Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges PDF

Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges Author(s): Gerda Lerner Source: Feminist Studies , Autumn, 1975, Vol. 3, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 5-14 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3518951 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR f...

Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges Author(s): Gerda Lerner Source: Feminist Studies , Autumn, 1975, Vol. 3, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 5-14 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3518951 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3518951?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  PLACING WOMEN IN HISTORY: DEFINITIONS AND CHALLENGES Gerda Lerner In the brief span of five years in which American historians have begu women's history as an independent field, they have sought to find a co work and a methodology appropriate to the task. The first level at which historians, trained in traditional history, ap history is by writing the history of "women worthies" or "compensato Who are the women missing from history? Who are the women of ach what did they achieve? The resulting history of "notable women" does much about those activities in which most women engaged, nor does i the significance of women's activities to society as a whole. The histor women is the history of exceptional, even deviant women, and does no experience and history of the mass of women. This insight is a refinem ness of class differences in history: Women of different classes have diff cal experiences. To comprehend the full complexity of society at a giv development, it is essential to take account of such differences. Women also have a different experience with respect to consciousne on whether their work, their expression, their activity is male-defined oriented. Women, like men, are indoctrinated in a male-defined value conduct their lives accordingly. Thus, colonial and early nineteenth-ce reformers directed their activities into channels which were merely an their domestic concerns and traditional roles. They taught school, care the sick, the aged. As their consciousness developed, they turned their the needs of women. Becoming woman-oriented, they began to "uplift organize women for abolition or temperance and sought to upgrade fe but only in order to equip women better for their traditional roles. On stage, growing out of the recognition of the separate interests of wom and of their subordinate place in society, did their consciousness becom defined. Feminist thought starts at this level and encompasses the act of the rights and grievances of women. These various stages of female need to be considered in historical analysis. The next level of conceptualizing women's history has been "contrib describing women's contribution to, their status in, and their oppressio defined society. Under this category we find a variety of questions be have women contributed to abolition, to reform, to the Progressive mo labor movement, to the New Deal? The movement in question stands in This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 6 Placing Women in History of inquiry; women made a "contribution" to it; the contribution is judged first of all with respect to its effect on that movement and secondly by standards appropriate to men. The ways in which women were aided and affected by the work women," the ways in which they themselves grew into feminist a Jane Addams' enormous contribution in creating a supporting fe new structures for living are subordinated to her role as a Progress pretation which regards her as merely representative of a group of trained women with no place to go. In other words, a deviant fr Margaret Sanger is seen merely as the founder of the birth contr a woman raising a revolutionary challenge to the centuries-old pr bodies and lives of women are dominated and ruled by man-made movement, women are described as "also there" or as problems. T on behalf of themselves and of other women is seldom considered a writing their history. Women are the outgroup, Simone de Beau Another set of questions concern oppression and its opposite, th woman's rights. Who oppressed women and how were they opp respond to such oppression? Such questions have yielded detailed and very valuable accounts social oppression, and of the various organizational, political way as a group have fought such oppression. Judging from the result ask the question-why and how were women victimized-has its u what society or individuals or classes of people have done to wom women themselves have reacted to conditions imposed upon them tus and oppressive restrains were no doubt aspects of women's h and should be so recorded, the limitation of this approach is that either that women were largely passive or that, at the most, they sures or to the restraints of patriarchal society. Such inquiry fail and essential way in which women have functioned in history. M first to point out that the ongoing and continuing contribution o opment of human culture cannot be found by treating them only sion.2 I have in my own work learned that it is far more useful t tion as one aspect of women's history, but never to regard it as t women's history. Essentially, treating women as victims of oppr places them in a male-defined conceptual framework: oppressed, ards and values established by men. The true history of women is ongoing functioning in that male-defined world, on their own te of oppression does not elicit that story, and is therefore a tool of to the historian. A major focus of women's history has been on women's-rights the winning of suffrage, on organizational and institutional histo movements, and on its leaders. This, again, is an important aspec but it cannot and should not be its central concern. