U.S. History As Women's History: New Feminist Essays

By Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris and Kathryn Kish Sklar

This outstanding collection of fifteen original essays represents innovative work by some of the most influential scholars in the field of women's history. Covering a broad sweep of history from colonial to contemporary times and ranging over the fields of legal, social, political, and cultural history, this book, according to its editors, 'intrudes into regions of the American historical narrative from which women have been excluded or in which gender relations were not thought to play a part.' The book is dedicated to pioneering women's historian Gerda Lerner, whose work inspired so many of the contributors, and it includes a bibliography of her works.

The contributors include:

Linda K. Kerber on women and the obligations of citizenship
Kathryn Kish Sklar on two political cultures in the Progressive Era
Linda Gordon on women, maternalism, and welfare in the twentieth century
Alice Kessler-Harris on the Social Security Amendments of 1939
Nancy F. Cott on marriage and the public order in the late nineteenth century
Nell Irvin Painter on 'soul murder' as a legacy of slavery
Judith Walzer Leavitt on Typhoid Mary and early twentieth-century public health
Estelle B. Freedman on women's institutions and the career of Miriam Van Waters
William H. Chafe on how the personal translates into the political in the careers of Eleanor Roosevelt and Allard Lowenstein
Jane Sherron De Hart on women, politics, and power in the contemporary United States
Barbara Sicherman on reading Little Women
Joyce Antler on the Emma Lazarus Federation's efforts to promulgate women's history
Amy Swerdlow on Left-feminist peace politics in the cold war
Ruth Rosen on the origins of contemporary American feminism among daughters of the fifties
Darlene Clark Hine on the making of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2000
• ISBN: 9780807866863

Book preview

U.S. History as Women’s History

GENDER & AMERICAN CULTURE

Coeditors

Linda K Kerber

Nell Irvin Painter

Editorial Advisory Board

Nancy Cott

Cathy N. Davidson

Thadious Davis

Jane Sherron De Hart

Sara Evans

Mary Kellry

Annette Kolodny

Wendy Martin

Janice Radway

Barbara Sicherman

U.S. History as Women’s History

New Feminist Essays

EDITED BY Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, & Kathryn Kish Sklar

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS Chapel Hill & London

© 1995 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 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 U.S. history as women’s history: new feminist essays / edited by Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar.

      p. cm.—(Gender and American culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2185-3 (cloth: alk. paper).—

ISBN 0-8078-4495-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Women—United States—History. I. Kerber, Linda K. II. Kessler-Harris, Alice. III. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. IV Title: US history as women’s history. V. Title: United States history as women’s history. VI. Series: Gender & American culture.

HQ1410.U17    1995

305.4′0973—dc20    94-27192

CIP

99  98  97  96  95  5  4  3  2  1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

TO GERDA LERNER

in admiration for her courage

her leadership

and her pioneering work

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART 1. STATE FORMATION

1 A Constitutional Right to Be Treated Like American Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship

Linda K. Kerber

2 Two Political Cultures in the Progressive Era: The National Consumers’ League and the American Association for Labor Legislation

Kathryn Kish Sklar

3 Putting Children First: Women, Maternalism, and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century

Linda Gordon

4 Designing Women and Old Fools: The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939

Alice Kessler-Harris

5 Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity: Marriage and the Public Order in the Late Nineteenth Century

Nancy F. Cott

PART 2. POWER

6 Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting

Nell Irvin Painter

7 Gendered Expectations: Women and Early Twentieth-Century Public Health

Judith Walzer Leavitt

8 Separatism Revisited: Women’s Institutions, Social Reform, and the Career of Miriam Van Waters

Estelle B. Freedman

9 The Personal and the Political: Two Case Studies

William H. Chafe

10 Rights and Representation: Women, Politics, and Power in the Contemporary United States

Jane Sherron De Hart

PART 3. KNOWLEDGE

11 Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text

Barbara Sicherman

12 Between Culture and Politics: The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs and the Promulgation of Women’s History, 1944–1989

Joyce Antler

13 The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War

Amy Swerdlow

14 The Female Generation Gap: Daughters of the Fifties and the Origins of Contemporary American Feminism

Ruth Rosen

15 The Making of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia

Darlene Clark Hine

Notes

Bibliography of the Writings of Gerda Lerner, compiled by Thomas Dublin

Contributor

Index

INTRODUCTION

This book is dedicated to Gerda Lerner, who has been a resolute advocate of the capacity of history to change the course of human events. A historian of women who has transcended the limits of the academy to reach out to a wide audience, she has challenged a generation of scholars and activists to join her. Committed to expanding the possibilities for women to participate fully in society, she has worked to expand knowledge about women’s past in ways that will change the consciousness of men and women. This book celebrates Gerda Lerner’s intellectual and political energy, her talent for engaged scholarship, her creativity, her persuasive powers, and the combative spirit that has enabled her to give new meaning to the historical enterprise.

The contributors to this volume grew up into a world in which history was rigidly limited. It paid little attention to social relationships, to issues of race, to the concerns of the poor, and virtually none to women. Women figured in history for their ritual status, as wives of presidents like Abigail Adams or Dolly Madison; for their role, as spoilers, from the witches of Salem to Mary Todd Lincoln; or for their sacrificial caregiving, like Clara Barton or Dorothea Dix. Even when women like Sojourner Truth, Jane Addams, and Eleanor Roosevelt were named by historians, the radical substance of their work and their lives was routinely ignored. A very few historians of women—Eleanor Flexner, Julia Cherry Spruill, Caroline Ware—worked on the margins of the profession, their contributions unappreciated and their writing vulnerable to the charge of irrelevance.

The politics of the 1960s sparked a radical change. The civil rights movement, resistance to the Vietnam War, and a new wave of feminism inspired a generation of scholars to explore subjects previously ignored. The feminist assertion that the personal is political, which unearthed so many hidden injuries, had its own resonance for historians who took up the challenge to interrogate the ways in which the structures and experience of daily life, and women’s roles in them, shaped the construction of public culture. If the personal and the private had political implications, then the significance of women, even positioned as private and apolitical beings, also had substantive political implications.

