:History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism

Abstract

It would be good to see more works of feminist history that focus on historiography: on debates and trends in the field and on the state of feminist history today. Judith M. Bennett covers all of this and more, in a style that is informed, provocative, often insightful, and also accessible. While she draws extensively on her own specialist field of medieval English and European history for examples, the value of this work as a general guide to writing feminist history is undiminished. She also includes a thoughtful chapter on how to circumvent the lack of historical sources when writing lesbian history. Bennett contends that “history [still] matters” to feminism. She sees the linguistic turn as resulting in the displacement of feminist (“women's”) history as a leader in the field of feminist studies and also, too often, in a narrow focus upon discourse and representation. As she puts it, “many of us are now focusing more on representations of past lives than on lived experiences, more on the performative creation of gender rules than on the effects of male power” (pp. 24–25). Analysis of the former need not rule out attention to the latter, but it certainly can do so, as Bennett observes when bemoaning how the recent study of the construction and manipulation of gender “rules” in a wide range of media has tended to shy away from “concrete, accessible histories” toward abstract analyses. This is a familiar refrain in feminist scholarship with whose conceptualization I do not entirely agree, since one would think that gender constructs are concrete or material realities—part and parcel of social relations. Yet I do see Bennett's point. It is difficult to see how feminist history can still constitute a call to arms or, to use her terminology, be adequately “offensive” if unpacking the “complex meanings of gender” is our only concern. Clearly, we should still be asking: how far did dominant gender constructs of women's roles and duties, status and identities actually affect their lives?