SOURCE: Smith, Hilda L. “Women Historians and Women's History: A Conflation of Absence.” Journal of Women's History 4, no. 1 (spring 1992): 133-41.

[In the following review, Smith discusses Novick's problematic treatment of female historians and developments in the field of women's history in That Noble Dream.]

In That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, Peter Novick has given us a key to understanding the evolution of professional historians from the 1890s to today. By focusing on questions of objectivity, he has identified a problem that concerns each of us as historians, whether expressed explicitly in our writing or not. Following the appearance of his work, which received reviews marking it as a work of singular importance to the profession, a panel of critics discussed it at the 1990 American Historical Association meeting. Their commentary was ultimately published in the American Historical Review, where Novick was given an opportunity for defense and rebuttal.

This review seeks to build upon concerns raised by Linda Gordon in her published critique of Novick's work.¹ While noting Novick's overly simple representation of the binary opposites of objectivity and relativity as characterizing individual historians, groups of historians, or historical specialties, she was especially critical of his treatment of women's history which she considered inadequate and even “disrespectful” (p. 687). Novick devotes only nineteen pages in a work of over six hundred to women's history, and the bulk of this discussion focuses on the Sears case and pays little attention to the scholarly or theoretical contributions of women's history.

In responding to what he believed an incorrect attribution—namely his focus on a binary opposition between objectivism and relativism among historians—Novick offered, I think, an indication of what was especially troubling about his work concerning women historians and women's history. He contended that objectivity was treated as a goal and not a methodology or epistemology, as Gordon and others had contended. He then followed that explanation with the following sentence: “This is why the question is so highly charged: it goes not to the [methodological] issue of how we do our work but to who we are, what we're doing, and what we've done when we've done it” (p. 700).

What Novick manages to do in his work is clarified in its defense in the American Historical Review, namely, he conflates the historian and the history he or she writes in ways that obscure the identity of each. It is not merely that he presents a brief and inaccurate understanding of women's history; he also provides an inadequate understanding of women in the historical profession. Women are often not a part of his story at all, and when they do arrive, they mostly arrive in tandem with the field of women's history. For much of a very long book, he has given us a great deal of information about the professional roots of current-day male historians, but these analyses provide little or no understanding of the professional roots of women historians.

Most historians today, either male or female, have trouble tracing their professional or intellectual ancestry back to the few great historical minds who dominate the early portion of this work. However, for those men teaching at “the best” schools whose work is thought of as expanding the theoretical or historiographical boundaries of the discipline, they may in some recesses of their souls trace their intellectual origins back to Adams, Becker, or Beard. They may still be concerned whether their institution might be harmed financially or experience a decline in national standing by an imprudent embrace of overly radical or unscholarly standards of historical research. But for women, their professional roots lie elsewhere. When Novick conflates the evolution of professional history and historians, as he does in his narrative of That Noble Dream, he finds no place for women's professional development. And, just as he finds no place for that development, so he finds little space for women's history or for the political movements and causes that influenced and activated women's scholarship throughout the twentieth century.

For most of the period up to World War II, historical scholarship and most postbaccalaureate training were for the wealthy, the near-wealthy, or the fortunate few who were tapped as potential holders of college and university positions. Even so, women of similar social and economic classes were not excluded from historical training and research or, later and to a lesser degree, teaching and research. By a number of measures, they held positions in ratios more favorable to their male counterparts than did later generations. But they held them at women's colleges, institutions overlooked by Novick in tracing the evolution of the profession. Their work certainly did not gain as much attention, except for the great importance of women to the field of medieval Europe and for the work Mary Beard coauthored with her husband, as the work of influential male historians.² Yet they provided the professional and intellectual roots and were often the teachers and role models of the postwar generation of women historians who entered the profession in increasingly larger numbers and who later did become intellectual leaders among their sister and fellow historians. If we are to understand how these scholars who were crucial in establishing the new social history, as well as women's history, viewed themselves as historians, why they chose the historical topics they did, and why they turned overwhelmingly to tracing the past of their own sex, we need to know about the Sylvia Thrupps, the Caroline Robbins, and the Julia Cherry Spruill who preceded them.

