Women and the historical enterprise in America : gender, race, and the politics of memory, 1880-1945
"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. During this transitional period, the study of history became professionalized as an increasingly masculine field of scientific inquiry, no longer considered a feminine realm of knowledge devoted to nostalgia for a patriotic past. Des Jardins reveals how women nevertheless transformed the historical profession and the construction of historical memory during these years in their roles as writers, preservationists, educators, government workers, archivists, 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 to 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. According to Des Jardins, women produced, preserved, and reinterpreted history for many different reasons, but they were united in their desire to broaden the field of inquiry. Taken together, their work reveals a growing activist impulse and historical consciousness and constitutes a historiographical legacy that remains relevant today."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2003
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, ©2003
History
x, 380 pages ; 25 cm.
9780807827963, 9780807854754, 0807827967, 0807854751
51460974
The regendering of history, 1880-1935
From feminine refinement to masculine pursuit, 1880-1920
Social activism and interdisciplinarity in writing and teaching, 1910-1935
Perspectives from the professional, social, and geographic margins
Women regionalists and intercultural brokers
African American women's historical consciousness
Constructing usable pasts
Womanist consciousness and new Negro history
Remembering organized feminism
Establishing women's history as a field
Creating a usable past for women
Legacies for women' s history in the twenty-first century