Narrating the History of Women’s History

Abstract

Narrating the History of Women’s History Monica Pacini Enrica Asquer, Anna Bellavitis, Giulia Calvi, Isabelle Chabot, Cristina La Rocca, and Manuela Martini, eds. Vingt-cinq ans après. Les femmes au rendez-vous de l’histoire [Twenty-five years after. Women at the rendezvous with history]. Rome: École française de Rome, 2019. 498 pp. ISBN 9782728313785 (pb). Teresa Bertilotti, ed. Women’s History at the Cutting Edge: An Italian Perspective. Rome: Viella, 2020. 120 pp. ISBN 9788833131412 (pb); 9788833136196 (PDF); 9788833139074 (ePub). Julie E. Gallagher and Barbara Winslow, eds. Reshaping Women’s History: Voices of Nontraditional Women Historians. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 292 pp. ISBN 9780252042003 (cl); 9780252083693 (pb); 9780252050749 (e-book). Elizabeth Jacoway, ed. No Straight Path: Becoming Women Historians. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. 264 pp. ISBN 9780807170434 (cl); 9780807172124 (ebook). Karen Offen and Chen Yan, eds. Women’s History at the Cutting Edge. London: Routledge, 2019. 130 pp. ISBN 9780367029074 (cl); 9780367663520 (pb); 9780429001093 (ebook). Hilda L. Smith and Melinda S. Zook, eds. Generations of Women Historians Within and Beyond the Academy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 336 pp. ISBN 9783319775678 (cl); 9783030084820 (pb); 9783319775685 (ebook). It has been over a year since the Covid-19 pandemic considerably transformed women’s lives and work. The closure of libraries, archives, and laboratories has distanced people from one another, reduced physical mobility, and entrusted contacts and projects to webs of words and virtual images. Remote working within domestic spaces has compelled people to seek out a new balance between family and personal needs, between production and caretaking, and it has revealed the deep fractures of society, the preexisting disparities, and the unequal impacts of the crisis in terms of gender.1 In this suspended time of mourning and emergency, as the work of women historians is changing, that work has become an even more important object of reflection. The matter of women’s historical work intertwines with debates over policy and the strategies to adopt for maintaining countries’ social and democratic fabrics, and with the challenges that feminist activism is facing.2 Representation, health, forms of [End Page 120] control, work protections, access to income and credit, taxation, life-work balance, protests, consumption, and public and social spending all appear under a different light considering the events of the past few months, the shock that struck the markets and the world, and the catastrophe of millions of human lives lost. Between 2018 and 2020, right before the pandemic unfolded, numerous collected volumes were published on the relationship between the past, present, and future of women’s and gender history; on the forms of access for women to research and write; and on the historian’s profession between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Adopting different critical tools, these studies have contributed to the revival of the discussion of the interconnection between the personal, political, and professional dimensions of women’s history work, twenty years after the release of the collection edited by Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri.3 Since its inception, women’s and gender history has stood out for its distinct tendency to reflect on itself: from the seminal questions of the 1970s on the possibility of “making” women’s history to the debates that have followed about the state of the profession, the historiographical trajectories followed in various countries, the ability to transform mainstream historiographic practices, and how to educate new generations and how to have an impact on a wide audience (Asquer, et al., 25–34; Bertilotti, 45–53). Not infrequently, this intense work of introspection and synthesis has sprung up from a desire to measure women’s history against History, which is understood as an exclusive, professional academic prerogative of a male white elite. Even in the early 1990s, Hilda L. Smith and Bonnie G. Smith asked provocative questions and brought attention to the contemporary representations of the “noble dream” of historical research that had omitted women’s intellectual contributions and women’s history.4 Recently, Bonnie G. Smith has recalled that one of her articles on the contribution of women historians to modern French and Anglo-Saxon historiography did not resonate with members of the American Historical Association when...