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gerda Lerner 7 Some recent literature has dealt with marriage and divorce, with educational oppor- tunities, and with the economic struggles of working women. Much of recent work has been concerned with the image of women and "woman's sphere," with the educational ideals of society, the values to which women are indoctrinated, and with gender role acculturation as seen in historical perspective. A separate field of study has examined the ideals, values, and prescriptions concerning sexuality, especially female sexuality. Ron Walters and Ben Barker-Benfield has tended to confirm traditional stereotypes concerning Victorian sexuality, the double standard, and the subordinate position of women. Much of this material is based on the study of such readily available sources as sermons, educational tracts, women's magazines, and medical textbooks. The pitfall in such interpretation, as Carl Degler has pointed out in his recent perceptive article, is the tendency to confuse prescriptive literature with actual behavior. In fact, what we are learning from most of these monographs is not what women did, felt, or exper- ienced, but what men in the past thought women should do. Charles Rosenberg, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Carl Degler have shown how to approach the same ma- terial and interpret it from the new perspective of women's history.3 They have sharply distinguished between prescription and behavior, between myth and reality. Other attempts to deduce women's status from popular literature and ideology demonstrate similar difficulties. Barbara Welter is an early and highly influential arti- cle, found the emergence of "the cult of true womanhood" in sermons and periodicals of the Jacksonian era. Many historians, feminists among them, have deduced from this that Victorian ideals of woman's place pervaded the society and were representative of its realities. More detailed analysis reveals that this mass media concern with woman's domesticity was, in fact, a response to the opposite trend in society.4 Lower-class wom- en were entering the factories, middle-class women were discontented with their accus- tomed roles, and the family, as an institution, was experiencing turmoil and crisis. Idealization is very frequently a defensive ideology and an expression of tension within society. To use ideology as a measure of the shifting status of women, it must be set against a careful analysis of social structure, economic conditions, institutional changes, and popular values. With this caution society's attitudes toward women and toward gender role indoctrination can be usefully analyzed as manifestations of a shifting value system and of tensions within patriarchal society. "Contribution" history is an important stage in the creation of a true history of women. The monographic work which such inquiries produce is essential to the devel- opment of more complex and sophisticated questions, but it is well to keep the limita- tions of such inquiry in mind. When all is said and done, what we have mostly done in writing contribution history is to describe what men in the past told women to do and what men in the past thought women should be. This is just another way of saying that historians of women's history have so far used a traditional conceptual framework. Essentially, they have applied questions from traditional history to women, and tried to fit women's past into the empty spaces of historical scholarship. The limitation of such work is that it deals with women in male-defined society and tries to fit them into the categories and value systems which consider man the measure of significance. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8 Placing Women in History Perhaps it would be useful to refer to this level of work as "transitional women's his- tory," seeing it as an inevitable step in the development of new criteria and concepts. Another methdological question which arises frequently concerns the connection between women's history and other recently emerging fields. Why is women's history not simply an aspect of "good" social history? Are women not part of the anonymous in history? Are they not oppressed the same way as racial or class or ethnic groups have been oppressed? Are they not marginal and akin in most respects to minorities? The answers to these questions are not simple. It is obvious that there has already been rich cross-fertilization between the new social history and women's history, but it has not been nor should it be a case of subsuming women's history under the larger and already respectable field of social history. Yes, women are part of the anonymous in history, but unlike them, they are also and always have been part of the ruling elite. They are oppressed, but not quite like either racial or ethnic groups, though some of them are. They are subordinate and ex- ploited, but not quite like lower classes, though some of them are. We have not yet really solved the problems of definition, but it can be suggested that the key to under- standing women's history is in accepting-painful though that may be-that it is the history of the majority of mankind. Women are essentially different from all the above categories, because they are the majority now and always have been at least half of mankind, and because their subjection to patriarchal institutions antedates all other oppression and has outlasted all economic and social changes in recorded history. Social history methodology is very useful for women's history, but it must be placed within a different conceptual framework. For example, historians working in family history ask a great many questions pertaining to women, but family history is not in itself women's history. It is no longer sufficient to view women mainly as members of families. Family history has neglected by and large to deal with un- married and widowed women. In its applications to specific monographic studies, such as the work of Philip Greven, family