The History of Feminism

The History of Feminism Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy. New York : Oxford University Press, 1993. xiv + 395 pp. ISBN 0-19506604-9(cl); ISBN 0-19-509060-8(pb). Susan Amussen Students of feminism and women's history have often sought to explain both the emergence of feminist thinking in some periods and its disappearance in others. In this, the second volume of her study of women and history,1 Lerner addresses this question with a sweeping study of particular themes in women's intellectual history. Lerner argues that from the early Middle Ages onwards there is evidence of feminist consdousness ; it did not give rise to a feminist movement until the nineteenth century because of patriarchy's suppression of feminist writings. Without the knowledge of earUer feminist thinkers, individual women had to reinvent the challenge to patriarchy. The exclusion of women's achievements from the history of knowledge meant that women did not learn from one another, but instead each worked in isolation. This important book is a study of women's relationship to knowledge and authority. Feminist consdousness could only emerge when women found a basis for challenging the established order and using their own voices. They did this, of course, in a sodety which denied them any place from which to speak, any legitimate, recognized source of authority. Given this, any woman speaking or writing is almost ipso facto a feminist, though she may not have the consciousness with which Lerner is concerned. For Lerner, feminist consciousness is: the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group; that they have suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but is societally determined; that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs; and finally, that they must and can provide an alternate vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination (p. 14) This broad definition enables Lerner to trace the resistance to patriarchy in many unexpected and surprising places, as well as the more famUiar ones. She relies here on published writings, though she acknowledges that there might be unwritten forms of resistance as weU. Access to education is the key to any resistance, and for Lerner, one of the primary reasons for the underground nature of the tradition of feminist resistance © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. ι (Spring) 156 Journal of Women's History Spring to patriarchy is the educational disadvantage of women in relation to their brothers. Lerner emphasizes the distinction between the "historical process"— the events, ideas and lives of the past, and "History"—the way historians have written about these things. Not only does she try to construd a new version of History, wJuch places women in their proper place in the historical process, but she argues that women scholars through the ages have sought to write a history that included women. In other words, one of the central themes here is the contest between women and men on the meaning of History and their own relation to historical process. This attempt to claim authority through history is a crudal aspect of feminist consciousness. Resistance to patriarchy is difficult because patriarchy makes itself seem the natural order of things; as a result, any resistance is "ludicrous" (p. 9) and perhaps even mad. Thus one of the greatest problems that women have faced concerns the basis on which they claim authority: from what position can they challenge patriarchy? In this book Lerner identifies several sources of authority for women: themselves, mysticism, motherhood, creativity, knowledge, and community . Each of these offered women a particular point of departure, and deals with at least one of the many obstacles placed in the way of writing women in the past. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Lerner's work for most feminists is the attention she pays to religious women. For although the churches were themselves a primary bulwark of patriarchy, women within the churches often used Christian teachings as a basis for resisting patriarchy. From early nuns like Hrostvitha of Gandersheim and HUdegard of Bingen to the nineteenth...