’s Top 10 popular history books. It’s a few years old (shortly after Rembrandt’s Eyes (?1999), no mention of History of Britain), and in the light of his more recent pronouncements, interesting both for what it includes and what it doesn’t. Gibbon is there, ‘for the jokes and the fantastic footnotes’ (yep, footnotes) and so is Carlyle, though only at no. 8 - but where’s Macaulay? And the historian at the top spot, Richard Cobb, didn’t get much of a look in when Schama was telling us who we should emulate in our history writing, did he? Also here is Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World and one of my all-time favourites, Carlo Ginzberg’s Cheese and the Worms (that book turned me on to early modern history as a first-year undergrad).

This list, in fact, sums up my puzzlement at Schama’s statements earlier this year, which seemed to me to contradict his own history as a wide-ranging historian ready to experiment with subject and form: he appeared to want us to narrow our options (in both respects). It didn’t make too much sense, unless you saw it as an exercise in plugging his new TV series (which I didn’t find very interesting, despite the talents of the actors recruited to read the extracts; I wonder if it would have worked better on the radio), or a kind of defensive reaction to the criticisms of the History of Britain series for being old-fashioned. (It often was, but I rather enjoyed it anyway.)

This older list tells a rather different story, one in which diversity, the old and the new, different kinds of history (including the highly scholarly, if not the quantitative brands) and story telling, are celebrated. Perhaps Schama ought to go back and read it himself.

(Originally posted 24 June 2004.)

(It seems a good idea to follow up the Africa history re-posting with this, which was written around the same time.)

As my next-door neighbour* Brandon Watson has recently commented from the perspective of early modern philosophy, not everyone knows what ‘early modern’ means. Even amongst those who would recognise it, it covers a pretty varied timespan; it can, I think, start as early as the mid-fifteenth century, even if c.1500 is regarded as more usual. As for endpoints: some would not allow it to extend beyond about 1750 (in fact, many books of ‘early modern history’, in British history at least, stop at 1640…); for others it can clearly go to 1800 and even beyond. Americanists, of course, have another (more commonly used?) name for it, with a very clear terminal date: ‘the colonial period’. Or, if we are discussing the ‘early early modern’, up to the early seventeenth century, others - especially those focused on literature - may use the term ‘Renaissance’; and the ‘late early modern’ might go under the headings ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Industrial Revolution’, ‘Romanticism’…

And then there are nationally/regionally specific, often dynastic, titles covering various parts of the period: Tudor, Stuart, Ancien Regime, Tokugawa, Mughal, Ottoman. Those non-European ones, in their non-conformity to European periodisation, also pose some questions about spatial varieties (or even limits?) to the concept of ‘early modern’. A Japanese historian may seem on the surface fairly comfortable with the idea of early modern Japan (with the dates 1600-1868) - or is that just a pragmatic way of giving Euroamerican students a label that they can recognise, to make them more comfortable?

The cultural historian Peter Burke discussed the problems with ‘early modern’ at some length in an interview (and he too was sceptical of the applicability of ‘early modern’ to Asian and African contexts).

What I am afraid of is the reification of the period, and because of division of labour we want to divide ourselves off from the mediaevalists on one side, the modernists on the other. But if we started to believe that our period is homogenous, then that would be the end. So I treat it just as a flag of convenience… the dates that matter vary according to the problem you are interested in. And so if political history need not have, probably should not have the same dates as economic history, and the history of high culture probably should not have the same dates as the history of popular culture. And yet we want to do total history, so what are we doing? I think the only thing is we use this term, but we don’t pretend it’s more than convenience.

I agree. (Though might a philosopher like Brandon argue that this is a typical bit of historians’ fudging?) But I’d still be curious to know what historians of Asia and Africa in (roughly) the half-millennium to 1900 think about all this.

And if you know of good online resources (in English) for the world beyond Europe and north America during that period, do let me know.

(Originally posted 10 July 2004)

*That link is no longer current: see Houyhnhnm Land

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PS: These issues also inspired Ralph Luker at Cliopatria to post this link. Go and read it. (But watch out for that Luker guy, he’s trouble. He just accused me of foot fetishism, wouldya believe it?)