history has been used to describe the real- tionships of fathers and sons and the property arrangements between them.5 The relationships of fathers to daughters and mothers to their children have been ignored. The complex family-support patterns, for example, whereby the work and wages of daughters are used to support the education of brothers and to maintain aged parents, while that of sons is not so used, have been ignored. Another way in which family history has been interpreted within the context of patriarchal assumptions is by using a vaguely defined "domestic power" of women, power within the family, as a measure of the societal status of women. In a methodo- logically highly sophisticated article, Daniel Scott Smith discovers in the nineteenth century the rise of something called "domestic feminism." expressed in a lowered birth rate from which he deduces an increasing control of women over their reproductive lives.6 One might, from similar figures, as easily deduce a desire on the part of men to curb their offspring due to the demands of a developing industrial system for a more highly educated labor force, hence for fewer children per family. Demographic data can indeed tell us something about female as well as male status in society, but This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gerda Lerner 9 only in the context of an economic and sociological analysis. Further, the status of women within the family is something quite different and distinct from their status in the society in general. I learned in studying the history of black women and the black family that relatively high status for women within the family does not signify "matriarchy" or "power for women," since black women are not only members of families, but persons functioning in a larger society. The status of persons is determined not in one area of their func- tioning, such as within the family, but in several. The decisive historical fact about women is that the areas of their functioning, not only their status within those areas, have been determined by men. The effect on the consciousness of women has been pervasive. It is one of the decisive aspects of their history, and any analysis which does not take this complexity into consideration must be inadequate. Then there is the impact of demographic techniques, the study of large aggregates of anonymous people by computer technology based on census data, public documents, property records. Demographic techniques have led to insights which are very useful for women's history. They have yielded revealing data on fertility fluctuations, on changes in illegitimacy patterns and sex ratios, and aggregate studies of life cycles. The latter work has been done very successfully by Joseph Kett, Robert Wells, Peter Laslett and Kenneth Keniston.7 The field has in the United States been largely domi- nated by male historians, mostly through self-imposed sex-role stereotyping by women historians who have shared a prejudice against the computer and statistics. However, a group of younger scholars, trained in demographic techniques, have begun to research and publish material concerning working-class women. Alice Harris, Virginia McLaughlin, Judith and Daniel Walkowitz, Susan Kleinberg and Tamara Hareven are among those who have elicited woman-oriented interpretations from aggregate data.8 They have demonstrated that social history can be enriched by combining cliometrics with sophis- ticated humanistic and feminist interpretations. They have added "gender" as a factor for analysis to such familiar concepts as class, race and ethnicity. The compensatory questions raised by women's history specialists are proving inter- esting and valuable in a variety of fields. It is perfectly understandable that after cen- turies of neglect of the role of women in history, compensatory questions and those concerning woman's contribution will and must be asked. In the process of answering such questions it is important to keep in mind the inevitable limitation of the answers they yield. Not the least of these limitations is that this approach tends to separate the work and activities of women from those of men, even where they were essentially connected. As yet, synthesis is lacking. For example, the rich history of the abolition movement has been told as though women played a marginal, auxiliary, and at times mainly disruptive role in it. Yet female antislavery societies outnumbered male socie- ties; women abolitionists largely financed the movement with their fundraising activities, did much of the work of propaganda-writing in and distribution of newspapers and magazines. The enormous political significance of women-organized petition cam- paigns remains unrecorded. Most importantly, no historical work has as yet taken the organizational work of female abolitionists seriously as an integral part of the antislav- ery movement. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 10 Placing Women in History Slowly, as the field has matured, historians of women's history have become dissatis- fied with old questions and old methods, and have come up with new ways of approach- ing historical material. They have, for example, begun to ask about the actual experi- ence of women in the past. This is obviously different from a description of the condi- tion of women written from the perspective of male sources, and leads one to the use of women's letters, diaries, autobiographies, and oral history sources. This shift from male-oriented to female-oriented consciousness is most important and leads to challeng- ing new interpretations. Historians of women's history have studied female sexuality and its regulation from the female point of view, making imaginative use of such sources as medical textbooks, diaries, and case histories of hospital patients. Questions concerning women's experience have led to studies of birth control, as it affects women and as an issue expressing