Women and Intellectual History in the Twentieth Century, Part Two: Activists, Academics, and the Future

We pick up this two-part article on women and intellectual history at the end of the 1960s. Here again, I am as interested in scholarship that named itself "intellectual history" as I am in work that was substantively engaged in telling the history of women's ideas, regardless of the subfield to which it was explicitly linked, either by its authors or its readers. Alongside an interest in the activities of US intellectual historians, I offer a reexamination of the work of scholars who increasingly wrote women's history in the academy, and the work of activists who were turning, in different contexts, to the past. This article is by no means a full account of what is a rich and complicated history; rather it seeks to trace just some of the contours of the historiography of intellectual history in the twentieth century that have not previously been charted in essays of this kind.

The familiar story of intellectual history in the US from the late 1960s to the early 1980s is one of crisis and decline. Social history, seen by some in the 1930s as a friendly ally in the disciplinary competition with political history, came to be regarded by many, especially in its new quantitative, data-driven forms, as intellectual history's greatest rival.¹ Concerns about perceived irrelevance were compounded by the rise of cultural history, which offered new ways of studying historical systems of belief and "mentalities." While the subdiscipline of the history of political thought is commonly understood as undergoing a rejuvenation in this period—due, primarily, to the rise of the so-called Cambridge School and its transatlantic impacts—this was famously not a story that, in the beginning at least, had much if anything to say about women.²

The symbolic culmination of anxieties about the future of intellectual history in the US was the 1977 Wingspread Conference on "New Directions in American Intellectual History," an intergenerational event organized by John Higham and Paul Conkin.³ The eponymous volume of Wingspread conference papers, edited by the pair and published in 1979, was at once cautious and ecumenical. Their introduction suggested that intellectual historians were now embracing an "interplay of approaches that used to stand in starker opposition"; they were putting less emphasis on the "study of distinctive individuals"; and they were wary of what, fairly or not, was seen as a tendency among their predecessors toward unearned or vague generalizations, not least in their claims about an "American mind."⁴ The task became, as participant Thomas Bender put it, to look for the "terms of rapprochement" between intellectual and social history.⁵

The Wingspread volume did not, however, address what it might mean to include women and people of color in US intellectual history.⁶ All of the participants were white, as were all of the historical subjects, and only one contributor was a woman—Dorothy Ross. None of the essays focused on historical women and, with two exceptions, none of the scholarship cited by the authors included any of the work that had, over the last several decades and especially in the 1970s, made women's ideas central.⁷ Brandon Byrd has highlighted aspects of Wingspread's racialized exclusions: its participants failed to engage any of the cutting-edge work being done by men on African American intellectual history.⁸ But there is much left to say about the gendered, and what we might call the intersectional, exclusions of a historiographical narrative that centers Wingspread.

When viewed from the perspective of historical narratives about women and gender, the 1970s were not, as many intellectual historians tell it, the doldrums of the history of ideas in the US. They were a renaissance. The evidence for this revised account comes from three related contexts. First, articles that came out of a variety of social movement publications and newly formed feminist presses, from the late 1960s onward. Second, work produced by scholars writing in "women's studies" journals. And finally, the work of "women's historians" standardly understood as "social" or "cultural" history.

There is a widespread view that history writing across each of these contexts was not particularly concerned with ideas.⁹ In a 1974 essay in the Journal of the History of Ideas on Poulain de la Barre's "ignored seedbed of feminist thinking," Michael A. Seidel contrasted his own scholarship with that of those he called "bandwagoners of the new sexual politics." They were superficial, "prob[ing] just far enough into the past's frustrations to dignify the present's revisionism."¹⁰ Some who promoted women's intellectual history in the 1980s and 1990s presented the 1970s as a barren decade and accused women's history of systematically neglecting women's minds in favor of their everyday lives.¹¹ The agenda of the "new social history of the 1960s and 1970s," said intellectual historian Daniel Wickberg in 2001, was "to write history from the neck down … ideas didn't really count for anything."¹² The publications from activist contexts were maligned on all sides. In the Historical Journal in 1982, Patricia Hilden characterized work in the "popular feminist press" as mere "historical polemic" that was simply "necessary for political organization."¹³ Some prominent women's historians sometimes contrasted what they saw as the more serious work of academic women's and gender history with what Joan Wallach Scott once called the "naive search for the heroic ancestors of the contemporary women's movement."¹⁴

Some of these assessments were not wholly unjustified. It is easy to find, for example, wide-eyed paeans to "lost heroines" in the writings of women's liberationists. But even here, there is more to say. Across each of these contexts—in activist publications, in "women's studies" journals, and in "women's history"—we find writing that resists the standard descriptions. This work either explicitly named itself "intellectual history" or it met criteria laid out by the men of the discipline. It debated and sometimes anticipated questions they cared about concerning ideologies and philosophies and their influence, tradition and canon construction, authorship and authority, and literature as a site for political thinking.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

Let me begin with writing produced in social movement contexts. From at least the mid-1960s, women across a variety of social movements—from civil rights, Black Power, homophile, labor, welfare, and peace, to Chicano, Asian American, and Indigenous American movements—were pressing questions about gender, sexism, and chauvinism within their respective groups. A variety of social and political formations emerged, each with their own distinctive relationship to the activist contexts under scrutiny. For some, it led to the creation and involvement in what became known as women's liberation. For others, naming and protesting male supremacy came either before the existence of or with a wariness toward women's liberation.¹⁵ African American, "third world," Chicana, Asian American, and Indigenous women produced analyses and publications that articulated the distinctiveness of their oppression as women who were also, and on some views primarily, marginalized according to race, immigration status, colonial histories, sexuality, and class.¹⁶

While history writing was not the primary aim of these activists, it is hard to overstate the sheer volume of historical material they produced. In 1969 one onlooker was able to suggest that a central aim of women's liberation "cells" was to "gain a sense of the intellectual history of women."¹⁷ The value of historical work for feminist activism featured in arguments over feminist political strategy.¹⁸ And there are multiple examples of authors taking the thoughts—the intellectual lives, the extant arguments—of past women seriously in movement anthologies, bibliographies, newsletters, journals, and pamphlets. Similar tendencies to seek answers in history can be found in the special issues on "women" hosted in radical and socialist political journals printed across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁹

Many movement publications existed, and were publishing material on women's history, before academic women's studies journals such as Signs, Frontiers, and Feminist Review were founded, and before the emergence of specialist women's history journals. Historical work was required, it was often argued, to correct the "myths" and "prejudices" that had been presented to women as "history."²⁰ Grassroots archives like Laura X's Women's History Library in Berkeley built international collections partly as a way of facilitating histories—and women's studies courses—that skeptical colleagues assumed impossible.²¹ Established presses and new feminist publishers began reissuing primary material. By 1971 Source Book Press was advertising "forty titles in fifty-three volumes having to do with the women's movement," including Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women.²² As one popular anthology of women's historical writing pointed out, "Many of these essays can only be found in special collections or in rare book rooms and have generally been overlooked by most historians and literary scholars."²³ The aim, as described in another volume, was to give readers "a sense of how these women thought, what arguments they brought to bear on their analysis."²⁴

