Alison Joseph

Reexamining American History

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and the list goes on . . . the founders of our country and heroes of our history. For the most part the discipline of American History has been limited to the history of men in America. For more than two centuries, the "American experience" has been restricted to that of the men; the women, who also shaped our country either on the front lines or behind them in the home, have been disregarded and excluded from the general history. Mary Beard, was one of the first to begin to explore the history of women in America. She "understood the centrality of women as makers of history."1 Beard's book, America through Women's Eyes, published in 1933, was an anomaly for the time among the work of American Studies scholars.

American Studies Association President Elaine Tyler May, in a 1996 address to the association, dates the beginning of American studies to the 1930s. Characterized by academics and public intellectuals involved in "politics and social movements of the day,"2 American Studies scholars set out to prove and explore the virtues of American culture in an era during which intellectual elites considered America to be an inferior extension of Europe. Deviating from the elite, the American Studies scholars in the 1930s, focused their work on politics, governments, and wars, infrequently exploring social or cultural developments. Within this context and the popular concentrations in research used by these scholars, it is not surprising that women were rarely included. Women for most of American history, as recently as a decade prior to the birth of American Studies, were not part of the political nation, as they did not have the vote! For many other reasons too women were not holding office within the government nor shaping it at its inception. And obviously, the women were not the generals fighting our wars. It seems understandable that women were not included given the concentration of this discipline. Despite this, there were such historians as Charles and Mary Beard who "examined the democratic spirit of the American people in opposition to both European aristocracy and American monopoly capital."3 They were looking at the economic, social, and cultural progress of this country.

One way to consider the progress of the American Studies discipline is to evaluate the development of the study of women's history. Mary Beard's work is one of the first of this currently popular theme of study. Mary Beard's work, America through Women's Eyes,4 can be compared to Rosalind Rosenberg's Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century.5 Although the time frame of each is a little different, Beard writes of the colonial period through the early 1930s, while Rosenberg begins at the turn of the century and writes into the 1990s, the style and purpose of each historian can be readily compared. Additionally, the specific treatment of the overlapping periods can be assessed where appropriate. Both Beard and Rosenberg reexamine the history of the United States in order to include half its population (the women) previously omitted. In doing so, their studies expand what was previously studied by American Studies by adding this additional dimension.

The most striking difference between these two books can be seen in the way that the history is presented. Beard names herself the editor of an anthology of primary documents written by women throughout American history. The essays, articles, letters, and journal entries often have been printed previously in similar collections or in magazines and newspapers. Rosenberg's book is clearly a secondary source, a historiography, in which she cites specific individuals, writing their stories, but from the historian's perspective. Beard adds her point of view through her introductions to each chapter and between each excerpt. This difference creates a distinct experience for the reader. In the case of Beard's collection, the reader must arrive at many theories her/himself, while Rosenberg dictates, from a more informed position than that of the reader's, what she reads of the history. I do not think that this difference in style and presentation is a result of the development of American studies, Beard's method being a more primitive one, because similar, more modern collections do exist. One such example is Susan Ware's Modern American Women: A Documentary History.6 Ware has collected a variety of different documents, articles, essays, letters, and journal entries, written by many women and incorporated them into an anthology in which she wrote an introduction to each chapter, section of chapters, and each essay. Perhaps Ware's book would have been a better comparison to Beard's collection. Different from Beard's book is the way in which Ware and Rosenberg arrange their books. This may be indicative of a development in the discipline American Studies.