cul- tural and symbolic values; of the physical conditions to which women are prone, such as menarche and pregnancy and women's ailments; of customs, attitudes, and fashions affecting women's health and women's life experience. Historians are now exploring the impact of female bonding, of female friendship and homosexual relations, and the experience of women in groups, such as women in utopian communities, in women's clubs and settlement houses. There has been an interest in the possibility that women's century-long preoccupation with birth and with the care of the sick and dying have led to some specific female rituals.9 Women's history has already presented a challenge to some basic assumptions his- torians make. While most historians are aware of the fact that their findings are not value-free and are trained to check their biases by a variety of methods, they are as yet quite unaware of their own sexist bias and, more importantly, of the sexist bias which pervades the value system, the culture, and the very language within which they work. Women's history presents a challenge to the periodization of traditional history. The periods in which basic changes occur in society and which historians have commonly regarded as turning points for all historical development, are not necessarily the same for men as for women. This is not surprising when we consider that the traditional time frame in history has been derived from political history. Women have been the one group in history longest excluded from political power as they have, by and large, been excluded from military decision making. Thus the irrelevance of periodization based on military and political developments to their historical experience should have been predictable. Renate Bridenthal's and Joan Kelly-Gadol's articles in this volume confirm that the history of women demands different periodization than does political history.10 Neither the Renaissance, it appears, nor the period during which women's suffrage was won, were periods in which women experienced an advance in their status. Recent work of American historians of women's history, such as Linda Kerber's work on the American Revolution and my own work, confirms this conclusion. For example, neither during nor after the American Revolution nor in the age of Jackson did women share the historical experience of men. On the contrary, they experienced in both periods status loss, a restriction of options as to occupations and role choices, and certainly in This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gerda Lerner 11 Jacksonian America, there were restrictions imposed upon their sexuality, at least in prescriptive behavior. If one applies to both of these cases the kind of sophisticated and detailed analysis Kelly-Gadol attempts-that is, differentiations between women of different classes and comparisons between the status of men of a given class and women of that class-one finds the picture further complicated. Status loss in one area-social production-may be offset by status gain in another-access to education. What kind of periodization might be substituted for the periodization of traditional history, in order for it to be applicable to women? The answer depends largely on the conceptual framework in which the historian works. Many historians of women's history, in their search for a unifying framework, have tended to use the Marxist or neo-Marxist model supplied by Juliet Mitchell and recently elaborated by Sheila Row- botham.11 The important fact, says Mitchell, which distinguished the past of women from that of men is precisely that until very recently sexuality and reproduction were inevitably linked for women, while they were not so linked for men. Similarly, child- bearing and child-rearing were inevitably linked for women and still are so linked. Women's freedom depends on breaking those links. Using Mitchell's categories we can and should ask of each historical period: What happened to the link between sexuality and reproduction? What happened to the link between child-bearing and child-rearing? Important changes in the status of women occur when it becomes possible through the availability of birth control information and technology to sever sexuality from inevi- table motherhood. However, it may be the case that it is not the availability and distri- bution of birth control information and technology so much as the level of medical and health care which are the determinants of change. That is, when infant mortality decreases, so that raising every child to adulthood becomes the normal expectation of parents, family size declines. The above case illustrates the difficulty that has vexed historians of women's history in trying to locate a periodization more appropriate to women. Working in different fields and specialities, many historians have observed that the transition from agricul- tural to industrializing society and then again the transition to fully developed indus- trial society entails important changes affecting women and the family. Changes in relations of production affect women's status as family members and as workers. Later, shifts in the mode of production affect the kinds of occupations women can enter and their status within them. Major shifts in health care and technological devel- opment, related to industrialization, also affect the lives of women. It is not too diffi- cult to discern such patterns and to conclude that there must be a causal relationship between changes in the mode of production and the status of women. Here, the Marxist model seems to offer an immediately satisfying solution, especially if, following Mitchell, "sexuality" as a factor is added to such factors as class. But in the case of women, just as in the case of racial castes, ideology and prescription internalized by both women and men, seem to be as much a causative factor as are material changes in production relations. Does the entry