The articles in "women's liberation" journals and the sources reprinted in many feminist anthologies, sometimes edited by academics for a variety of audiences, often privileged the voices of white North American and European women. Across seven hundred pages, Alice Rossi's The Feminist Papers (1973) included only a single contribution from a woman of color, Sojourner Truth, who, unlike the white women also excerpted, went unnamed in the table of contents.²⁵ Gerda Lerner's Black Women in White America (1972) was among the early attempts to address these exclusions. "In the present volume," Lerner noted, "I have endeavored to let black women speak for themselves."²⁶ Some of the writings she included, like the constitution of the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society, were clear sources for even the most conventional understandings of intellectual history. In a review, Maya Angelou praised it as a collection of the "thoughts and writings of this doubly jeopardized segment of America."²⁷

Women of color entreated editors of liberationist magazines to expand their remits, and founded publications of their own.²⁸ Maylei Blackwell has shown that one aim of the newspaper of Chicana feminist group Hijas de Cuauhtémoc was to shine a light on the diverse histories of Chicana writers, theorists, and political ideas.²⁹ Throughout the 1970s, writers including Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, and Frances M. Beal made the case in publications from Ms. to Conditions to Triple Jeopardy (the magazine of the Third World Women's Alliance) for recovering Black women's thought and writing. In 1977, the Feminist Press—an institution which looked to bridge the divide between grassroots activism and the academy—commissioned what would become the landmark two-volume series Women Writing in India (published in 1991). With its eleven regional language editors, material that spanned from the early sixth century BCE to the late twentieth, Women Writing in India had a clear focus on recovering, among other things, the history of the intellectualism and the political thought of Indian women. The introduction addressed the limits of theoretical approaches developed by US feminists for very different historical and archival circumstances.³⁰

"Movement" authors have been accused of hostility toward the history of ideas and philosophy, of caring only about figures who vindicate a triumphant feminist teleology or, more generally, of distorting history for their political ends.³¹ While there is certainly evidence that supports such assessments—anti-intellectualism and opportunism can be found in many milieus, including among non-feminist academics—there is also much that casts them into doubt. On closer inspection, the charge itself can seem a piece of obfuscating dogma. A serious engagement with much of the historical writing in movement texts shows a cautious, often prescient, approach to a variety of historiographical issues: from anxieties about inadvertently constructing "great women" narratives to meditations on canonization and on the utility of history for theory. Writers in movement publications, sometimes themselves graduate students in history, gave serious thought to negotiating the tension between remedying the sexist exclusion of women's ideas from the historical record and recognizing that for most historical women, often because of their race or class, many of the means for recording their minds were denied to them.

Movement journals published work that wasn't widely published in academic intellectual history journals. In 1976 Quest, described by the New York Times as "perhaps the movement's leading journal of ideas," ran an essay by Carol Adams on the reception history of Mary Astell.³² In the essay, Adams critically engaged existing feminist historiography, resisted whiggish hagiography, and called for historians to properly contextualize Astell in order to "allow her words and thoughts to speak for themselves."³³ She developed a point first made in Florence Smith's Mary Astell (1916): that attempts to recover Astell's views about women should not be read as instances of feminist excess but as correctives to a reception history that tended to deny her interest in women in favor of a focus on her theology. An article from 1973 in Big Mama Rag cautioned against false teleologies and encouraged readers to approach the past "on its own terms." We find such injunctions to contextual sensitivity expressed more than once in the history writing in feminist publications.³⁴ It is hard not to hear the echoes of Quentin Skinner's maxim that "the intellectual historian is someone who studies bodies of texts and aspires to understand them so far as possible in their own terms."³⁵ To read a writer on their own terms, Susan Spragg Jones argued in Big Mama Rag, means resisting the anachronism of forcing "the history of 17th and early 18th century women" into "the 19th and 20th century categories of oppression and liberation."³⁶ In their meditations on what history could do, authors in "liberation" journals made claims that are now widespread among historians of political thought. As Ann Forfreedom put it in the first issue of Everywoman (1970), including women in history "could raise some basic questions about our view of what has been historically necessary and what is merely contemporary expedience"—a revelation that was taken to have potentially revolutionary consequences.³⁷

On some occasions movement publications would provide the first venue for articles on women's ideas that would later be republished by academic journals.³⁸ Intellectual preoccupations that are usually thought to have had their origins in the academy can be found developed much earlier in texts closely related to the movement. Engagements with male theoretical "canons," for example, are commonly dated to a series of books within philosophy and political science that interrogated, as one 1979 text put it, the "sexism of social and political theory."³⁹ But a decade beforehand, liberationist publications, including the feminist literary journal Aphra (founded in 1969 and named after Aphra Behn) and Robin Morgan's anthology Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), encouraged readers to learn more about the long history of heterodox ideas about women (going back, they often said, to Plato) as well as about attempts to conceptualize "woman" in a way that benefitted male interests (Aristotle, Rousseau). In 1974, Frances M. Beal argued that women of color should engage with the "tradition" in order to attend to the "philosophical foundations upon which [sexist] attitudes are built."⁴⁰ It is far too easy—and far too common among some intellectual historians—to present feminist women from this period of US history as dogmatically anti-canonical and thus anti-intellectual. Rather than spurn the so-called canon, we find several arguments for why women should in fact read it, even if primarily to better understand the role of ideas in making and sustaining an unequal world.

Finally, movement publications often turned to the history of feminist and movement ideas themselves. These discussions occurred against a background of worries about the co-option of feminism by liberal, professional, educated women and the erasure of radical and socialist women from movement histories. Women of color, in turn, repeatedly questioned the whiteness of genealogies of US freedom struggles offered by many women's liberationists.⁴¹ Among the stated objectives of the Third World Women's Alliance, was "Self-Knowledge—the history of third world women and their contributions to the liberation struggle."⁴² Triple Jeopardy launched with its own feature on "Forgotten Women."

Whatever else these debates were, they were also debates about how the history of feminist political thought should be written. They were not just concerned with practical matters of who organized what and when, but also with texts, ideas, and arguments. Meanwhile, at the very same moment, academic intellectual historians were increasingly preoccupied with debates in the history of political thought. But the simultaneous work being done on the history of feminist political thought did not capture their attentions or imaginations. Even books focused on recovering lineages of feminist ideas in this period that explicitly named their interventions as "intellectual history" have rarely, if ever, been reviewed or discussed in the subfield's journals.⁴³ What is it, one might ask, about the history of feminist political thought as opposed, say, to liberalism or republicanism that made it appear less worthy of intellectual engagement?

Some readers might feel that nothing in the movement texts I've mentioned meets the criteria for intellectual history, or the standards of professional history, properly speaking. I think there are good reasons—reasons to be found in the experience of reading these texts rather than speculating about them from afar—for not conceding this point. But suppose we are to concede it. I am struck by a passage in Anthony Grafton's own review of intellectual history, in which Grafton refers to a period in Jewish intellectual history as one of "primitive accumulation" in which scholars tried to "fix the basic outlines of the textual tradition and its larger context."⁴⁴ Might not even the skeptic see something similar in these movement texts which so often collected and analyzed material that could serve as the basis for histories of women's intellectual lives, political views, and ideas—that is, their intellectual history?

