Heroics of Teaching and Writing Women’s History

The women who have contributed to this forum are my heroes. As historians who use gender as an analytical lens to study the Civil War, they open the field to students who would otherwise feel alienated from the topic. There is bravery in their act of rescuing voices of women and other marginalized groups and challenging us to reconsider the traditionally masculine nature of war. Though, as Massey tells us, the Civil War gave women the catalyst they needed to “leap from their spheres” and advance, and even though the abolitionist movement gave rise to the first wave of feminism in the United States, female historians are still forging a pathway into the crowded stream of masculine perspectives on the war 150 years later.

It would be difficult for female historians not to identify with Massey on some level. But she also raises troubling questions. Did Massey dance through a sexist minefield of historical publication? Did she know that her work would create a foundation for later scholars that, as Thavolia Glymph points out, delegitimized the struggles of enslaved women? Did she leverage their stories for her own power in a field where she used every tool available to secure her place? Do we do anything similar? And are we fully aware of how our contexts affect our interpretations?

I work at an institution that resembles Massey’s own Winthrop College for women. But while Winthrop shed its identity as a women’s college decades ago, my institution strives to be the women’s college of the twenty-first century. Yet the campus is no bastion of feminist thought. There are no women’s history courses offered to students, and the women’s studies minor has been canceled after a strategic amputation-like program review. In my composition courses, I teach Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and my students discuss his description of education’s alienating effect. According to Freire, the oppressor uses education to force a singular interpretation of the world onto students, which denies their power to affect change. My students grapple with this idea; we talk about how interpreting history from our perspectives gives us agency. Yet all the while, I realize that I am sending them on to history courses that privilege the usual perspectives on American history and the Civil War—perspectives that tend to overlook the significance of women and non-white individuals in American historical events. Sadly, I can’t change the slow-moving behemoth that is curriculum. Like Massey, I have to work within the limited framework available.

Every essay in this discussion struggles with Massey’s identity as a scholar and with her work. She is an imperfect foremother. Unable to separate myself from my own identity as an educator at a women’s college, I would still like to think optimistically that to the women who followed her in the field and to her students at Winthrop, Massey was a heroic figure, rescuing some women from the silence of history and demonstrating that women’s lives are worthy of exploration.