Politicizing Women’s History, Engendering Policy History

The usual story goes this way: Women’s History originated in social history and the feminist search for a usable past. Policy History originated as a reaction to the demise of political history. Women’s History was about everyday life and culture, the domestic and the private. Policy History was about government, bureaucracy, and politics, the public sphere. Policy History was born out of the anxieties of white men left behind by new identity-based histories, who, in searching for their own usable past, repackaged political history as policy history, looking to political science, of all deadly disciplines, to sex themselves up.¹ They later became terribly threatened when women’s historians invaded their home turf at the first Policy History conference at Bowling Green and subsequent ones in Saint Louis—though they could avoid going to sessions about women and gender and ignore the gender historians, while cultivating women who disavowed emerging feminist paradigms.

Sometimes it seemed that Policy History and Women’s History would never get hitched, with the first threatened by the gender turn and the second preferring the suitors of cultural and social history. The writings of Jane Sherron De Hart complicate this origins narrative (as does the support for gender and women’s history by the editors of the Journal of Policy History). De Hart shows how the two fields could not only live together but also thrive by informing each other. Women’s History could not be history with the politics—or the law—left out, nor could Policy History be written without attention to gender, sex, and women’s diverse lives—or an understanding of culture. Her essays have illuminated women’s places in policy processes as well as the gendered components of politics and policy—with emphasis on questions of equality, difference, and rights.

Writing Policy History before the field gained its name, De Hart sought to bridge the divides of Women’s History and Political History. She had earned a substantial reputation in U.S. Women’s History. Her edited collection with Linda K. Kerber helped define the U.S. Women’s History survey.² Already she was training a new generation of women’s political historians. De Hart taught the necessity of studying antifeminism as well as feminism and distinguishing between feminisms. Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA, a 1990 study of the ratification battle in North Carolina over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) written with Donald G. Mathews, revealed through the practice of writing history itself that historians of women need to take into account political and policy processes. But this prize-winning work further instructed historians of policy to consider gender ideologies and gendered interests in accounting for policy failure as well as success.³ “Classification by sex,” which the ERA would have curtailed, proved central to both the discourse and strategy stories that De Hart has generated.⁴

When women’s historians discovered that we were writing Policy History, many of us focused on social welfare. Our “maternalism wars” debated the discourse of motherhood and the focus on policies benefiting women and children that dominated Progressive Era reform. We debated the meanings of motherhood for women’s citizenship and questioned whether attention to female difference—women’s care responsibilities and even biological uniqueness—could beget equality.⁵ It is not that De Hart ignored the racialized gendered social assistance system that commonly goes by the term “welfare,” though she would come to frame it in terms of national identity.⁶ Or that she did not confront female “difference,” which she interrogated in essays on the antiratificationists (women opponents of the ERA) to uncover implications that stem from seeing women’s difference from men as more complicated than feminist revaluation of women’s culture or carework usually confronts.⁷ Rather, De Hart emphasized the political process and women’s search for equality and rights, not their fight to meet social needs. She placed the political first. She focused on three arenas that we would do well to remember in writing the history of other political times, including our own: women as mobilizers for or...