The Happy Marriage of Women’s History and Policy History: The Work of Jane Sherron De Hart

The papers you have read offer assessments of Jane De Hart’s intellectual interventions over the course of her long academic career. In them she is all mind, thinking out problems, merging oral history into policy history, stretching the craft of women’s history.

But the Jane I know is not a disembodied mind, and the historical context in which she made her career is sharply different from the context that people entering the profession now encounter. We all know that the past is a foreign country; let me sketch out some of the specifics of that landscape as Jane experienced it.

Preparing these remarks, I was reminded that Jane and I published our first major articles in the same issue of the Journal of American History in 1975. Martin Ridge, the feminist editor of the JAH, had been looking for a way to convey to the profession his strong support for the women who were becoming more visible in it, and he decided to construct an issue completely composed of articles by women authors. But to accomplish that he had to delay the publication of some essays until he had enough to fill an issue. He held onto mine for at least two years, maybe longer, and I believe he did the same for Jane’s; her essay on the Federal Theatre appeared long aft er her 1967 book, and only a year before the publication in the American Historical Review of her next major essay, on abstract art and the Cold War.¹ I have no idea whether, when the “women’s issue” finally appeared, anyone noticed.

It was not easy in those days to manage a personal life and a professional one. Jane married while she was in graduate school at Duke University. In the early 1960s, when she had passed her orals and was embarked on the project that was to become The Federal Theatre, 1935–1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton University Press, 1967), she and her husband moved to Princeton, where he had a position in the history department. Jane worked part-time for Educational Testing Service, and then was hired at Douglass, the women’s college of Rutgers, as a replacement for someone on leave.

When she was within a year of achieving her Ph.D., an opening occurred at Douglass, and she was offered a full-time position; a year or two later her book appeared, and now she was offered a permanent position at Douglass with an appointment to the graduate faculty at Rutgers; something of a dream job.

But in those days assistant professors at Princeton rarely if ever were considered for tenure, and her husband was offered a permanent position at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The concept of partner hires had yet to be invented; they returned to North Carolina, figuring something would work out, as it had in New Jersey.

Jane found that: (1) The UNC history department could not consider her as a candidate for any position because they had a nepotism rule; (2) The UNC American Studies Program, just beginning, had a line for a lecturer, for which, they adamantly insisted, she was “overqualified.” (3) Duke had a rule against hiring its own Ph.D.s. (4) North Carolina State, in Raleigh, already had one woman in its history department. The rumor was that the men had found her difficult and didn’t want another woman. (5) And UNC–Greensboro, less than an hour away from Chapel Hill, had never had anyone who commuted; an appointment was “out of the question.”

By now it was 1969. The next year the American Historical Association released what we know as “The Rose Report”—after its chair, Professor Willie Lee Rose, then of the University of Virginia—a critical evaluation of the status of women in the profession, calling it “a necessity . . . to remove existing disabilities and to establish a genuine parity for women historians,” and making clear how pervasive the problem was by publishing startling statistics that revealed the absence...