When Gerda Lerner entered graduate school at Columbia University in 1963, she overcame her mentor’s resistance and wrote a dissertation on the Grimké sisters. By the time she completed her degree three years later, a generation of graduate students committed to an engaged history was beginning to form. Each of the contributors to this volume found her or his own path to women’s history in the years between 1967 and 1972. Trekking through unfamiliar terrain, each of us encountered Gerda Lerner: sometimes it was through something she had written; sometimes it was at a political meeting; sometimes it was on a scholarly panel. She seemed to be everywhere. Her authoritative voice, with its muted Viennese inflection, cajoled, persuaded, encouraged, and demanded changes in the way we wrote history and in the way the profession treated women. We responded because her words resonated with what we were thinking and because she was radical and brave. She took risks: in the subjects she chose to study, in the research and analytic strategies she adopted, in the ways she negotiated the surfaces of the profession. She was older than we were, yet she was more energetic than most of us. She could hold a room with her formidable presence.

For Gerda Kronstein Lerner, history was her third, perhaps even her fourth career. In 1938 she received the Matura in her native Vienna just before she was forced by the Nazis to leave the country of her birth. Arriving in the United States, she took a succession of what she later described as typical women’s jobs while she learned English and then married Carl Lerner and raised two children. Over a twenty-year period, she became an active political organizer around issues of social justice and women’s equality, and a creative writer. She collaborated with Eve Merriam on a musical called the Singing of Women, which was produced in 1951; published a moving novel, No Farewell, in 1955; and wrote an important screenplay, Black Like Me, published in 1964. In 1959 she resumed her formal education, earning a B.A. at the New School for Social Research in 1963 before she entered Columbia to start on her Ph.D. By then she already knew that she would make a career of women’s history. Her dissertation quickly became, in 1967, her first historical publication, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery.

In the relatively short space of time since then, Gerda Lerner’s talent as a scholar, thinker, practical politician, and organizer has been widely felt. Her scholarly work, which began with a stubborn insistence that sources could be found to study even the poorest and most subordinated of women, has stretched the boundaries of our knowledge about women’s lives and encouraged historians to ask questions previously considered impossible.

At first, Lerner focused her attention on the American context, producing articles and books in which she placed women’s activities as institution and community builders at the center of political struggle. In order to find the documents that are included in Black Women in White America (1972), Lerner traveled throughout the South, visiting African American churches, schools, and families, her own example energizing allies to help her in retrieving written records that many historians had easily assumed had not survived. The book—which, like virtually all of her major publications, remains in print—still offers a warning against the assumption that any people are voiceless. By its example, it has inspired other documentary retrieval projects, notably Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in the Middle West archive.

Presciently, Lerner recognized that if there were to be a new women’s history it would need to organize itself around principles that would illuminate women’s lives. She had already begun to do this in her classic article, The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson (1969), where she demonstrated how differences in class location altered women’s relationships to each other and shaped their responses to technological and economic change. In her documentary history, The Female Experience (1976), she developed a chronology and periodization that reorganized history around life-cycle categories opening up fresh possibilities of thinking about women in terms of their own experience. She virtually predicted the general outlines of the future historiography of the field in Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges (1975).¹

By the end of the 1970s Lerner had already concluded that studying the United States alone—even over the course of its four-hundred-year settlement—was insufficient to provide an authentic understanding of the problematic relations between men and women. Americans had made their own reinterpretations of the patriarchy that they had inherited, but they had not invented it. As fearless as ever, Lerner embraced a more capacious agenda. Raising some of the same questions that Friedrich Engels had addressed in 1884 in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, she began to seek the origins of patriarchy and of the subordination of women. Though her project moved her out of familiar time, it led her back to the European-centered turf in which she had been steeped as a child. Working with familiar and unfamiliar languages and cultural references, and with a broad sweep of literary sources as well as religious and archaeological artifacts, she painstakingly traced the emergence and development of patriarchy over more than two millennia of Western civilization.

The result has been an astonishing demonstration of virtuosity. In the first of two volumes, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), she challenged traditional conceptions of the emergence of slavery to construct new definitions of class and to reveal new meanings of customary ideas and metaphors about women. The argument forged a new and persuasive synthesis that has revealed patriarchy’s vulnerability to social circumstance and historicized its construction. In The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), Lerner explored the devastating effects on women of their exclusion from the historical record. She persuasively argued that women’s struggle to comprehend their own history lies at the heart of their ability to envision a world in which they are full participants.

This insight pervades every phase of Gerda Lerner’s life. At a time when many American academics insisted that good historical practice required that historians distance themselves from the political passions of their time, Lerner taught that one wrote history to save one’s own life, indeed one’s own sanity. As a person who had been, by Fascist law, racialized into an Other, she had experienced the significance of racism. As a political activist, she had learned how crucial class relations were to understanding the historical process. As a feminist, she had already concluded that integrating women into history would wholly transform historical and therefore present consciousness.

All the contributors to this volume share some portion of these sensibilities, but Gerda Lerner lives them with an intensity and conviction that leaves us breathless. Convinced that history was an absolute lifeline to self-recognition and to giving our life meaning, she has dedicated herself both to innovative and resourceful research and to the training and education in women’s history not only of young scholars, but also of female activists and the public. Her accomplishments in this area are nothing short of remarkable. As a faculty member in 1972 at Sarah Lawrence, she persuaded the college to invest in what was then the unique idea of a master’s program in women’s history. With help from the Rockefeller Foundation, this program became a model for graduate education in the field, preceding and inspiring the many Ph.D. programs that followed, including her own expanded work at the University of Wisconsin.

