Not Additive, but Transformative: Women and Gender in the Journal of American History

Katherine Turk

“Historians, looking at the past, do not see all that is there,” Duke University professor Anne Firor Scott advised the annual meeting of the Organization of American Histo- rians (oah) in 1984. The organization’s seventy-seventh president, but only the second woman to hold that office, Scott used her work in women’s history, then a niche specialty, to make her point. Women’s voluntary associations powered the American economy, stamped the nation’s politics, and solved social problems for centuries, she said. The proof was all over the archives, but because historians “did not expect to find women doing the things they had defined as significant,” they simply did not notice all the evidence to the contrary. To correct such oversight, to make “the historically invisible visible,” Scott said, historians needed to take two steps. First, they had to “call attention to an area of life hitherto ignored,” thus challenging “conventional wisdom.” Second, they needed to make the new subfield essential to scholars’ “general body of knowledge.” Women’s history was taking that second step, she claimed. Thirty-six years later, it still is.1 To mark the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Journal of American His- tory ( JAH) has asked me to create a special online issue, gathered from the articles of women’s and gender history it has published since its founding in 1914 as the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (MVHR). A century of scholarship on women and gender offers a road map to the field as it has grown and changed. TheJAH, like the profession itself, has become more inclusive of women’s and gender history, but its coverage has been uneven. The articles compiled in the JAH Women’s History Index convey the major contributions that scholars of women and gender have made to U.S. history. Yet, these articles also reveal that historians continue to labor on the second phase of Scott’s process. We are still working to prove that fully integrating women and gender into the main body of knowledge is not merely additive, but transformative.

Of the nearly 1,800 articles published in the JAH and the MVHR, only about 152 have chiefly concerned women’s history. (TheJAH Women’s History Index, and the methodologies by which it was created, are available at http://www.processhistory.org/ womens-history-index/.2) All but one of the first fifteen articles, which appeared before

1 Anne Firor Scott, “On Seeing and Not Seeing: A Case of Historical Invisibility,” Journal of American History, 71 (June 1984), 7, 19, 20. 2 Created collaboratively by the JAH staff, the Women’s History Index consists almost exclusively of articles. It excludes thousands of book, movie, and exhibition reviews. To maintain a focus on women’s history, the JAH staff

© The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. March 2020 The Journal of American History 1 2 The Journal of American History March 2020 the mid-1970s, were authored by men. These earliest treatments of women reveal scholars’ masculine assumptions about who deserved their attention, stemming from their own rigid notions of power. The firstMVHR article on women’s history, published in 1926, described British Queen Anne’s negotiations with native people in early America. An overview of a 1902 labor conflict centered on the charismatic organizer Mother Jones. Both articles treated their subjects’ sex as incidental. The only early piece about a notable woman that interrogated her identity was outright condescending. The Civil War–era “oratorical prodigy” Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, grumbled the historian James Harvey Young in 1944, was “a parrot” and “a tool of the Radicals” who lacked “a sense of propri- ety and respect” in her challenges to President Abraham Lincoln.3 A second kind of early depiction of women in the Journal used aspects of their ordi- nary lives as windows on to their communities. A 1937 article on “the homespun fabric of pioneer life” strung together details about rural nineteenth-century communities. A similar article in 1944 offered a close reading of the diary of Rachel Mitchell Haskell, who lived in a Nevada mining camp in the 1860s. The diary is significant, according to the historian Richard G. Lillard, for depicting “activities in a social segment both literary and domestic” including “the drudgery of household work, the joys of family recreation in the long winter evenings, and the normal rise and fall of strained relations between de- voted spouses.”4 These initial essays explored many of the themes the JAH took up later in its expanded coverage of women: everyday life, social difference, and remarkable individuals. But they never transcended rich description, revealing how little women’s history could explain without analysis that incorporates gender, race, class, and sexuality. TheJAH published very few articles written by women on any topic in its first half century, although women were writing their own histories from outside the academy.5 TheJAH extended its coverage of women as resurgent feminism remade society in the 1970s. To overcome the previous era’s dearth of articles, women’s historians staked out their own concepts—concepts that tended to universalize by treating women as a single constituency: “sex roles,” the singular “woman,” and “the patriarchy.” In the JAH’s first essay on women’s activism, Estelle B. Freedman examined the aftermath of the Nineteenth Amendment. Women did not have “full equality” in the 1920s, as many had presumed, and sexism continued to define American life. Freedman foreshadowed the field’s future direction when she cautioned against “excessive generalization—the tendency to write about the American woman, when race, class, region, and ethnicity have significantly di- vided women in twentieth-century America.”6 opted to omit many excellent works on closely related topics such as manhood and masculinity or gender more broadly. 3 William Thomas Morgan, “The Five Nations and Queen Anne,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 13 (June 1926), 169–89; Edward M. Steel, “Mother Jones in the Fairmont Field, 1902,” Journal of American History, 57 (Sept. 1970), 290–307; James Harvey Young, “Anna Elizabeth Dickinson and the Civil War: For and against Lin- coln,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 31 (June 1944), 59, 80, 74. 4 R. Carlyle Buley, “Glimpses of Pioneer Mid-West Social and Cultural History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 23 (March 1937), 481. Richard G. Lillard, ed., “A Literate Woman in the Mines: The Diary of Rachel Haskell,” ibid., 31 (June 1944), 81. 5 See, for example, Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 6 Estelle B. Freedman, “The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s,” Journal of American His- tory, 61 (Sept. 1974), 385, 393. Women and Gender in the JAH 3