WOMEN'S STUDIES, WOMEN'S HISTORY

Developing in parallel with the interest in women's ideas found in activist publications was the rise of women's studies and women's history in US universities from the late 1960s.⁴⁵ The historical work on women produced in these university contexts is almost always categorized as "social" history and many intellectual historians have seen it as distinct from, or even a challenge to, their programs and preoccupations. In 1980 Robert Darnton published a study of specialized history courses and dissertations at eight US universities which, he argued, confirmed that intellectual history had been in decline during the previous decade. He treated courses in "women's history," without question or elaboration, as a subspecies of "social history."⁴⁶

This is a limited and limiting categorization. First, it obscures the academic women's history in the 1970s done under the sign of intellectual history, rather than social history. By the early 1970s university courses were being taught on women's intellectual history (where some of the white women considered in these articles—including Mary Ritter Beard, Mary Sumner Benson, and Aileen S. Kraditor—found a place).⁴⁷ Many of the women who would be credited with advancing women's intellectual history in the 1980s—from Linda Kerber to Hilda Smith and Rosalind Rosenberg—were publishing work on women's thought that they named "intellectual history" across the 1970s.⁴⁸ In 1976 Kerber published a path-breaking essay on the "republican mother" that stated its intended audience on the first page: "historians of political thought and … those who seek to write women's intellectual history."⁴⁹ Reflecting on this period, Kerber recalled that her own work did not require "finding new documents." "The materials were often there," she said. "I think what I did was to take them seriously."⁵⁰ Neither Kerber nor any of these other scholars were invited to Wingspread.⁵¹

The widespread view that women's history in this period was hostile to intellectual history obscures how often work done by "women's historians" or those associated with "women's studies" was also focused on ideas. Many women's historians might have spurned the label of intellectual history, but they often did so while reconstructing the ideas of their subjects and historicizing the contributions of women to larger discourses: from varieties of "feminism" itself to progressivism, liberalism, and socialism, among others.⁵² Following "A Review of Sexism in American Historical Writing," much of the first issue of Women's Studies (1972) could, in principle, have been published in the Journal of the History of Ideas. The issue includes articles such as "Religious Arguments against Higher Education for Women in England, 1840–1890"; "Sex, Sentiment and Oliver Wendell Holmes"; and "Victorian Feminism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel." We find a similar story in early issues of Feminist Studies, Frontiers, and Signs, where subjects ranged from prostitution in medieval canon law⁵³ to sexual equality and "the cult of virginity" in early Christian thought, the writings of Christine de Pizan⁵⁴ and fellow fifteenth-century humanist Isotta Nogarola,⁵⁵ Juan Luis Vives on the education of women, the history of women's historiography,⁵⁶ women and political ideology in Weimar Germany, and the political thought of Clara Zetkin.⁵⁷ Authors proposed that genres beyond the tract and the treatise be recognized as vehicles of political ideas and argumentation. In 1978 Berenice Carroll wrote about "the political thought" of Virginia Woolf, "seldom seen as a political writer … and almost never as theorist with a comprehensive and penetrating grasp of the social and political fabric of the society we inhabit."⁵⁸

Women's studies journals also regularly reprinted or first-printed sources, some of which clearly spoke to the concerns of intellectual history. The second issue of Signs printed the first English translation of Hippocrates's Diseases of Women 1 by Ann Ellis Hanson.⁵⁹ In 1976 Lise Vogel, in her editorial notes on the republication of Factory Life as It Is, by an Operative—an influential 1845 text published by the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association—suggested that as well as provide insight into the grievances and organizational practices of women in textile mills, Factory Life also spoke to "the ideology of republicanism, liberty, and equality" (themes that would preoccupy Dorothy Ross only a year later at Wingspread).⁶⁰ Working women were presented as participating in a debate that contrasted "the reality of [their] lives" with "the false promises of the ideology of the republic."⁶¹ While specialist intellectual history journals were barely publishing work on the history of women's ideas, women's studies journals were showing how some marginalized women's voices might speak to some of intellectual history's long-held preoccupations.⁶²

Though certainly not their main focus, women's studies journals also published articles that looked to the history of women's ideas beyond the US and Europe. The third issue of Signs included an essay on Raden Adjeng Kartini, "Indonesia's first modern intellectual," which reconsidered her extant writings and resisted attempts to domesticate her; the next year Signs published translations of political writings by Hiratsuka Raichō, part of an ongoing project to translate and anthologize women's writings in the journal Seitō.⁶³ A panel on women's participation in the Indian nationalist movement held at the fifth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 1978 was expanded into an edited volume in which, to take one example, Geraldine Forbes engaged with recent work on the historical intersections of Indian nationalism and feminism by scholars associated with the development of women's studies in India, including Vina Mazumdar, Gail Omvedt, and Aparna Basu.⁶⁴ Such publications and others like them are not commonly found in genealogies of intellectual history in this period.

Most self-identified "women's historians" in the US embraced the categories of social and cultural history. And yet, when we return to the interventions, both substantive and methodological, of many of the new women's historians, from members of the older generation like Gerda Lerner to those who first published in the early 1970s, like Kathryn Kish Sklar and Nancy Cott, these self-designations don't seem to capture what we find in their scholarship. Far from spurning the history of ideas—or writing history "from the neck down"—their work engaged directly, and in different ways, with how to recover women's ideas in a manner that avoided, as Lerner put it, presenting women either as mere victims of oppression or as "contributors" to history on terms developed by men.⁶⁵

The scholarship produced by these historians often spoke to—and in some cases anticipated—conversations that were troubling intellectual historians at the time, not least about the social function and the social history of ideas.⁶⁶ We also find traditional approaches from intellectual history rendered unfamiliar by their application to the ideas of women and to sources not yet included in studies of American intellectual life. A paradigm of this combination of old and new was Sklar's work on Catharine Beecher, which was highlighted by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in 1975 as a signal example of the "new" women's history.⁶⁷ Sklar herself is an intriguing figure for our purposes: she credited much of her interest in history and her early approach to an undergraduate class she took with Perry Miller; later, John Higham served on her dissertation committee.⁶⁸ In her analysis of Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy, Sklar found not only practical advice but, as she called it, "some basic building blocks of social theory."⁶⁹ She treated Beecher as an author of "moral philosophy,"⁷⁰ and, along more familiar, traditional intellectual historical lines, traced her philosophical influences from the passages in which Beecher quoted Tocqueville directly in support of her views⁷¹ to her engagement with John Locke, Herbert Spencer, Isaac Newton, and the Common Sense school of academic philosophy (of both the conservative Evangelical Francis Wayland and the liberal Unitarian William Ellery Channing).⁷² Sklar's approach to reading this tract on domestic economy in 1973 is one increasingly familiar among intellectual historians today, a number of whom apply terms like "theory," "philosopher," and "theorist" in ways that challenge prevailing historical understandings of who "did" theory or who "counted" as a philosopher. What matters for these historians, as it mattered for Sklar, is the content of the argument—not whether it was called "theory" but whether it meets particular criteria for "theory."⁷³

Returning to Sklar is also instructive in light of complaints by some self-described women's intellectual historians in the 1980s who accused women's historians in the 1970s of "a lack of interest in women's intellectual accomplishment" or of favoring figures who could be cast as model proto-feminists.⁷⁴ Sklar was very clear that Beecher neither supported women's suffrage nor acknowledged the centrality or importance of racial divisions in American life. This was not the recovery of a "good" woman whose story could easily be placed in a teleology of hopeful feminist progress.

Many women's historians did not identify as "intellectual historians" in this period, and some would perhaps have resisted association with a field often experienced as exclusive and excluding, a fraternity concerned only with dead white men.⁷⁵ But women's historians did sometimes use the category to describe aspects of each other's work. It is tempting to see these invocations as subtle attempts at reconfiguring what might be included under the sign of "intellectual history." When Linda Gordon's Woman's Body, Woman's Right was published in 1976, a classic of the new, neo-Marxist women's social history, Gerda Lerner nonetheless described it as "a first-rate social history of the birth control movement in the United States and a fine intellectual history of attitudes toward sexual regulation."⁷⁶ Looking back at the 1970s, Linda Kerber recalled, "Against those who insisted that women's history was a topic within family history, we insisted that if it were a subfield, it was a subfield of everything: social history, legal history, intellectual history. Indeed, whatever topics we were drawn to, everyone who taught women's history became perforce an intellectual historian."⁷⁷ Might many of these historians be read as attempting the very "rapprochement" between social and intellectual history so many of the male intellectual historians claimed to be seeking?

