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 his- tory 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. The JAH, 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 re- veal 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 knowl- edge 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 schol- ars’ 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 es- say 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 profes- sion. “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 devel- oped 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 capi- talism. Dorothy Sue Cobble explored how working-class women built an enduring trans- national 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.