challenge of "opinionative assurance", The

National Forum, Summer 1997 by Kerber, Linda K

Thirty years after Pauli Murray's path-breaking "Jane Crow and the Law," which constructed sex-discrimination as congruent with race discrimination and therefore vulnerable to parallel attack, and some thirty-five years after Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique and Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle, from which Friedan drew most of the material in her historical sections, we have an enormous base of fresh research on which to stand. The number of dissertations in all fields with "woman" or "feminine" or some other similar marker in the title has increased more than 300 percent in the last decade alone. Few of us would now think of teaching without instructing our students in woman suffrage, sex segregation in the workplace, the careers of Ida B. Wells and Eleanor Roosevelt (if we are Americanists) or of Rosa Luxemburg and Marie Curie (if we teach European history). Questions about women now appear on the advanced placement exams. Women's History Month is held each March, with its posters and essay contests.

But it is, after all, very hard to disrupt the inherited narrative. It is all too easy to cower in the face of "opinionative assurance." My guess is that women still enter our basic survey courses mostly in three ways: ( 1 ) insofar as they help men do what men wish to do, whether it is to settle the frontier or to keep factories running; (2) for shock value, as witches or prostitutes or Women Air Service Pilots in World War II; or (3) in the politics of woman suffrage, which is understood to have ended in 1920.

I recently spent some time consulting with my counterparts at an old and distinguished college, and examined the first portion of the core course in American history. The students read John Smith and John Winthrop, Cotton Mather and Thomas Jefferson - and Abigail Adams' letters to John. When I observed that the course went through two hundred years of American history before a woman offered a thought that was deemed important enough for the students to read about and study, and then it was in the form of private exchanges, the staff responded that they were very careful to convey that women were silenced in colonial America, and that they, as teachers, certainly did not approve. They were teaching, after all, the oppression of women.

Faced with this sort of opinionative assurance, how can historians best respond? More than fifteen years ago, Gerda Lerner suggested that the writing of women's history can be arranged in successive stages of development, each stage more complex and sophisticated than the last, but all useful and necessary. Lemer called the first stage "compensatory history." In this stage the historian wanders around like Diogenes with a lantern, seeking to identify women and their activities. This work is not trivial; at its best it can lead to the creation of major reference works such as Notable American Women, first published in 1971, with an important supplementary volume published in 1980. The challenge of doing "compensatory history" remains a strong one, as we see in the hearty welcome offered to the Encyclopedia of Black Women's History, edited by Darlene Clark Hine when it appeared three years ago, and the continuing need for a new supplementary volume for Notable.