Productive Collaborations: The Benefits of Cultural Analysis to the Past, Present, and Future of Women's History

I remember picking up the Chronicle of Higher Education in summer 1990 and reading with interest its coverage of the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. The headline warned that "Scholars of Women's History Fear the Field Has Lost Its Identity." Historians of women had "broken into warring camps."¹ The deconstructionists were under not-so-friendly fire from materialists, and vice-versa. Unifying paradigms were out of the question; they were a vestige of women's history's past. Apparently the Chronicle expected to encounter solidarity and unanimity among feminist historians and found it newsworthy that we approached our work from many and different methodological perspectives.

That tension was brought home to me at the conference as I joined a group of octogenarians for breakfast. As I surreptitiously glanced at nametags, I suddenly realized that one of these women—Alice Mitchell—had a very familiar name: I had used items from her archival collection in my dissertation research. I wanted to express shock that she was, well, alive, but I thought better of it. Instead I praised her collection that represented decades of assembling of women's rights materials. We around the table became fast friends as Alice introduced me to her colleagues. "This is Louise, she was a Methodist, now she's a feminist," and so on. Now that the women had made a graduate student friend, they broached a sensitive topic: "Can you tell us what 'deconstruction' is?" Alice and her friends had been attending the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women for years simply because they cared deeply about women's history. However, they suddenly felt out of the loop. So I did my best on deconstruction. "It seems so simple, when you explain it," they commented.² But I was left with the unsettling irony that the connective tissue between our generations was frayed. Alice's generation built the archive; my generation mined it to produce incomprehensible scholarship.

I learned in that exchange, and I continue to believe, that talking across the generations is vitally important to our work as feminist historians. Dialogue holds out the possibility of finding common ground, of bridging gaps of misunderstanding. Gerda Lerner's essay on the state of the field provides us with a perfect opportunity, and she has invested considerable time and effort in this assessment. As I imagined her sifting through 280 dissertation abstracts, 150 books, and 290 articles, I was reminded of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton holed up for three summers with a load of "appalling boxes" as they attempted to craft a documentary history of the woman suffrage movement.³ It is obvious that Lerner takes on this less-than-glamorous enterprise because she is deeply invested in the future of the field she has done so much to shape. She inspires us to take stock of where we are and where we may be headed. Here, in sum, are her concerns: the literary turn in women's history has resulted in a shift away from the social, political, and organizational history of women; the category of "class" is widely ignored; interest in identity is high; interest in historiography and theory is low; the present looms larger than the past; much of women's history is not yet documented; and we lack a new paradigm "by which we order past events so as to find the true relationships between women and men as agents in history" (25).

Gerda Lerner raises important, ambitious questions for us to consider, but I do not share her sense of alarm about the state of women's history. First, generational shifts in theme, methodology, and interpretation are an essential, defining element of historical practice. Second, the changes in scholarly focus that Lerner documents in her essay are not as dramatic as they may appear. Finally, the evolution of women's history in the direction of cultural analysis has been a productive and positive development, perhaps indispensable to survival of women's history.

I fear that Lerner's methodology—of assigning dissertations...