A Reply to "Culture et Pouvoir" from the Perspective of United States Women's History

Abstract

One of the major directions in the historiography of United States women's history during the past several years has been a multifaceted critique of the sphere of women argument which had previously been the single most important organizing principle in the field. (This argument was most powerfully enunciated by Carrol Smith-Rosenberg in her 1975 Signs article, The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.)1 Thus the implicit critique of this idea by the authors of Culture et des Femmes will not seem a novelty to their sister historians across the Atlantic who will, I think, welcome the subtlety of their exposition. Nor will any of us take exception to their notion that women should be studied in the context of relationships with men, for this idea, too, has recently garnered support in important historiographical essays. Nancy Hewitt, for example, has noted the failure to take class into account within the sphere argument: nineteenth-century working women, she points out, much more frequently formed alliances across gender lines with working-class men than they did with middle-class women.2 Linda Kerber has outlined the ways in which the separate culture of women, and by implication, that of men, was not a fixed entity but rather was continually negotiated within and across gender lines by the women who formed it.3 In her germinal 1975 essay on women's history methodology, Gerda Lerner argued that separate histories of women and of men would have to be written before a universal, gender-integrated history could be essayed. It is debatable whether or not that separate history of men has been written. * Still, after two decades in which United States women's historians, I would submit, have focused on women as exclusive subjects much more than have European women's historians, we may, in fact, be moving into Lerner's final phase. In this new women's history aborning, I agree with the authors of Culture et Pouvoir that the issue of power is crucial. In working out an implicit theoretics of hierarchy and domination/subordination, historians of American women have not fully faced the implications of the notion of power. In assuming that all Western culture is androcentric, we have avoided the question of agency, of who is responsible for what has happened to women. In a sense, Culture et Pouvoir has opened the Pandora's box of our pursuit, the possibility, in fact, that women have been oppressors as well