Both Ware and Rosenberg collect/write within specific time periods while Beard's chapters each concentrate on an experience. Rosenberg divides her chapters by eras, beginning with the turn of the century, leading into the first decade of it; Beard's first chapter is "Opening the Wilderness" while the later chapters include "Carrying on in Agriculture" and "Carrying on in Big Business." Although both techniques are successful in illustrating the social and economic changes, the more modern method of Rosenberg and Ware allows the reader to examine the larger picture, evaluating what is occurring as a result of national trends in culture, economy, and society to all women in America, simultaneously including all classes, races, and geography (urban/rural). Within her first chapter, "The Family Claim: 1900," Rosenberg addresses the experience of the white middle class women of leisure, lower class, rural black women, small town housewives, the fight against birth control as a form of oppression against women, the new working girl in the big city, the development of female white collar workers, the "New Woman," the social reformers, and Boston marriages to name a few. In this way, it is possible to view the general experience of American women of the time and the different circumstances that contributed to their places in society. This way is somewhat more scientific in methodology. The historian as well as the reader are able to observe the overarching socio-economic changes and the way that they affect all parts of society. In Beard's history there is little connection between the experience of women in different contexts, except for the fact that they were all women. This difference can be attributed, according to May, to the upheavals that began in the 1960s during which many scholars "turned their attention to the lives, experiences, and cultural expressions of those peoples whose histories had been virtually invisible in the scholarship of the immediate postwar years: women, racial and ethnic minorities, workers, gays, and lesbians."7 Beard's research on women's roles in American History was a step in the right direction, but she does not quite accomplish what May characterizes as the spirit of the modern historians. Although she attempts a similar endeavor as these later scholars, her intention is different from Rosenberg's.

Mary Beard's work was uncommon for American studies scholars of the 1930s, who usually identify the "most striking and significant tendency of contemporary social thought" by "integrating all aspects of life,"8 as seen by the Social Science Research Council of the United States. This council contributed evidence about the limitations of specialization and resolved that the central problem of society was the idea of civilization itself, severing it from its distinct parts. Beard criticizes the movement in which "all divisions of thought . . . cultivated by specialists . . .are being dissolved as independent entities. They are no longer regarded as isolated departments of life, open to special observation, self contained, each running under its own momentum according to its own laws or characteristics."9 Beard claims that this cannot continue and the act of writing a book about women in history defies the prohibition practiced by many scholars. She states that women's "activity, their thought about their labor, and their thought about the history they have helped make or have observed in the making"10 has influenced American history.

Rosenberg's purpose in writing the history of women in the twentieth century is "to explain both the extent and the limits of women's achievements in this century, by examining women's lives within the larger context of the social and political history of which they have been an integral part."11 Though this goal is similar to that of Beard's, the difference is in the way each portrays and attributes the experience of women. Also in her preface, Rosenberg critiques historians for the way they record women in history: "historians tended to portray women as victims of discrimination and faulty socialization, and to explain change as something that happened to them--as when World War II pulled large numbers of women into the labor force, changing their behavior and, eventually, their attitudes."12 An example of what Rosenberg is saying is present in Beard's account of the colonial period, which includes journal entries of colonial women. More official records of the life of the time virtually exclude women except from the social scene.13 The history is recounted as events that happened to the women, without much of their own control, as well as events involving women, but not so much as a evaluation of the affect of gender on these episodes. This may be a result of the nature of the events (in colonial times women were brought over primarily to be the wives of the settlers. Jamestown virtually failed until women were brought over.14) or it may be the tendency of early women's historians, in that women were seen as the victims of men and their situation.

In contrast, Rosenberg says that by the middle of the 1970s "a new approach was emerging. Rather than emphasizing the sameness of men and women, historians began to stress their differences. In this view women no longer served primarily as symbols of disadvantage but instead represented agents of change who openly criticized the dominant political system on the basis of values forged in a separate female culture."15 One way this difference can be clearly seen is in the treatment of the common theme of both these books: the "family claim."16 Rosenberg identifies the idea of the family claim, that the family regards the daughter as a family possession,17 as an oppressive force against women throughout history which continues to challenge them into the future, in such broad a range of circumstances as women entering the work force, using birth control, and day care. Mary Beard, although not naming it as such, addresses the same idea of the family claim.