of lower-class women into industrial production really bring them closer to "liberation"? In the absence of institutional changes such as the right to abortion and safe contraception, altered child-rearing arrangements, and varied options This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 Placing Women in History for sexual expression, changes in economic relations may become oppressive. Unless such changes are accompanied by changes in consciousness, which in turn result in insti- tutional changes, they do not favorably affect the lives of women. Is smaller family size the result of "domestic freedom" of choice exercised by wom- en, the freedom of choice exercised by men, the ideologically buttressed coercion of institutions in the service of an economic class? Is it liberating for women, for men, or for corporations? This raises another difficult question: What about the relation- ship of upper-class to lower-class women? To what extent is the relative advance in the status of upper-class women predicated on the status loss of lower-class women? Examples of this are: the liberation of the middle-class American housewife in the mid-nineteenth century through the availability of cheap black or immigrant domestic workers; the liberation of the twentieth-century housewife from incessant drudgery in the home through agricultural stoop labor and the food-processing industry, both em- ploying low paid female workers. Is periodization then dependent as much on class as on gender? This question is just one of several which challenge the universalist assumptions of all previous histori- cal categories. I cannot provide an answer, but I think the questions themselves point us in the right direction. It appears to me that all conceptual models of history hitherto developed have only limited usefulness for women's history, since all are based on the assumptions of a patri- archal ordering of values. The structural-functionalist framework leaves out class and sex factors, the traditional Marxist framework leaves out sex and race factors as essen- tials, admitting them only as marginal factors. Mitchell's neo-Marxist model includes these, but slights ideas, values, and psychological factors. Still, her four-structures model and the refinements of it proposed by Bridenthal, are an excellent addition to the conceptual working tools of the historian of women's history. They should be tried out, discussed, refined. But they are not, in my opinion, the whole answer. Kelly-Gadol offers the useful suggestion that attitudes toward sexuality should be studied in each historical period. She considers the constraints upon women's sexuality imposed by society a useful measure of women's true status. This approach would necessitate comparisons between prescribed behavior for women and men as well as indications of their actual sexual behavior at any given time. This challenging method can be used with great effectiveness for certain periods of history and especially for upper- and middle-class women. I doubt that it can be usefully employed as a general criterion, because of the difficulty of finding substantiating evidence, especially as it pertains to lower classes. I raised the question of a conceptual framework for dealing with women's history in 1969,12 reasoning from the assumption that women were a subgroup in history. Neither caste, class, nor race quite fit the model for describing us. I have now come to the conclusion that the idea that women are some kind of a subgroup or particular is wrong. It will not do-there are just too many of us. No single framework, no single factor, four-factor or eight-factor explanation can serve to contain all that the history of women is. Picture, if you can, an attempt to organize the history of men by using four factors. It will not work; neither will it work for women. Women are and always have been at least half of mankind and most of the time have This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Gerda Lerner 13 been the majority of mankind. Their culturally determined and psychologically inter- nalized marginality seems to be what makes their historical experience essentially dif- ferent from that of men. But men have defined their exeprience as history and have left women out. At this time, as during earlier periods of feminist activity, women are urged to fit into the empty spaces, assuming their traditional marginal, "sub-group" status. But the truth is that history, as written and perceived up to now, is the history of a minority, who may well turn out to be the "subgroup." In order to write a new history worthy of the name, we will have to recognize that no single methodology and conceptual framework can fit the complexities of the historical experience of all women. The first stage of "transitional history" may be to add some new categories to the general categories by which historians organize their material: sexuality, reproduction, the link between child-bearing and child-rearing; role indoctrination; sexual values and myths; female consciousness. Further, all of these need to be analysed, taking factors of race, class, ethnicity and, possibly, religion into consideration. What we have here is not a single framework for dealing with women in history, but new questions to all of universal history. The next stage may be to explore the possibility that what we call women's history may actually be the study of a separate women's culture. Such a culture would include not only the separate occupations, status, experiences, and rituals of women but also their consciousness, which internalizes partiarchal assumptions. In some cases, it would include the tensions created in that culture between the prescribed patriarchal assump- tions and women's efforts to attain autonomy and emancipation. The questions asked about the past of women may demand interdisciplinary ap- proaches. They also may demand broadly conceived group research