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differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.3 (2003) 1-23



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Feminist Reverberations

Joan Wallach Scott


INTRODUCTORY NOTE: This paper was delivered by Joan Wallach Scott as the keynote address at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, held on June 7–9, 2002, at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Founded in 1929, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians was a form of early feminist caucus in the American Historical Association. In 1973, in the context of the burgeoning “second wave” of feminism, the group began to sponsor conferences where new scholarship on women could be presented. Held every two years and attended by several thousand scholars from the U.S. and abroad, the conference has become an international forum in the field of women's history. It has played a critical role in the legitimation and dissemination of writing on the history of women and gender.

In March 1942, only a few months after the United States had entered World War II, the chairman of the program committee for the American Historical Association's annual meeting, Yale historian Stanley Pargellis, wrote to Hunter College professor Dorothy Ganfield Fowler in her capacity as secretary of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. He was turning to Mrs. Fowler (as he addressed her—all the men [End Page 1] mentioned in the letter are referred to as Professor) for some advice. The general theme for the 1942 meeting was, fittingly enough, “Civilization in Crisis,” and the program committee (which initially had managed not to include a woman in its ranks) hoped to organize a session on women and the great crises of civilization. Pargellis thought that if the right scholars (man or woman) could be found, “we might produce an original and significant session of two or three papers, one on the changing functions of women in the fifth or the sixteenth centuries, and one on the nature of the problem today” (6 Mar. 1942). Fowler replied with the names of two scholars: Dr. Pearl Kibre, a medievalist, and Dr. Mary Sumner Benson, an Americanist working on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and (showing herself to be a model of disciplinary rectitude) she suggested that the question of women's status in the present might best be addressed more informally by members of the audience, since little reliable material was available for serious research (18 Mar. 1942). The following day, Professor Pargellis brusquely turned down her proposal:

Dear Mrs. Fowler, [he wrote], I am glad that you were interested in the subject about which I wrote you, but must confess that I was disappointed to find that so little attention has been given to the problem of the way in which the status of women reflects the character of a civilization. I gather from your letter that both Dr. Kibre and Dr. Benson have been concerned with descriptive treatments only, and that there is no one who could handle for the great critical periods a more interpretive approach. If my understanding of your letter is the right one, I think that we had better abandon plans for a session upon this important topic. (19 Mar. 1942)

Several days later, Fowler wrote back, assuring Pargellis that the scholars she had recommended were quite capable of interpretive approaches and offering to have the Berkshire Conference take over full responsibility for the session (23 Mar. 1942). He replied that “without committing ourselves in any way,” the program committee was willing to let the women historians explore some further possibilities. His letter went on to outline his expectations in a most condescending manner, defining terms (“by sweeping change we mean something more profound and more long range than a war [. . .]”) and time periods (“As for the American Revolution, we have come to the conclusion that it is of insufficient significance to stand along with the shift from medievalism to modernity as [End Page 2] a period of crisis” [27 Mar. 1942]). Fowler replied politely that she would take all this up with her colleagues at the forthcoming meeting of the Berks, but there is no correspondence...

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