Rosenberg's discourse18 of the theme of the family claim includes manifestation into many forms. Throughout the country the household burden fell on women; women were responsible to feed and clothe the family, nurse the sick, teach the young and continue communal ties to heritage, family, religion and tradition. This often excluded the opportunity for education, work outside of the house, outside interests, and independence. Within different parts of society women had different restraints. Some women were forced to take in home-work (sewing and such) or boarders in order to supplement the family income. Women had obligations to the family in their choice of husbands; they should marry within their class. The parents of writer Zora Neale Hurston eloped against their parents' wills because he was a poor sharecropper of light skin and not in her same class. Furthermore, the idea of birth control was restrained by the family claim. There was little information about birth control, and that available left people misinformed.19 Those who wanted to practice more reliable forms of birth control were accused of attempting race suicide.20 Women were seen by society as "supportive assistants" rather than partners and independents. The industrial revolution availed important opportunities for young women. Single, adolescent girls could often get work in the city. This gave them more independence, mobility, and social opportunity, but it still restricted them. Most "working girls" were expected to give all of their earnings to their families. Because many lower class women needed to go out to work in order to support the family, they frequently received no more than an elementary school education. More affluent women were discouraged from attending college because it might deem them unmarriagable. Still, even for the "better-off" women, the centralizing obligation to the family was a controlling force in their lives. Rosenberg presents all of these situations within the context of the consequence of the family claim; although each is different, each shares the unifying controlling force of the obligation to the family.

Mary Beard also regards the family claim as an important determinant in shaping the lives of American women. She includes a speech given by Anna Garlin Spencer in 1898.21 In this essay, Spencer identifies woman as the first human being to experience bondage and claims that the "subjection of woman to man in the family bond was a vast step upward from the preceding condition."22 Spencer considers this advancement, a release of savage life, as progress allowing the woman time and strength to develop beauty of person and refinement, teaching capacity, and a closer relationship between man and woman than known previously, gaining the advantage of the man's qualities. Although positive at first, this slavery has grown into "the sum of all villanies." She claims that there is "no condition so hurtful and outrageous, as the subjection of women to men in a civilization, which like ours, assumes to rest upon foundations of justice and equality to human rights."23 Different from Rosenberg, Spencer relates this subjugation to classical means. She speaks of the old Roman law and the later English common law. She claims this experience of woman is improving in the United States, but is also spreading to other parts of the world, in places in which we consider the people primitive, such as Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines. She accepts that the subjugation of women occurs, but our true wrong as an American people is our introducing it into savage and half-civilized communities. Clearly, Spencer believes that this is natural within civilization, and we should, rather than destroying it, limit it from expanding to the non-civilized world. This attitude is similar to the early American studies scholars, as May characterizes them in her article; there is a boiling down of the causes of American "progress" to civilization.

Similarly, in a later essay by Ada M. Bittenbender, included in Beard's collection, about women appealing to be recognized and licensed as lawyers, the idea of the family claim is seen. Bittenbender quotes a Justice Bradley who says that "the constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womankind."24 Bittenbender most clearly demonstrates the constrains of the "family claim" on women, not only is it enacted by the family, but it is also of divine origin; women are divinely designated to a separate sphere.

Both Beard and Rosenberg fulfill what Rosenberg characterizes as the difference between studying history and women's history: women's historians are those who "emphasize women's differences from men[. They] were not as ready as earlier scholars to regard male achievement as the measure of female emancipation. Instead, they tried to see the world as women saw it and to identify the ways in which women's distinctive values altered the course of history. In the process, the study of housework, mothering, sexuality, and women's organizations all took on added significance."25 Rosenberg does this in a more systematic and general way, in which the reader can interpret the affects of society on women, within a given time period, within all parts of society, than Beard. Beard, by her topical organization, forces the reader to make her/his own comparisons among the different sections of the text. The way in which both Rosenberg and Beard address the concept of the "family claim" is difficult to pinpoint. In some ways it is clear to see the influences of the contemporary historical approaches to each historian, in that Beard, although attempting to separate from the common method of scholarship does, in fact decrease thing to the general idea of civilization, often portraying the history of women as the history of victims. In contrast, it is possible to see the great lengths to which Beard goes in order to separate different aspects of American life and specialize in one, namely women. It is uncertain whether the differences in the way in which Rosenberg and Beard address the particular vocation of women's history is a result of style or the added benefit that Rosenberg has with hindsight, writing sixty years after Beard. Although the former argument, following the style of contemporary historian, is at play in these texts, the latter must be acknowledged as well.