A la Lutte

I have been loath to contemplate the ongoing dilemmas facing female academic historians, particularly those involved in the dynamic enterprise of American Civil War history. Lest I forget, there are always downturns in the economy and my mission remains to convince bright, energetic people to hop onboard the Starship Academic Enterprise, even if I’m not sure where it’s going. Apologies to the intrepid Lesley Gordon for my stubborn reluctance, and hats off to Matt Pinsker, Judith Giesberg, and especially Jim Downs for schooling me on the responsibilities of senior historians to future scholars.

Thus, participation in this forum has allowed me to interrogate much more than Mary Elizabeth Massey’s career and legacy. I remember in 1974 asking an early pioneer in women’s history, Carl Degler, how long he thought it would take for women to get equity within the historical profession, and he fired back—“How long before we eliminate racism? anti-Semitism?” and reeled off a long list of “isms.” I used to sign my letters to Carl, “a la lutte,” and with his passing in 2014, I feel the lessons of patience, protest, and struggle bear repeating.

I am not contented, nor am I as consistently malcontented as I was for most of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century seems full of more promise than peril for men and women fighting the good fight against sexism, even in Civil War history. We seem to have stomped out much of the nostalgia for the womanless landscape, and other features of the Paleolithic era. Female military historical scholars are winning plaudits and prizes, a wider spectrum of Civil War women have complicated our narratives, plus masculinity and gender studies for the 1860s flourish.

I have had a very privileged career and am writing from a comfortable perch: an endowed chair in American history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where my expertise in Civil War studies is a confirmed asset. I do not want to offer observations that will strike history PhDs (particularly women struggling to complete degrees, get published, get employed, stay employed, et cetera, et cetera) as snarky or worse. When I was younger, I warned those seeking a mentor not to follow my example, as I was an exception to prove the rule that you could publish and perish. Despite a solid teaching and publishing record, after being denied promotion at Harvard, I found that most search committees were interested in me as window dressing; in the late 1980s, I was too often the token and lone female on searches, so I decided to retire to write full-time. During a particularly rough patch, Hanna Gray (whom I have never met but much admired) sent advice through a mutual acquaintance that the early part and final years of an academic career can be easy—it’s the middle part that feels impossible. But I have weathered many droughts and storms and, considering my recent good fortune, I am happy to report that you can publish, perish, and piss off those who begrudge your good fortune, just not all at the same time—it takes struggle and patience.

But during my thirties, I was extremely impatient. Academic feminists seemed much too polite: “barbarians” ringing the doorbell, mistakenly waiting for someone to let them in! Yet, I also felt extremely hopeful, and when Nina Silber and I determined—over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club—to undertake commissioning and collecting the group of essays that later became the first of our two anthologies on gender and war, we were passionately committed to demonstrating that gender studies was a vital subset under the umbrella of Civil War studies. We were both concerned about and critical of the increasing popularity of literary and screen interpretations of the American Civil War where women rarely put in an appearance.

Our alarm was stimulated first by the publication of James McPherson’s landmark, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) and even more so by the 1990 debut of Ken Burns’s phenomenally popular series The Civil War, which was the most widely viewed PBS documentary of...