The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (review)

The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice. By Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 306 pp. $35.00.

The Gender of History is an important and provocative book that challenges "the 'singular' tale of [Western] historiography, historical reality and professional advance" (13). Distilling Smith's complex, compelling, and sometimes startling arguments into several hundred words is almost impossible. But this book certainly should be read by historians concerned with the nature of historical writing and the emergence of the historical profession. It will appeal to a broad audience of those interested in how knowledge is created and given value.

Smith joins scholars in such other fields as music, philosophy, and linguistics who have demonstrated that intellectual practices are grounded in understandings of gender, and that borders and boundaries between men and women not only exclude, but also provide identity, as definitions of self are always relational. Since historical writing emerges from the conditions of one's life and experience, it consists of multiple "cognitions, sensations and relationships to the past" (67). The paths taken to these points are plotted by gender, and the quality and success of the journey is measured by whether one is male or female. Smith is not arguing that gender is a "bias" that men should shed in the search for a more inclusive and accurate history, or a "barrier" that women must overcome in order to be recognized as "real" historians. Instead, in this work, as she takes apart and recasts the story of Western history from c. 1800 to 1940, she convinces us that history itself is a conscious and unconscious work, as well as an expression of gender.

This book is impressively erudite, drawing from multiple disciplines and perspectives, and resting on diverse and extensive archival sources, autobiographies and published collections of letters, and works of history. Smith uses careful reading of critical theory in a wide range of fields to interpret and give meaning to the records and expressions left by men and women who engaged in the project of writing history.

Especially important to her analyses and conclusions are contemporary interpretations of trauma and its effects and of theories about identity production, cognition, and the connections between the body and the gendering of knowledge. With these tools Smith recreates for us the "traumatic narratives" and "better stories" of early women amateurs (51, 57), and introduces us to the scientific male historian engaged in "manly and useful" work as a "virtuous citizen" (112, 114). She shows how facts became "historical facts" (135), and then acquaints us with turn-of-the-century early professional women historians, "spinsters," and "bad girls," whose lives and works are paradoxes, but contribute to the "modernist impulse" (186, 211). The gender dance continues as male professionals, forced to confront the changes and challenges of the times, expand the horizons of their studies and refashion themselves, almost as supermen whose "muscular, cognitive claims" carry them to new heights of wisdom, "all the while preserving hierarchies and protecting gender" (228).

The resulting work is an intellectual tour de force filled with tension, discord, and challenge. Gone, thankfully, is the clear, linear, and progressive narrative of history's rise to greatness. Instead, Smith presents an equally "real" and valuable story that circles through the traumas, differences, contests, and victories that constitute the web of historical practices and writing in the modern era.

Jane Slaughter
University of New Mexico

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