All the while, Gerda Lerner traveled to college campuses to teach truculent colleagues the importance of women’s history. With astonishing patience, she helped reluctant historians understand how they might integrate gender issues into American history courses and research. Outside the academy, she played an important role in making women’s history visible to the general public. She conceived the notion of an Institute for Women Leaders, which met at Sarah Lawrence in the summer of 1979. There, Molly McGregor brought from Sacramento the idea of a day-long celebration of women’s history, and the proposal for a Women’s History Week was born. When the institute concluded its meetings at a Washington, D.C., press conference, its leaders persuaded Colorado congresswoman Patricia Schroeder to ask for congressional endorsement. Since then, Women’s History Week has become a month-long observance, transforming elementary and secondary school curriculums and bringing public programs that celebrate women’s past to libraries, trade unions, and civic celebrations across the nation. Other institutes have had an equally startling impact. Gerda Lerner has organized programs for secondary school teachers and for scholars and students of black women’s history. In 1988 she helped coordinate a conference on graduate training in U.S. women’s history, which marked the maturity of the field by attracting scholars from fifty-two institutions that offered doctoral training in women’s history. Each of these activities has spun off a web of activity and created networks of active participants.

We honor Gerda Lerner for her service to the profession and for her capacity to reach audiences far beyond the scholarly community. She continues to inspire us through her own example to think rigorously, systematically, analytically, and globally about women’s role in history. We honor her for her success in demonstrating, in her own words, that women’s history is a primary tool for women’s emancipation. We are grateful to her for challenging us to think in the ways that are reflected in these essays.

I read [history] a little as a duty, observes Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences ... and hardly any women at all. Much of the work of women’s historians has been dedicated to retrieving historical women, respecting their records, describing their lives. In Placing Women in History, Gerda Lerner in effect predicted a historiography for a field of study that then barely existed. In the first stage historians would be like Diogenes with a lantern, wandering through the past, seeking literal evidence of women’s historical existence. It was a stage characterized by productions like biographical dictionaries and documentary collections. That stage—marked in 1971 and 1980 by the publication of Notable American Women—continues to retain its vitality, as the publication in 1993 of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia testifies.² Once biographical presence was established, Lerner asserted, there would be a second stage, in which historians would easily recognize women’s contributions to developments already marked as important but thought to have been completely the work of men; in a third stage it would be possible for historians to appreciate those enterprises that women themselves reshaped or reconfigured. Most of the contributions to the explosion of publications in women’s history in the last three decades can readily be placed in one or another of these three categories.

Lerner understood, however, that to recognize women’s historical agency would ultimately radically unsettle historical narratives as they had been written. To recognize women as historical actors—vulnerable as men are to forces beyond their control, striving as men do to shape the contours of their lives as best they can—is to introduce into historical work the analysis of gender relations. The work of women’s history expands to include not only those experiences particular to women but also the complex relations between men and women. Asking questions about how men and women construct meaning for their historical experience, historians now understand that gender itself is socially constructed, a culturally specific system of meaning that—as Alice Kessler-Harris has said in another place—orders the behavior and expectations of work and family, influences the policies adopted by government and industry, and shapes perceptions of equity and justice.³ To put it another way, now that Catherine Morland can no longer complain that there are hardly any women at all, historians are challenged to turn their attention back to popes and kings, wars and pestilences, that is, to seeking to understand how men and women, in all their abrasive interaction, together construct and transform the world by power and by knowledge.

Women’s history began by questioning the claims of the normative. It has intruded upon and destabilized virtually every element of the old narratives. All the standard topics—whether witchcraft, or slavery, or westward expansion, or industrialization, or political change—require reassessment. There is no doubt that the grand narratives that we have inherited, built as they were on the assumption that men’s experience is normative and women’s experience is trivial, are partial narratives; as Edmund S. Morgan once said in another context, they are revisions in need of revising.⁴ We are challenged to enter into dialogue with them; to reframe their questions; in short, to revise them, with the understanding that our work will be revised in its turn. Women’s history has itself not been immune from charges that it has established a new set of norms. As a field, it has been profoundly tested by the challenge of African American scholars that it constructed its own exclusionary assumption that white women are the measure.

The essays in this book reflect the continuing dialogue over what we are as a field as well as how we influence the process of historical understanding. They are in their different ways evidence that the field has reached the fourth stage of development predicted by Lerner nearly two decades ago. Seeking a synthesis of what we know about women and about men, these essays are driven by questions about how power is certified and exercised, and how knowledge is produced and restricted. In this context women’s agency sometimes achieves expression, but often it is subordinated. Individually and together these essays seek to discover how gender serves to legitimize particular constructions of power and knowledge, to meld these into accepted practice and state policy. In seeking women’s agency, we seek to recapture voices of women in dialogue and in confrontation with men. We trust that these voices will lend depth to our perception of what counts as historically significant and that they will contribute information about women even as they help us comprehend what enables and sustains power for certain groups of men. When we find silences, we seek not simply to hear the still voices, but to discern how it was possible to write history from which women’s voices were excluded; when we find spaces that seem empty, we ask how boundaries have been imposed and maintained.

State formation, power, and knowledge have not traditionally been understood to be the subjects of women’s history. But they are themes that permeate the essays in this volume. As editors, we did not ask nor intend that this be so. It simply happened. In approaching potential contributors, we sought out historians of our own generation whose lives and work had been touched by Lerner’s efforts to expand the impact of women’s history. We make no claim to be inclusive; the network of powerful minds reached by Lerner is far more extensive than we could possibly encompass. Nor did we aspire to be fully representative as to field or approach. Rather, we wanted, by means of example, to illustrate how the new work in women’s history had provoked an exciting reassessment of what constituted the historical enterprise.

