Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race and the Politics of Memory: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880-1945

By Julie Des Jardins

In Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, Julie Des Jardins explores American women's participation in the practice of history from the late nineteenth century through the end of World War II, a period in which history became professionalized as an increasingly masculine field of scientific inquiry. Des Jardins shows how women nevertheless transformed the profession during these years in their roles as writers, preservationists, educators, archivists, government workers, and social activists.

Des Jardins explores the work of a wide variety of women historians, both professional and amateur, popular and scholarly, conservative and radical, white and nonwhite. Although their ability to earn professional credentials and gain research access to official documents was limited by their gender (and often by their race), these historians addressed important new questions and represented social groups traditionally omitted from the historical record, such as workers, African Americans, Native Americans, and religious minorities. Assessing the historical contributions of Mary Beard, Zora Neale Hurston, Angie Debo, Mari Sandoz, Lucy Salmon, Mary McLeod Bethune, Dorothy Porter, Nellie Neilson, and many others, Des Jardins argues that women working within the broadest confines of the historical enterprise collectively brought the new perspectives of social and cultural history to the study of a multifaceted American past. In the process, they not only developed the field of women's history but also influenced the creation of our national memory in the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2004
• ISBN: 9780807861523

Julie Des Jardins

Julie Des Jardins is professor of history at Baruch College, City University of New York.

Book preview

Women and the Historical Enterprise in America

GENDER & AMERICAN CULTURE

Coeditors

Thadious M. Davis

Linda K. Kerber

Editorial Advisory Board

Nancy Cott

Cathy N. Davidson

Jane Sherron De Hart

Sara Evans

Mary Kelley

Annette Kolodny

Wendy Martin

Nell Irvin Painter

Janice Radway

Barbara Sicherman

Women and the Historical Enterprise in America

Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 Julie

Des Jardins

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2003 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America Set in Minion types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Des Jardins, Julie.

Women and the historical enterprise in America : gender, race, and the politics of memory, 1880–1945 / by Julie Des Jardins.

p. cm. — (Gender & American culture)

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2796-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-5475-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Historiography—Social aspects—United States—History. 2. Historiography—Political aspects—United States—History. 3. Women historians—United States—History. 4. United States—Race relations. 5. Sex role—United States—History. 6. United States—Historiography. 7. Memory—Social aspects—United States—History. 8. Memory—Political aspects—United States—History. I. Title. II. Series.

E175 .D47 2003

973’.07’2073—dc21 2003000563

cloth  07  06  05  04  03    5  4  3  2  1

paper  07  06  05  04  03    5  4  3  2  1

FOR LADY

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction. Discovering Women’s Hidden History

PART I. The Regendering of History, 1880–1935

1 From Feminine Refinement to Masculine Pursuit, 1880–1920

2 Social Activism and Interdisciplinarity in Writing and Teaching, 1910–1935

PART II. Perspectives from the Professional, Social, and Geographic Margins

3 Women Regionalists and Intercultural Brokers

4 African American Woman’s Historical Consciousness

PART III. Constructing Usable Pasts

5 Womanist Consciousness and New Negro History

6 Remembering Organized Feminism

PART IV. Establishing Women’s History as a Field

7 Creating a Usable Past for Women

8 Legacies for Women’s History in the Twenty-First Century

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book was a long time in the making, and I have many people to thank for helping me bring it to completion. Through the course of research, I came in contact with librarians and archivists who generously shared their knowledge of materials and dedicated valuable time to assist me. In particular, I want to thank Peter Carini at Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections, Michael Jackson at the Rockefeller Library at Brown University, Amy Hague and Sherrill Redmon of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, Jean Berry at the Wellesley College Archives, Sydney Roby of Special Collections at Goucher College, and the staffs at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the John Hay Library at Brown University, and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College. Of course with any historical research, funding is of the essence. I would not have been able to travel to archives without the generous fellowships and scholarships granted by the Brown University graduate school, the Brown University history department, the John Nicholas Brown Center in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College.

Friends and colleagues offered helpful advice on the manuscript. I want to thank Adam Nelson, Seth Schulman, Ed Rafferty, and participants in workshops at the John Nicholas Brown Center and the Conference on Historical Memory at Yale University for their insights in the early stages of drafting. Jim Patterson was an incredibly helpful reader when I presented this work as a dissertation; despite being in England on sabbatical, he pored over the completed manuscript, caught things no one else did, and offered me sage advice for continuing in the field of professional history.

About the time Bonnie Smith completed The Gender of History, I had the good fortune of talking with her about my project. I was not sure how I would feel about this meeting. I thought I had stumbled onto new topics and materials only to discover that she had asked similar questions about women historians well before I conceived my project. Nevertheless I was heartened that a scholar whom I had long respected thought women historians and the gender of historiography important areas of investigation. Bonnie Smith proved to be a generous scholar and encouraged my focus on twentieth-century historians and African American women in particular. That brief meeting inspired me to see the manuscript to completion.