In the preface to New Directions, Higham and Conkin allowed that many studies within the "new social history" might "belong just as comfortably in the repertoire of many intellectual historians."⁷⁸ But they did not draw out these links and offered no citations to the kind of work they had in mind. Reviewing New Directions in the American Historical Review, Gene Wise—who had written his own "state of the discipline" essay in 1975—noted that missing from the volume were "newer perspectives from women's history and from studies of minority cultures." His example was Nancy Cott's Bonds of Womanhood (1977), a book Lerner described as dedicated to "the intellectual development of educated women."⁷⁹ For Wise, Cott's achievement was to have "gleaned ideas from non-public or non-written sources not ordinarily used by intellectual historians. Though there is much discussion of such sources here [in the Wingspread volume], there is little actual representation."⁸⁰ Wise's review appears to have had little effect on the constituency at which it was aimed.

BLACK WOMEN'S HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

As Gloria T. Hull and Barbara Smith pointed out in the book that gave name to Black women's studies, many of the women's studies syllabuses developed in the 1970s had barely anything to say about Black women.⁸¹ The same is true of much of the source reproduction and the articles published in women's studies journals and by university-based women's historians in the same period.⁸² Just as we have to look beyond intellectual history journals for the full story of the history of ideas in the twentieth-century US, so too must we look beyond "women's studies" journals for the full story of the history of women's ideas. Across different academic contexts, and against a background of continued institutional marginalization, these occlusions were protested by women of color who pointed out, as Martha P. Cotera put it with reference to Chicana women, that myths were allowed to proliferate "because very few resources have been allocated to objective research and to documenting historical fact." This belied the fact that "literature and information abound, undiscovered and unculled in archives."⁸³

Let me focus in this limited space on some aspects of Black women's intellectual history as it developed in the 1970s. Against the whiteness of women's studies and the maleness of Black studies, Black women scholars looked to center Black women's pasts.⁸⁴ Even if, again, much of this scholarship did not self-define as "intellectual history," it was often concerned with reconstructing a history of Black women as bearers of distinctive and powerful ideas, as agents with rich intellectual lives, and as thinkers whose minds and voices were worthy of scholarly attention. In the process, these authors made methodological interventions and substantive arguments that deserve a more prominent place than they have so far received in our histories of intellectual history.

Even today, those who wrote Black women's intellectual history in the 1970s don't yet get their due attention in accounts of the "rise of African American intellectual history." The earliest text on Black women Brandon Byrd cites in his important revisionist history was published in 1982. Most attention in Byrd's narrative is paid to Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015), a landmark collection of essays in the development of Black women's intellectual history as a field, but one whose aim was not a close reconstruction of the historiography of Black women's intellectual history before the 1980s.⁸⁵ As a result, Byrd's compelling argument—that we displace Wingspread in the story of US intellectual history in the 1970s and see the ways that male African American historians were offering new approaches to the history of ideas well beforehand—risks itself occluding the interventions of women of color in the very same period, as well as the longer story of the practices of Black women's intellectual history. In the year after Byrd's essay, the pathbreaking historian of Black women's history, Pero Dagbovie, suggested that "since the 1970s and 1980s a significant group of Black women historians generated much … scholarship that could be considered intellectual history."⁸⁶ Despite this tantalizing proposal, Dagbovie says no more, focusing his analysis on work published after 2015. The danger of only attending to important texts from the recent present when engaging the history of writing Black women's intellectual history is one of obscured historiographies. If we do not detail the full extent of the historical work, we risk masking a further injustice: the decades during which the calls and interventions of Black women historians for a history of Black women's ideas were, by certain constituencies, ignored.

From the beginning of the 1970s, a series of bibliographies⁸⁷ aimed, as Ora Williams put it in her "Bibliography of Works Written by American Black Women" (1972), to chronicle Black women's contributions "to every genre in the humanities and many areas of the social sciences," as well as to reveal "the vast amount of work that needs to be done with [their] writings."⁸⁸ The popular idea of "the Black woman" was primarily determined, Williams felt, by white people and Black men. These myths and caricatures ought, she argued, to be placed against the extant testimony—so often assumed not to exist—of Black women themselves.⁸⁹ The literary scholar Nellie McKay recalled that "Williams's book made it clear that black women had been and were writing, had been and were publishing in all creative and intellectual areas. Others may not have been listening or seeing, but black women's writings were challenging the social presumption that they should be silent and invisible."⁹⁰ In her own doctoral dissertation on Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Williams presented Nelson's poems as "documents of American literary history … [which] say much about Black intellectual thought and Black history."⁹¹

Thanking, among others, Dorothy Porter for assistance in collecting sources, the editors of Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings (1976) made clear their historiographical target: "Men have been granted a conceptual monopoly. Both the interpreters and those interpreted with few exceptions reflect a set of masculine attitudes, a cast of masculine thought."⁹² (A preoccupation of this particular volume—one the editors hoped their sources would encourage scholars to address—was the way that male historians "almost never" treated of the "intellectual contributions of nonordained evangelical women."⁹³) For many scholars, including Mary Helen Washington, Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, and Barbara Christian, the project of recovering Black women's literature was inseparable from that of reconstructing the history of Black women's ideas.⁹⁴ They showed that Black women's ideas, for various reasons, were not solely or even primarily contained in tracts or treatises. To treat such calls as simply a part of the history of literary studies—rather than also as part of intellectual history—is to reinforce the barriers these scholars were trying to break down.⁹⁵

In 1978, coincident with the founding of the Association of Black Women Historians, Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn co-edited The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images.⁹⁶ This text has long been credited as a foundational volume in Black women's history, but it should also be read as a key contribution to the historiography of intellectual history.⁹⁷ Harley and Terborg-Penn made this clear with their volume's title: the purpose of emphasizing "images," their preface argued, was to reconstruct the ideas of and about Black women across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from those held by Black men and white suffragists, to the myriad counter-hegemonic images conjured by Black women themselves in, for example, blues songs and poetry. The volume's essays—each of which drew closely on archival collections—covered a series of topics that, had their subjects been, say, Renaissance humanists or white Progressive-era politicians, would be entirely familiar to intellectual historians, not least for the repeated themes of education and liberty. Evelyn Brooks Barnett's essay on Nannie Burroughs described Burroughs's "social and political philosophies," which Barnett connected to Burroughs's deep learning in Black history and literature, and her arguments for the need to teach it.⁹⁸ Sharon Harley presented Anna Julia Cooper as one of a "few women in the nineteenth century [who] had their ideas about the rights of women published" and, on the basis of work in Cooper's papers, argued for her direct influence on W. E. B. Du Bois, already a central figure for African American intellectual historians writing about men.⁹⁹ Developing her 1974 essay, Terborg-Penn again critically engaged with Kraditor's intellectual history to argue for an intellectual tradition: that the "black feminist movement in the United States during the mid-1970s is a continuation of a trend that began over 150 years ago."¹⁰⁰ The volume's wide range of sources, from prose and letters to oral testimony and songs, showed why the history of ideas should acknowledge multiple sources as sites for important ideational activity.¹⁰¹

