Transcript THROUGH THE FEMINIST LENS

THROUGH THE FEMINIST
LENS
FROM FEMINIST TO GENDER
HISTORY
MARY
BEARD
1946
Ann Summers
JOAN SCOTT
1975
1974-2007
THE
CHANGING
FACE OF
FEMINIST
NATALIE
ZEMON
DAVIS
1980’S-90’S
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HISTORIOG
RAPHY
MIRIAM
DIXON
1976
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Ann Curthoy and John Docker
THE FEMINIST CHALLENGE
1980’s onwards
Gender
historiography
60’s,70’s
Feminist
historiography
Mary Beard
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•Gerda Lerner criticized feminist scholarship for
topically narrow, descriptive and devoid of
interpretation. She warned against seeing
women as a unified group, using analogies
with other groups eg slaves or economi9cally
deprived
•Gender replaced patriarchy as category of
historical analyses
•Simone De Beauvoir The Second Sex (
philosophy)
•Women’s subjection not just economic or
political but embedded in the fabric of
Western Thought
•Link between feminist movement and
historians strong. They were often activists as
well eg Anne Summer
•Women as Force in History 1946
•Questioned the proposition that women were
members of a subject sex throughout History
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Bonnie Smith on the dual
tradition
• “Historical writing was not so much all
male as profoundly gendered, split
between an almost entirely male world
of professional academic history and a
parallel world of amateur history in
which both men and women had an
important place….producing works of
historical fiction, local histories and
family histories.”
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Mary Spongberg
Writing Women’s History since the
Renaissance
• “ In so doing they maintained a separate
feminine historical tradition exploring and
hybridising genres and developing them for
their own purposes; autobiographies,
biographies of Holy Women, history of kin,
secret history, personal memoirs, anecdotal
history, local history, geneology, collections
of folklore, journals and letters.”
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FORMATIVE IDEOLOGICAL
INFLUENCES
ANNALES
MARXISM
Eric Hobsbawn
Interdisciplinary
approach
POST MODERNISM
Foucault, Derrida
EXTERNAL SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE FIRST AND SECOND
WAVE FEMINIST MOVEMENT
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The dual nature of the
feminist legacy
Gender
history is
about gender
issues in
society
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Gender
history
is a
perspective
over
historiography
all areas of
history
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GERDA LERNER
• “ Too great a focus on oppression
returns the historian to the study of the
actions of men, or more precisely to a
male defined conceptual framework.”
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SUSAN PEDERSON
AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
• “If we take feminism to be that cast of mind
that insists that the differences and inequalities
between the sexes are the result of historical
processes and are not blindly "natural," we can
understand why feminist history has always
had a dual mission—on the one hand to recover
the lives, experiences, and mentalities of women
from the condescension and obscurity in which
they have been so unnaturally placed, and on
the other to reexamine and rewrite the entire
historical narrative to reveal the construction
and workings of gender.”
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DAMNED WHORES AND GOD’S POLICE
Anne Summers 1975
• An active feminist of the 1970s, who worked as a political
adviser to Prime Minister, Mr Paul Keating. From 1983 to 1986
she was First Assistant Secretary of the Office of the Status of
Women, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Summers
was a co-founder of the women's studies journal Refractory
Girl and of a number of books including Damned Whores and
God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia.
• Summers theme is that society segregates those who accept
their traditional roles ( God’s police) and those who buck
them ( Damned Whores, prostitutes, single mothers and
feminists). God’s police women are then used to maintain the
status quo by socializing the young in homes and education
into accepted obedience and further ostracism of Damned
Whores .
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THE REAL MATILDA
Miriam Dixon 1976
• This book traces the origins, derivations and
formation of Australian male/female,
black/white, convict/free interaction
patterns but within the context of a
patriarchal /fratriarchal( heavily Irish)society.
