No Straight Path: Becoming Women Historians ed. by Elizabeth Jacoway (review)

The personal is historical. Take, for instance, a scene in the queue for the restroom at the 1996 Southern Historical Association conference, where one woman laughed to another, “remember the days when there weren’t any lines in the ladies’ room?” Today, a quarter of a century on, those women could easily have written one of the ten essays in No Straight Path: Becoming Women Historians. A compilation of brief memoirs from the Delta Women Writers, a group of historians based near the Mississippi River south of Memphis, Tennessee, this volume traces the winding paths that these pioneering female scholars of the baby boom generation followed as they built careers and lives in the pursuit of history.

“What makes us who we are?” Sylvia Frey asks in her essay late in the volume; “My answer to myself is heritage and experience, a combination of geography, ethnicity, education, and luck” (p. 200). All of these factors and more are at play here, despite the seeming homogeneity of the volume’s contributors, the majority of whom are middle-class, white, and heteronormative. Their differences lie in the details of background, family circumstances, and, as the title suggests, paths each woman took.

The book’s organization itself does not follow a straight path, nor should it, and the essays can be read in any order. Different pieces will resonate with different readers. However, themes such as sexism, the importance of good mentors and life partners in getting through an often-punishing education and profession, the discovery of one’s abilities, and the impact of the past reappear throughout. Quite often, the essayists realized, either in retrospect or in the moment, that they had lived through important historical moments and had become pathbreakers themselves. Highlights include Frey’s essay on how personal experience informed her historical inquiry, Jannan Sherman’s three-way love story as her husband joined her in support of her pursuit of knowledge, and the pairing of Beverly Greene Bond’s and Elizabeth Jacoway’s essays that describe growing up on different sides of the color line and their efforts to understand that past. Jacoway’s is particularly poignant, exposing some of the perils of writing history with participants still living.

The weak link here lies in the foreword, introduction, and conclusion, which convey the Delta Women Writers’ gratitude and camaraderie but fall short in providing a larger context. The volume emerged from the group’s decision to share their experiences but lacks any explanation of the circumstances that led them to organize the group itself in the first place. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s foreword lays out many of the common issues that these historians faced as women entering a male-dominated field, leaving readers to wonder about the continuities of issues such as sexism and harassment. Many had fantastic allies among their largely white male professors and colleagues. They included John B. Boles, Joel Williamson, and Randy Sparks, to name a few, and stood out as exceptions. Others who were less exceptional still teach and train young scholars, potentially continuing or excusing bad behavior. One essayist recalls finding that her credentials did not merit promotion while a male colleague’s comparable ones did. Another recounts her male professor’s eager anticipation of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s addition to their faculty because she was a “fox” (p. 108). Both experiences are appalling and entirely familiar to many women.

Likewise, more context for the drastic changes in the academic world, particularly in the past two decades, would be welcome. The women in this collection express deep gratitude for their fortune in being able to pursue their passion for a living, having survived an era less welcoming to women. They describe economic and personal hardships, but today a graduate student, new Ph.D., or junior faculty member might look upon those hardships as inconveniences when facing the collapse of the profession within the...