As the essays began to come in, each of them an individual reflection on how current questions merged in or had affected its author’s work, the editors discovered just how much the field of women’s history had moved from the discovery of women to an evaluation of social process and institutions. The authors have rarely been explicit about problems of method or the theoretical implications of their work. But each, in exploring an element of individual research, has necessarily touched upon one or more ingredients of the linked nexus of power, knowledge, and state formation. The authors share a refusal to concede that the private is necessarily nonpolitical, a refusal that eases the examination of the reciprocity embedded in systems of political agency that empower men and systems that disempower women. It also becomes easier to seek sites of women’s agency and power.

As states continue to develop, they continue to construct and reshape gender relations. Rights and obligations are rarely distributed or enforced evenly throughout a society; fissures run along the lines of gender, race, and class. Often race lines intersect with those of gender or of class. In the construction of citizenship, state formation, power, and knowledge merge until the elements are impossible to separate. Gender is implicated in the rights that states make it possible to claim; as Linda Kerber argues in her essay (Chapter 1), gender is also implicated in the obligations that states impose on citizens. What is right, what is obligation is negotiated; who wins these negotiations is determined not only by power relations but also by the confidence with which knowledge of appropriate social relationships can be asserted. In ideological systems that sustain the knowledge that women serve the state through serving the men of their family, women’s exclusion from both rights and obligations is understood to be rational, realistic, and wise.

Thus in the United States the consent of the governed has been understood to be measured by voting, but for two-thirds of the nation’s history, none of its women citizens could vote, and until the last few decades, explicit barriers to African American voters sustained their exclusion. Yet if, instead of assuming that therefore women had no political life we adopt a capacious understanding of the possible ingredients of politics, we discover that they did indeed have a political history, one that involved petitioning, testifying, and mobilizing themselves and others. Kathryn Sklar’s essay in this volume (Chapter 2) shows how members of an organization of middle-class women developed their own forms of knowledge, their own view of power, and their own location in the political process, differentiating themselves from an analogous group of men and making it possible for them to accomplish what men could not. By enlarging her story to encompass the male-dominated political process, she shows how fundamental features of state formation in the United States created opportunities for women that were closed to men. In this case we see how women’s gender-specific actions served as a surrogate or substitute for what ultimately became class-specific public policies. Part of this outcome arose from women’s activism, part from the male-dominated polity in which they maneuvered.

Women can differ among themselves over how to achieve political voice. The particular strategies they choose depend on their assumptions as well as their goals, as Jane De Hart reveals in her astute assessment of more recent political activists (in Chapter 10). In the 1970s, campaigners for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, while exhibiting different styles of political behavior, acted on a shared notion of entitlement to equal rights. In the 1980s and early 1990s, practitioners of a feminist-inspired electoral politics mobilized to put women and men in office who supported a feminist agenda. They focused less on rights and more on representation of interests. More effective in their embrace of political power, they are nevertheless dependent on a broadly diffused feminist consciousness among the electorate.

The political history of women involves a narration of their regulation and control as well as of their agency; it involves a continuing struggle to shape political choices in a variety of sites. Power, even political power, has never been completely monopolized by those who were supposed to monopolize it; it has always been contested, always flowed into odd places. Linda Gordon’s essay (Chapter 3) indicates how gender is implicated in systems of entitlements that also simultaneously become systems of regulation and control. When diverse coalitions of women attempted over a period of years to protect children, they found that they were most effective when they defined themselves, and the recipients of government aid, as selfless mothers. This reflected knowledge already in place among the middle classes and the elite; adjustment to this knowledge made possible a reshaping of state agencies. But a state that reshaped itself to assist children did so in part as a way of avoiding assisting more diffuse categories of adult women; the strategy of putting children first backfired, Gordon argues, because it required that women conform to a rigid and limited definition of motherhood. Child-centeredness, writes Gordon, worked for women primarily when they could get themselves defined as good mothers ...; when there was any question about their qualifications or parenting style, they became vulnerable to losing control over their children. Almost no activity in which adults participate is so generally thought to be a matter of private choice as marriage, yet, as Nancy Cott shrewdly points out (in Chapter 5), the context in which these private choices are made has always been rigidly shaped by state power and state policy. Who is eligible to marry, what pairings of individuals will be marked as miscegenation and made illegal, all are defined by the law of domestic relations. This system of law is coterminous with the origins of the state and inseparable from it.

As states develop bureaucracies and state services, these agencies too reflect cultural assumptions about what is fitting for men and what is fitting for women, hardening theory into practice. These assumptions sometimes result in gendered contests of power on sites that we have long understood to be explicitly involved in the exercise of male power, such as courts, schools, and prisons. Most American historians now concede that during the years from 1890 to around 1920, organized women exercised a great deal of influence over the social institutions governing American society. Searching for an explanation of why their influence waned after that date, some historians have pointed to the achievement of the suffrage; others, to the increasing bureaucratization of the state. But Estelle Freedman (in Chapter 8), using the life of prison superintendent Miriam Van Waters as a case in point, shows that separate women’s organizations continued to support women who were able to acquire formal political authority. Although women’s movements for reform were smaller, more beleaguered, and more vulnerable after 1920, women continued to organize as women—even without an explicit ideology of gender difference.

The idea that women could construct pockets of public power that can be understood only by understanding the personal influences that moved them provides the model that William Chafe uses (in Chapter 9) to explain Allard Lowenstein’s rise to power. Despite his provocative stances on issues of civil rights and social justice, Lowenstein, the child of immigrants, became a well-known congressman. Using Eleanor Roosevelt’s life as a touchstone, Chafe demonstrates that in both cases the construction of their political careers can only be fully understood by understanding the personal anxieties that propelled them. But, in turn, the personal becomes a way for historians to understand the twists and turns of state policy in particular periods.

