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chapter ten Holistic History CHALLENGES AND POSSIBILITIES / In this essay I revisit a question that has occupied me since 1969: what is the significance of Women’s History for the entire field of history? How will Women’s History affect and change the practice of historians in the future? I wrote on this subject several times during the past decades and often addressed it in my public lectures.The longer I wrote and taught Women’s History and the more I experienced the profound transformative effect it had on women students, the more I became convinced that the development of this new field of scholarship amounted to a major cultural breakthrough, a paradigm shift. Surveying the field in recent years I was struck not only by its astonishing growth, but also by the proliferation of different approaches and specializations that seemed to splinter the field and diffuse its message. Interest in the histories of various identity groups—African American, Latina, Native American, Jewish, Asian American, and women of otherethnic groups— added a newdimension to traditional knowledge about the American past. Lesbian/Gay/ Transgender and Sexualities Studies added several new categories of inquiry to the focus on socially constructed identities. Gender Studies challenged and complicated the generalizations in Women’s History. Theories, such as postmodernism and cultural studies, derived from literary theories, influenced much new research that focused on representation, images, performance, and popular culture, marking a sharp turn away from social history. While I saw the proliferation of interest groupings as a sign of strength, rather than of division, I was concerned at the lack of interest contemporary historians seemed to have in social movements and the actual lives and experiences of women in the past. I was alarmed at the fact that most current work was concerned with the recent past—a trend that was overwhelmingly obvious in the topics of dissertations—and that there seemed to be very little thought given to the larger, historical meaning of what historians of women’s history are doing. In the current essay I take a somewhat different view. I stress the far-reaching influence Women’s History scholarship has had on transforming the general field. Rather than drawing conclusions from current trends, I decided for once simply to project my own ideas of where I think the field should be going. I end upwith a call fora new holistic historyand with several fairly utopian statements. Knowing full well that historians are not supposed 164 LIVING IN HISTORY to predict the future, I have taken this liberty on the basis of claiming the privilege of my age. Old women and men, at the end of life, are entitled to express their vision. And so I have done here. The millennia-old omission of women from recorded history has resulted in a serious distortion of the record of civilization. It has presented a world to us in which seemingly all significant events were activated and executed by men, with women relegated to marginality and cultural insignificance. Men had agency; men built civilization and cultures; men devised theories and explanatory systems of thought; women took care of reproduction , the rearing of children, domestic production, and the maintenance of daily life. These false assertions led to the equally erroneous claim that women had no history, or at least no history worth recording. With the growth of universities, which from their beginnings in the Middle Ages and well into the twentieth century excluded women from access to higher education, the male monopoly on formal knowledge became institutionalized.When the recording of history became a profession all scholarship was male-centered and male-defined. Man was the measure of all that is significant; male activities, like warfare and the control of land and resources, were deemed more significant than the rearing of children, the daily maintenance of life, and the building of communities. University-trained historians, all male, asked only androcentric questions of the past. The recorded history that resulted made it appear as though women had made only marginal contributions to the building of civilization . Such findings reinforced already existing biases against women and led both men and women to view women’s subordinate place in society as though it were appropriate and acceptable. Although individual women resisted such definitions and asserted women’s claims for equality, their voices were ignored, distorted, or defined as deviant. By arrogating to themselves the representation of all of humanity, men have built a conceptual error of vast proportion into...

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