Race and Politics in U.S. Women's History

Abstract

Neither race nor politics exist as stable, timeless categories. While women's history from the start disrupted our understanding of the political, its encounter with race has resembled history's encounter with gender. In its relation to research on women of color, the field of women's history has undergone a trajectory similar to the one Gerda Lerner mapped for the incorporation of new scholarship on women. 1 Once there was compensatory history, which uncovered notable women of color, and contributory history, that charted their participation in women's suffrage, the development of the American West, or social welfare through concepts derived from white (and usually middle-class) women's experiences. But just as women's history insisted on studying women on their own terms (even if white was an unstated subtext), historians of African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and other racial/ethnic women began from inside the lives and thoughts of their group, rather than from preset paradigms. We are in the process of writing the history of racial/ethnic women through their cultures, communities, and consciousness.