When I eventually submitted an abstract of the project to the University of North Carolina Press, I was grateful that it fell into Kate Torrey’s hands. She quickly decided that my work coincided with the topics in the Gender and American Culture Series and invited me to submit the manuscript. Throughout the publishing process she has demonstrated tremendous patience with me, an unmistakable first-time author. She has been very encouraging, as has everyone at UNC Press. I would especially like to thank Ron Maner, Stephanie Wenzel, Nancy Hewitt, and the other anonymous reviewer assigned to my manuscript. Although I was not sure what to expect, in the end I was astounded at the careful reading and substantive advice I received for revision. These reviewers turned what I assumed would be a painful ordeal into a rewarding and productive experience.

There are two people at Brown University whom I especially want to acknowledge for their dedication to me as a student and historian. Mari Jo Buhle has been a wonderful friend, and I see her as a model of all I hope to be as a historian of American women. As I grappled with my ideas for this book, she seemed to know just what feedback I needed to move on to the next stage of thinking and writing. She has never given me a piece of advice that has not been dead on, and in hindsight I am glad I listened so intently. Then there is Jack Thomas. He took more time to read and discuss drafts of this book than I deserved. Piles of other students’ projects sat waiting for his careful attention, and yet he always made me feel like his only student. How he did this, I will never know, but I will certainly never forget. He convinced me that narrative, and specifically the story of people, is still vitally important. I will never have a knack for dramatizing people like he does, but I feel privileged to have witnessed how he thinks and hope that his influence will continue to enhance my work.

Finally, there are those people near and dear to me who were encouraging and patient in the years I was writing this book. To my precious companions from Providence—Seth and Susanne Schulman, Deb and Sterling Vernon, Harley Johnson and Amy Wagoner Johnson, and Jeff and Dana Reiser—thanks for being such wonderful friends and brilliant people. All the Des Jardins, Hardwickes, and Bowleys continue to remind me how nurturing family can be; my sister Jory and my father, Joel, also remind me that family can be great unofficial agents and fans. Of course my mother, Joy Des Jardins, the woman to whom this book is lovingly dedicated, never doubted that my days in basements of libraries and in front of computer screens would pay off. As for my husband, Christopher, I thank him or whatever force is responsible for transporting him thousands of miles to a foreign culture and a studio apartment down the street from a graduate student about to embark on her dissertation in American women’s history. You, my love, have undoubtedly seen and heard it all.

Abbreviations

Women and the Historical Enterprise in America

Introduction

Discovering Women’s Hidden History

Mercy Otis Warren, historian of the American Revolution, once remarked that men were too busy making history to be troubled with recording it themselves. She, on the other hand, a woman behind the scenes, on the sidelines, and in the background of noteworthy events, wrote The History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution in 1805 as a leisure activity but also as her patriotic obligation. Warren would not be the last woman to answer the call to chronicle moments of national glory. Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Ellet, Juliette Kinzie, Frances Caulkins, Caroline Dall, and dozens of others continued where Warren left off, remembering the national past for moral instruction, civic training, and public consumption. In the nineteenth century, American women embraced their roles as the custodians of national history. They studied the past from the books they kept in home libraries and preserved family relics of bygone years, all to prepare themselves for their maternal duty to raise civic-minded children and future citizens.¹

Conduct books, school primers, and course listings for some of the first women’s colleges and finishing schools reveal that historical knowledge was considered an important piece of intellectual equipment for the well-bred woman throughout the nineteenth century. One commentator insisted that women should read history if for no other reason than to giv[e] them a disgust to comedies and romances and to prevent vanity and affectation. An etiquette book in 1833 listed history as one of the subjects indispensable for preparing young ladies for the active duties of life. Between 1830 and 1870 it became commonplace for female seminaries to offer ancient, modern, and U.S. history for these very reasons. In the 1860s Elmira Women’s College offered general history, and Felton’s Historians was required reading for Vassar College’s Classical Course. School administrators believed that Ancient Greek and American history would instill democratic ideals in young soon-to-be mothers; by the 1880s both had become prerequisites for attendance at Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges.²

The scarcity of male elementary and secondary educators after the Civil War prompted women to take their knowledge of history outside the home in unprecedented numbers to make it their vocation in local schoolhouses and libraries. The rising number of women history teachers was commensurate with the increase of women teachers on the whole in these years. Ever since Catharine Beecher’s midcentury declaration of teaching as woman’s natural profession, Horace Mann and other advocates of the common school movement had been encouraging women to take up this public work. By 1870 three-fifths of all elementary school teachers in America were women. Fifty-seven percent of teachers for all pre-college grades were women by 1880; 65.5 percent, by 1890; and 70.1 percent, by 1900.³ At the same time school teaching was turning into feminine work, church, state, and patriotic groups were giving history greater attention as a classroom subject and a realm of social and civic knowledge. Several New England states made curricula in U.S. history compulsory in elementary schools as early as the 1820s, but after the Civil War it became a requirement nationwide, partly in reaction to the unsettling demographic and industrial changes in postwar cities. State laws now stipulated that it was the schoolteacher’s duty to use history to instill in students a love of country[,] and to lead them into a clear understanding of the virtues which were the basis upon which was founded a republican constitution.⁴