As I read through That Noble Dream, especially its early pages but in many ways throughout, I returned to a professional language I thought we had left behind, where a department had to replace their “Ren-Ref man” or find “a bright young fellow to carry on the work of _____ in Reconstruction.” While guarding against anachronism, and realizing the men of the circle at the heart of this work certainly did see this as a male profession, I decided what was most upsetting about the omnipresent use of “man” and “he” was its indication that the work ignored the intellectual, professional, or political origins of a third of the profession while continually conflating the historian with “his” scholarship and the intellectual direction of “his” profession.

On page 71, Novick turns to Lucy M. Salmon of Vassar, a member of the AHA's Committee of Seven, which established many of the early professional standards for teaching, and quotes from an article by her on the teaching of history. When she wrote, “The ultimate object of history, as of all sciences, is the search for truth, and … that search entails the responsibility of abiding by the results when found,” she did not employ sex-specific language. Nor in a following sentence, also quoted by Novick, focusing on heroes, does she mention their sex, but draws attention to “a great work accomplished and a noble life lived.” Her language resonates in this work whose intellectual assumptions and words of those who peopled it so seldom manage to move beyond history as equated with masculine identifiers and experience. In another example, on page 63, Novick lists a range of progressive political and social movements that influenced historical scholarship, while omitting that movement that attracted more members and consistently more attention than any other. There is a clear link between ignoring women's path of development as professional historians and their path to political and legal rights, not to mention their leadership in the temperance and settlement movements.

The point here is not Novick's omission of women as historians or as subjects of history, but the mind-set that equates the profession with what a few men at a limited number of schools were saying, thinking, and writing. Such an approach will never provide an accurate understanding of women's current standing in the profession, their intellectual interests or career paths, or the development of the field of women's history, which evolved into one of the most important if not the most important new field(s) of scholarship over the last two decades. While Beard and Becker were debating the future of their profession, women were being excluded from all-male regional meetings, which exclusion led to the formation in 1929 of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians for those teaching in the New England region. Often in their own lives, but certainly in the lives of those who taught them, women historians learned that their relationship to their profession was always problematic; to understand them as professional historians and to understand the field of women's history, one cannot lose sight of that awareness.

More useful treatments of women historians' professional and intellectual origins are presented in Barbara M. Solomon's In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America, Kathryn Kish Sklar's “American Female Historians in Context: 1770-1984,” Joan W. Scott's “American Women Historians, 1884-1984,” or Natalie Zemon Davis's AHA presidential address that includes women along with men historians to help delineate “History's Two Bodies.”³ One can find it in Ann Firor Scott's introduction to Julia Cherry Spruill's Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies or in the works attesting to the importance and influence of Mary Beard that Berenice Carroll, Ann Lane, and Bonnie G. Smith, among others, authored.⁴

Novick's list of manuscript sources excludes any collection of a woman historian or any of the extensive college records available from women's colleges in the formative years of the profession or later. Lucy Salmon's papers are held at Vassar, and as a member of the Committee of Seven, one would have thought they were worthy of review, since Novick—in addition to the major male historians—did include archival materials from the department of history at the University of Illinois, as well as materials from historians who were not of the rank of the luminaries who dominated the early portion of his work. Contrary to the impression given by this omission, it is difficult to over-stress the importance of women's colleges in both training women students and in providing employment for early women historians. For example, dealing mostly with collegiate education, Barbara Solomon discusses the role of faculty as well as students at women's colleges at the turn of the twentieth century. She documents the percentage of women in higher education (as a proportion of all students): 1870: 21 percent; 1990: 36.8 percent; 1920: 47.3 percent; 1950: 30.2 percent, and 1980: 51.8 percent. Of course, in the early years they represented a small fraction of the total female population, but by 1980 they comprised 37.8 percent of all women between the ages of 18 and 24 (Solomon, pp. 63-64). In Margaret Rossiter's study of women scientists she calculated that of those women listed in the first three editions of Men of Science (1906, 1910, and 1921), 41 percent graduated from women's colleges (cited in Solomon, pp. 82-83). The importance of women's colleges is confirmed for historians in Sklar's and Scott's treatments, as well.

Kathryn Sklar based her 1975 essay on an analysis of the women identified as “historians” in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, and she deals with women as historians over a lengthy chronological stretch, 1770 to 1930. As Novick focused on only professional historians from the late nineteenth century to the present, much of Sklar's earlier pages are not relevant to his treatment. However, she discusses nine of thirteen women noted as historians who were born after 1850 and who attended graduate school. That number included Lucy Salmon; Nellie Neilson, who served as president of the American Historical Association in 1943 and had been a founder of Speculum; and Mary Williams, who was for many years on the editorial board of the Hispanic American Historical Review. Certainly their importance as individuals and as professional forebearers of current women historians makes their treatment essential to any work claiming to capture central questions for the development of the profession (Sklar, pp. 177-179).