The Afro-American Woman made clear that the emerging formalization of the field of Black women's history should take seriously the intellectual lives of Black women, an impetus that aligned with the aims of Dorothy Porter, who wrote the foreword to The Afro-American Woman, in her 1935 article on Sarah Remond.¹⁰² (In a 1977 collection on "candidates for rediscovery" Porter herself had written on "Women Activists, Wives, Intellectuals, Mothers, and Artists.")¹⁰³ But Terborg-Penn and Harley's collection also troubled gendered, racialized, and classed notions of the "intellectual." As well as showing that that there were Black women who conformed to conventional views of the intellectual—had a PhD, for example—they also queried the standard criteria. In so doing, they insisted that both intellectualism and good ideas—ideas worth writing about—were not the preserve of the academy, or of a small group of highly educated white people.¹⁰⁴

This theme—the need to establish Black women's intellectual traditions while practicing skepticism about the application of terms like "intellectual"—was central to All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982). Hull and Smith's introduction to the volume charted a history of "discrediting [Black women's] intellectual power" and of "categorizing all who are not like themselves as their intellectual and moral inferiors." Despite the ways that Black women "have been kept separated in every way possible from recognized intellectual work" and "far from the centers of academic power," they have nonetheless "created and maintained [their] own intellectual traditions as Black women, without either the recognition or the support of white male society."¹⁰⁵

But Hull and Smith also struck a note of caution familiar from movement texts about the dangers of an approach that focused simply on "great Black women."¹⁰⁶ They worried about what they called "intellectual 'passing,'" and were suspicious of the institutionalization of women's studies and its effects (too much focus on "respectability and the career advancement of individuals"). They wanted an approach that went beyond the "ultimately class-biased strategy" of the "great" Black women, which also avoided the pitfall of failing to take seriously historic Black women's ideas.¹⁰⁷ This can be read as a challenge to intellectual historians. It was one taken up across the 1980s by authors—very often themselves Black women—whose scholarship would, again, receive little to no reception in the professionalized subfield of intellectual history.

THE "NEGLECT" AND "EMERGENCE" OF WOMEN'S INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

During the 1980s and early 1990s, academic work on the history of women's ideas and of ideas about women increased exponentially.¹⁰⁸ To take one example: protests at the exclusion of women from the "canons" of philosophy in the 1970s hadn't been sufficient to change the mainstream, male-authored textbooks that continued to be written as if women philosophers had never existed. In response, women in philosophy in the 1980s marshaled their resources into doing something decisive about it. Drawing, for example, on the networks created by the Society for Women in Philosophy (established in 1972) Mary Ellen Waithe spearheaded The Project on the History of Women in Philosophy which eventually issued a four-volume multi-authored collection, A History of Women Philosophers (1987–95).¹⁰⁹

Scholars like Hilda Smith, Mary Kelley, and Rosalind Rosenberg published fine work on women in Europe and the US who they named as intellectuals; their books were then made exemplary as some in intellectual history—almost always women—noticed what they described as the gradual "emergence" of women's intellectual history.¹¹⁰ These essays are some of the first to discuss the gendered omissions of the male intellectual historians.¹¹¹ They also consolidated two views: first, that women's intellectual history had been a "neglected field … largely unexplored territory," as Louise Stevenson put it in a 1992 panel discussion on "Discovering Women's Intellectual History."¹¹² And, second, that "women's historians" of the 1970s had not concerned themselves with women's thinking.¹¹³ In 1985 Smith worried that women's history had been directed "only to a study of the personal and private" and in 1987 she decried the near-total "lack of interest in the history of women's intellectual accomplishment."¹¹⁴ Reporting on a literature survey by Smith, Rosenberg announced in the Intellectual History Newsletter in 1987 that women's historians had written only two articles in intellectual history in the past fifteen years.¹¹⁵

These authors were right to say that their male peers in intellectual history were often curiously resistant to the serious study of women's ideas. They were also no doubt onto something when they noticed tensions between two sociological groups: the intellectual historians and the women's historians.¹¹⁶ But they themselves, however unwittingly, sometimes participated in the very occlusions against which they were writing. By contrasting the proper work of the intellectual historian to the scholarship done in "women's" or "social" history, these commentaries failed to acknowledge the full range of work being done in those contexts and reproduced a constrained and exclusive understanding of intellectual history that privileged the ideas of elites—in this case, elite white women. Scholars like Smith promoted a view of intellectual history that was, by virtue of including women, more expansive than the approaches of many of the men they were criticizing. But it was also, in its insistence that women's intellectual history ought to focus primarily on "high" intellectual activity, and its offering of highly educated white women as the best subjects, more conservative than the approaches of many of those same men—not to mention the women who had long been producing work on non-elite women's thinking.

The claim that women's intellectual history was only beginning in the 1980s failed to register the lines of continuity with authors who—as we have seen—had both in substance and in name intervened in the field well before.¹¹⁷ In 1984, in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Judith Tormey suggested that the early 1980s marked the moment that scholars had decided "the time has come to cease complaining that women have been historically neglected and to try instead to remedy the absence of knowledge about their images, their works, and their lives."¹¹⁸ She made no mention of the women who had already made, as we've seen Harley and Terborg-Penn put it, "struggles and images" central to their historical work. In the same year, Kathleen D. McCarthy's "The Feminization of American Intellectual History," the first essay in the Intellectual History Newsletter to focus on women's ideas, reviewed books by William Leach, Rosalind Rosenberg, and Dolores Hayden, which McCarthy described as "compelling attempts to shift feminist, collectivist ideas to the center of American intellectual history."¹¹⁹ By this point, Hayden had published her work on domestic architecture and the history of ideas in Chrysalis, a feminist magazine of women's culture, in 1977 and a year later in Signs, both facts that went unmentioned in McCarthy's review.¹²⁰ In 1993 Elisabeth Israels Perry proposed in the Intellectual History Newsletter that those who wanted to write the intellectual history of women should look at "the intellectual concerns women voiced through their voluntary associations." A good suggestion, but one that had by then been made and acted upon by several women's historians.¹²¹

Narratives emphasizing the failure of women's historians to appreciate ideas and intellectualism also seem insensitive to the ways women's historians themselves understood the historical development of the preoccupations of their peers.¹²² It is striking to read Bonnie Smith in the AHR in 1984 describe Joan W. Scott and Louise Tilly's Women, Work and Family (1978) as offering a new agenda: altering "the nature of questions asked of historical data and [seeking] … not reasons why women did not unionize or become socialist but rather the content of their work lives and political thought."¹²³

Perhaps most troubling of all is the way certain "emergence" narratives exacerbated the already racialized dimension of the gendered exclusion of women from intellectual history. The vision these essays offered of an emerging women's intellectual history barely engaged with the work of women of color.¹²⁴ Again, this occludes not just the longer history traced here, but the nature of the work being done on and by women of color in the 1980s.¹²⁵ There were new milestones in source reproduction, including The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers series, edited by Henry Louis Gates. In 1988, the first thirty volumes were launched, including the first reprint since 1841 of Ann Plato's Essays, as well as Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South (1892) and three volumes of Alice Dunbar-Nelson's works. (In her introductory essay Mary Helen Washington proposed that "the exclusion of Cooper from black intellectual history" was because her book "was by and about women.")¹²⁶ Among the texts reprinted was Gertrude Mossell's The Work of the Afro-American Woman, described in Joanne Braxton's introduction as a "valuable document of black cultural and intellectual history."¹²⁷