Suddenly it appeared that the historical learning women facilitated in both the private and the public spheres had been ascribed greater social significance than ever before. Mothers, aunts, and sisters perhaps long understood that by wielding their knowledge of the past to guide the development of future citizens, they could gain public authority unachievable by other means. Nina Baym estimates that at least twenty women published history textbooks for home and school use between 1790 and 1860 and established national reputations not as historians per se but as dutiful educators of children. Emma Willard’s position as the director of a New York seminary for girls, for example, sanctioned her writing of historical textbooks, which in turn gave her the power to shape historical discourse in the public domain where women had traditionally been kept silent. In this way the relationship between history and the woman historian was reciprocal: Just as her creation of national narratives affirmed the existence of the nation-state as an exceptional entity, history as a product of her thoughts and actions affirmed her worth as an agent of public discourse.⁵

Most women did not achieve the national influence of Willard but, rather, remained in local communities writing history for town newspapers, teaching history in elementary schools, or collecting family relics to display in town halls and historical societies. They found that their designated responsibility as custodians of the local past allowed them to perform the work of historical preservation, paid and unpaid, with authority, influence, and social acceptance. Such was the case at the former Transcen-dentalist community Fruitlands, where Clara Endicott Sears bought the deed to the property and saved its original structures from ruin. Mary Jeffrey Galt and Cynthia Tucker Coleman, the cofounders of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, also garnered support for their preservationist projects well beyond their local community, turning Jamestown Island and the Powder Magazine in Williamsburg into places of national repute.⁶

These women did not differ from the tens of thousands across the country who made up the rank and file of local preservationist groups by the late nineteenth century. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) (1890) and the Society of Colonial Dames (SCD) (1891) preserved monuments and colonial vestiges on a national scale, while organizations such as the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the Ladies’ Hermitage Association, and the Monticello-Jefferson Memorial Association maintained single homes and monuments as symbols of American values. The Dames explained in their constitution that they recovered the tangible aspects of the colonial past to stimulate a spirit of true patriotism and a genuine love of country; as they embarked on the twentieth century, several members even fashioned themselves as masters of historical pageants. Partly theatrical production, partly historical allegory, and partly patriotic propaganda, in the 1910s these popular rituals gained influence through women who served as planners, spectators, choreographers, actors, and artists—and even as symbols, for women and girls commonly dressed up as the feminine figures of Liberty and Columbia for these displays.⁷

Women outside New England were equally devoted to retrieving the past for civic purposes by the turn of the century. The United Daughters of the Confederacy and southern chapters of the DAR and SCD arose from local confederate veterans organizations following the Civil War and pressed to make their interpretations of the sectional conflict known to the rest of the country. Mildred Lewis Rutherford, historian-general of the United Daughters (1912–16), worried that northern women’s versions of national events were becoming the official accounts in schoolbooks and classrooms across the country and dedicated herself to righting their historical wrongs. Women expressed similar sentiments in the West and Midwest and likewise established organizations to interpret the past as they saw it. The Native Daughters of the Golden West, like the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers and members of dozens of analogous organizations, disseminated patriotic, albeit regionally exceptionalist, history in hopes of gaining social influence and cultural authority.⁸

Susan Pringle Frost (the historic district of Charlestown), Elizabeth Thomas Werlein (the French Quarter of New Orleans), and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (the Alamo) were just some of the preservationists who achieved clout as civic educators at this crucial moment at the turn of the century—when fears intensified about immigrant newcomers jeopardizing American values and university men sought similar cultural authority for themselves. At a time when white, domestic women still had no formal access to the political process, preserving national sites and planning historical parades had proven an effective means for them to claim rights to the American legacy and its associated privileges. Women discovered that there was power to be gained in placing an interpretive spin on the national past.

Indeed all the manifestations of the historical enterprise—collected and written, preserved and taught, enacted and studied—had fallen into the universe of the white, middle-class domestic woman by the turn of the twentieth century. And yet for reasons to be explained, scholars have obscured her close association with the historical enterprise. Here we attempt to retrieve her from obscurity, ultimately to reveal her as an important predecessor and counterpart to women who broadened historical practice in the twentieth century. Pageant masters, domestic writers, and preservationists are not the focus of this book, but their relationship to the historical enterprise sets the tone for the plots that unfold in the following pages. These domestic women, conservative in their political outlook and nostalgic in their views on the national past, may have unwittingly paved the way for diverse groups of American women with new agendas—radicals, feminists, and race activists, among others—to engage in the public sphere, as both historians and historical heroines in the making. As professional and popular writers, librarians, archivists, and activists, many women offered new perspectives on the national past that reshaped historical practice in lasting ways. This study contains the stories of only some of these women who refined usable pasts in the early twentieth century, but they are presented as a point of departure for more thorough discussions of women, gender, race, and the distinctive relationship of all three to the historical enterprise and public memory in America.

