As my thesitation takes me onto wobbly territory in the realm of what is commonly called “women’s history,” this seems an apt time to start to work out some of my own investments in that realm. The recent kerfuffle about one “Mercurius Rusticus” and his misogynistic blurt lets me know that, whatever progress has been made, the field remains vexed, and that those of us who are engaged in it had better stay engaged — and pay close attention to how we formulate that engagement.

First, some slightly irritated ground-clearing in response to two stupid questions. Please note that I use “women’s history” here largely as a signpost for “histories of the subaltern”: because I do not wish to speak to that of which I know nearly nothing, I stick to “women” and “gender.” But I have a feeling what I will say here and in future posts may apply to other areas as well.

To the question, “Why does women’s history matter?” I respond easily that I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why it doesn’t matter, and that to challenge any category of historical analysis is to challenge the historical endeavor itself. Why does history matter? is an important question, but if “history matters” can be taken as a given, “women’s history matters,” “military history matters,” “culinary history matters,” “the history of imperialism matters,” and every other formulation, easily follow. The more interesting questions are, “how can we do women’s history?”, “where will women’s history take us, as historians, as literaturians, as educators?”, “how is women’s history different from any other history?”, and so on. Crucially: “What is the difference between ‘women’s history’ and ‘gender history’?” To this last I hope to return in a later post.

To the argument that those who are engaged in the history of women, of gender, and of the family are sapping energy from other areas, I respond easily, “What the hell are you smoking?” Every creative act committed means that a range of others were not committed in that moment, with that energy. The cynical way to see it is that arithmetic progress entails geometric loss. This is the fundamental principle behind the impossibility of a Key to All Mythologies: no one can do everything, and every mythos that gets recorded eats up some time that could have gone to the others. If you find a solution to this problem, please give Doctor Causaubon a call; I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.

There are overtilled fields — many areas of Shakespeare studies and the American Civil War provide prime examples. A great deal of ink gets spilled producing largely unoriginal accounts of this or that. Yet the accusation to be levelled in that case is, precisely, of unoriginality, not of inutility.

The vast lacunae in the histories of women and of gender indicate that they will not approach supersaturation any time soon – not within my lifetime, anyhow. Scholars of early modern western Europe, for example, have only just begun, in the past ten years or so, to look for means to discover significant literacy rates for women of all classes. How women read, what they read, which women read, under what circumstances, to what purpose, and why any of this was so, are all open questions in the field of early modern studies. This is only one example. Because much of women’s political and creative agency took its roots in private or domestic spaces, in the informal economy, in manuscript rather than in print, through influence and string-pulling rather than through public action, their lives and the significance of their lives must be sought by means to which traditional historiography was never suited. Those means are not always obvious, the archive is often obscure, the problems vexed and multifaceted and their solutions roundabout.

In some ways, the unobviousness of gender history, of gendered historiography, is what makes it thrilling for its practitioners. Unobviousness is one place to which women’s history can take us: it enables us to question our assumptions about the nature of a given historical problem and about the materials by which we wish to assess that problem. Simply put, doing women’s history keeps us on our toes — a position especially necessary for wee mouse here.

There will be more on this. I am, for reasons obvious to my longtime readers, especially interested in how the historical and literary disciplines intersect in the “women’s history” enterprise. To be investigated.

Readers, your thoughts?