A Rich and Adventurous Journey: The Transnational Journey of Gender History in the United States

In the mid 1980s, I became involved with a group of historians from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway who were intrigued by some of the same questions around wage-earning women that had long fascinated me. Several trips to Scandinavia and a comparative project later, I began to assess the impact of this kind of involvement on my work as a historian of the United States.¹ Because that assessment occurred at about the same time as I, like many other historians of women, began to turn toward gender as an explanatory category, it opened the question of how gender, which had so effectively participated in reshaping our national history, could help us to think across national boundaries as well.

My experience was probably not unusual. In the 1980s and after, many historians of women in the United States began to turn to gender as one way to understand systems of ideas that shaped national politics. As they—we—did so, it became clear that the only way to hold gender constant was to look at it across cultures rather than within them. In the brief comments that follow, I try to trace the history of a gendered transnational history as it has affected the work of historians of the United States. I argue that historians of women and gender within the United States helped to reframe our discipline even as our increasing awareness of national historical traditions outside the United States shaped the practice of women's and gender history within it. Although transnationalism has opened up a ground for gendered comparisons, gender has been one of the integrative devices that have enabled the practice of an international or transnational history. Women's history in the United States is a huge and unwieldy subfield, so what follows is necessarily idiosyncratic: it constitutes a very personal view of the development of a field.

In its modern incarnation, the history of women in the United States dates back to the late 1960s. Although it cannot then be said to have been part of an effort to reshape a discipline, the pioneering work of Eleanor Flexner, Gerda Lerner, and Ann Scott played an enormous role in encouraging young scholars to rethink their work.² Its expansion over a span of nearly forty years has been shaped and encouraged by three things: prevailing practices in the discipline of history; the structure of academia in the United States; and the influence of a vital women's movement.³ Each of these helped to nurture the new subfield of women's history and its transformation into the history of women and gender.

Historians trained in the United States were in some sense lucky. In the 1960s, the field of history was in flux—some would say crisis—wrought by a controversial war in Vietnam, a powerful civil rights movement, and a widespread cultural revolution. The first demanded a new look at how the history of American domestic politics and foreign, particularly cold war, policy had been written; the second insisted on a reevaluation of how effectively such fundamental values as equality of opportunity had crossed barriers of race; the third raised questions about the imposition of authority and ultimately fostered a history from the bottom up. Each of these contributed to questions about traditional historical wisdom. All of them drew strength from parallel shifts in the structure of American higher education whose dramatic expansion in the postwar period made room in the academy for a new generation of instructors. New possibilities for employment and promotion opened doors to women as well as to men. Now widely known as revisionist, or "new left" historians, the 1960s generation encouraged (although they did not invent) new practices in history, especially in social history, anthropology, quantitative history, material culture, the new labor history, and social movements. All these provided spaces within which to study women and ultimately opened paths toward women's history.

At the same time, a newly vibrant women's movement encouraged increasing numbers of young women to seek professional training and to participate in campaigns...