Today we still typically refer to white men in the academy when discerning the forces responsible for the way national history has been conceived and practiced over the preceding 100 years. Historiographers have summoned Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis in 1893 and his call for more social history as president of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1910 as turning points in the historical field. Similarly, speeches such as Carl Becker’s Everyman His Own Historian and Charles Beard’s History Written as an Act of Faith have been recalled as watershed events that brought in new ideological or methodological tides—in these cases the inauguration of cultural and historical relativism. But are the ideas of academic men all we should consider? Perhaps by assuming that male scholars arbitrated all the ways Americans understood the past we give an inordinate amount of attention to the production of academic scholarship and not enough to its actual consumption among the wider populace outside the academy, where women were prolific shapers of history.

To be sure, women writers and preservationists of the late nineteenth century would not have proclaimed themselves social or cultural historians, nor would they have associated themselves with the same intellectual program as the scholars who came to identify themselves by these terms later in the twentieth century. Nonetheless I will suggest here that a good many of them pioneered social and cultural perspectives that characterized historical practice in the academy well after they were forgotten. Nina Baym maintains that women constructed forms of history before and after 1850 that were situated comfortably within a domestic tradition of writing about people’s daily, social interactions. Bonnie Smith has also described women’s historical writing in the last third of the nineteenth century as encyclopedic and polymathic in genre and perspective, encompassing aspects of the past beyond the male focus of political figures and military events to shed light on changing social relationships in ordinary contexts.⁹

Domestic women had no intention of pioneering the historical methodologies and perspectives that would allow future writers to question Whig interpretations of national progress or to recast historical women outside their traditional sphere; they peopled their accounts and described facets of everyday life in the past not as subversives but as dutiful mothers reminding their children of the origins of the American republic and its associated civic values. Yet by the 1910s women with different agendas were borrowing their methods, examining the past through shifting social and cultural lenses to counter the historical justifications for white, male hegemony and the scientific historian’s emphasis on the political arena. In the Progressive Era in particular, women examined American groups in the everyday as a means of reforming labor conditions, race relations, exploitation of Native Americans, and immigration policy in growing industrial cities. At the same time participants in the suffrage and woman’s rights movements reworked versions of the national past as a means of sparking social and political change for women in the public sphere. As new generations of women became professional historians, librarians, and archivists who recovered the hidden stories of nonwhites, non-Protestants, and women, they also debunked the myth of progress upon which former historians built the exceptional American past, present, and future. These historians rewrote the past to serve new reform agendas, yet they owed a methodological debt to earlier domestic writers and woman patriots who shared an interest in similar subjects: women and social groups in the everyday.

My case for the connection between women’s production of social and cultural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is difficult to make, in part because the process of historical professionalization that began in the 1870s and 1880s seemed to interrupt the continuity between historical practices in America before and afterward. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob have written about this transitional moment when science and history got linked together, describing it as one during which history began to take its modern form as an organized, disciplined inquiry into the meaning of the past. Peter Novick has also explained how scienticity came to be the hallmark of the modern and authoritative for the new class of twentieth-century professional historians, causing former conventions of history writing to lose their appeal. I would suggest, however, that these earlier conventions did not altogether disappear; rather, they were modified in the twentieth century to match the scientific milieu of the academy.¹⁰

It is largely because of this scientific recasting of history that the influence of women as historians before, during, and after professionalization has been obscured, for the scientific ideal was inevitably masculine in its nature and effects. David Hollinger and Margaret Rossiter have remarked that the very language of twentieth-century scientism appropriated gender and its corresponding hierarchies, but not until recently has Bonnie Smith suggested that the recategorization of history as a science brought about its similar regendering. The development of modern scientific methodology, epistemology, professional practice, and writing, she concludes, has been closely tied to evolving definitions of masculinity and femininity. Indeed the authority of all women historians seemed to diminish as history shifted from a feminine realm of knowledge to a masculine field of scientific expertise.¹¹

Women by no means stopped writing or preserving history during these years, but their influence on the nascent historical profession has been overshadowed by the focus scholars then and since have placed on the work of male standouts in the university and the implicitly gendered meanings they constructed in defining scientific history and its expert practitioners. Professionalization, scientization, and academicization will be examined here as gendered processes to assess how women renegotiated their places in the historical enterprise in this transitional period. Only then can the field be recast to include women’s role in its development and can we understand how women ultimately reinterpreted the past for their own advancement in the twentieth century.

It is certainly useful to look at the professional strategies of the few women who did succeed in becoming historians in the American university by 1945, but academicians do not reveal the entire influence of women historians or the scope of the effects of gender on historical practice. When we look outside the ivory tower, we see that women became savvy marketers and disseminators of their versions of the past on the grassroots level: in classrooms, over the airwaves, in popular markets, and for mass consumption. Often their bottom-up methods for the dissemination of social and cultural history mirrored their insightful methods of historical analysis. As marginal figures to the historical profession, many represented the pasts of Americans marginalized by race, class, ethnicity, or gender in ways that scholars have little acknowledged.

