Reconceptualizing Differences Among Women

Reconceptualizing Differences Among Women Gerda Lerner The development of women's history in the past twenty years has not only helped to bring new subject matter to history, but has forced us to deal with the concepts and values underlying the organization of historical studies and of all intellectual fields. It has forced us to question not only why certain content was previously omitted, ignored, and trivialized, but also to consider who decides what is to be included. In short, we have begun first to question and then to challenge the conceptual framework for the organization of traditional knowledge. We challenge it because of its omissions: it leaves out the experiences, activities, and ideas of half or more of humankind . We challenge it because it is elitist: it leaves out not only all women, but most men, those of non-white races, those of various ethnicities, and, until quite recently, those of lower classes. In so doing, it defines all the groups omitted as less significant than the groups included. Patently, this is untrue and therefore it is unacceptable. We challenge it because what traditional history teaches us denies our own experience of reality. We live in a world in which nothing happens without the active participation of men and women and yet we are constantly being told of a past world in which men are © Copyright 1990, Gerda Lerner. All rights reserved. May not be quoted, reviewed or reprinted without the author's written permission. 'This article was first prepared for delivery as a keynote address for the Lowell Conference on Women's History, sponsored by the Lowell National Historical Park, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Massachusetts Department of Education, the New Hampshire Department of Education, and the New England Center for Equity Assistance, held at Lowell, MA on March 2, 1988. I benefited from the discussion and comments by over two hundred high school and college teachers attending this conference. I am grateful also for the comments and suggestions made by Professor Nellie Y. McKay, Afro-American Studies Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and by Professor Nell Painter, Princeton University. Over the years, I have learned much from discussions of my ideas on "differences" with my colleagues Florencia Mallon, Steve Stern, and Steven Feierman, who helped me to sharpen my thinking in the light of their expertise in Latin-American and African history. Finally, the concepts on which this article is based were tested and applied in an undergraduate lecture course, "Sex, Gender, Class and Race in Comparative Historical Perspective," which I have twice given at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The interest and enthusiasm of my students for this conceptual framework encouraged me to write this article. I am indebted to the participants of the Conference on Graduate Training in U.S. Women's History, held at Wingspread, Racine, WI, October 21-23,1988, who shared their course syllabi and experiences in attempts to reconstruct Women's History and US History survey courses along non-racist, non-sexist lines. 1990 DIALOGUE: GERDA LERNER 107 presumed to act and women presumed to be acted upon. Women's history, even in its short development, has proven this judgement to be false, for the past as well as the present. Women are and always have been active participants in the shaping of events. One of the basic errors of patriarchal thought has been to make claims of universality for descriptions of the activities of a small elite group of upper-class white males. Traditional historians have described the activities of this group and called it the history of all of humankind. They have subsumed all women under the term "men" and have ignored the actual differences that exist among people by asserting that the small group whose activities they describe can stand for the rest of us. It obviously cannot. In rejecting this androcentric distortion of the past, we have opened the way to other insights and challenges. Historians of women have long ago come to see that "women" cannot be treated as a unified category any more than "men-as-a-group" can.1 Women differ by class, race, ethnic and regional affiliation, religion, and any number...