Kerber - Toward an intellectual history of women: essays

In the invisible college that students do not see, academics educate each other. Term papers do not stop when Ph.D.s are awarded. With varying mixtures of loyalty, pride, curiosity, and energy, we accept each others assignments. We submit our work to each others review. Sometimes we know our critics, sometimes we dont. Masquerading as flattery, as opportunity, as obligation, commissions pour in.

When I look at the table of contents of this book, each title resonates simultaneously with a friends voice and a colleagues will power, urging me to reschedule what I had thought was my own research agenda. Sometimes it is a matter of honor: Eric McKitrick and Stanley Elkins are gathering essays by Richard Hofstadters former students to honor his memory after his untimely death; it is itself an honor to be part of that project. Sometimes it is an assignment. An old and dear friend, arranging a conference on the theme Defining Our Terms, calls to say that shes certain that I am the appropriate person to reflect on the changing uses of the term separate spheres; the exercise will be strenuous, she admits, but it will be good for my intellectual health. Sometimes it is opportunity: travel now, pay later in manuscript. Ron is organizing a conference and needs a keynote speaker; Darline is organizing an international conference and needs an Americanist. Each time I accepted an assignment, I wondered if it were deflecting me from my real work on a longer project, but my own research agenda has been enriched by what I have learned in the invisible college about my capacities as a historian and as a writer.

In the early 1970s, when the first of the essays in this book was published, a friendly but unadventurous colleague tried to warn me off. Womens history is a topic, not a subject, he said gently. I knew he was wrong: Mary Beards Woman as Force in History (1946) and Eleanor Flexners Century of Struggle (1959) sat rock-solid on our shelves; Gerda Lerner had already begun a series of major interpretative essays in 1969. But I also knew he was right: gender was not yet understood to be, in Joan Scotts felicitous phrase, a useful tool of historical analysis. Throughout my graduate student years at Columbia University, my colleagues and I had read virtually no books by women historians, no biographies of women activists, and, with the exception of works by abolitionists, no primary source materials testifying to womens experience. This would have been less true had we been medievalists. Columbia historians took great pride in public speaking, and during my years there, from 1961 to 1968, I heard many dazzling lectures. But none were by women faculty members. There were, in fact, no women faculty members among the Americanists at Columbia, although I had been taught by women at Barnard, the womens college of the university, whose faculty had courtesy privileges at Columbia and occasionally served as graduate examiners or as members of dissertation committees. No lecture in graduate school that I remember focused clearly on womens historical experienceas workers, teachers, educators, politicians, criminals. None of the books that I was expected to read in preparation for examinations were written by women.