Feminism's History

In 1974, Lois Banner and Mary Hartman published a book of essays they called Clio's Consciousness Raised.¹ Consisting of papers from the 1973 Berkshire Conference on Women's History, it was a rallying cry for many of us, an assertion of our intention to make women proper objects of historical study. If the Muse of History had too long sung the praises of men ("glorifying the countless mighty deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity"² ) , it was time now to bestow a similar glory on women. The second of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnnemosyne (Memory), Clio's special province was history (and according to some accounts also epic poetry—a version of history). Our challenge to her seemed simple: to make women's stories central to the memory she transmitted to mortal humans. In order to ease her task, we would supply the materials she needed: histories of the lives and activities of women in the past.

Of course, no challenge to the gods is simple and our effort could easily have been construed as hubris, for we were presuming to tell Clio what to say. The Muses have meted out dire punishment to those who sought to interfere or compete with them. When the Pierides tried to out-sing the Muses, they were turned into magpies, ducks, and other squawking birds. When the Sirens claimed to sing better, the Muses plucked out their feathers and made crowns for themselves. The minstrel Thamyris was blinded and sent to Hades for having boasted that he could sing more beautifully than the Muses. And, less cruelly, they had the last word when Prometheus claimed that he, not they, created the letters of the alphabet. This could have been a matter of dispute, the chroniclers tell us, "had not the Muses invented all tales, including that of Prometheus."³

Our goal was not so much to compete with Clio as to emulate her, although there is always an element of competition in such identification. Like her, we wanted to tell edifying stories whose import went beyond their literal content to reveal some larger truth about human relationships—in our case, about gender and power. Like her, we wanted to be recognized as the just source of those stories, although for us there was no classical myth to authorize the claim. Like her, too, we wanted all of history as our province: we were not just adding women to an existing body of stories, we were changing the way the stories would be told. In our identification with Clio, we revealed the double aspect of our feminist project: to change the discipline fundamentally by writing women into history and by taking our rightful place as historians.

The last several decades have seen the realization of both these aims. Of course the achievement is not perfect; neither women's history nor women historians are fully equal players in the discipline and we have by no means rewritten all the stories. Indeed, the temporal and geographic unevenness of our accomplishment—far greater success in Euro-American modern history than in ancient, medieval, early Modern, and non-Western history; far more success in introducing women into the picture than in reconceiving it in terms of gender—suggests there is more to be done. Still, the gains are undeniable. Unlike Clio, we cannot punish those who would deny our accomplishment, nor can we be only amused by the folly of those brothers of Prometheus who claim to be the real innovators, treating us as imitators or usurpers. (We still get angry.) We can, however, point to an enormous corpus of writing, an imposing institutional presence, a substantial list of journals, and a foothold in popular consciousness that was unimaginable when Banner and Hartman published their book almost thirty years ago. If we have not taken over history, we have claimed a portion of the field; once viewed as transgressors, we are now in possession of legitimate title.

But ownership, for those who began as revolutionaries, is always an ambiguous accomplishment. It is at once a victory and a sell-out, the...