The need to balance abstraction with granular analysis came to define women’s history and reflected broader shifts in the study of the past, ushered in by women and people of color who overcame institutional barriers and pried their way into the historical profession. “How could one generalize about a whole nation,” Carl N. Degler asked in his 1980 presidential address to the OAH, “once it was recognized to be as diverse in race, class, and ethnicity as the new social history had shown it to be?” Women’s historians were just getting started.7 The JAH published more scholarship on women in the 1980s, when historians developed gender analysis and new attendant methodologies. Articles from that era analyzed work and class, activism, domestic life, and more. Eileen Boris examined gendered pre- sumptions about the value of work and the limits of the patriarchal welfare state in a 1985 study of New Deal–era debates about home-based labor. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall wedded class and sexuality and used oral history methods to take “a female angle of vision” in a 1986 essay about “disorderly” garment workers in the interwar years. Despite scholars’ new interest in sexuality, the JAH was slower to feature gay and lesbian history. John D’Emilio published a 1989 reflection about the “transforming” and “inherently political” experience of being among its first practitioners, but the field remained small in size and other historians had yet to fully embrace it.8 The pace of women’s and gender history in the JAH has increased over the past three decades. Recent articles offer new sight lines on to trends in the U.S. historiography such as the transnational turn, histories of policing and incarceration, and the history of capitalism. Dorothy Sue Cobble explored how working-class women built an enduring transnational labor rights network and sustained international human rights movements in the interwar years. Kali Nicole Gross and Timothy Stewart-Winter both authored articles on how the carceral state developed in gendered, racialized, and heteronormative ways. And Emily A. Remus revealed how debates over women’s public consumption gave rise to the modern city. Gay and lesbian history and the histories of women of color rightfully re- ceived more coverage than in previous years, but class faded somewhat as a major theme.9 Women’s and gender history is now complex and multilayered. In a 2012 JAH essay on the state of the field, Cornelia H. Dayton and Lisa Levenstein described women’s and gender history as a “big tent” that has “consistently encouraged breadth, interdisciplin- arity, and innovation.” First they identified scholars’ recent works on women’s identities, formed in part by women’s relationships to each other, as a major development. Sec- ond, they explained that the inclusion of women and gender “fundamentally change[d] our understanding of major questions in U.S. history” by “continu[ing] the revelatory process by which topics once thought to be the province of men or interpretable without reference to gender and sexuality receive analytically compelling treatment.” In a re-

7 Carl N. Degler, “Remaking American History,” ibid., 67 (June 1980), 14. 8 Eileen Boris, “Regulating Industrial Homework: The Triumph of ‘Sacred Motherhood,’”ibid. , 71 (March 1985), 745–63; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” ibid., 73 (Sept. 1986), 357; John D’Emilio, “Not a Simple Matter: Gay History and Gay Historians,” ibid., 76 (Sept. 1989), 439. 9 Dorothy Sue Cobble, “A Higher ‘Standard of Life’ for the World: U.S. Labor Women’s Reform International- ism and the Legacies of 1919,” ibid., 100 (March 2014), 1052–85; Kali Nicole Gross, “African American Wom- en, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection,” ibid., 102 (June 2015), 25–33; Timothy Stewart-Winter, “Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Late Twentieth-Century United States,” ibid., 61–72; Emily A. Remus, “Tippling Ladies and the Making of Consumer Culture: Gender and Public Space in Fin-de-Siècle Chicago,” ibid., 101 (Dec. 2014), 751–77. 4 The Journal of American History March 2020 sponse essay, Alice Kessler-Harris stressed the divergence between these approaches: the first defined gender as a fixed identity rooted in subjective experiences, while the second framed gender making as a process and “a vehicle for exploring the distribution of power in society at large.” The field had matured to a point where historians were focused both inward, excavating women’s internal lives and experiences, and outward, bringing gender to bear on broader questions. The best path forward, Kessler-Harris argued, was to keep doing both.10

