Tales of Triumph

Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds. Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, the Political, the Professional. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xx + 295 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-253-33494-2 (cl); 0-253-21275-8 (pb).

This book is an important contribution to the historiography of women's history as well as to women in the historical profession in the United States. Thirty years after the founding of the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession (CCWHP) in 1969 (known as the Coordinating Committee of Women in History [CCWH] since 1995), twenty women who have been closely related to the organization trace interconnections among their private lives, political activities, and professional engagements. Editors Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri provide a short, but useful introduction to CCWH's intentions and achievements. Their aim in Voices of Women Historians is no less than to encourage women to enter the historical profession, oppose discrimination of women in the pro-fession, and promote research and instruction in women's history. Hostile forces were overcome gradually, and today the CCWH is an important national organization, able to offer prizes and support to graduate students, untenured faculty, and independent scholars. While successfully advancing research in women's and gender history, the CCWH continues to address such present day problems as planned closures of feminist research centers, welfare reform, and affirmative action. Cooperation in many fields has supplanted the originally cold relationship to the American Historical Association (AHA), and historians of women have occupied--and still occupy--central offices in the AHA.

Who were the initiators and later active historians who strove to achieve such good results? The twenty autobiographical sketches in this collection are valuable sources for answering that question. They include most founders and important officers of the CCWH. In different ways, the text highlights the connections among the private, political, and professional, illustrating the various trajectories leading to a professional interest in women's history. Although the contributors are mainly white and middle-class, women of color and women with a working-class background are also represented.

What do these twenty historians have in common besides their choice of research in women's history as their main professional field? These are strong, persistent, and intellectually gifted scholars. No traces of self-imposed modesty, often assumed to characterize women's autobiographies, are evi-dent. These are histories of survivors. As historian Berenice Carroll stated in 1994, they have struggled "'to change the profession of history, to change historical scholarship, and to change the direction of our own history'" ¹ (xiii). Most have also been active in other social movements, including peace, human rights, and women's liberation movements. Experiences of the effects of racism, as residents of the United States or as refugees from European anti-Semitism, have spurred some historians to trace the history of groups on the margin. For other scholars, expectations of marriage and motherhood have guided their career choices, characterized their marginal position within a male dominated historical profession, and added to problems involved in receiving tenure. Autobiographies offer insight into contingent, shifting, and interlocking identities, from the private daughter/partner/mother, via the political activist, to the professional researcher/teacher, and demonstrate how such identities change according to the individual's position in the life cycle.

But marginal positions are not understood solely as a source for discrimination. Marginality, interpreted as a place for resistance, empowerment, and creativity, figures as a common ground, most directly expressed by historian Mary Elizabeth Perry. In fact, the marginal position of women's history and of women in history led to the creation of CCWH and a number of other organizations. These autobiographical sketches demonstrate the importance of networks built among women historians, networks that at times also became safety nets. The contrasts many contributors described between the atmosphere of competition and individual achievement prominent within male dominated departments and organizations, and the welcoming, open, and mutually supporting spirit of the CCWH, are striking.

The personal accounts...