When academic production is no longer the center of focus, the continuity between nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical practice becomes more readily apparent, as does women’s participation in the development of history as a professional field and medium for activist expression and social change. We see that while women did break the barriers of gender in some cases, engaging in the scholarly culture of the academy, others continued to construct narratives and preserve the artifacts of history on their own terms, giving past and present realms of female activity their due recognition. Others still took history in activist directions in the twentieth century, invoking versions of a usable past to make gains for woman suffrage, labor legislation, and heightened social equality for Americans of color and the working class. Indeed the story of women’s historical work in the twentieth century no longer appears to be a simple linear narrative of progress or an account of how patriarchal regimes suppressed feminine expression. It becomes an account of individual women and groups actively employing, invoking, and preserving the past for varied and complex purposes—despite and because of their marginalized position in the historical profession.

I have singled out African American women in this study for their particularly limited access to professional credentials, for in many cases this forced them to become the most resourceful historians of the twentieth century. A small group of black, middle-class clubwomen discovered historical writing as an effective means for promoting the merits of the race, and they initially emulated white women historians in hopes of bringing social uplift to their communities. Later than white women, but by no means less substantially, they were able to articulate their past and present plight as distinct from other American women and even men of their race. They had fewer material resources and opportunities to write history, and so they came to rely more heavily on oral tradition, commemorative strategies, interdisciplinary methods, pedagogical techniques, and grassroots mobilization to shape the contours of race memory and their own legacies as black women. One need not have access to official documents, government repositories, or tenure in a university history department, they proved, to render original and empowered history of African American women, but simply the wherewithal to search for this hidden past in the most inauspicious of places.¹²

The special access of African American women to the cultural traditions and social relationships of the past had nothing to do with their female biology or any feminine proclivity to tend to the historically mistreated. What appeared to be their instinct was really just a consequence of the historical perspective they unavoidably cultivated from the margins of the academic establishment, the masculine professions, race organizations, and the male public sphere. Already distanced from structures of power, women of varying racial and cultural backgrounds found themselves in closer social proximity to the historically inarticulate and eventually articulated for them. Women may have felt like outcasts from the field of professional history, yet their outsider status allowed them to investigate the past uninhibited by the scientific mantra of the university: to examine the past only through written documents, inside official realms of public and political activity, and always above the fray of social advocacy. They enjoyed the flexibility to poke and prod where male historians thought it inappropriate to roam: in the pasts of the poor, the oppressed, the abused, and underprivileged. Like their historical subjects, they often understood the complexity of power because they themselves never enjoyed the luxury of taking it for granted. As many women consequently viewed the past from the bottom up, they scrutinized the layers of social relations, economic conflicts, and cultural crossroads underneath the facade of official history. Whereas men often viewed the American past superficially as one of perpetual progress, these women peeled back the layers to see it as a patterned prevailing of power. In this way women turned their marginal positions into stations of privileged historical perspective.

It would be reductive to describe all the women in this study as constructing history and influencing memory in similar ways or for similar ends. As professional scholars, feminists, race reformers, advocates for Native Americans, and labor activists they embarked on this work for a variety of reasons and employed a unique set of techniques given their social objectives and available tools. A common link between them, however, was their ability to enable and be enabled by the practice of social and cultural history from multiple points of view. Collectively they encouraged methodological shifts away from Rankean empiricism in the twentieth century and once again toward a larger repertoire of historical lenses to shed light on the communal, private, and everyday realms of human experience—where women were better revealed. As this study tracks a different course for women in the tale of American historical practice, it also traces their increasing ability to assert themselves through historical mediums. Their works will become a lens through which to chart an intensifying activist and historical consciousness among them, yet, at the same time, to discern the different identities they sought for themselves as women with distinctive historical crosses to bear. The women introduced here took a variety of paths, but they all reclaimed the past as a way of reclaiming their present.

I

The Regendering of History, 1880–1935

Chapter 1

From Feminine Refinement to Masculine Pursuit, 1880–1920

In 1921 a writer for the New York Evening World asked the question, Why was it left for women to write the most authentic histories of New York? Several men had attempted to write authoritative histories of the great metropolis before, he noted, including the likes of William Smith and Washington Irving. Yet the accounts written by women over the preceding fifty years seemed to him the most accurate. There was Mary Louise Booth’s History of the City of New York (1859), for example, as well as Alice Earle’s Colonial Days in Old New York (1896), Ester Singleton’s Dutch New York (1909), and Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer’s History of the City of New York in the Seventeenth Century (1909).¹ Of all the New York histories, however, the one that impressed him the most was History of the City of New York: Its Origins, Rise, and Progress, a massive, multivolume work written by Mrs. Mary Lamb between 1877 and 1881. Sources told him that Lamb accomplished her labor under most discouraging conditions. . . . At her own expense she ran down important historical clues. While her dedication did not lead to instant wealth, it paid off in the long run, for her book continued to be relied on for details about New York’s major figures and events. In honor of her impressive feat and lasting impact, this journalist wished to raise Lamb from the depths of obscurity to make the seemingly anonymous historian a subject of history in her own right. Unfortunately for Lamb, this correspondent for the New York Evening World could not recollect the past with nearly the same accuracy he attributed to her, for the woman to whom he kept referring as Mrs. Mary Lamb was really Martha J. Lamb, once the esteemed editor of the Magazine of American History.²

