Reflections on Being a Female Historian with an Interest in Gender

What follows are personal reflections from the participants in this forum about their own experiences in the field and what parallels, if any, they see between Massey’s generation and theirs.

I became pregnant in 1991, soon after Catherine Clinton and I discussed the possibility of coediting a volume of essays on gender and the Civil War. The extensive and wide-ranging work scholars were doing in this field gave me encouragement and inspiration; it made me believe I could carve out a scholarly home, even in a field that had been forbiddingly masculine. And yet, as we gathered and edited the essays for Divided Houses, I had also become trapped in my own institution’s retrograde (although perhaps typical) maternity policies. In my first decade of teaching, which was also when I gave birth to two children, I never had an actual maternity leave and so either used my “summer break” as a leave time or lost half of a fellowship year to taking care of a new baby. As a result, it took several years before I could get my scholarship back on track. My male colleagues, of course, used their fellowships and summer breaks as they were meant to be used: writing and publishing books and articles and then turning that publishing record into a platform to win more awards and prestigious job offers. I don’t think I really understood, at the time, how those early steps down the path of discriminatory practices could have far-reaching consequences. Neither did anyone else, including the university administration or most of my male colleagues. Still, I felt lucky to have the job I did and grateful that, at least from an intellectual standpoint, the horizons seemed to be expanding. In short, I think I experienced a kind of disconnect that was probably familiar to many female historians of my generation: we could glimpse the exciting possibility of pushing our scholarship across the gender boundaries of the past but were still being held back by backward institutional practices.

Some of those practices have improved—there is actually a clear and definite maternity policy now at my university—but women experience new types of institutional burdens. Women outnumber men among adjunct teachers while far more men hold full-time tenured positions. In addition, there is the all-too-common demand placed on women in the professoriate to take on administrative work and committee assignments, even administrative leadership, because some type of diversity is required, especially to make sure that those committees don’t continue to perpetuate cycles of sexist and racist discrimination. I’ve done more than my share of that work, and I’m glad to have done it, but it might be time for faculty and administrators to realize that fighting sexism and racism in the academy has to go beyond the faces you see in the dean’s office or on administrative committees and that proactive measures might be needed to make sure women and people of color get the opportunities, perhaps even some extra opportunities, to make sure they remain vital and productive members of their scholarly communities.