Studying Women

Studying Women EllenCarol DuBois. Feminism and Suffrage: T/zi:> Emergence of an Independent Women '.s Mnl'ement in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. 220 pp. Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis, eds. familr and Population in Nineteenth-Centwy Ame,ica.Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1978.250 + xiv pp. HelenDeiss Irvin. Women in Kentucky. Le\ington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1979. 134pp. EllenCondliffe Lagemann. A Generation of H'lmzen Education in the Lfres of Progressive Reforme,:s.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Pres!.,1979.207 + viii pp. Anita Clair Fellman Howbest to study the history of women'? Do women need to be a segregated and explicit focus of research, or should they be considered in the context of theinstitutions with which they were associated? What is gained by studying womenas women rather than as reformers, teachers or pioneers who happened alsoto be female? What are the key aspects of women's pasts on which to focus scholarly inquiry? How do historians' reasons for studying women affect the kindof history they write? These are the sorts of questions stimulated by readingfour disparate books which in various ways might be expected to illuminatesomething of American women's past. An analysis of what each of the four bringsto the study of women should enable us to understand more clearly what can be learned from each type of historical inquiry, although by no means do thesebooks illustrate the entire range of the contemporary study of women's history. I willbegin with a book which is only inferentially about women, but being about the family, is presumed to touch upon women's lives. Fami(v and Population in Nineteenth-Centw:i· America, edited by Tamara K. Hareven andMaris Vinovskis, is the product of an advanced seminar on the history of thefamilyin the process of urbanization held at Williams College in July 1974. The editors and authors perceive the collection to be a contribution to the long-rangegoal of a "systematic analysis of the relationship between demographic processes and family and household structure" (p. 4) in industrial Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 1982, 61-74 62 Anita ClairFellman America. The essays are divided between the demographic study of fertilitv and the analysis of household processes, with a strong, and to the uninitiated. perhaps even tedious, emphasis on the complex methodology involved, Although women are clearly intrinsic both to changes in fertility and to household composition and strategies, their experience is not by any means the focus of the book. For instance, the essays on fertility seek to assess the role of urbanization and industrialization in the baffling decline of fertilit} in a largely rural nineteenth-century America, the relationship between economic opportunity and fertility levels in rural areas, and the relevance of ethnicity and race to fertility levels and trends. The essays on household structure and family processes are fueled by the issue of whether the family was ''an active agent or a passive recipient of social change" (p. 19). Clearly, then, whatever is to be learned about women will be derived from the context of other analytic preoccupations. And indeed there are some very interesting facts to garner from this book, Richard A. Easterlin, George Alter and Gretchen A. Condran, in their essay ''Farms and Farm Families in Old and New Areas: The Northern States in 1860" teach us that farm wives in older, more settled rural areas married later than those in newer, less settled areas, and that they also stopped having children at an earlier age, probably sometimes by''the deliberate limitation of fertility" (p.65).The book's editors, Hareven and Vinovskis, in ''Patterns of Childbearing in Late Nineteenth-Century America: The Determinants of Marital Fertility in Five Massachusetts Towns in 1880,"demonstrate that although in their sample the fertility rates of foreign-born women were always higher than those of native women (a pressing late-nineteenth-century concern for nativists). the fertility of foreign-born women was inversely related to their husbands' occupations and to their own literacy: the higher the husbands' occupation and the more literate they themselves were, the fewer children they had. This suggests that although ethnicity was an important determinant of...