Conversations about canons and traditions started by women of color in the 1970s took on new force in the 1980s, especially among historians, literary scholars, theorists, and sociologists.¹²⁸ The sheer volume of material produced, and the complexity of the intertwined historiographical and theoretical debates, deserves an essay of its own. Criticisms were made of the racialized exclusions of an emerging feminist "tradition" (focused on white women like Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millet) which, Elizabeth Spelman argued, mirrored omissions characteristic of the traditional canon (going back to Plato and Aristotle).¹²⁹ There was increasing scrutiny of the patterns of attention among white women when it came to acknowledging Black women's history, not least the tokenizing of figures like Sojourner Truth.¹³⁰ Bettina Aptheker described herself in 1982 as "struck by the omission of women's ideas and initiatives in the abolitionist movement and by the almost total neglect of Afro-American women with the exception of the ritual citations of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman."¹³¹ In 1988, Toni Morrison's Tanner Lecture—"Unspeakable Things Unspoken"—took on directly the question of canons, their constitution and their uses.¹³²

Paula Gunn Allen repeatedly opposed a history of "American" political thought that erased Indigenous Americans, arguing, for example, for a recognition of "the Native American roots of white feminism."¹³³ In Spider Woman's Granddaughters (1989) she connected the occlusions of the historians with the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples:

Intellectual apartheid of this nature helps create and maintain political apartheid…. And because political conquest necessarily involves intellectual conquest, educational institutions in this country have prevented people from studying the great works of minority cultures in light of critical structures that could illuminate and clarify those materials in their own contexts. The literatures and arts of non-Western peoples have thus remained obscure to people educated in Western intellectual modes.¹³⁴

Meanwhile, Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke were working from 1983¹³⁵ on Opening the Gates (1990), which would introduce readers to "a century of Arab feminist writing," including the fact that in a 1944 essay "Arab Women's Intellectual Heritage," Zahiya Dughan had called on "all Arab universities, especially colleges of liberal arts to give the intellectual and literary heritage of the Arab woman the attention it deserves."¹³⁶

In light of this history, it is striking that the most prominent transatlantic debates between men, in the 1980s, about how to do intellectual history—which were always in part debates about who or what should be the subject of intellectual history—manage never to mention any of these ongoing conversations about, or new sources for, writing the history of women's ideas.¹³⁷ Much like Higham and Conkin had in New Directions, David Hollinger, in his essay, "American Intellectual History: Issues for the 1980s," allowed that there were "studies of aspects of feminism … that deal primarily and self-consciously with ideas, and are easily received as contributions to intellectual history."¹³⁸ But, also like Higham and Conkin, he cited no examples. One aim of Hollinger's essay was to defend the field from William J. Bouwsma's proposal that "we no longer need intellectual history because we have all become intellectual historians."¹³⁹ Hollinger suggested that one commitment of intellectual historians, properly speaking, was to "the historical significance of thinking done by people who were reasonably good at it."¹⁴⁰ Given who tended to be discussed within such a framework, it is hard not to wonder what assessment of women's thinking this view implied.

In their exchange about post-structuralism, canonicity, tradition, and the issue of an intellectual history focused on "great texts," the Europeanists Dominick LaCapra and Anthony Pagden did not acknowledge that, by the late 1980s, discussing these questions might require engaging with the ongoing debates among feminist historians and literary critics about the constitution of canons and about inherited notions of authority.¹⁴¹ Discussion of "cultures of reading" showed no awareness that from at least the 1970s historians had addressed women's reading and how reading and its record constructed alternative notions of womanhood.¹⁴² When, at the end of the 1980s, David Harlan lamented the failure of intellectual historians to engage literary theory despite a "return to literature,"¹⁴³ there was no mention of the ways that historians of Black women's literary production thought about how literature could be a basis for the history of ideas and debated the relationship between (feminist) theory and the recovery of ideas from the history of literature.¹⁴⁴ More broadly, the methodological literature of the 1980s does not indicate that the "philosophical questions," as Joan W. Scott once put it, confronted by historians of women, gender, and sexuality might also be relevant to those trying to write the history of ideas.¹⁴⁵

There is little sign that, by the early 1990s, the men with the most disciplinary power in the named field of intellectual history had taken on board the new work on women that had, by then, been produced. When the editor of History of Political Thought reviewed the journal's first decade in 1990, he said nothing about the fact that it had published only four essays on women's ideas, three of which were on Hannah Arendt. (He did, by contrast, note his surprise that it had received more submissions on the eighteenth-century Scottish jurist James Mackintosh than on Jean-Paul Sartre.)¹⁴⁶ Between 1989 and 2011 David Hollinger and Charles Capper edited multiple editions of The American Intellectual Tradition, a source-book of "the most significant documents in American intellectual history" from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries. The first edition included only six white women across both volumes; by 2011, this had increased to ten—but all of the women included were white and all of the authors of color were men.¹⁴⁷ To borrow another phrase from Joan W. Scott: the women who initially "came to have meaning" as both subjects and as historians among the formalized subfield of intellectual history were, in the 1980s, almost always white and elite.

I want to bring this history to a close by briefly contrasting five moments from 1996. Their juxtaposition is in some ways representative of the story I have been outlining here, of intellectual history as it was practiced and conceived by a particular sociological group and of intellectual history as it was done otherwise.

The 1996 issue of Intellectual History Newsletter included a symposium on "Intellectual History in the Age of Cultural Studies."¹⁴⁸ Hollinger repeated his description of intellectual history as the "study of actual argumentation and reasoning, at least as carried out by historical actors who were good at it, or made a production out of it (i.e. 'intellectuals')." Once again, none of the contributions discussed the ways in which women's history had been speaking directly to intellectual history thus understood. There were glimpses of the shifts I have been pointing to. Daniel Rodgers reported that rather than digging in their heels at the challenges of social and cultural history, his graduate students were reframing "the history of 'thought' … with histories of men and women thinking."¹⁴⁹ But many of the standard occlusions continued: Charles Capper remarked on a social historian in his department who was now "exploiting" the field of intellectual history for "women's history," something, he said, that would have been hard to imagine in the "ideologically 'populist' historiographical climate of the 1970s."¹⁵⁰ (The same climate, we might note, in which Bell Chevigny published—with The Feminist Press and in Women's Studies—her work on Margaret Fuller, the subject of Capper's 1992 intellectual biography.)¹⁵¹ Capper characterized "gender" as, until recently, the preserve of social and cultural historians, and invited intellectual historians to engage it. But he said nothing about what was, by 1996, the vast amount of work that met his own criteria for intellectual history. The one essay dedicated to women's ideas—Mary Kelley's "Thinking about Women Thinking"—criticized the "practitioners of intellectual history who have focused upon a small number of male thinkers" but again treated women's intellectual history as an endeavor for the future, making no links to existing work.¹⁵²

The year 1996 also saw the launch of a new publication: Intellectual News, the newsletter of the recently founded International Society for Intellectual History.¹⁵³ Edited by Constance Blackwell—an indomitable historian of Renaissance ideas who pushed for intellectual history to break out of its Euro-US centric modes—the first issue contained twenty essays offering different perspectives on intellectual history. Its aim was pluralist: intellectual history was explored according to its relationships to other disciplines and subfields (political theory, religious history, history of scholarship, art, music, philosophy, and history of science) and from different national perspectives (Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Israel). Yet regarding race and gender it was strikingly uniform: all the essays were by white scholars, two were by women, and none had anything to say about the last decades of literature historicizing women's ideas.¹⁵⁴

This was not the story everywhere. In 1996, Margaret L. King (author of a 1978 Signs essay on Isotta Nogarola) and Albert Rabil Jr.—both based at US universities—published the first volume of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, a series aimed at translating and editing texts that showed "the importance of intellectual activity of women in the early modern era."¹⁵⁵ Over the next 25 years the series would expand to over 135 volumes, and publish over 150 women.

