Men Doing Women's History: What's the Difference?

Men Doing Women's History: What's the Differenced Stephen H. Norwood Persons who are not members of a group they are studying may, in certain instances, be more on the inside than members of the group itself. A man studying women's history need not always be an outsider, as my experience shows. My publications in women's history include work on women in both the public and private spheres, and on both working-class and upper-class women. Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923 was concerned with determining how and why women workers successfully organize and the relationship and conflicts between women and men workers and between women workers and the largely middle- and upper-class women's movement. I also focused on the impact of youth culture in the 1910s on women's labor organizing and militancy. The women I studied were largely Irish-American Catholics; I am not of that group.1 In an article published in New England Quarterly entitled "From 'White Slave' to Labor Activist: The Agony and Triumph of a Boston Brahmin Woman in the 1910s," I examined the transformation of a neurasthenic society woman into a committed labor and women's rights activist, focusing particularly on her divorce trial of 1913-15. The woman I studied was a Boston Brahmin; I am certainly not of that group.2 I do not think that one should be disqualified from studying a group of which you are not a member. Just because we oppose how the historians of the WASP elite used to do history, defining everybody else as marginal does not mean that it is right to adopt a similar approach by turning theirs on its head. Remember that as late as 1962, the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, suggested in his presidential address that historians of "lower middle-class or foreign origins" were "outsiders on our past," unqualified to write about American history. People of urban background, he claimed, could not understand a society that had been for so long predominantly agricultural.3 For decades, English departments held that only persons of Anglo-Saxon descent were able to understand English literature. Not until 1944 did an Ivy League English department grant tenure to a Jew.4 Much of the truly outstanding work of historians has been done by so-called outsiders. Today, most scholars in labor and working-class history are from the middle class. Perhaps the greatest, E. P. Thompson, was affluent; yet, no one would deny that he wrote excellent working-class history. To be sure, some labor historians have worked in factories and © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 1996 DIALOGUE: STEPHEN H. NORWOOD 147 gained some insights from the experience. I have done so myself. But doing factory work for a few years is not the same thing as being a factory worker for life. Those scholars involved in factory work for a few years or even a decade always knew they could get out of it. Perhaps the greatest historian of Puritanism, Perry Miller, was an atheist. Few of the leading historians of sport were themselves athletes. Many, no doubt, were of below-average athletic ability. One of the best books on boxing, the most masculine of all sports, was written by a woman, Joyce Carol Oates. To do military history, do you have to be a veteran? Many of the leading military historians never served in the military. In fact, Stephen Crane, the author of one of the greatest novels about war, The Red Badge of Courage, who displayed a very deep understanding of the emotional experience of soldiers in military combat, never experienced combat himself . Can we not have a history of piracy, because no historians have been pirates? Today, in fact, much of the leadership of the Organization of American Historians seems to be arguing that outsiders are more qualified to evaluate the Smithsonian exhibit on the use of the atomic bomb against Japan than are World War II combat veterans of the Pacific Theater. Those who insist that an impassable divide exists are generally those who, for self-interested reasons...