It draws on official papers, literature ,
newspaper and anecdotal evidence. Dixon
also draws on psychoanalyses in the
childhood gendering influences
• Her founding interest is the place of women
in the national identity
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Natalie Zemon Davis
A LIFE OF LEARNING lecture1997
• Professor Davis, has taught courses in
early modern France at Michigan,
Toronto, California, Paris, Oxford
Princeton and has pioneered
interdisciplinary courses in history and
anthropology, history and film and
history and literature, the study of
women and gender and the history of
the Jews in early modern Europe
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BRIEF BIO
• Born of Jewish Immigrants in Detroit Michigan
• Received PHD in 1959
• Married at 19 to Chandler Davis, a mathematician,
3 children
• Her works include;
• Society and Culture in Early Modern France 1975
• The Return of Martin Geurre 1983- the basis for a film
• Fiction in the Archives 1987
• Women on the Margins; Three Seventeenth Century
Lives 1995
• Acknowledges Marxism, Annales and Feminism as
formative influences
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Sources
• She makes use of numerous sources
such as judicial records, plays, notorial
records, tax rolls, early printed books
and pamphlets, autobiographies and
folk tales. She is a proponent of crossdisciplinary history, which consists of
combining history with disciplines such
as anthropology, ethnography and
literary theory
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Women on the Margins
• In her Women on the Margins (1995), she
looked at the autobiographical accounts of
three 17th-century women ;
• the Jewish merchant Glikl Hamel,
• the Catholic nun Marie de l’Incarnation,
who came to New France, and
• the Protestant entomologist-artist Maria
Sibylla Merian—and discussed the role of
religion in their lives.
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CRITICISM
• She opened her Women on the Margins with an imaginary
dialogue, in which her three subjects upbraid her for her
approach and for putting them in the same book.
• Some critics of her work find this troubling and think that this
practice threatens the empirical base of the historian’s
profession. Davis’s answer to this is suggested in her 1992 essay
“Stories and the Hunger to Know,” where she argues both for
the role of interpretation by historians and their essential quest
for evidence about the past: both must be present and
acknowledged to keep people from claiming that they have
an absolute handle on “truth.”
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Leon Africanus
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W
gFqI2_tNTk
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BRAIDED HISTORIES
An Herodotean Allusion?
• 18th-century Suriname studies networks
of communication and association
among families, both slave and free,
on the plantations of Christian and
Jewish settlers.
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Joan scott
• The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political
Action in a Nineteenth Century City (Harvard University Press,
1974);
• Women, Work and Family (coauthored with Louise Tilly) (Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1978);
• Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press,
1988);
• Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of
Man (Harvard University Press, 1996);
• Parité: Sexual Difference and the Crisis of French Universalism
(University of Chicago Press, 2005) and
• "The Politics of the Veil" (Princeton University Press, 2007
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BIO
• Joan Wallach Scott (born December
18, 1941) is an American historian of
France with contributions in gender
history and intellectual history. She is
currently the Harold F. Linder Professor
at the School of Social Science in the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, NJ.
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• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M
rknwNl818
•
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GENDER A Useful Category
for Historical Analyses
• “ the history of the term “gender” as different from “sex” —
particularly as it applies to socially-constructed rather than
biologically-determined distinctions. Interest in gender (and class and
race) as a category of analysis developed in the 1970s among
feminist social historians as a way of broadening the historical field
using different theoretical perspectives and for different objectives.
To Scott however, gender is most powerful as “a primary way of
signifying relationships of power” when it exposes how political
discourse has used gendered terms and references to create
meaning, by defining occupations and familial, political, and social
roles as masculine or feminine to create natural hierarchies or
oppositional relationships”
• ," Joan Scott argues that the study of gender must go beyond the
study of women. She argues that gender analysis must encompass
gender's role in constituting social relationships more broadly and in
signifying other relationships of power.
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Jill Matthews 2002
“Good History”
• “ By good I
mean…recognizing that
sometimes gender does not matter; that the
presence or absence of women sometimes does
not matter; that the fact of someone being a man
or a woman may not be the most important thing
about them and their behaviour. It means
sometimes using gender as a tool to analyze other
more important historical categories, rather than
making it the central issue.”
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STARKEY FOOT IN MOUTH
• "If you are to do a proper history
of Europe before the last five
minutes, it is a history of white
males because they were the
power players, and to pretend
anything else is to falsify."
• "But it's what you expect from
feminised history, the fact that so
many of the writers who write
about this are women and so
much of their audience is a female
audience. Unhappy marriages are
big box office."
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