Same Language, Different Academic Cultures: Working Across the Trans-Atlantic Divide

Same Language, Different Academic Cultures:

Working Across the Trans-Atlantic Divide

"While Anglo-American feminist historians may share a common theoretical language . . . that may silence alternative voices of women's and gender historians from other parts of the globe, there are structural differences in the place of feminist historians in the academies of the two countries that may produce misunderstandings . . . [that ultimately] hamper efforts to open their vision of feminist history to new ideas."¹ Those of us who work on British women's and gender history need to grapple with the essence of this statement, and thus it may be a worthwhile exercise to explore "the trans-Atlantic divide" between U.S.- and U.K.-based historians.

I feel a need to begin with one of the main sources of contention that can exist as a result of this divide, which is that it says something in and of itself that the person who addressed "Great Britain" on a panel devoted to transnational historiographies is American and based at an American university. It tells us something about the constraints faced by British-based scholars in terms of financial support, flexibility, and workload—all issues worth airing and contemplating further.² During the Second World War, one clichéd complaint about American soldiers was that they were "overpaid, oversexed, and over here," and I sometimes think that with a few variations (more like "over-funded, over-coddled and over here" perhaps?), this could apply to attitudes toward American feminist scholars in Britain today. This is not to say that there is overt hostility; I have found colleagues in the United Kingdom amazingly generous and supportive. Still, in addition to the questions I faced as a graduate student—all related to one, larger question: why come over to study British women and not just focus on American women?—I also have become aware of the tremendous differences between scholars based on the varying possibilities within the academy, and outside of it, and the differing expectations often inherent in these two cultures.

The short answer that I used to give to the query about studying Britain was that I was inspired by the works that I read as an undergraduate—Jill Liddington and Jill Norris's One Hand Tied Behind Us and Judith Walkowitz's Prostitution and Victorian Society, as well as the scholarship by those who came out of the History Workshop movement, such as Sally Alexander, Anna Davin, Anne Summers, and Barbara Taylor.³ As Leonore Davidoff has recently summarized, "British women's history of the 1970s and 1980s was spearheaded by feminists with a deep commitment to the women's movement. We confronted a traditional and male-dominated historical profession whose view of history centered on high politics and diplomacy. By contrast, for many, our approach had been through labor history, . . . and focused on working-class, everyday lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."⁴ This historical literature, with its links between labor history and women's history, made the history of feminism and women's lives vivid and accessible. As British women's history developed in the 1980s and early 1990s, some of its most inspiring work came from such scholars as Leonore Davidoff and Sonya Rose, whose background was in sociology, and such others as Sally Alexander and Denise Riley, who used psychology and psychoanalytic theory, to question the meanings of sexual difference and the category of "woman."⁵

Given the origins of British women's and gender history in labor history—and one can think back to such first-wave–era scholarship as Alice Clark's Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century published in 1919 and Ivy Pinchbeck's Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 published in 1930—and the inherently conservative structures of the British academy, it is perhaps not surprising that what are still perceived as the highest echelons of British academia...