Gendering Historiography (review)

Over the last thirty years gender has become a fairly respected category within history, spanning a broad range of research and generating a wealth of studies, especially in the Anglo-American context. However, there have been far fewer attempts – especially in Germany – to discuss the influence of gender on historiography, on the historical canon and on writing history in general. The international conference ‘Gendering Historiography’ was designed to fill this gap in research, exploring and examining the history of historiography in novel ways. It addressed the inclusion and exclusion of gender in historiography, in national canons and in several sub-disciplines of history, especially the field of biography. Furthermore, it looked at the gendered boundaries between academic and non-academic history.

The conference was made possible by the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the University of Hamburg. It was hosted in the Aby Warburg House in Hamburg, which provided the discussants and attendants with particularly stimulating surroundings. Angelika Schaser (University of Hamburg) and Angelika Epple (University of Bielefeld, formerly University of Hamburg) who organized and co-ordinated the conference, succeeded in bringing together scholars from various European countries as well as the United States and managed to create an inspiring atmosphere to discuss the broad issues at stake.

After a warm welcome from the organizers the conference started with an evening lecture delivered by Bonnie Smith (New Brunswick, NJ), whose 1998 book The Gender of History had proved a major turning point in the discussion of gender as a category for historical writing. In her talk on ‘Gendering Historiography in the Global Age’ she sketched a broad picture of current trends in historiography and then focused on problems in the field of world history from the U.S. perspective. She first reviewed the way history was gendered during the last two centuries and convincingly showed how it was thoroughly masculinized. She subsequently turned to the subject of world history, which has become a dominant field, particularly in the United States. She demonstrated how new world history had reinforced some of the old paradigms and had re-established a focus on a predominantly male history, thereby marginalizing gender as a category as well as women as actors in history. Generally, she provided a rather bleak outlook on the future of gender as an important category in history since she perceived the situation as an ongoing struggle. However, she also reported on initiatives in the United States – stemming mostly from cultural history – that try to counteract these processes of regendering world history and to contradict the recurring notion that women were confined to the home and had thus no place in world history.

The second day started with a panel on ‘Gendering the national canon of historiography’. Maria Grever (Rotterdam) who gave the first paper, on historical culture and the historiographical canon, also highlighted the remarkable staying power of national narratives. She demonstrated how since the nineteenth century distinct national bodies of history had marginalized other voices. She called for more research about the representability of the past, since canonical histories were often the heroic stories of a presentable past, both producing and reproducing gender asymmetries. Historians of historiography should therefore focus on the socio-psychic circumstances of historical writing and allow for a plurality of discourses. Generally she suggested using the concept of historical culture, which could overcome the concept of a division between established male forerunners and inferior female amateur historians and could also include non-textual practices, thereby acknowledging historiographical diversity. Irma Sulkunen (Tampere) reinforced some of Grever’s arguments in her talk on biography, gender and the deconstruction of a national canon. She first showed how she had been able to deconstruct some of the male-centred interpretations of Finnish history by focusing on individual historical female actors at a grassroots level in several of her biographies. She subsequently discussed her work on the Finnish Literature Society, a group that had been essential in the nation-building process of Finland in the nineteenth century. Her approach allowed her to question the legitimized framework of the national historical narrative. Markus...