Women's Culture and Women's Power: An Attempt at Historiography

Women's Culture and Women's Power: An Attempt at Historiography Cécile Dauphin, Anette Farge, Geneviève Fraisse, Christiane Klapische-Zuber, Rose-Marie Lagrave, Michelle Perrot, Pierrette Pfzerat, Yannick Ripa, Pauline Schmitt-Pantel, and Daniele Voldman The trials and tribulations of women's history and its current forms clearly show its place within the discipline of history. They explain in part the current choice of topics studied by historians and the specific methods used by them. For the past ten years important shifts in how to identify and analyze historical material have taken place. Within this large movement, so far hardly subjected to critical analysis, women's history has met with different systems of exclusion, tolerance and, today, banalization which should be brought to light. Doing so would achieve two objectives: to remain critical towards women's history's own formulations and to approach the necessary relationship between this particular field and history as a whole differently. This represents an ambitious project whose difficulty we acknowledge, for it is always easier to ask questions than to answer them. But history is not just the production of new knowledge, it is also the formulation of questions. The questions which it raises and which are asked of it constitute a specific area of research which needs to be urgently and openly discussed. The choice of Annales as a forum is neither fortuitous nor indicative of a desire to carve a niche in a journal which at first did not readily accept women's history, although it did not ignore it.1 Rather, it is an opportunity to openly question the methods used to analyze gender roles, methods often expounded in Annales, and to ask oneself how a certain recent type of historiography has managed to make its own the study of female-male relationships. Here is a brief description of the history of women's history whose twists and turns have not been perceived by everyone. Women's history really took off in 1970, with the realization that it had been neglected and denied. It was helped along by the explosion of the feminist movement, the progress made by anthropology and the history of "mentalités,"* the new knowledge brought by social history and the new studies on popular consciousness. This represents a key period when feminist activists were writing women's history before women historians themselves. After this ©1989 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. ι No. ι (Spring)__________________ Translated by Camille Garnier. Funds provided by the American Association of University Women. Permission to reprint from: Annales, Économies Societies Civilisation, mars-avril 1986, n° 2, pp. 271-293, "Culture et Pouvoir des Femmes: Essai d'Historigraphie." * Translator's Note: "Mentalités" concerns unconscious assumptions and common ways of thinking. 64 Journal of Women's History Spring initial impulse, French universities initiated research groups and instituted new departments. This intense intellectual activity was governed by two principles: women's central place in a history which so far had neglected differentiation by gender, and their exploitation and oppression under male domination. In this particular context, where ideology and identification are part of the object under examination, women's history is an addition to general history. At times, male historians have added a chapter of women's history but this was a mere token offering to a feminism which was overtaking them. The confusion between feminism and the history of feminism is cleverly maintained when they should clearly be distinguished, since women's history and the history of feminism are two separate entities. Is one a sub-category of a category which history is already so reluctant to accept? Or is their relationship more complex insofar as the history of feminism surpasses women's history by the very questions it raises? At any rate, as the facts show, women's history remains for the most part a women's task that is either tolerated or viewed as marginal by a discipline on which it has no direct impact. As soon as this new area of research became more organized and more important, some female historians realized the grave danger of intellectual isolation which could only lead to excessively tautological studies. Since they wanted to...