Yet even when it is so understood, maintaining that understanding involves invoking subtle and hidden forms of power. Power involves the controlling of choices and the continuing struggles to shape those choices in a variety of sites. These loci can include the most private spaces of all: we now understand clearly that even the happiest of nuclear families are places in which gendered power is exercised. Nell Painter challenges us (in Chapter 6) to take seriously the point that so long as slavery endured, all American families, white and black, enslaved and free, were necessarily participating in a single social system, one that licensed male heads of households to indulge their wish for power over all dependents. To live as a free person in a society based economically on slave production and characterized by open and unabashed captivity and physical abuse of adults and children had social and psychological implications, both for people who were themselves enslaved and for people who understood themselves to be free. If, as radical abolitionists maintained, all American society was indeed complicit in sustaining the use of violence to secure obedience and deference, and in maintaining obedience and submission as ideals, then we are forced to reconsider many familiar generalizations about antebellum society, especially the North as a domain of freedom and individual choice.

If the process of state formation is intricately connected to practices of power, it is no less tied to the shaping of knowledge. Men and women know who they are and how they behave, and on the basis of that knowledge, they interpret their own lives. On the basis of that knowledge they seek to intervene in state formations. And on the basis of that knowledge, they lay claim to the shape of public policy, incorporating what they know into the construction of policy. Michel Foucault speaks of many knowledges; what we know and how confidently we know it is related to the knower’s social place. For more than a century, young women of the middle classes searched in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women for what they needed to know in their quest for meaningful adulthood. Barbara Sicherman’s subtle examination (in Chapter 11) of the ways in which interpretation of a single book varied by the social location, interpretive conventions, and perceived needs of disparate communities of readers is a powerful demonstration of the uses to which a historian can put the analytic strategies of reader-response theory. Read this way, Little Women becomes a social text, doing cultural work, not least for the young Jewish women whom Sicherman finds using the novel as a guide to upward mobility and what they understood to be authentic American life.

Michel Foucault also identifies a sphere of privileged knowledge, which, claimed by elites, by agents of state power, or by leaders, can be exercised in ways that regulate and control. A superb example of how this works on a small scale occurs in Judith Walzer Leavitt’s essay (Chapter 7). For nearly a century, Leavitt reports, Typhoid Mary has been an abstraction, conveying the belief that women are associated with pollution, but not conveying anything at all about the real woman, Mary Mallon, or about the historical process that created her. Needing to regulate the disease, authorities had to create a picture of social disorder that the disease exemplified. To do this required them to find a symbol; in the process they constructed an image of a denatured woman. Desexing Mary Mallon, turning her into an Amazon, became the vehicle for enhancing the power of public health officials and advancing the status of the medical profession. When Mary Mallon was jailed, no powerful groups of women noticed the gendered basis of her incarceration and isolation. The knowledge of the experts organized in the public sector had overwhelmed the knowledge of nonprofessional, nonorganized friends and acquaintances. The cost was the reinforcement of the public conviction that, uncontrolled by social norms, women posed a threat to social order.

Alice Kessler-Harris suggests (in Chapter 4) some of the more general policy implications of particular constructions of knowledge. Her essay on the 1939 amendment to the Social Security Act explores some of the ways in which gendered assumptions permeated the legislative process. On the basis of who they think they are, men and women lay claim to policy knowledge, which in turn helps them shape a political agenda and construct social policy. In this instance, organized groups of women played an inconspicuous role, yet social policies did not escape the implications of gendered ideas that, in turn, sustained racial agendas. The Advisory Council, justifying a lower social security stipend to aging women, believed that they should live with a child. According to its chairman, the grandmother helps in the raising of the children and helps in home affairs, whereas the aged grandfather is the man who sits out on the front porch and can’t help much. State policies formulated on such a basis clearly had long-range implications for the construction of gender relations and for their uses as well.

Foucault also locates what he calls subjugated knowledges—knowledges disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated.⁵ Women’s knowledges, especially when claimed by women understood to be themselves subdued on the grounds of race or class, have often, but not always, been of this latter type. Such knowledge is often regulated by explicit repression, which Gerda Lerner has described in the case of women as the world-historical tendency to deny women access to their own past, even their own recent past. In an elegant illustration of this process, Amy Swerdlow’s reconstruction (in Chapter 13) of the Congress of American Women (CAW) laments the process in which, even within a ten-year period, women activists could lose track of their own predecessors. Swerdlow has restored to us the history of the Congress of American Women, a group that once had a quarter of a million members and a wide-ranging program that included virtually every second-wave feminist goal. Repression not only killed the group but also eliminated memory of it. The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs, which paralleled the CAW and lasted for about a decade longer, is the subject of Joyce Antler’s essay (Chapter 12). Its much smaller Jewish immigrant membership continued to exercise power and influence by a conscious effort to sustain its cultural roots. But language and culture provided a closed system that did not outlast the generation of women who founded the group.

When young, white middle-class women in the 1960s sought ways to express their discontents, they did not have the experiences of either the Congress of American Women or the Emma Lazarus Federation available to them. Nor, indeed, could their mothers or their teachers provide them with energizing examples of ambition, authenticity, and political effectiveness. Largely ignorant of women’s history, young women reacted against the Feminine Mystique of the 1950s. The invisible ghost haunting their youth, writes Ruth Rosen (in Chapter 14), wore an apron and lived vicariously through the lives of her husband and children. In their search for a different life, they responded to the criticism and activism of male rebels. Social critics lumped them together with young men and pronounced a generation gap. But no one noticed that it was a gendered generation gap. For young women, rebellion against tradition turned into a much more complicated journey. Only after a struggle could they perceive that male claims for adventure were grounded in the assumption that women would continue to serve the needs of others. Without knowledge of their own historical situation, neither they nor the larger culture understood that "two generation gaps existed... each with its own gender-specific fears, dreams, and solutions."

The final essay in this volume movingly demonstrates the tragic example of wiping out historical memory for historians themselves and the efficacy of restoring lost women to us. Darlene Clark Hine describes (in Chapter 15) her painful decision to become involved in the creation of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and the rewards of having done so. Her project restores to American history a vital culture and a crucially important community. Playing midwife to the reincarnation of the lives of 640 African American women enabled Hine to provide a historical record where none had existed. One can imagine their ghosts waiting for this fine encyclopedia.