Joan Scott, in her study of women historians from 1884 to 1984, addresses the conflict between “Universal Man” as the subject of history and the role of women as professional historians. She sees gender as not excluding women from the profession but as contributing to a hierarchy of who counts. Space has been made for a few women at the top, but these women were often perceived as isolated representatives of their sex and explicitly rejected as individuals who constituted an opening wedge for other women. Lucy Salmon's career is illustrative. Salmon's appointment at Vassar was considered sufficiently significant for its president, James Taylor, to inform Herbert Baxter Adams that he had appointed a highly qualified scholar, whose appointment “will doubtless result in the satisfactory reorganization of the entire department” (Scott, pp. 181-182). While working to democratize the profession, its early leaders still viewed their female colleagues as different, as female appendages who required social gatherings, with groups such as the Colonial Dames, unnecessary for themselves. Lucy Salmon was offended by such segregation, and she wrote in 1905 that “We do not care for afternoon teas where we meet society women, and deprecate entertainments that separate the members into two classes, men and women” (Scott, pp. 183-84). Salmon often served as the only woman on council or committees and wrote repeatedly to gain appointments for her sisters to AHA committees. Yet, Adams, in response to her request for another woman on the Committee of Seven, expressed a view that hardly died with his generation, that he was “inclined to think one woman is enough!” (quoted in Scott, p. 184). Such underrepresentation continued through the 1960s. The most recent CCWHP newsletter notes the dramatic shift from 1969 at 0 percent to the present in which currently a majority (53.7 percent) of AHA officers are women. Again, more reason to understand their professional roots.

The interaction between Novick's treatment of women historians and women's history reflects his vision of women on the periphery. Women's history is treated in a chapter entitled, “Every Group Its Own Historian,” and he considers such treatment as representing “particularist interests” (see pp. 469-472). He contends that women's history has been written by feminists who make claims “for distinctive and cognitive styles” for their own sex (p. 471). Little attention is given to the substance of women's history, and much coverage is given to a discussion of the Sears case.

Most troubling about this account is its slight resemblance to the development of women's history as a specialty. The sense of women as being essentially different in regard to “discursive and cognitive styles” had nothing to do with the founding of the field and is still rejected by a majority of those pursuing women's history today. Women's history began, as did most efforts to expand the definition of who was historically significant, by generating a great deal of information regarding women's past. Following that early phase of recapturing the past, various foci developed among women's historians: detailed social and demographic accounts of working-class women, accounts of African-American women under slavery and through later historical epochs, the treatment of women's private existence, including their relationships with each other and within the family, to name a few. Growing attention was then given to understanding sex or gender (depending upon the stage of the field's development) as a significant social relationship or category of analysis for historical scholarship more broadly. In so doing, women's historians developed in greater depth concerns that had been raised from the beginning concerning the biased judgments as to what was historically significant and how that assessment was influenced by language, cultural assumptions, and the personal and professional circumstances of the historian.

By focusing on the Sears case, and contending that Rosalind Rosenberg had been compromised there by her efforts as a feminist while Alice Kessler-Harris had raised doubts concerning her adherence to scholarly standards, Novick ignored the intellectual progression of women's history and gives a very questionable reading of the involvement of historians in the Sears case itself. Kessler-Harris spoke for the plaintiffs in an area where she is leading scholar while Rosenberg offered expert testimony in an area where she had done little personal research. One might raise questions as to which action most conformed to professional norms. Second, Kessler-Harris is criticized for not accepting an absolute interpretation of women's choices, so if any personal desire to avoid competitive employment affected a woman's not being employed by Sears, discrimination did not occur. This seems precisely to apply historical “nuances”—in Alice Kessler-Harris's language—to the nonhistorically precise setting of the courtroom. In pushing for women's differing personal and work goals as undercutting the statistical case offered by the EEOC for female absence in commission sales positions, Novick states: “Rosenberg in this view, emerged as the spokesperson for the disinterested historical truth, in all its sometimes painful complexity” (p. 506). Whatever the merits of the arguments over “difference,” it does not seem immediately clear that Rosenberg represented the professional high ground while Kessler-Harris held forth for the feminist low ground (for Novick's discussion, see pp. 502-507).

