Three decades of women’s history in the United States

Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. This important shift reflects both the revival of mass immigration after 1965 and the growing importance in American self-understandings of California and the southwest, with their own multiracial histories. While the scholarly traditions in black history reach back over a hundred years, these other fields are much, much newer and so in some ways the challenges are even greater. The first books in the women’s history of Mexican Americans (by Vicki Ruiz), Japanese Americans (by Valerie Matsumoto), and Chinese Americans (by Judy Yung) only appeared in the 1990s. Each of these historians had the great responsibility of identifying the basic issues in her subject and laying out guidelines for future scholars to follow.

The shift towards multiracial scholarship in women’s history has contributed greatly to new understandings of the wellsprings of racism itself. Increasingly we understand that the construction of invidious racial distinctions rests on the sexual and reproductive policing of women, on the Feminists have been speaking of the oppression and liberation of women for hundreds of years but their actual purview was usually limited to those of their own social stratum. I believe that, in the United States for the first time, feminists have come to understand that a truly comprehensive feminist politics must be heterogeneous, capable of tolerating different as well as similar experiences and perspectives. Feminism is now being “spoken” and claimed by a wider range of women, especially with respect to race and ethnicity, than ever before.

Even so, I have some concerns here I think there is the possibility that the interest historians now take in race may subtly work to crowd out attention to the structure and workings of gender. OI also have concerns that the attention historians are paying to bringing out and criticizing the racist ideologies and actions within the history of white feminism – work which is very important to getting past those traditions – may be painting an historical picture in which feminist is identified exclusively with racism. Not only is this version of history politically unfortunate, it is untrue. American women’s history offers a small but steady historical stream of