Questions about the interrelationship between power and knowledge haunt the essays in this volume. If people understand themselves in a certain way, should we, as historians, take their knowledge for our own? When people are denied knowledge, they are usually also simultaneously disempowered. What does it mean to know? What does it mean to have, or to resist, power? When people in power or social movements seeking power use their knowledge to shape policy, knowledge and power become synchronous. State formation cannot be separated from the material conditions under which states are formed and constantly reshaped; the knowledge that guides state founders is knowledge of material conditions as well as of theory.

Women’s history as traditionally practiced in the United States and elsewhere has situated itself as critique of inherited narrative. In each successive historiographical stage it has implicitly positioned itself as a disconcerting, destabilizing force, its practitioners locating themselves as outsiders who aimed to alter the trajectory of scholarship. In its early phases, practitioners took the risk that their conclusions would not be taken as obvious by historians whose gaze was on traditional measures of power. That risk turned out to be real; whether ignored or admired, women’s history has been vulnerable to marginalization. But positions of marginality are frequently fruitful. Protest against marginalization drove Gerda Lerner’s volumes on the relationship of patriarchy and feminist consciousness; we suspect that protest against marginalizing tendencies in part accounts for the efforts of the contributors to this volume to intrude into regions of the American historical narrative from which women had been excluded or in which gender relations were not thought to play a part. If the normative U.S. history can no longer be understood to be male, then there must be room for women in its center: room for Miriam Van Waters in the history of prisons, room for the persistent influence of the law of domestic relations in our understanding of the construction of citizenship, room for Typhoid Mary in the definition of disease. Like these essays, the new U.S. women’s history of which they are a part provokes us to construct a new normative stance for all of U.S. history. This new history suggests that changes in gender relations in moments of social change have participated in changing power relations. It affirms the likelihood that these changes are central to new configurations of social power. In this sense we end with a vision of U.S. history as women’s history quite as much as it is men’s history.

Human beings, Gerda Lerner has written, have always used history in order to find their direction toward the future: to repeat the past or to depart from it.⁶ As historians, including those represented here, seek to develop a more complexly articulated understanding of human relations in the past, they participate in a continuing effort to make power less mysterious and knowledge more accessible. It is, we think, a worthy quest.

Linda K. Kerber

Alice Kessler-Harris

Kathryn Kish Sklar

PART 1 State Formation

CHAPTER 1 : A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO BE TREATED LIKE AMERICAN LADIES : WOMEN AND THE OBLIGATIONS OF CITIZENSHIP : LINDA K. KERBER

The title of this essay comes from the words of Kathleen Teague, who represented the Eagle Forum, a conservative women’s organization, in testimony before the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee in March 1980. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan the previous winter; seeking a measured response, President Jimmy Carter had proposed universal mandatory draft registration. Carter recognized that in the event of a draft, current rules required that women be assigned only to noncombat roles; nevertheless, with 150,000 women already serving in the all-volunteer army, he believed that [t]here is no distinction possible, on the basis of ability or performance, that would allow me to exclude women from an obligation to register. Teague argued against the administration’s proposal. She and her colleagues pointed out that the obligation of military service had always been marked by gender. Recognizing the reciprocal relationship between rights and obligations, Teague pointed out that the absence of an obligation to serve in the military was tantamount to the presence of a right; women, she said, had the right to be treated like . . . ladies. ... [A right] which every American woman has enjoyed since our country was born.¹

Teague was not wrong to argue that American tradition and precedent have sustained the practice of defining the ingredients of citizenship differently on the basis of gender. Women have been citizens of the United States from the moment of its origins: they could be naturalized, they were subject to its laws, and they could claim the protection of its courts; as single adult women, they were vulnerable to taxation. But American women’s relationship to the state has from the beginning been understood to be different in substantial and important respects from the relationship of their male counterparts and contemporaries. Rights and obligations have generally been stated in generic terms incumbent on all citizens, male and female, but they have been experienced differently by men and by women. Struggle over women’s suffrage and, in recent years, over the interpretation of the meaning of the right to the equal protection of the laws guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment has publicized the extent to which the meaning of rights has been linked to gender. That there is a history of gendered obligation is less well understood.

I suspect that we have not thought much about gendered differences in citizenship because we employ egalitarian language; all citizens, after all, pledge allegiance to the flag, using a capacious rhetoric that ignores differences of gender, race, and ethnicity. Indeed, in recent years the suspicion has been voiced that public understanding of the meaning of citizenship has shifted sharply. It is possible that an older scheme that emphasized conduct—the exercise of rights and the fulfillment of duties—is fading, to be replaced by an emphasis on claims without reciprocal duties, what Mary Ann Glendon has called rights talk. Lizabeth Cohen and others have pointed out that the meaning itself is changing; in the late twentieth century, citizenship is increasingly treated as a commodity. Instead of being understood as a status that in turn authorizes civic participation, citizenship is increasingly likely to stand for a range of entitlements: to unemployment compensation, to welfare payments.²

What did Kathleen Teague mean when she asserted that American women have the right to be treated like ladies? The context suggests that she understood being a lady to involve being excused from civic obligation. Most contemporary theorists of citizenship, as well as members of Congress, acknowledged that the power to draft women was implicit in the sovereignty of the state. But many, like Teague though not so explicitly, also took the position that the failure of the state to exercise that power over the long course of the history of the republic had been tantamount to abandoning the claim. Although no one made the explicit analogy, the reasoning was not unlike the logic of the Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett (1875), when the Court had agreed that given the absence of prohibitions against woman suffrage in the original constitutions of the federal government and the states, the original intent of the founding generation might well have encompassed the development of woman suffrage. But in 187 5 the Court also maintained that the failure to act on that potential over a long period of time had established a fact. If woman suffrage had not been generated within a century after the ratification of the Constitution, the burden was on suffragists to establish their claim. A century after Minor, Teague conveyed that if an obligation of military service had not been developed over the course of nearly two centuries since ratification, a reciprocal right to be free of that obligation had been constructed in its place. She concluded that those who wished to change that status quo carried the burden of persuading women that the change was to their advantage.