However, as Linda Gordon noted in her critique, the Sears case does hardly women's history make (American Historical Review, 687). A great deal of the remainder of Novick's discussion, other than over-stressing the dominance of “work which emphasized women's autonomy and a distinctive women's culture,” deals with the politics of women's place within the profession and the attitudes of male historians. Except for the Sears case, there is little analysis of how scholarship in women's history relates to the “objectivity question.”

In many ways, Novick's treatment of women's history—and its relationship to women's standing within the profession—is tied to the continuing and tired issue of why the history of white men is universal and that of African Americans, women and others is particularistic. One could study conflicts among members of a presidential cabinet and not be particularistic, but studying women, in broad historical categories and over an expanse of time, equates with particularistic concerns. Explaining the struggles within a president's administration to explain the operations of a political structure overwhelmingly dominated by white men is not seen as particularistic or self-serving or even as self-focused. And, if one argues it is, that is seen as a political and not a scholarly or intellectual assessment.

One of the reasons this seems to be the case, in Novick's example but certainly more broadly as well, is that when discussion of the historical profession, central historical questions, or issues of controversy arise, women historians or their work do not emerge. Examples of this are clear in Novick's treatment of African-American history, as written by white and African-American historians. Early on, when discussing the historians' lengthy and intensive attack on the pathology of the black family thesis offered by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he speaks of Herbert Gutman and Lawrence Levine, but ignores the early and crucial work of Elizabeth Pleck on the two-parent household in Boston as undercutting Moynihan's vision of the decline of the black family based on an ineffective nuclear unit during slavery. And, when listing white historians and their study of African-American life, he ignored work such as Jacqueline Jones's Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present. And an African-American woman historian such as Nell Irvin Painter appears not for her own work but as a commentator primarily on the work of white men.⁵

Again, the point is not that Novick ignores these works, or that he concerns himself with the highly visible debates of white male historians, but that he has on blinders concerning gender as influencing his understanding of importance in the past and hierarchy in the profession. For instance, again in his analysis of African-American history, when assessing Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution, Novick writes, “He acknowledged that there were some slaves who lost their manhood, but for the most part their appearance of subservience was a disguise assumed to deceive the owners” (p. 480). Novick makes no comment as to the equating of the slave with manhood, nor does he comment elsewhere on the general pattern of defining the slave as “he” or of discussing slave women for the most part to document their sexual abuse at the hands of white masters. Yet certainly the failure to see such a perspective as “particularist” must contribute to his omission of works on African-American women such as that by Jacqueline Jones and Nell Irvin Painter.

Just as objectivity or relativity are ambiguous terms used by different individuals and groups of historians at different points in the evolution of the profession to hold quite different and often obscure meanings, “particularities” can also lie in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes they can signify class differences, at other times gender or racial identities. But they are not particularities only of those groups who have now become their “own historian[s].” They also pertain to the group that has been its own historian for an even longer period of time.

Notes

1. “Comments on That Noble Dream,” American Historical Review 96 (June 1991) 3: 683-87.

2. Susan Mosher Stuard, Women in Medieval History and Historiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 87-96, esp. 88-89.

3. Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Kathryn Kish Sklar, “American Female Historians in Context, 1770-1930,” Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 171-84; Joan W. Scott, “American Women Historians, 1884-1984,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 178-98; Natalie Zemon Davis, “History's Two Bodies,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 1-13.

4. Julia Cherry Spruill, Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, Introduction by Anne Firor Scott (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1972), v-viii; Berenice A. Carroll, “Mary Beard's Women as Force in History: A Critique,” in Liberating Women's History, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 26-41; Ann J. Lane, ed., Mary Ritter Beard: A Sourcebook (New York: Schocken Books, 1977); Bonnie G. Smith, “Seeing Mary Beard” Feminist Studies 10 (1984): 399-416.

5. Elizabeth H. Pleck, “The Two-Parent Household: Black Family Structure in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston,” in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), 152-77; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf Press, 1977); “Sojourner Truth in Life and Memory: Writing the Biography of an American Exotic,” Gender and History 2 (1990): 3-16; “Bias and Synthesis in History,” Journal of American History 74 (1987): 109-112.