The articles collected in this special online issue provide a sample of the topics, methods, and innovations that JAH authors have covered since attention to women and gender intensified in the 1980s. My choices are undoubtedly influenced by my interests in law, social movements, and labor and working-class history, as well as by my perch in the American South. This issue opens with two essays that explode myths. By the time Linda K. Kerber wrote on “the rhetoric of women’s history” in 1988, the field had grown critical of its earlier tendency to overgeneralize. In that vein, Kerber challenged the old, sweeping claim that women and men had ever lived in “separate spheres.” Attributing the concept to the nineteenth-century author Alexis de Toqueville, Kerber explained how mid-twentieth- century women’s historians borrowed his notion of woman’s “circle of domestic interests” to carve out space for their budding field. Separate spheres became both “instrumental and prescriptive,” offering an analytical lens while imposing “a static model on dynamic relationships.” Drew Gilpin Faust used gender history to open up a new vantage on a major debate: why the South lost the Civil War. Her 1990 article exposed a crucial tension. The Confederacy expected white women’s unflinching loyalty, but white men failed to protect them. Far from bit players, white women demanded an end to the Civil War. The Confederacy “did not endure longer,” Gilpin Faust claimed, “because so many women did not want it to.”11 A pair of 1991 articles brought gender analysis to the histories of law, medicine, and social movements, addressing contemporary issues that remain strikingly urgent. Leslie J. Reagan examined how state officials and medical practitioners treated women dying from abortions in the decades when the procedure was illegal but widespread. Local lawmakers and doctors meted out gendered “social punishment”—in the form of physical torture and public exposure—against working-class women much more than elites. If abortion were criminalized again, Reagan wrote, the same configurations of sexist, racist, and clas- sist state power would recrystallize, and more women would die. Nancy MacLean applied a gendered lens to the heavily studied Leo Frank case, when white men lynched a wealthy Jewish factory owner in early twentieth-century Georgia. Gender was key to unlocking some of the deeper meanings of the case. The lynching revealed perpetrators’ “profound concern about changing relations between the sexes and generations.” Rather than building solidarities that respected women’s and African Americans’ new freedoms, these white

10 Cornelia H. Dayton and Lisa Levenstein, “The Big Tent of U.S. Women’s and Gender History: A State of the Field,” ibid., 99 (Dec. 2012), 794, 802, 816; Alice Kessler-Harris, “Gender Identity and the Gendered Process,” ibid., 827. 11 Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,”ibid ., 75 (June 1988), 10, 26, 38; Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” ibid., 76 (March 1990), 1228. Women and Gender in the JAH 5 male southerners forged a new “reactionary populism” that reflected anxiety about the erosion of their authority.12 Two more articles show how gender history can illuminate enigmatic figures and ex- tract new meaning from familiar sources. In an analytical approach to biography—what the earlier Queen Anne and Mother Jones profiles might have been—Nell Irvin Painter argued that understanding Sojourner Truth meant examining Truth’s own “ways of making [herself] known,” including her use of “speech, writing, and photography to convey her message and satisfy her material needs.” Painter contrasted Truth’s self-fashioning with the ways white biographers, using more conventional written sources, had fashioned her. Sharon Block critiqued the narratives embedded in that kind of readily available evidence—early American newspapers and other printed material—to analyze their treatment of rape. Block found that male writers created a standard, singular narrative that turned assaults on women into “an occasion for men to speak to other men about a range of male prerogatives.” Masculine rape stories built male colonists’ solidarities, “transforming attacks on individual bodies into attacks on the American body politic” and precipi- tating both the nation’s independence and women’s disfranchisement within it.13 Gay and lesbian history can smash bedrock narratives in gender history and U.S. history writ large, as Margot Canaday and Rachel Hope Cleves have each demonstrated. Canaday’s 2003 article recast the meaning of the 1944 G.I. Bill of Rights, which scholarship and popular memory have lauded for expanding the benefits of citizenship. Canaday agreed that the provision was “far-reaching,” but redefined it as regressive. Soldiers dis- charged from the armed forces because of same-sex desire were not incidentally left out because they did not form nuclear families. “Rather, homosexual exclusion was explicit, built into the very foundation of the welfare state.” Rachel Hope Cleves’s 2015 article similarly examined an institution that formally excluded gay and lesbian Americans: marriage. But as Cleves revealed, people in varied times and places simply claimed the right for themselves. Cleves’s article stitched together histories of unions between women and men that were “previously treated as sui generis to illustrate that same-sex marriage has long been known in American history.” Cleves highlighted the limits of the state’s power to regulate intimate life. “The definition of marriage cannot be restricted to its legal boundaries,” she concluded, “since people in past societies did not always live by those limits.”14 In the JAH’s most recent articles, women’s and gender historians continue to tackle major questions. Alexandra Finley demonstrates that the labors of enslaved women— “domestic, sexual, and reproductive”—shaped the antebellum slave market and the development of American capitalism. Forced to provide “clean, healthy, and well-dressed bodies,” they “maintain[ed] the labor force before sale,” elevating enslavers’ profits and laying the groundwork for the racialized, gendered division of labor that continues to de-

