challenge of "opinionative assurance", The

National Forum, Summer 1997 by Kerber, Linda K

There is no need for a Sherlock Holmes to serve as a detective in a search for the controlling or influential ideas employed in modem books, articles, reviews and published addresses dealing with men and women. Even a novice can discover one obtruding conception that haunts thousands of printed pages. It is the image of woman throughout long ages of the past as a being always and everywhere subject to male man, or as a ghostly creature too shadowy to be even that real.

As for centuries the Ptolemaic conception of the astrophysical universe dominated discussions and "reasonings" in astronomy, so the theory of woman's subjection to man, the obliteration of her personality from consideration, governs innumerable discussions and reasonings in relation to human affairs. Here, there, and almost everywhere, it gives animus, tendency, and opinionative assurance to the man-woman controversies of our day (77).

-Mary Beard,

Woman as Force in History

With this 1946 book, Mary Beard set the agenda for many of the feminist historians who followed her. I have not seen the phrase "opinionative assurance" before or since, but when I read it I knew exactly what Beard was talking about: the certainty with which we clothe our opinions when we feel that they are beyond question. This certainty can be a special problem in introductory courses both in high school and in college. As teachers we inherit "survey courses" in which the lessons already seem to be well laid-out, marching in sequence from Columbus to as close to the present as we can get before the class sessions are used up. In face of the need to make our way efficiently, it is tempting to adopt a structure driven by outdated "opinionative assurance": the Progressive Era is a time of great political innovation; Washington, Lincoln, and FDR were the "great" presidents; the League of Nations failed, and the United Nations succeeded; matters related to women are less important than matters related to men. The tendencies Beard identified are present not only in the history of women and men but also in many other topics. Among these false certainties are the assumption that immigrants have been, compared with native-born people, insignificant historical actors, and that enslaved people had no agency in their own emancipation.

Beard emphasized the damage that this "opinionative assurance" has done. It would have been bad enough had male historians contented themselves with conveying that they thought women had not done very much of anything; that they concluded, from evidence which they laid before us, that freedpeople had not had any skill in politics; that they deduced that immigrants were absent from most intellectual histories because they had not thought many significant thoughts. Alerted that these conclusions were, like any other conclusions, perched on limited evidence and open to reexamination, it would have been relatively easy for historians to embark on fresh research, locate fresh evidence, and destabilize the conclusions - just as we do with any historical opinions and judgments. The state of historical writing would have been healthier, and the profession would have been the wiser.

But these opinions were rarely offered straight, up front, in forms open to question and testing. Instead, opinion has often been offered with absolute assurance, opinion offered as fact, opinion offered as though it did not need to be tested, evaluated, or investigated. One of these opinions, as Beard phrased it, is that woman is "a ghostly creature too shadowy to be . . . real" and that the historical narrative can proceed as though she does not exist -- except, of course, when she occasionally disrupts the narrative, as in the Women's March on Versailles during the October Days in 1789 (an episode which, I was instructed in college in 1956 by a brilliant feminist historian who was befuddled by the "opinionative assurance" of her day, was carried out by men dressed in women's clothing). Latinos also have figured in most narratives of American history as ghostly creatures too shadowy to be real, embodied in confusing assortments of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Chicanos. AsianAmericans were especially ghostly; they were the immigrants who, unlike those from other parts of the globe, were generally denied the opportunity to qualify for citizenship.

Much has happened since Beard wrote. We are beneficiaries of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, of a transformation of immigration patterns that began after World War II and was enhanced by the immigration reform act of 1965, and of the second wave of the women's movement. Each of these social and political trends has affected the demography of the historical profession: the social backgrounds of those who practice as historians, the social identities of who our students are likely to be, the questions about the past that teachers and students are likely to ask. In the rest of this essay I want to offer, by way of example, some of the ways in which these changes have affected research and teaching in the last two decades, particularly in the field of women's history.