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Reviews in American History 33.2 (2005) 217-223



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Shaping Public Memory

Julie Des Jardins. Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. x + 380 pp. Notes and index. $45.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

When we consider the knowledge we possess about the American past, we usually credit the development of the historical profession, principally in the context of the academy. However, in her engaging and richly detailed study, Julie Des Jardins has examined the production of historical knowledge much more broadly. The "historical enterprise" that has shaped our understandings of our past extends far beyond the university history department. Women academics appear here in force, but the enterprise Des Jardins excavates included a large cast engaged in an array of activities including collection and archival projects, local histories, and historical commemorations. Cast this way, women historians emerge as prolific and influential shapers of public memory in the United States. The numerous subcultures she identifies range from African American women concerned with "uplift" to DAR members worried about authentic Americans to feminists trying to create a single version of the suffrage fight. The most poignant passages relate to the politics of exclusion, but Des Jardins does not write a victimology. Instead, she has created a rich, flowing, and detailed narrative that reframes our understanding of the creation of historical knowledge in the United States. And that is not all. Des Jardins argues that historians need to make still another adjustment in thinking about their collective past: the multicultural and social history approaches that are commonplace today originated with women innovators not normally included in our historiographies.

This is not completely new ground, and Des Jardins draws on other fine scholarship, including recent biographies of women historians. She also expresses her debt to Bonnie Smith's superb study, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (1998). Yet Des Jardins's subject and approach are different from Smith's. The subject is twentieth-century U. S. history, whereas Smith included the United States and Europe. Smith's theoretical analysis probed how historical thinking and practice have been gendered. She pioneered in demonstrating how professionalization depended upon [End Page 217] masculinity since it defined itself against the lowly and unworthy amateur, understood to be inherently female. Des Jardins's study uses these insights as the backdrop for viewing the broader "enterprise" and the fine detail of women's knowledge-producing activities. Both studies ask us to acknowledge the influence of a male-centered narrative on how the profession has developed, but Des Jardins's study emphasizes the historians, a stunning array of lively, creative, courageous, and dedicated women whom all of us can claim and celebrate.

Des Jardins has used her structure to help convey her purpose. Part One provides a sort of overview up through 1935 focusing on broad outlines and the profession. In the second part, she zeros in on people outside the academy, particularly those writing regional, Native American, and African American histories. The third part focuses on two groups of women who were concerned with reconstructing the past as a way to create a more empowered present: African American women and white feminists. The final two chapters in the last part address the creation of women's history as a subfield. This structure works because there is so much happening at the same time, a chronological approach might have been incoherent. Still, it was sometimes hard to maintain both connections between the parallel strands and a clear sense of change over time. While there are many crosscuts inside chapters linking these separate trajectories, I found myself wanting more.

In the late nineteenth century—decades before professionalization—middle-class white women actively participated in creating popular historical narratives rooted in their maternal duty to teach the young about civic virtues. In the process, these conservators of a patriotic version of history enjoyed a degree of social power and even financial success. The rise of the new scientific history at the turn...

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