Agency and Collective Action vs. Diversity and Difference

It seems to me that one of the topics this anniversary section of the Journal of Women's History should consider is how well women historians in the twenty–first century are serving the subfield that took the discipline by storm beginning in the late 1960s. A related subject is how well that subfield is serving the feminist needs of women since many of the early historians of women were political activists as well as feminist scholars, even though many of them had not started out their academic careers as specialists in what was becoming the social and cultural history of women and gender.

By the middle of the 1980s, Christie Farnham and I (and others in the profession) had become convinced that the traditional history journals could not or would not publish enough of the high–quality articles being produced in women's history. This was not a unique or particularly original idea on our part because at a March 2007 centennial session of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) it was pointed out that historians in the traditional fields of political, diplomatic, military, and economic history had also come to a similar conclusion. So historians sought more specialized serial publications like Diplomatic History, Studies in American Political Development, the Journal of Policy History, the Journal of Military History, the Journal of Economic History, and the Business History Review.

By the end of the 1980s, the Berkshire Conference, established in 1973, constituted one of the largest history gatherings in the country, and the ranks of historians of women and women's history programs had grown exponentially as evidenced by the 1988 Conference on Graduate Training in U.S. Women's History funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in Racine, Wisconsin. Moreover, the early 1970s also saw the establishment of the Coordinating Committee of Women in the Historical Profession (CCWHP) to promote radical change in employment practices, scholarly meetings, and journal evaluations. Despite the existence of Signs, Feminist Studies, and the Women's International Forum—journals which published articles in many fields besides history—fewer than 10 percent of articles in the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, and Revue Historique were on women's social and cultural history. So in 1989, I helped Christie Farnham to launch the Journal of Women's History at Indiana University.

Our stated goals were simple and direct: 1) we were going "to publish synthetic and narrative works on individuals and groups of women that integrate[d] both their public and private lives"; and believing "in the importance of gender as a category of analysis," 2) we were going to seek out those poststructural studies that attempt[ed] to do more than simply demystify or eliminate traditional binary oppositions . . . and encourage gender analysis that continue[d] to focus on women's commonalities"; and 3) we wanted to insure that a focus on gender did not weaken or ignore "the political potential of historical works about the past to shape feminist public policy in the future."¹

It is the last of the original goals of the Journal of Women's History that I want to address. A decade after the Journal was a mere gleam in Christie's eye, there was a theoretical debate going on about whether the discipline of history was in a state of crisis. Historian Robert Berkhofer in his 1996 book, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse, and other scholars, including myself, writing in the mid–1990s, believed that the history profession in the United States had not only been seriously challenged but also damaged by the postmodern theories and deconstructionist methodologies that had been largely imported from abroad since the 1960s. Little wonder that poststructuralism put traditional historians on the defensive with its denial of experience outside of the ways that language constructs it; its denial of historical agency, that is, real people having an impact on real events; and its denial of linear change over time based on causality. They had not been made more comfortable by Berkhofer's suggestion that perhaps history was the discipline that...