Unexpected: Women, Sources, and Histories

Teaching students about history this past academic year, we encountered salient historical questions that made me, as our teaching should, reflect on our own practice as researchers, intellectuals, activists, and historical actors. Those questions ranged from the esoteric ("What is history? What is a fact?") to the practical ("What is an archive? Where does one find historical material?"). Each step of the way, I encouraged a consciousness of historical practice. As I read and contemplated Gerda Lerner's assessment of women's history over the last thirty years, a recurring question was, "Where do we look for history?" Working in African American women's history, it is a challenging question with some unexpected answers, but at its most basic, histories of marginalized groups are often found where we least expect to find them.

As Lerner notes, her general impressions of the direction that women's history has taken in the years since she and other scholars pioneered the field are based on three main areas: dissertation abstracts, monograph prizes, and book reviews. She gauges the relative acceptance of women's history within the discipline based on books recognized by the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the Bancroft Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Finally, Lerner surveyed books reviewed in the Journal of American History (JAH) and dissertation abstracts for content pertaining to women's history. Advances in these areas do, indeed, indicate the movement of women's history from a peripheral place in the discipline to, at least, closer to the center in significant ways in the last thirty years.

I want to take up four observations Lerner makes in her review: the concern that women's history is tending to focus on prominent women to the neglect of others less prominent; the availability of sources for women's history; what I interpret as an interdisciplinary or postmodern skepticism; and issues of a proliferation of research on particular themes over others. I would contend that in this new era of women's history we need to look for history in unexpected places. I mean this in two senses: one, literally thinking about where we find historical documents pertaining to women's history or what we might categorize as historical documents of women's history, and two, locating women's history in interdisciplinarity. In other words, perhaps it is time we looked outside the field and its organizations for additional places for acceptance of women's history. If anything, the field and its gatekeepers would do well to recognize the ways in which attention to gender, women's reconfiguring of the political landscape, and the contributions of women of color have changed historical practice for the better. Granted, there is much work to be done in putting our own house in order in terms of critique, but seeking out history in unexpected places might be necessarily and simultaneously internal and external critical practice.

I want to take as my example African American women's history. The contributions of scholars working in African American women's history are substantial and go a long way in helping us see how an intersectional approach to history and women's experiences can illuminate categories heretofore thought invisible (for example, whiteness, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, and myriad class positions). However, I was concerned with Lerner's separation (segregation?) of African American women's history into a distinct category that we might all do well to emulate.It might seem odd, as a practitioner of African-American women's history, to stake out this position, but I view it akin to "positive stereotypes"—if we only heap on and take praise, where is the room for improvement and innovation?

In accounting for the prevalence of biographies, Lerner notes that "In the case of these biographies [on Mary Church Terrell and Meta Fuller], it is obvious that the availability of sources is not an issue that determines the selection of subjects; rather it seems to be the popularity of the persons." For those concerned with African American women's history—histories on any marginalized group—we might consider the extent of this statement: are the archival...