Women and the Historical Enterprise

Women and the Historical Enterprise

At the beginning of her text, Women and the Historical Enterprise, the female American historian Julie Des Jardins asks the age old question: who writes history? The usual answer is, of course 'the winners write history.' And until recently, the answer to this question has been, sadly -- male winners write history. That is, American men have largely written, although not lived, American history. According to Des Jardins, over the course of the evolution of American historiography American men by and large have provided the cultural and ideological narrative lens of focus -- a focus upon males, upon Whites, and upon actions and stories that American men have deemed important. This is not because American women have not made major contributions to American history. Rather, American education and historical writing has privileged the male view of history as the paramount or 'correct' viewpoint.

However, as women gained increased access to media venues, women historians began to create a more pluralistic and inclusive view of history. As women had been so long disenfranchised, including more female voices also had the unintended result of brining more diverse views into the history of American historical record, including the voices of 'lower class' and immigrant workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, and religious minorities. Perhaps the most notable example of such narrative historical diversity is to be found in the folkloric collections of the African-American Barnard graduate Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston, a marginal historian by definition in the 'academy' because of her race and gender, brought not simply an interest in her people's culture, but also an interest in oral culture as well to the study of history as African-Americans had been so long denied the gift of literacy in America, Hurston could not rely upon written records, as male historians had in the past, to narrate the American experience.

By recording such oral folklore, Hurston did not simply give dignity to her people, and garner a greater respect for African-American culture in America. She also introduced new idea to American historiography about what was considered a valid way of accessing the history of the past. She brought many of the techniques of anthropology to historical study and record. Hurston stressed that history was not simply what could be 'written,' history could also be found in the voices of ordinary men and women.

Hurston thus was pioneer the field of academic folklore in late 1920's and 1930's as an academic as well as an African-American literary pioneer. She undid the common delineated line between the chronicling historian and the chronicled, openly admitting her own prejudices and participation in what she saw. To record the life of the community, she had to gain community trust, and could not hold her self above the African-American people of the South as a Barnard academic from the North. Through her experiences in the field, Hurston learned there was no such thing as an objective history. As an anthropologist, as she observed hoodoo practices of Southern blacks and became such a hoodoo priestess herself, she embraced subjectivity. (79) historian and woman ahead of her time, Hurston thrived not only, out of necessity on the physical margins of academia, but also on the professional margins of 'writing history.' But her techniques not only "became spaces of perspective" and "turned black folk" into legitimate subjects. Her perspective also made for a better writing of American history in general because it included the voices of marginalized figures. (118) Zora Neale Hurston took advantage of her "heightened penchant" for interdisciplinary study "to forge some of the first substantive academic research on African-Americans" but highlighted the need for interdisciplinary and openly subjective historical study in general, particularly of those peoples deemed to be marginal to mainstream 'written' American society and history. (138)

Hurston studied Black culture partly to recover her own heritage, which she feared losing as the result of her education. But many women after Hurston who "did not find conditions conducive to the study of women or American culture in history, sociology, or economics departments," turned to Hurston's blending of historical recording and lived anthropology because it offered them the option of "observing peoples other social scientists ignored," particularly Native Americans, and thus gave them unmined academic territory, in which they could make their careers.

Moreover, unlike historians, anthropologists studied the Native American past unapologetically to address present social injustices and to shed light on historical wrongs that they could identify with -- and also make their careers from. Even in the 1970's the Oklahoma native named Angie Debo chose to become a historian of Americans Indians partly for that reason. (65) She became the author of a compassionate text called the Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic, which painted native Americans not as stoic savages, but attempted to penetrate Indian life in a real and meaningful way, based in experiences with the tribes as well as common cultural images. (112)