12 Leslie J. Reagan, “‘About to Meet Her Maker’: Women, Doctors, Dying Declarations, and the State’s Investi- gation of Abortion, Chicago, 1867–1940,” ibid., 77 (March 1991), 1258; Nancy MacLean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism,” ibid., 78 (Dec. 1991), 919. 13 Nell Irvin Painter, “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known,” ibid., 81 (Sept. 1994), 462; Sharon Block, “Rape without Women: Print Culture and the Politicization of Rape, 1765–1815,” ibid., 89 (Dec. 2002), 850. 14 Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” ibid., 90 (Dec. 2003), 935, 936; Rachel Hope Cleves, “‘What, Another Female Husband?’: The Prehistory of Same-Sex Marriage in America,” ibid., 101 (March 2015), 1061, 1060. 6 The Journal of American History March 2020 fine American work. Beth Lew-Williams brings gender and sexuality to bear on the histories of race, citizenship, and state making in Progressive Era California. Scholars have presumed a clear racial and political border that “cast Chinese as perpetual foreigners in America.” Lew-Williams paints a more nuanced portrait by foregrounding “the terms of inclusion.” She explains in particular that in local areas the task of policing inclusion “fell to unwritten rules of racial etiquette.” Elites tried but often failed to stamp out interracial intimacies.15 The JAH has featured a gradual expansion of topics and approaches that reflect the richness of women’s and gender history. Clustering as a subfield was essential for the earliest practitioners, who sought to command respect for new historical subjects, events, and dynamics. But perhaps the “big tent” itself could someday be dismantled if gender analysis succeeds in reshaping every corner of U.S. history. Women’s and gender history posits that social change is relational and bottom-up, that power works in unexpected ways, and that everyday people make history—insights that are more necessary today than ever, as plutocracy and white heteropatriarchy define so much about our era. Women’s and gender history offer the tools to analyze these formations and build something better.

The JAH’s coverage of women and gender will continue to broaden, if its past is any guide, but the speed and direction of that broadening are not determined. As Gerda Lerner, Anne Firor Scott’s fellow pioneer in women’s history, pointed out, the linked developments of the profession opening up to women scholars and accepting women’s history did not represent the inevitable maturation of a living discipline. Both developments demanded women’s “considerable organizational effort.”16 U.S. historians in general and the JAH in particular have more work to do to absorb and reflect the state of women’s and gender history in its fullness and dynamism. There are very few articles about women of color in the JAH’s pages, for example, and there is a glaring lack of articles authored by them. TheJAH ’s reviewers and editors should heed Scott’s call, continually reexamining what they see when they look at women’s and gender history manuscripts and rethinking what counts as innovative scholarship. Scott concluded her 1984 presidential remarks by argu- ing that historians must accept the fact that their own conditions mold their accounts of the past, but as historical subjects themselves, they can never understand precisely how. “Whether there are changes right now that will make it easier for women’s history . . . to be integrated into historians’ general view of the world I do not know,” she said. Em- bracing this uncertainty, historians should work constantly to “become conscious of the things we are at present not seeing” because, “like the unexamined life, the unexamined discipline is unlikely to achieve its fullest potential.” Scott passed away last year at age ninety-eight, having witnessed one transformation after another in the field she cultivated with such care. She would implore us to keep pushing and probably encourage us to pick up the pace.17

15 Alexandra Finley, “‘Cash to Corinna’: Domestic Labor and Sexual Economy in the ‘Fancy Trade,’” ibid., 104 (Sept. 2017), 410, 411, 412; Beth Lew-Williams, “‘Chinamen’ and ‘Delinquent Girls’: Intimacy, Exclusion, and a Search for California’s Color Line,” ibid., 104 (Dec. 2017), 633, 636. 16 Gerda Lerner, “A View from the Women’s Side,” ibid., 76 (Sept. 1989), 453. 17 Scott, “On Seeing and Not Seeing,” 21.