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>> 17 1 Women’s Past and the Currents of U.S. History Kathy Peiss Less than half a century ago, the subject of women and gender barely registered in the scholarship and teaching of American historians. In remarkably short order, uncovering women’s past became a political imperative and intellectual passion, and then emerged as a legitimate area of professional inquiry and research. With some distance from its origins, it is now possible to consider women’s and gender history as particular forms of knowledge production that grew out of broad intellectual, social, and political developments in the post-World War II period. This chapter focuses on four conceptual “turns” in the field, and how they have shaped the practices of American historians and the study of women: the rise of women’s history; the change in subject from women to gender; the linkage between gender analysis, poststructuralism , and cultural studies; and the growing importance of transnational history. These approaches overlap and continue to inform the work of a new generation of scholars; their contours reflect intellectual agendas consciously pursued, but also unforeseen or underestimated developments that have affected the field. The Emergence of Women’s History The emergence of women’s history as an intellectual endeavor grew directly out of feminist political movements in the 1960s and 1970s. I discovered women’s history when I entered graduate school in 1975. I never took a course on the subject, but I found myself continually writing seminar papers on women. I managed to learn women’s history on the fly, as a teaching assistant one step ahead of her students. Indeed, there was hardly any historiography for me to master then. My reading list for Ph.D. orals included every piece of secondary literature on women’s history, and that was the last moment I could truthfully say I had read everything. As I began to conceptualize my dissertation topic, a history of working women, leisure, and sexuality that would eventually become Cheap Amusements, my advisers wondered 18 > 19 hold a session on the history of women, including a paper on the “nurturing of feminism in the United States” by Jeannette P. Nichols.2 Even more important were efforts beginning in the 1930s to establish repositories for women’s history, where the documentary record of women’s actions would be preserved and made available for future generations. Mary Beard was unsuccessful in creating a World Center for Women’s Archives, but the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and the “women’s archive” at Radcliffe College, later known as the Schlesinger Library, were both established during World War II. “No documents, no history,” Mary Beard used as her motto. If historical consciousness was a mode of making sense of the world and of placing oneself within it, such archives would serve as crucial sites of identity formation and political solidarity.3 The questions animating historians of women, as the modern field emerged, were informed not only by the second-wave political critique of male domination in the U.S., but also by the divisions within the movement over the means and ends of feminist social change. Although much of the success of post-1960s feminism lay in its ability to claim inclusion, equality , and rights in the framework of American political liberalism, it was the more radical approaches, especially socialist feminism and radical feminism, which shaped the early endeavors in women’s history. In hindsight, the close relationship between women’s history and second-wave feminist politics is readily apparent. An influential 1970 manifesto of the feminist group Radicalesbians , “The Woman Identified Woman,” de-eroticized lesbianism and expanded the spectrum of female-centered relationships. It provided the ideological foundation for Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s groundbreaking essay, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” even if Smith-Rosenberg did not acknowledge it; first presented as a paper at the 1974 Organization of American Historians meeting, it was published the following year in the inaugural issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Ellen DuBois’s pioneering Feminism and Suffrage traced the rise of an independent women’s movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Exploring the fraught relationship of antebellum women’s rights and abolitionism, and the growing consciousness of the particularities of women’s oppression, this history bore a striking resemblance to the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1960s out of the civil rights and antiwar movements, especially the view that women’s liberation required an autonomous movement...

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