Lamb had stumbled onto history writing relatively late in life. As a young woman she served as a math instructor at a polytechnic institute, leaving to marry and establish an orphanage in Chicago. Eight years later she moved to New York, only to be virtually bedridden from the moment she arrived. Under doctor’s care she began reading about New York’s local history. Her fascination led to avid note taking and the manuscript of History of the City of New York fourteen years later. Once the publisher A. S. Barnes introduced Lamb’s two volumes to the public, reviewers overwhelmingly sang its praises: The style fully equals that of Macaulay, or Froude, wrote one scholar. While the theme is the most spacious and splendid in American local history, her enthusiasm for it has matched its greatness, and her treatment, on the whole, has been ample and brilliant, wrote another. One reviewer went so far as to conclude, This woman has written the most complete history ever published of any city in the world.³

History of the City of New York would not be an isolated success; Lamb went on to write two other books to favorable reviews, The Homes of America (1879) and Wall Street History (1883), along with dozens of smaller historical works.⁴ By 1883 she had become such an established historical authority that she was chosen to be the editor and financial manager of the Magazine of American History. She devoted herself tirelessly to the journal from 8:00 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon every day, again to the admiration of most critics. The New York Times reported in 1888, Mrs. Lamb never published an uninteresting number of this periodical, and the New York Recorder announced that under Lamb the magazine was more read and esteemed among those who mold the national mind than any other periodical of the day.⁵ It was not long before Lamb’s reputation had earned her remuneration and privileges that most women writers could only imagine. When she first researched volume 1 of History of the City of New York, she was said to have nearly begged for more than the $50 a month she received for it. However, when she closed her deal for volume 2, A. S. Barnes agreed to give her sole control over the disbursements for engraving and electrotyping. Two years later Funk and Wagnalls agreed to give her a relatively high percentage of the royalties for Wall Street History. That same year when the Historical Publication Company bought the Magazine of American History, Lamb and her nephew set up the new share structure of the company over which she now presided.⁶

By the time she died in 1893, Lamb had written hundreds of historical articles and essays and been inducted as an honorary member into over a dozen historical societies and associations in New England and New York. Commentators frequently remarked that Lamb had mastered the historical craft as well as any man of her day. In 1881 the women’s literary club Sorosis honored her with a lavish New York reception, where she received letters of congratulation by the presidents of several historical societies, universities, and even former U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1886 President Grover Cleveland hosted a dinner party for Lamb and invited the legendary historian George Bancroft to take part in the honors. Upon her death the New York World reminded readers that Lamb’s histories had won her acclaim as one of the most advanced women of the century. Another writer eulogized that she was the one woman who has written history successfully. Not only did she take interest in historical matters, he added, . . . but she won respect and admiration of eminent and erudite historical scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, and came to be recognized as an authority on historical matters.⁷

The woman whom the writer for the New York Evening World wanted to snatch from obscurity in 1921 had in fact not always been so obscure after all. By all accounts Lamb had arrived as a respected historian in her own right. Thus this fact can only beg the question, Why was she so little known to New York journalists by 1921, only forty years after she first came to prominence as a great lady historian? More curious yet, Why was a journalist in 1921 so surprised to discover that at least three other women had written histories of New York since Lamb had published hers in 1877? Perhaps most baffling of all, Why would her eulogizers insist that Lamb was the only woman historian of influence when she died in 1893?

Certainly the reason was not the lack of women writing commercially successful or widely read histories at the time. Alice Earle and Sarah Bolton, for example, published most of their local histories and historical biographies between 1885 and 1900, albeit to far less fanfare than Lamb enjoyed before 1881. Ironically, at this time women were gathering influence as the writers of collective biographies, compilations of historical sketches—usually of dignitaries, leaders, martyrs, and generals—that presented the public men of history as universal role models for young readers. As a genre the collective biography allowed women to disseminate their prescriptions for national manhood to mass audiences as never before, although late in the nineteenth century these prescriptions did not differ much from those of nearly 100 years earlier, when Mercy Otis Warren first recorded the history of the American Revolution. Whether Pilgrim ministers, Founding Fathers, Union soldiers, Horatio Algers, frontier pioneers, Cavalier planters, or American statesmen, great men had always made up the substance of women’s nineteenth-century historical writings. Bolton, the most widely read collective biographer of the time, compiled Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous (1885), Famous American Statesmen (1888), and Famous Men of Science (1890). Poor Boys alone sold more than 50,000 copies in its first few years of print, much to the pleasant surprise of publisher Thomas Y. Crowell, who then contracted with Bolton to write more sketches of famous leaders, authors, and givers. Through her writings she reinforced men’s domain in the past as the public and noteworthy realms of politics, letters, science, commerce, and religion—and women’s by omission as the unremarkable private sphere.⁸

