Three decades of women’s history in the United States

Holland and England and the United States. [[US actrivist Emma Goldman’s papers are in Amsterdam and the Hungarian feminist Rosika Schwimmer’s are in New York.

But US women’s historians are also American historians and American historians in general have traditionally not been internationally minded . American historians classically saw their country developing according to its own internal, “exceptional” logic, shaped by forces regarded as uniquely American. We in the US are slowly becoming aware of the rich scholarship on the history of the US being produced outside our national borders by perspectives that are new to us. (Italians have been particularly active.) A few of the subjects on which US women’s historians in particular write have profited from this internationalization, for instance the history of women’s role in the creation of modern social welfare policies . Also my own subject, the history of American women’s rights, has benefited from an increasingly international perspective.

Among cultural critics of the American Studies (diff from American history) field, US history is being energetically internationalized and here the reigning paradigm is that of a critical history of imperialism. Scholars are exploring the historical exercise of US global power, economic and political but especially cultural, and many have linked their explorations into the history of American imperialism with the issues of gender. In her influential book, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture, Amy Kaplan has taken the nineteenth century ideology of true womanhood and reframed it as an argument in which American women and their approach to the family and femininity Ironically, as some US scholars expose the history of American imperialism, they retain the US centered perspective. In the (anti) imperialist paradigm, Americans still act and the rest of the world is acted upon.
When we situate the US in transnational context, we need to recognize that there are historical actors on both sides and that historical influence flows back and forth across US borders, despite the greater power of the US. . US women, for all their assumptions of American superiority and global leadership, have historically been deeply influenced by the actions of other actors, other women, outside the US. The history of feminism makes this dynamic transnationalism very clear. Feminist influence and inspiration has often been exported by the US to the rest of the world but just as often it has been imported. I regard women’s rights as an internationally circulating tradition, in which ideas, organizations, politics and even people are transformed as they move about a world that has always, and not just in the last few decades, been thoroughly global.