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The Women's History BoomTransforming a profession from the inside.

By Megan MarshallPosted Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2007, at 2:05 PM ET

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Megan Marshall also examined how biographers research and create the characters in their books. David Greenberg questioned the value of popular histories. Erik Tarloff and Katha Pollitt discussed Dear Sisters, a scrapbook of the women's liberation movement. Cathy Young and Wendy Shalit debated whether women should be more modest.

Ulrich looks at three women who experienced feminist epiphanies at very different historical moments. She begins with Christine de Pizan, who wrote the Book of the City of Ladies in 15^th-century France, celebrating the lives of "worthy women—queens, princesses, warriors, poets, inventors, weavers of tapestries, wives, mothers, sibyls, and saints," after realizing that the books on her study shelves, all written by men, were filled with "devilish and wicked thoughts about women." Ulrich then turns to the United States and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In her memoir Eighty Years and More (1898), Stanton wrote of her youthful vow to agitate for legal reform after reading, in her father's upstate New York law library in the 1820s, the "inexorable statutes" depriving married women of their civil rights. Ulrich's tour of book-inspired awakenings ends with Virginia Woolf, whose question "Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?" led her to the library of the British Museum in 1928. There Woolf found only a dismaying profusion of volumes by men emphasizing that woman was "naturally the inferior" sex—and she wrote her landmark plea, A Room of One's Own, in response.

Interested to demonstrate how women's history has flowered in recent decades, Ulrich devotes the remainder of her book to showing how contemporary historians have tackled many of the questions raised by these earlier writers, employing ever more enterprising, archivally based scholarship. Important to her account, as well, is a survey of the "multiple feminisms" that arose during the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and '70s and led to women's embrace of previously male-dominated professions, not least the profession of history.

Have women changed the practice of medicine, law, or politics by joining those games? The matter is open to debate. By contrast, how history is studied has radically changed—though not as its pioneering polemicists might have imagined. Back in the days of WHRC and the Mormon Sisters Inc., there was plenty of talk of finding our "foremothers" and of writing an alternative "herstory," a favorite neologism of Laura X. Yet it turns out that, as Ulrich's book shows, we didn't need to change the language to discover and tell the stories that Pizan, Stanton, and Woolf were searching for.

For the formative historians of women's lives whose careers Ulrich briefly describes (the founders of the field, Gerda Lerner and Anne Firor Scott), or whose work she cites—not to mention Ulrich's own oeuvre—the most traditional kind of spadework has proved essential to a revolution, in a sense, from within. Serious historians "explore the things that get left out when a person becomes an icon"; recover the all-important details from primary documents and artifacts that can tell us how obscure women and men lived in earlier times. "Historians," Ulrich writes, are "less interested in discovering universals than in tracing change over time."

Armed with new questions, women's historians have transformed a discipline that is defined by the very questions its practitioners ask, expanding the scope and texture of the field and deepening its rigor at the same time. After centuries of asking, women no longer have to wonder, where are the women in our history books? They are there, because sleuths like Ulrich saw the need to look harder at all the "unprocessed" ephemera of women's lives—which in future years will no doubt include a T-shirt or two—and "try to understand."

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Megan Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. She teaches nonfiction writing and the art of archival research at Emerson College.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

As a student of women's history in the early 1980s, I found this article touched many of the bases with insight and conviction. I do remember running into the fascinating Laura X at one point. While emphasizing her role as an heiress who functioned in absentia from her office, you minimized an important motive that animated much of her historical work: she was a vociferous advocate for laws against marital rape. The very concept of marital rape was something that many men and women had a hard time understanding back then, but Laura X documented it, brought it up to the cultural surface, and advocated for its victims. We owe Laura X a great deal as her work, including the acquisition of massive resources, helped change social attitudes. Although marital rape still persists, it is no longer tolerated and fewer of its perpetrators escape without legal repercussions.

As for Laura Ulrich, her early work was often slighted by my fellow grad students in history if only because she made women's traditional domestic work so damned interesting. There was a thirst during that time for more adventurous women: labor leaders, religious visionaries, radicals, women writers, professional pathfinders. It is all the more commendable that Ulrich stuck with her quieter sort of work and focused her extraordinary historical sophistication on the lives of less illustrious women. In doing this, she has provided the rest of us with a history of our own.

--elisabeth

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