In John Locke’s classic formulations, claims of rights are generally related to reciprocal duties; the right to self-preservation is linked to the duty to preserve the safety of others.³ Theorists of the social contract generally connect a duty to obey the law with the power to claim rights under it. The right to invoke the protection of the state is, for example, often tied to the obligation to bear arms in its defense. The relationship of rights and duties is rarely, however, so neatly reciprocal. The obligation to pay taxes has not always brought with it the right to vote, the right to vote does not bring with it the obligation to vote, and until very recently the right to serve on juries did not bring with it the obligation to serve on juries.

In her transformation of an issue of obligation into a problem of rights, Teague was squarely in the American political tradition; constitutional and theoretical debates have generally been focused around claims for rights. American political theorists have had relatively little to say about obligation. This emphasis is congruent with English political theory, which has, ever since Magna Carta, stressed claims that subjects can make against the prerogatives of the Crown and in which articulation of obligation has been correspondingly weak.⁴ Much American thinking on the subject developed in the late eighteenth century, when the relation of the citizen to the state was theorized by revolutionaries who were asserting claims of rights against the state. Arguments were modeled on those expounded by Whigs during and after the English civil war, and also on those developed by Baptists, Quakers, and other groups in their struggle against compulsory church taxes in colonial Massachusetts and elsewhere. These political and religious rebels pushed the defense of rights in the direction of protecting freedom of thought and conscience and of resisting taxation without representation. The federal Constitution was remarkably silent on obligation. It was restricted to a succinctly outlined set of specified powers; the first ten amendments activated a set of limits on those powers, to be enforced by the act of claiming rights. The Civil War amendments continued in the same spirit; the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, describes citizenship in terms of its privileges and immunities, not its duties or obligations. The strategy continues to infuse American constitutional and legal thinking.

The term duty is often informally used interchangeably with obligation. But duty is a broad term, encompassing behavior understood to be required by systems of morals as well as systems of law. Avoiding the term obligation, with its implication of a binding and perhaps transcendent moral duty, American constitutional argument, like liberal political theory in general, has mainly rested on the confidence that individuals can be authentically bound only by rules that they themselves have chosen, and that authentic government is shaped by freely chosen agreements among the ruled. Consent theory makes all obligation in some way an obligation to oneself, there being, Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan (pt. II, chap. 21), no obligation on any man, which ariseth not from some act of his own. Much American constitutional talk proceeds as though the Revolution had created a state of nature and as though the Constitution were a social contract; having consented to the political order, all obligation becomes individually elected obligation. The burdens of citizenship, in theory, rest on all citizens alike. Once the powers of government are properly framed, a binding obligation, impersonally imposed on all citizens, ensues.

Consent theory, however, brings with it a number of fictive elements. As Edmund S. Morgan has poignantly argued, government requires make-believe. It requires that an imagined community be called into being, personified as though it were a single body ... superior to government, and able to alter or remove a government at will.⁵ When the Continental Congress issued a decree on the authority of the people, and—especially—when the federal convention, exceeding its mandate to revise the Articles of Confederation, issued its Constitution in the name of We the People, it was, as Michael Warner observes, displaying a delirious theatricality . . . acting out, through time, the eighteenth century’s narrative of legitimation: the social contract. In that context the People functioned as a legitimating signifier, interpolating subjects into a political world; it was cultural assumptions that allowed the printed constitution to embody the will of all.⁶

Even if the authority of the people is conceded, men and women have been differently situated in relation to consent theory. Carole Pateman’s searching examination of the theory of social contract reveals that men are imagined as entering the social contract as free agents, but most women enter the social contract already bound by marriage and by antecedent obligations to their husbands.⁷ This was certainly true in early America. When revolutionaries challenged laws governing the relations between male subjects and the king, reconstituting men as individuals free of patriarchal constraint, they left intact the law of domestic relations, which systematically merged the civic identity of married women with that of their husbands. Even though coverture, which transferred a woman’s civic identity to her husband at marriage, giving him the use and direction of her property throughout the marriage, was theoretically incompatible with revolutionary ideology and with the liberal commercial society developing in the early republic, patriot men carefully sustained it. They even continued to refer to the body of law of coverture by its traditional name, The law of baron et feme, that is, not the reciprocal husband and wife or man and woman but lord and woman.⁸

To examine early American law of the household is an exercise in turning Pateman’s theorizing into practice. To put it another way, before the constitutions were constructed as new social contracts, there were marriage contracts and the complex system of subordination and authority that they were understood to embody. If ever there were a site to examine the simultaneity of the personal as the political, it is here. The legal treatises of the early republic describe households as hierarchical as if Locke had never written.

Tapping Reeve, for example, conducted perhaps the most respected legal training in his generation; among his students were his own brother-in-law Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun; there were also future U.S. congressmen and senators, judges and Supreme Court justices. A full generation after the Revolution (forty years after the Declaration of Independence and twenty-nine years after the Constitutional Convention) Reeve published an authoritative treatise on the law of baron and feme. First published in 1816, it was reprinted with up-to-date annotations in 1846, a testament to its continued vitality.⁹

Reeve began with the forthright statement that the husband, by marriage, acquires an absolute title to all the personal property of the wife; in the second chapter he described the husband’s control of the wife’s real estate. By the third chapter Reeve was asking what advantages the wife may gain, eventually, by marriage, in point of property and answering directly, She gains nothing. Reeve did not stop there, however. Once these asymmetrical property relations were established, personal implications wound their way throughout the law. From the husband’s control of all property there logically resulted the wife’s inability to resist him; his coercive power over her was so great by blackmail that he was not thought to need to use force. Any legal offense that she did in his presence if he joins in committing it, or also encourages, or in any way approves thereof, the law presumes, that whatever the wife does, is done by the husband’s coercion. A wife could not make a contract, since it would not be reasonable to hold her to its terms, as it might be effect of coercion.¹⁰