In June 1996, women's historians in the US attended the tenth "Big" Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. Co-Chaired by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, the program included multiple papers that engaged with women's ideas and ideas about women. Panel topics included feminist biography; social reformers and racial justice in the progressive era; education and identity across place and time; new directions in Asian American women's history, which included a paper on the treatment of Asian women in legal history; Euro-American misperceptions of Indigenous women, especially in the law; Black Atlantic perspectives on the "construction of black womanhood" debates (with a paper from Mia Bay, who, twenty years later, would co-edit Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women); different ideas of sexual assault expressed in court contexts; women, politics, and letter-writing in medieval and Renaissance Europe; histories of US feminist political thought from the nineteenth century to the early 1980s; gender and the history of science; numerous panels challenging and rehistoricizing representations of "women" across national contexts (from colonial representations of "native" women to constructions of masculinity across twentieth century African contexts); women and their ideas in the US communist party (including a paper on Claudia Jones); women and conservative thought; and "recent work on the history of women in philosophy."¹⁵⁶

Finally, 1996 saw the eightieth anniversary of the Journal of Negro History, the publication that gave Dorothy Porter's 1935 essay on Sarah Remond a home. The anniversary was celebrated with a special issue, edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin: "Vindicating the Race: Contributions to African-American Intellectual History." Five of the ten articles were about the ideas of African American women.¹⁵⁷

CONCLUSION

In 2007 Caroline Winterer observed that many books about the "life of the female mind" described themselves as "cultural history." The "reluctance" among those scholars "to term such studies 'intellectual history' results perhaps," Winterer speculated, "from a hunch that the project called 'intellectual history' has not always been something particularly friendly to the study of women."¹⁵⁸ Here I have offered reasons to validate and to complicate this hunch. Professional intellectual history as a subfield has been unfriendly to women. But this hostility was never sufficient to arrest investigations into women's "intellectual history," both named as such and not. It is time for these works to find their place in our histories of the field.

It is also perhaps time to challenge narratives that propose women have always been simply "lost," "invisible to," or "forgotten" by intellectual historians.¹⁵⁹ It is true that there are many women—many people—whose ideas still await their historians, or whose ideas remain difficult, if not impossible, to access because they were never recorded or those records were not preserved.¹⁶⁰ It is also true that many historical narratives were constructed without attention to the women who lived, worked, and wrote alongside the men in question; these narratives are increasingly transformed after careful examination of the full range of available evidence.¹⁶¹ And it is true that, for years, male historians acted as if they could not "see" women either as subjects or as fellow historians. But I would submit that intellectual historians in the twentieth century, especially those with the most disciplinary power and prestige, are better conceived as having ignored, sidelined, or attempted to erase existing work done on women, even when that work used their preferred methods, engaged with their histories, conformed to their criteria, or directly named itself "intellectual history." In cases where the work we've looked at happened outside of the academy or not under the sign of intellectual history, we might nonetheless expect historians of ideas to have been a little more intellectually curious than it seems they often were. To propose a framework of attempted erasure over one of invisibility is not to abandon the aim of a systematic analysis of the phenomena and patterns I have begun to sketch here in favor of one grounded in, say, mere individual motivation or prejudice.¹⁶² But it is to insist that the terms we use in our historical narratives matter, in part because, as Clare Hemmings suggests, they shape our evaluations of the present. The diagnosis of—and perhaps also the appropriate response to—what, in some contexts, is a continued lack of attention to women's ideas is very different if we assume a history of ignorance and "forgetting" as opposed to one of repeated and active occlusion.¹⁶³

This argument raises further questions of explanation and justification which I do not have space to address here: Why has certain work on women been so persistently sidelined, ignored, or erased? What accounts for who has received uptake and who has not? How should we make sense of the contrast between perceptions of the historiography and the work that actually existed? How best to explain cases where male scholars who occluded women's ideas in their histories were nonetheless encouraging of certain women scholars, while some men who wrote essays on women or gender are sometimes reported by the women they taught as unsupportive if not hostile?¹⁶⁴ And who benefits from what the feminist historian of ideas Dale Spender once aptly called "the cycle of lost and found"—that is, the cycles of historiographical erasure that can lead each generation to believe they must discover women thinkers anew?¹⁶⁵

The account I've offered also raises an old question in women's history which, again, I can only briefly address: what changes? As Russell Jacoby noted in his 1992 survey of intellectual history—also silent on work on women's ideas—generalizations about "direction or contours seem arbitrary…. The matter always seems to depend on who is looking where."¹⁶⁶ What would the history of intellectual history look like if we took seriously the work that was done on women's ideas and intellectual lives? Joan Kelly taught us in 1977 that such reassessments often challenge familiar periodizations.¹⁶⁷ Would certain "emergence" stories in intellectual history be transformed (the "emergence of the social history of ideas" for example)? Would the "crisis" narrative change? Might we find that some intellectual historians were indeed thinking about the relationship of ideas to social practices?¹⁶⁸ Would we offer a different chronology of the embrace of literature by intellectual historians? Would we revise our sense of the contours and substance of the "canonicity" debates? Would we think altogether differently about who counts as an intellectual historian?

The historical writing I've looked at here speaks to intellectual historians across a range of methodological commitments. In each case, and precisely because so many of the historiographical reviews have been ad hoc in the application of their own criteria for inclusion, there is more to the historiography than is standardly realized. This is true whether you are a practitioner of the social history of ideas, or of intellectual history from below; a materialist who thinks that ideas nonetheless matter or a linguistic contextualist concerned with the economic and social limits on the meaning and effects of ideas. It is true if you agree with Anthony Grafton that intellectual history is "a study of texts, images, and theories that seeks to balance responsibility and precision in the formal treatment and analysis of its objects with an equally measured effort to connect them to a particular historical world,"¹⁶⁹ with Quentin Skinner that it is "the study of past thoughts,"¹⁷⁰ with J. G. A. Pocock that it is "the history of an intellectual activity as a history of actions performed by human beings in a variety of circumstances,"¹⁷¹ or with Peter Gordon that an important facet of intellectual history is an interest in institutions, including the university.¹⁷² It is true too if you sympathize with David Hollinger and Annabel Brett that intellectual history, properly speaking, is intimately tied to philosophy and does indeed focus on "complex" or even "great" texts.¹⁷³ Whatever your view of what "intellectual history" precisely is, so long as that view is not one that has sexism or racism built into its defining terms, the history of that intellectual pursuit is importantly different from what we have been told, again and again, it is.

To be clear: I am not claiming that when, in the 1970s, a scholar like Linda Kerber complained that there was a paucity of work by intellectual historians on women that she was simply wrong. I am rather suggesting that there was more to the historiography than even historians like Kerber acknowledged, a richer past and present that graduate students in intellectual history were often not taught to take seriously as part of the history of the history of ideas. This is, in part, because of where that past could be found. Over the course of this two-part article, we have seen that to understand the historiographical story of twentieth century intellectual history you cannot just look to a small number of specialist academic journals. To do so is to be held captive by the preferences and occlusions of editorial boards that were usually populated almost entirely by white men who were inclined to see varieties of "women's history" as distinct from, and even sometimes in opposition to, intellectual history. In this essay I have offered what we might call an "interstitial" approach to the historiography.¹⁷⁴ This approach requires that we look in perhaps unexpected places—history journals not specifically dedicated to ideas, specialist studies journals, nonacademic publications—to facilitate what Surekha Davies has called a "multiplicity of histories of the history of ideas."¹⁷⁵ Except that, when one thinks about the struggles of women, across time, to assert themselves as the bearers of ideas, it is perhaps only to be expected that this is where we must look.

