Mary Elizabeth Massey on “Leaning In”

When I first arrived at Villanova, there was a line of adjuncts teaching Civil War history classes to undergraduates and graduate students. None of them were trained in the field, they were not engaged in scholarly research, and they did not publish. I was assigned to teach the intro classes in Augustinianism, world history, and, thankfully, women’s history. With the exception of the first one, each had its distinct pleasures, allowing me to expand my repertoire (world history) and to play to my strengths (women’s history). Occasionally, one of the adjuncts would ask me if I would deliver a guest lecture in their classes: you know, something about “Civil War women,” something they didn’t really know anything about and were not at all interested in, but, even so, they thought it might be nice to throw a bone to the female students who enrolled in their classes. I became very good at avoiding these requests: I had a meeting or I was volunteering at my sons’ school. My great breakthrough came five years later when I proposed and was approved to teach a graduate course on Reconstruction. Two years later I offered a graduate seminar on Lincoln. Both courses are still favorites, but Civil War remained my Holy Grail—the thing I was trained in, researched, and wrote about, but yet somehow was unqualified to teach. This is the message my chair communicated to me, often expressed as something like, “Really, you don’t want to teach that,” or perhaps the emphasis was on the “you.”

Women who write and teach Civil War history still face skepticism from well-meaning but nonetheless misguided colleagues, mansplaining audience members at public talks, and university hiring committees. Only a few positions in U.S. Civil War history open up on any given year, and women and people of color face limited prospects of landing them; in the former case, it does not seem to matter whether or not their research focuses on gender. A survey of thirty-one named professorships in Civil War history and directors of Civil War centers revealed that twenty-four positions were held by white men, the rest by white women. Put another way, men hold 77 percent of these positions. And, whereas only four Civil War era centers were identified in this search, all were directed by men. Diversity has made few inroads in the field of Civil War history.⁶² Scholarship focusing on gender and the Civil War is fresher and more exciting now than ever—as is evidenced by the output of the scholars in this forum, among many others—but hiring committees would seem to show a marked preference for candidates who fit a traditional profile. If these decisions are being made because of what administrators and others think students want and expect, then it is worth noting that my Civil War history classes regularly enroll equal numbers of women and men. This might reflect the fact that the course is being taught by a female instructor, of course, and it certainly does not mean that the students are interested in gender. But, if women are not given serious consideration for named professorships or as directors of Civil War centers, these decisions do not reflect the reality that female college students are interested in the subjects and students enroll in these courses, even if the instructor is a woman.

I happily teach the Civil War classes here at Villanova to interested and smart undergraduates and graduate students, women and men, and no one thinks I am the wrong person for the job. My colleagues in Civil War history, male and female, are supportive and generous, and I have rarely felt the pinch that Mary Elizabeth Massey and her generation of Civil War historians must have. But on this anniversary, and with Lesley’s leaving the helm of Civil War History, it would not hurt any of us to stop for a moment to think about Massey’s own reflections on the field, made in her 1971 interview with the Houston Post. “The records seem to indicate,” she...