American Women’s History: The Fall of Women’s Culture

Canadian Review of American Studies 1992Special Issue, Part I American Women's History: The Fall of Women's Culture JoanneMeyerowitz 27 In the past ten years, the field of American women's history has grown inestimablymore complex.Almost everymajor American universitynow has a specialist in the area, and the field is burgeoning in dozens of directions at once. Recent works range from studies of women's rights in the 1840sto out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the 1950s,from Iroquois women of the nineteenth century to waitresses of the twentieth. And it is not entirely clear what cloth or even thread binds these disparate works together. In this essay,I have chosen to make some order out of this chaos by addressing the fall of one particular version of American women's history: the women's culture paradigm. I begin with a brief historiographic overviewof the rise of this dominant paradigm in the late 1970s and 1980s,and then address its current breakdown, with an emphasis on three recent trends: political culture , multiculturalism, and new gender analysis.All three of these trends respond to, rework, and revise the women's culture model. On the most basic level, this essay offers a limited sampler of new directions in American women's history. But it has other aims as well.The three trends, taken together, make a more general statement about the field. All three trends attempt to enlarge the territory of American women's history, to push into new areas of research, and to win broader recognition for the women's history endeavour. All three trends also maintain the concern with power that has characterized the field of American women's history since 28 Canadian Review of American Studies its inception in the 1960s. Definitions of power, however, have changed markedly, and the three trends illustrate some fundamental shifts in conception . This essay is not intended as a polemic endorsing one approach over another or as a jeremiad denouncing the decline of a field. As frameworks for American women's history, each approach has both promise and pitfalls. Like most overarching models, each approach provides useful tools for ordering and comprehending the past, and each also reduces the complexity of the historical record for the sake of a neatly packaged story. At this historical moment, many scholars have relinquished the search for one best version of history, for one overarching model or one grand narrative. Along with numerous other historians, my current preference is for multiple approaches to the past, for an eclectic, contextual, inclusive, and multifaceted women's history. This protean kind of history eschews rigidly defined transhistorical categories and uniform preassessments of how various women (and men) experienced their lives and constructed their identities. It does not ask historians to forgo the variegated feminist politics that have informed the writing of much of American women's history or to accept any and all interpretations as historically sound. It does request, though, that we promote "multiplevoicesrather than competing orthodoxies," that we study gender and women-in all their variety-in specifichistorical contexts, and that we respect, rather than resolve, the multiplicity, contradictions, and ambiguities of the past (Hall 1989, 908). 1 In the past decade, historians of American women have established a fairly standard (and simplified) account of the rise of the field.2My version of this familiar story, in its briefest form, goes like this: In the United States, the earlyworks in the field of women's history tended to focus on women's exclusion from formal positions of power and on the few women who had somehow inserted themselves into the mainstream historical record. More specifically, by the early 1970s, study centred on the nineteenth-century white middle class, its heavy-handed prescriptive literature, and the early activists who challenged women's subordination. 3 In the mid-1970s, a new paradigm emerged. Rejecting a story in which most women appeared as victims, historians came to emphasize women's historical agency and to celebrate women's everyday lives. This shift from women as victims to JoanneMeyerowitzI 29 women as agents-from a bleak story to a promising one-was a political shift that fit well with the sense of personal...