Trying to Tell the "Whole Story" (Or More of It)

Trying to Tell the "Whole Story" (Or More of It) Christina Simmons I am a white U.S. historian and immigrant to, now citizen of, Canada. I define myself primarily as an historian of women and of sexuality. I experience the insider-outsider dilemma first, in my research and writing on sexuaUty in the early twentieth century which has included work on lesbianism, although I am heterosexual; second, in research on AfricanAmericans as part of my work on sexuality, and in teaching an African American history course; and, third, in teaching a joint Canadian-U.S. women's history course. I have no specialized training in either AfricanAmerican or Canadian history. I do see, as my title suggests, real benefits in working on groups I am not part of. This includes more people moving in the direction of "telling the whole story," though, of course, in these postmodern times we know that "completeness" is an illusory goal. But I will also chronicle the difficulties and focus on issues of danger, distance, and power. In investigating the ideological shifts occurring around sexuaUty in the early twentieth-century U.S. I noticed in the texts an extraordinary anxiety about sex segregation and implicitly about lesbianism. This led me to argue that the stigmatization of lesbianism was a key component of the reformulation of dominant ideologies of womanhood. Without that piece of the analysis, our understanding of changes in heterosexual ideology is incomplete. An intense focus within a discursive construction impties a polarized negative, and the stigmatization of lesbianism was that "Other" shadowing the promotion of flappers and more expressive female heterosexual styles. This boundary may have been easier to cross because I was doing cultural-intellectual history, writing about the concept of lesbianism in dominant cultural ideology rather than doing a social history of lesbians . My own deepest interest lay less in lesbian lives per se than in the uses of ideas about lesbians to control aU women. On the other hand, connectedness rather than distance brought me into the topic, since I am sure that the presence of lesbians as friends and in feminist groups I was part of made it more possible for me to see this element in the texts I was analyzing. A way in which I do experience my lack of membership in the category as useful is in teaching. I think that as a straight woman I can feel less anxious about addressing lesbianism than a closeted lesbian might (though I have, reportedly, been considered a lesbian by some students, not due to the content of my teaching but owing to my feminist activism). © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 152 Journal of Women's History Fall On the other hand, my distance limits the depth of my engagement, and I think might be less satisfying to gay and lesbian students. The second piece of experience I would like to examine is my research which eventuated in an article on African Americans in the social hygiene movement of the 1910s, which arose from reformers' concern about venereal disease and which led to some proposals for sex education.1 The difficulty in addressing this topic stemmed from my knowledge of the intense racist branding of African-American sexuaUty. I feared that to discuss African Americans as agents of their own sexuality, though it should be perfectly possible, might evoke for some readers the racist images of blacks as threatening agents of sexual danger. In addition, I was afraid of imposing an inappropriate interpretive framework due to my outsider's understanding of the field of African-American history, though I knew that its historiography was undergoing feminist critiques by African -American women. Certainly, from the point of view of the project and its possible contribution to the history of sexuality, expanding the study was beneficial because it made the work more complete. My interpretation of the white social hygiene movement was, briefly and crudely put, one that sought to control white women's growing social freedom and reinstate modified Victorian sex roles. What I learned by studying African-American involvement was very useful in shaping a more complex picture. The work affirmed the...