PPS: I love Ralph really; his thoughts on the question of ‘early modern’ in African history (histories) at Cliopatria have sparked off some great comments, well worth reading.

Erin O’Connor at Critical Mass has been doing family history, clearly a moving experience. On ‘rediscovering’ an ancestor, David Sells, killed in the Civil War, lost in an unmarked grave and misremembered by subsequent family:

How do you find someone who has been twice lost–once by his country, and a second time by his own family? What do you really know about him from a letter and a photo and a small, sadly generic collection of facts? What can you know? It’s the grand conundrum of historiography writ small, as genealogy.

I often have doubts about family history when it seems to be simply genealogy, the collecting of names for a family tree, with no apparent desire to know more than those basic dates - birth, marriage, death - or to learn about the lives, the experiences, the societies in which those lives were led. Yet that may, I realise, be unfair; behind those lists of bald names and dates could lie all kinds of frustrated efforts to fill in the gaps. I should know all too well from working with poorly indexed archives that - certainly before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - that searching for those lives beyond the parish registers and census listings must be an immensely difficult task.

When so much early modern government and administration was done in courtrooms, there’s a good chance that somewhere in there you’ll find something rewarding. We’re not just talking ‘criminals’ here (to take just one example: if your ancestor ran an inn or alehouse, and there were a lot of them about, they were supposed to be licensed by magistrates, and documents relating to this frequently turn up in Quarter Sessions records - as do prosecutions of those who didn’t get licences…). But could even the most devoted family historian afford the time it would take to comb through the vast swathes of the early modern legal records, the maze of local and central criminal and civil courts, church courts, manorial courts, borough courts, special jurisdictions, in the hope of finding just a handful of people?

This is not just a problem when hunting for individual people. One of the reasons new online resources like the Old Bailey Proceedings are so important is the way in which they make it possible to search for needle-in-haystack topics. This has the danger that it can lead to decontextualised cherry-picking (there was at times a little of that at the Tales of the Old Bailey conference I went to last month and never got round to posting about), but the benefits - especially if we can get to the point where we have a wide range of such resources to search through and combine - to my mind outweigh that risk. (If nothing else, it should make for some interesting undergrad dissertations for us to read…)

Online resources are - is this an exaggeration? I don’t think so - revolutionising family history. Hopefully they will gradually come to have a much greater impact on ‘academic’ history too. But of course, they’ll never free us from that ‘grand conundrum of historiography’ (a quote to savour, don’t you think?). And who would, in truth, wish it otherwise? Where would we be without the uncertainties, the gaps, the controversies, which force us as historians to interpret and keep on interpreting, thinking and re-thinking?

So, let me finish with this (which concludes with perhaps my single favourite ‘history quote’), from the introduction to the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl’s book on the history of the history of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon: for and against [1949], written during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands).

To expect from history those final conclusions which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines is in my opinion to misunderstand its nature… The scientific method serves above all to establish facts; there is a great deal about which we can reach agreement by its use. But as soon as there is a question of explanation, of interpretation, of appreciation, though the special method of the historian reamins valuable, the personal element can no longer be ruled out, that point of view which is determined by the circumstances of his time and by his own preconceptions…. we cannot see the past in a single communicable picture except from a point of view, which implies a choice, a personal perspective. It is impossible that two historians, especially two historians living in different periods, should see any historical personality in the same light… A man’s judgement - for however solemnly some people may talk about the lessons of History, the historian is after all only a man sitting at his desk - a historian’s judgement, then, may seem to him the only possible conclusion to draw from the facts, he may feel himself sustained and comforted by his sense of kinship with the past, and yet that judgement will have no finality. Its truth will be relative, it will be partial…The study even of contradictory conceptions can be frutiful. Any one thesis or presentation may in itself be unacceptable, and yet, when it has been jettisoned, there remains something of value. Its very critics are that much richer. History is indeed an argument without end.