So, what next? Intellectual history that attends to questions of gender, race, class, and sexuality is thriving.¹⁷⁶ The collections which present themselves as successors to New Directions and Modern European Intellectual History (1982) both include an essay on aspects of women's and gender history.¹⁷⁷ In 2014, Christopher Cameron founded the blog that, with Keisha N. Blain and Ashley Farmer, they developed into the African American Intellectual History Society, an institution which centers histories of Black thought.¹⁷⁸ Through the work of Blain and many others, Black Perspectives has consistently promoted historical scholarship on Black women's ideas.¹⁷⁹ Since the early 1990s, much has been written on the intellectual history of various women across multiple geographies, social contexts, and time periods. This work has called into question both existing canons and a range of disciplinary presuppositions from the histories of philosophy, science, religion, political thought, literary studies, classics, and international relations.¹⁸⁰ The US and Europe are increasingly decentered in such studies: any contemporary survey of recent developments in the field would need to look, for one of many examples, at new books on women in Southeast Asia. Here we find histories that explicitly self-categorize as intellectual history, like Durba Mitra's Indian Sex Life (2020), as well as those that do not, like Achyut Chetan's Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic (2022)—but which, nonetheless, speak clearly to the preoccupations of intellectual historians and historians of political thought.

Despite this proliferation of scholarship, misleading historiographical stories and assumptions that risk perpetuating cycles of erasure continue. In some quarters, the discipline continues to constitute itself along gendered and racialized lines. As we have seen, even recent historiographical reviews have been silent on work on women. Several scholars continue to write about and teach intellectual history as if, over the last century or more, the only contributions that have mattered are those by men, about men.¹⁸¹ It is still possible to find new work on men's ideas that is silent on the women who wrote, thought, and acted alongside them. In a 2023 retrospective, Margaret King listed the journals that had reviewed at least one book in over 135 volumes of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. The only intellectual history journal on the list was the Journal of the History of Philosophy.¹⁸² At the time of writing, the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, founded in 1988, includes five white women among over 120 published authors: Christine de Pizan (1994), Mary Wollstonecraft (1995), Mary Astell (1996), Margaret Cavendish (2003), and Catherine Macaulay (2023).

Even recent book-length explorations of the field have presented intellectual history as a field almost exclusively practiced by and concerned with men. Richard Whatmore's What Is Intellectual History? (2016) answers its title question while staying completely silent on the history of women's thinking. Over six chapters, charting intellectual history's identity, history, method, practice, relevance, and "present and future," Whatmore uses the word "women" once, in relation to Rousseau, and "woman" not at all.¹⁸³ The "advice for further reading"—which includes many of the books and essays by men we have looked at here—includes not a single text under "classic works" or "the history of intellectual history" or "the history of political thought" to discuss women (and, in the latter, only one text written by a woman—Judith Shklar).¹⁸⁴ Indeed this bibliography, which runs to over 180 items, includes, by my count, just six women scholars, all white, only two of whom wrote about gender or sexuality: Joan W. Scott and Judith Surkis.¹⁸⁵ In a book that aims to introduce students to the field, there is not even the barest attempt to come to grips with several centuries of texts recovering the history of women's ideas, nor the more recent proliferation of such work.¹⁸⁶ And so, the cycle continues.¹⁸⁷

Whatmore is not alone in advertising to students a partial view of intellectual history's past and present. Despite the number of intellectual historical studies which center on women, when the discipline reflects on itself, even recently, gender often remains at the sidelines.¹⁸⁸ A 2013 volume dedicated to twenty-six interviews with intellectual historians included just one woman and no scholars who focus on women or gender.¹⁸⁹ This is especially striking given the editors did not limit themselves to those who self-describe as intellectual historians, choosing instead anyone who they felt had done interesting work on ideas. Even rare assessments of "gender and intellectual history" offer vastly abbreviated historiographical pictures.¹⁹⁰ Some recent work to recover women in political theory borders on misleading: women who have a robust historiography are presented as neglected, and themes that have often been taken seriously by past scholars—like the "conservatism" of early modern women thinkers—are treated as overlooked.¹⁹¹ Whose interests, we might wonder, are being served when scholars misrepresent the work of those who came before them? And what might it say about the broader field—about what literature is known and about which myths prevail—that such mischaracterizations can make it through peer review?¹⁹²

If we turn our focus to the Journal of the History of Ideas itself, we see that when it comes to publishing historical work on women in general, and on racially marginalized women especially, the situation is dire. Some examples: from the journal's inception in 1940 the phrase "black women" has appeared four times, three of which came in or after 2020, and only once in an essay that discusses the thought of any Black woman in any detail.¹⁹³ Since 1990, forty articles have been published which discuss the ideas of a woman.¹⁹⁴ A quarter of these were on three thinkers: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Astell, and Hannah Arendt; two were on women based outside of Europe or North America (Im Yunjidang and Leonor de Cáceres), the former of which is the only essay in the journal's history so far to focus primarily on the ideas of a woman of color.¹⁹⁵ This brings the number of articles to include any significant discussion of the ideas of a woman over the JHI's eighty-four-year history to fifty-eight, or roughly 2 percent of the total articles published.¹⁹⁶ In the same period, women authors (overwhelmingly white)¹⁹⁷ wrote 403 of the journal's articles, or around 16 percent.¹⁹⁸

A journal whose emphasis is quite purposefully not solely on agents named or accepted as intellectuals but on ideas themselves should be doing more to address historical prejudices around whose ideas matter. The task becomes not just to publish work already operating under the sign of intellectual history, but to figure out how to ensure that any scholar working on the history of ideas—of ideas that are important, impactful, singular, new, interestingly representative, or simply intrinsically interesting—feels that their work has a place both in the JHI and within the field of intellectual history more broadly.¹⁹⁹

The responsibility for effecting these changes cannot simply sit with the editors of any one journal, though they certainly bear much of its weight. It sits, too, with anyone whose role gives them some degree of gatekeeping power, whether by compiling an introductory syllabus to intellectual history or the history of political thought, editing a textbook or anthology, writing a historiographical review, serving on a graduate admissions committee, or engaging in peer review. At every stage, certain disciplinary trends and habits of categorization can be questioned and revised.

Each generation makes its own choices about who and what to take seriously. We make these choices against the backdrop of a long and ugly history of women both inside and outside the academy failing to receive recognition for their ideas. This is part of a much wider picture in which women, and marginalized women most especially, are not acknowledged for their contributions and labor across multiple contexts. From this broader perspective, the topic of these essays is trivial. It is of little importance to any movement for human liberation that attempts to recover the history of women's ideas have been repeatedly occluded by those professionally tasked with the preservation and analysis of the history of human thought. And yet, this small story is surely tied to a more significant one about what feminist activists have taught us to call the tools of patriarchal oppression. For erasing these histories of women's ideas is a just another way of undermining the standing of women as thinkers, as theorists, as the sources of innovation and insight wherever they may be. This habit of erasure means that what is needed, then, is not just more historical recovery, but a deeper historiographical awareness, one which might, in turn, bring an end to cycles of lost and found.