Just as women remained anonymous in Bolton’s histories, so did she as a woman historian. Whereas men such as George Bancroft and Francis Parkman had won esteem as gentlemen historians in the nineteenth century, women rarely enjoyed the corresponding distinction. Martha Lamb seemed to be an exception, but only for a time, for by 1921 even her reputation as a lady historian had to be recovered. In the decades after she published her books, other women wrote history prolifically and marketed it widely, though few won recognition as lady historians. Bolton’s sketches of great men had turned into popular history of mass proportions, yet she never regarded herself as one of the great writers or intellects of history, a distinction she reserved for the male heroes in her books. Perhaps Bolton perceived anonymity for herself and all women custodians of the past as a necessary cross to bear; women did not make history but recounted it for the benefit of younger generations.

Bolton spent the better part of the 1880s reconstructing the lives of history’s great men, yet a good number of them were not all that historic in the sense that they were still alive when she wrote about them. In fact some were, if only peripherally, part of her same Boston social circle; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for example, were men about whom she wrote but with whom she had also been socially acquainted. The familiarity with which she privately wrote of them suggests that she may have perceived herself as part of the same universe of historically significant movers and shakers. Although she kept a low profile as a woman biographer, she was prominent publicly as a moral reformer and temperance advocate. Through this feminine work Bolton had always believed that women could achieve great social influence—and eventually historical significance, it appears.⁹ For not long after writing exclusively about male subjects, Bolton began inserting women into her volumes of historical heroes. Her Successful Women (1888), Famous Types of Womanhood (1892), and Leaders among Women (1895) promoted the traditional domestic ideal but also depicted women as agents of national progress. One of Bolton’s exemplars of famous womanhood was Susanna Wesley, mother of theologian John Wesley, whom Bolton praised for giving her son his early religious and civic instruction. Her courage, her submissiveness to authority, the high tone of her mind . . . were visibly repeated in the character and conduct of her son, Bolton explained. What John Wesley would have been with an ignorant mother, it is difficult to conjecture. . . . It is a blessing to the world that Susanna Wesley ever lived.¹⁰

According to Bolton, John Wesley’s dutiful mother did more than act as an agent of moral progress; she directed the path of a heroic man and thus changed the course of national history, much like Bolton herself hoped to do by recalling the deeds of heroines in the past for potential heroines of the future. Like Poor Boys, Lives of Girls sold more than 50,000 copies its first few years in print and went through some two dozen editions. Better than notices of the press, Bolton reflected, have been the scores of letters received from women in various parts of the country, telling me how my book has inspired them to try to do something in the world.¹¹ In the 1880s and 1890s other women authors made a career of writing about Eminent Women, Famous Women, and Women Worthies. Moral reformers Frances Willard and Mary Livermore compiled over 1,500 sketches in Women of the Century (1893), a work undoubtedly intended to be both inspirational and prescriptive for young American girls. To no surprise, in this year of her death Martha Lamb was included among these 1,500 noteworthy women. Phoebe Hanaford’s Daughters of America (1883), Louisa Moulton’s Our Famous Women (1883), and Frances Willard’s Women in the Pulpit (1889) served much the same dual functions as history and instruction on the ideal feminine character.¹²

Examined collectively, these works reveal the growing inclination of women to present their contributions to national progress as distinct from yet equal to those of remarkable men. Bolton and her contemporaries were not the first to depict historical women in this way, however. In the 1850s Elizabeth Ellet had compiled similar works about aristocratic, pioneer, and revolutionary women and had won a popular following as a historian.¹³ Nina Baym suggests that such history in biographical form may have been the least defiant yet most effective way female authors could make a case for women’s historical agency. In the mid-nineteenth century, women were more acceptable as subjects of biography than of history, in part because they were deemed better objects to be contemplated rather than subjects of activity and agents of historical change.¹⁴

By the 1890s the market for these works had reached mass proportions; along with collective biographers such as Bolton, several popular writers of colonial history shifted their emphasis from Founding Fathers, male soldiers, and heads of households to ordinary women turned role models in early American society. Alice Earle and Anne Wharton, perhaps the most prolific female writers on the colonial era, considered the exploration of the domestic experiences of women in the colonies and the early republic as necessary aspects of their work. In Through Colonial Doorways (1893), Wharton insisted that to read of councils, congresses, and battles is not enough: men and women wish to know something more intimate and personal of the life of the past.¹⁵ Likewise in this passage from Colonial Days and Dames (1894), Wharton sought to reveal the private women behind publicly renowned men: Although Mary Washington and Abiah Franklin are chiefly known to later generations as the mothers of great sons, she prefaced, it is evident that both of these women were possessed of strong character and distinct individuality. Firmness, moderation, and deep religious sentiment were leading traits of Mrs. Washington; while Mrs. Franklin, thrifty and hard-working, having at two-and-twenty undertaken Josiah Franklin with his brood of little children, which her own contribution of ten augmented to the goodly number of sixteen, still found time, to reflect upon theological questions.¹⁶

The commitment of Earle and Wharton to revealing the domestic woman was evident in their contributions to Scribner’s six-book series Women of Colonial and Revolutionary Times. Accompanying biographies by Catherine Schuyler, Eliza Pinckney, Maud Goodwin, and Alice Brown, Earle’s Margaret Winthrop (1895) and Wharton’s Martha Washington (1897) proposed to shed new light on the invisible women behind historically noteworthy men. Women have been short shrifted in historical accounts and therefore this will be something slightly new, Wharton prefaced. The story of Martha Washington’s life has not been an easy one to tell, so largely has she, as a distinct personality, been overshadowed by the greater importance of the figure that had stood beside her.¹⁷ Wharton hoped to place the legacy of this woman worthy into the popular consciousness and, at the same time, to fill in gaps left by traditional political narratives with vivid details of daily domestic life. Similarly, in Through Colonial Doorways she recalled the domestic rituals that took place concurrently with more frequently recorded political events. As President Washington attended elaborate ceremonials in his honor, Martha, Wharton recounted, was detained at home . . . putting her household in order, and shipping china, cut glass, silver-ware, and linen from Mount Vernon to the capital. No longer trivial details, these domestic tasks behind the scenes, Wharton argued, added to Washington’s hospitality and diplomatic success. Thus they rightly found themselves in the foreground of her narrative, as political and military campaigns slipped into the backdrop.¹⁸

Throughout the nineteenth century, domestic historians had found woman worthies—queens, first ladies, actresses, saints, and martyrs—the most deserving of historical attention. Yet Earle and Wharton often abandoned the focus on exceptional individuals to examine unexceptional women in the collective and everyday. Earle’s Colonial Dames and Good Wives (1895) and Homelife in Colonial Days (1898) and Wharton’s Colonial Days and Dames and A Last Century Maid (1896) revealed ordinary women rather than exceptional and typically male individuals. I give a description of a group of women . . . rather than an account of some special dame of dignity or note, Earle explained in Colonial Dames. Calling one group The Boston Neighbors, she maintained that their interactions with one another revealed a picture of the social life of women more successfully than if she discussed single figures in isolation. Detailing common courtship and marriage customs, sports and diversions, holidays and festivals, girls occupations, and kitchen firesides, she offered a descriptive and layered view of social and cultural life suddenly peopled by heroic yet regular women.¹⁹

Again, as much as these works were intended to serve as history, they also served as civic primers; their glimpses into the lives of ordinary dames revealed an idealized view of feminine character to young female readers. The New York Times called the collective series of Scribner’s biographies a valuable element in the education of the American girl.²⁰ Yet even close inspection does not easily reveal which lessons about gender its women contributors wanted to prescribe. Alice Earle was perhaps the most indecisive. In Colonial Dames she championed the Victorian ideals of maternal piety and feminine deference at the same time she introduced embryonic versions of the twentieth-century new woman—self-sufficient, independent, politically invested, and even sexual—as a heroic model of femininity. Included in her cast of characters were women of affairs, colonial adventuresses, and Dame Margaret Brent . . . the first woman in America to demand suffrage. She lamented that Brent, a clear-cut, unusual, and forceful figure of the seventeenth century . . . vanishe[d] out of history, in a thoroughly feminine role, that of mourning sweetheart, for it was her role as a political activist—outside the domestic sphere—that made her the model heroine in Earle’s eyes.²¹

Her broad set of criteria for defining noble womanhood in the colonies suggests that Earle was unsure about what the ideal of femininity should be as the twentieth century approached. She argued that the historical impact of women in the private sphere was significant, for this was where they had arbitrated the mores for all American citizens. Ultimately she looked to women’s traditional roles in the home for solutions to the social disconnectedness of the new industrial order, but also to argue for their valuation in the public sphere. Thus she rightfully maintained, for example, that women in preindustrial society managed to work in the public marketplace and yet still be considered good wives. By using history to reinforce Victorian domesticity yet also to recommend more expansive public roles for women, Earle seems to have been torn between the values of older and modern times. Yet even if she never recognized it explicitly, her choice of historical vantage points—on groups of women and their ordinary social interactions—enabled her to render an empowered perspective of women that would have activist applications for historians to follow.

By the 1890s Sarah Bolton and Alice Earle were proudly acknowledging American women as public and historical figures in ways that Lamb could never have claimed in the 1870s and 1880s, yet