To follow the law of domestic relations, as Reeve delicately spun out its implications, is to watch the playing out of a stacked deck. Husbands were responsible for crimes committed by their wives in their presence or with their approval—except in the case of treason, a crime so severe that responsibility for it overrode obligation to the husband—or in the event that a wife kept a brothel with the husband’s knowledge, since keeping a brothel is an offense of which the wife is supposed to have the principal management. Because a wife could not make contracts in her own name, a husband was bound to fulfill the contract of his wife, when it is such an one as wives in her rank of life usually purchase.… If, however, she were to purchase a ship or yoke of oxen, no such presumption would arise, for wives do not usually purchase ships or oxen.¹¹

The law of domestic relations presupposed the husband’s right to sexual access to the wife’s body. For example, when Reeve explained why it was logical that wives could not enter into contracts, his reason was not only that wives did not control property that could guarantee their performance of the contract; wives could not enter into contracts involving their own labor. [T]he right of the husband to the person of his wife, Reeve observed, ... is a right guarded by the law with the utmost solicitude; if she could bind herself by her contracts, she would be liable to be arrested, taken in execution, and confined in a prison; and then the husband would be deprived of the company of his wife, which the law will not suffer. However, if a husband were banished from the realm, then his wife could contract, could sue and be sued in her own name; for in this case,... he was already deprived of the company of his wife, and her confinement in prison would not deprive him of his wife to any greater extent than was already the case.¹²

Under coverture, a woman’s only freely chosen obligation was to her husband. Once she made that choice, he controlled her body and her property; there were relatively few constraints on what he could do with either, except for the near universal guarantee of the use of one-third of his property during her widowhood. A married woman had no means of acting upon a choice of her own that challenged her husband’s; there were too many ways in which he could, by moderate correction or by manipulating her property, coerce her into agreement with him. Instead of protecting her against coercion, the law acknowledged that it was embedded in the marriage relationship. The married woman could have no will of her own. The legal system acknowledged her dependency by the practice of holding private examinations of married women before permitting them to sign away their right to any dower property and by not holding married women responsible for crimes committed in the presence of and with the knowledge of their husbands. If married women were permitted to vote, it was understood that husbands could too easily pressure their choices.

American revolutionaries did not change the law of domestic relations at the same time that they radically changed other civic relations; they did not even debate the possibility. They did not need to. Male revolutionaries of different classes and regions were differently situated in regard to slavery; some men benefited enormously, some a little, some not at all. It is not surprising, therefore, that white men debated the system of slavery and made some modifications in it. But all free married men—whatever their class position, whether they were white or black—benefited from a system of law in which husbands controlled the bodies and property of their wives. They felt no need to renegotiate it.

Rights and obligations are reciprocal elements of citizenship; so long as married women were understood to owe all their obligation to their husbands, they could make no claims of rights against the political community. They would have no way to consent or withhold their consent. American political theorists not only recoiled from making voting—the most explicit gesture of consent—an obligation of citizenship; they also refused until very recently to make it a natural right inseparable from citizenship. This hesitancy helped in large measure to sustain the gendered construction of the American citizen. The feme covert, asserted one prominent lawyer in the early nineteenth century, "has no political relation to the state any more than an alien."¹³ Not until deep into the twentieth century was this statement prima facie absurd.¹⁴ In the early republic, women were citizens, but they expressed their citizenship derivatively; it was the rare immigrant woman, wealthy with property in her own name to protect, who sought naturalization in her own right.

In effect, the law of domestic relations came down to the husband’s property rights in his wife’s body and to his position as barrier between her and public obligation.¹⁵ If she could not make a private contract, how could she enter the social contract? The same body of reasoning that governed the relations between husbands and wives monitored all household relations—parent and child, master and servant, guardian and ward. Against that system of law there would be hurled, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the complex ideologies of individual rights, fueling a political women’s rights movement from the founding generation of the republic to the present. The agenda of second-wave feminism, the women’s movement of the late twentieth century, has included many items that responded to elements of the old law of domestic relations inherited from two centuries before. Thus a flyer for the equal rights march in New York City on August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the suffrage amendment, included in its list of grievances, Women cannot buy property without their husbands’ signature (they don’t need yours); Women cannot be sterilized without their husbands’ signature (again they don’t need yours).¹⁶

Many historians have traced the history of the claiming of rights by women. But the denial of rights in the old law was accompanied by the exemption from obligations, and we have only rudimentary understanding of the relationships between rights and obligations. There is a history of obligations just as there is a history of rights; like the history of rights, the history of obligations is a gendered history, bordered differently for men and for women. In what follows I want to suggest the persistence of the idea that obligations, first to husbands directly, then to households more generally, was understood to substitute for obligations to the state. In the early republic, these substitute obligations were forthrightly named; a century later the original understanding had faded, and the absence of civic obligation was instead understood to represent privilege. By the time Kathleen Teague spoke, privilege had been transmuted into rights that should not be abandoned without a struggle.

As they emerged from the Revolution, American women faced a polity that made little space for them. Although women had long been active in public places—running taverns, making and selling goods, accepting pay for delivering babies and for teaching young children the rudiments of reading—they had also long been excluded from formal civic roles and denied formal political responsibility.¹⁷ Between 1770 and 1800 many writers, both male and female, articulated a new understanding of the civic role of women in a republic. This ideology drew on some old ingredients but rearranged them and added new ones, creating in the process a gendered definition of citizenship. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has recently argued, male citizenship was understood to be in conflict with the feminine and racialized other; the political iconography of the early republic subjugated the unruly figures of women, blacks, and