Three decades of women’s history in the United States

about “theory.” Feminist historical scholarship in the 70s and 80s has gotten a bad rap from younger scholars, in the US but perhaps here too, for what is considered its theoretical impoverishment. Modern feminist scholarship frequently enhances its own intellectual stature by contrasting itself with the supposedly naive empiricism of older research . I want to challenge the assertion that the pioneering generation of women’s history was theoretically undeveloped. It is certainly true and perhaps regrettable that historians of the U.S. in general, and US women’s historians in particular, are shy of explicit theoretical formulations. We tend to wear our theory, like our underwear, on the inside.

Nonetheless, the fundamental goal of our work into women’s history has always been theoretical: to explore the social construction of femininity. If occasionally we misunderstood rhetorical tropes as empirical descriptions, if sometimes we were tempted to a degree of essentialism in making claims for all women on the basis of the experience of some, nonetheless the basic point of our scholarship was the assertion that hegemonic assertions of femininity, such as the ideology of “true womanhood, ” were cultural frameworks for organizing fundamental relations of social power, including but not limited to those of gender. American women’s history in the 1970s drew attention to the centrality of the gender binary in the nineteenth century, within which masculine and feminine were mutually exclusive yet all encompassing terms constituting the entirety of human possibility, as ways of making claims not just about men and women, but about rich and poor, respectable and disruptable, black and white, and about America as a nation. Current understandings of the way that systems of economic and racial social inequality draw meaning from their links to systems of gender differentiation rest fundamentally on the work of this prior generation of women’s historians.

So what has changed in the practice of women’s history in the subsequent three decades? Have women’s historians just continued down these same roads, or have they pursued new paths? I want to examine three fundamental developments in the practice of U.S. women’s history in the last decade and a half.

First, the current generation of practitioners is far more likely to call themselves historians of