projects that end up giving functional answers; answers that deal not with slices of a given time or society or period, but which instead deal with a functioning organism, a functioning whole, the society in which both men and women live. A following stage may develop a synthesis: a history of the dialectic, the tensions between the two cultures, male and female. Such a synthesis could be based on close comparative study of given periods in which the historical experience of men is com- pared to that of women, their tensions and interactions being as much the subject of study as their differences. Only after a series of such detailed studies can we hope to find the parameters by which to define the new universal history. My guess is that no one conceptual framework will fit so complex a subject. Methods are tools for analysis-some of us will stick with one tool, some of us will reach for different tools as we need them. For women, the problem really is that we must acquire not only the confidence needed for using tools, but for making new ones to fit our needs. We should do so relying on our learned skills and our rational scepti- cism of handed-down doctrine. The recognition that we had been denied our history came to many of us as a staggering flash of insight, which altered our consciousness irretrievably. We have come a long way since then. The next step is to face, once and for all and with all its complex consequences, that women are the majority of mankind and have been essential to the making of history. Thus, all history as we now know it, is merely prehistory. Only a new history firmly based on this recognition and equally concerned with men, women, the establishment and the passing away of patriarchy, can lay claim to being a truly universal history. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 14 Placing Women in History NOTES This article, in an earlier version, was presented at the panel, "Effects of Women's Histo Traditional Concepts of Historiography" at the Second Berkshire Conference on the H Women, Cambridge, Mass., October 25-27, 1974. It was, in revised form, presented as the Sarah Lawrence College Workshop-Symposium, March 15, 1975. I have greatly be from discussion with my co-panelists Renate Bridenthal and Joan Kelly-Gadol, and from ments and critique of audience participants at both conferences. 1For the term "women worthies," I am indebted to Natalie Zemon Davis, Stanford For the terms "compensatory history" and "contribution history" I am indebted t Buhle, Ann G. Gordon and Nancy Schrom, "Women in American Society: An Historic tion," Radical America 5, no. 4 (July-August 1971): 3-66. 2Mary Beard, Woman as Force in History (New York: Collier Books, 1972). See also a further discussion of this question in Gerda Lerner, "New Approaches f of Women in American History," Journal of Social History 3, no. 1 (Fall 1969): 53-6 able in Bobbs-Merrill, Reprint, number H432. 3Ronald G. Walters, ed., Primers for Prudery (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Pren 1974); Ben Barker-Benfield, "The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth Century View o Feminist Studies 1, no. 1 (1972): 45-74; Carl Degler, "What Ought To Be and What W Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century," American Historical Review 79, no. 5 (Decem 1467-1490. For a different approach see also: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles R "The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Women in Nineteenth Century Journal of American History 60, no. 2 (September 1973): 332-56; Carroll Smith-Rose Hysterical Woman: Some Reflections on Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19th Century Social Research 39, no. 4 (December 1972): 652-78; Charles Rosenberg, "Sexuality, C Role," American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (May 1973): 131-53. 4Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly (Summer 1966): 151-57; Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the S Women in the Age of Jackson," Midcontinent American Studies Journal 10, no. 1 (Sp 5-15. 5Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). For a good sampling of recent work in family history, see Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973). 6Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," Feminist Studies 1, no. 3/4 (Winter-Spring 1973): 40-57. 7See Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2, no. 2 (Autumn 1971) for articles by Joseph Kett, Robert Wells, Peter Laslett, and Kenneth Keniston. 8Virginia Yans McLaughlin, "Patterns of Work and Family Orgnaization: Buffalo's Italians," ibid., pp. 219-314. Tamara Hareven, "The History of the Family as an Interdisciplinary Field," ibid., pp. 399-414; Susan Kleinberg, University of California San Diego, "Women's Work: The Lives of Working Class Women in Pittsburgh, 1870-1900" (unpublished paper); and Alice Harris, Sarah Lawrence College, "Problems of Class and Culture in Organizing Women Workers, 1900- 1920," (unpublished paper). 9For a good overview of this work see the papers of the Second Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Radcliffe College, 1974, some of which are published in this issue and in Feminist Studies 3, no. 3/4. See especially, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman and the New History." 10See forthcoming papers by Bridenthal and Kelly-Gadol in Feminist Studies 3, no. 3/4 (1975). 11Juliet Mitchell, Woman's Estate (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Sheila Rowbotham, Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973); Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 12Gerda Lerner, "New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History," Journal of Social History 3, no. 1 (Fall 1969): 53-62. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.97 on Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:16:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms