Reflections on Twentieth-Century American Women's History

Abstract

American women's history, like other areas of American history, has tended to neglect the twentieth century in favor of its predecessor, the nineteenth. The nineteenth century emerges from historical scholarship as a dynamic period in which the process of industrialization transformed women's work and family roles. Research on nineteenth-century American women has shed light on a variety of topics previously unexplored and, more important, has led the way in defining the themes and conceptual frameworks of women's history. Scholarship on the twentieth century, on the other hand, has been scanty and has not yet identified the major trends and developments that have shaped the lives of women in contemporary society. But the body of literature on American women in the twentieth century is growing, and we need to think about the direction it is taking. One thing immediately noticeable is a lack of continuity between the two centuries as they emerge from historical writing. It is as if the First World War destroyed the old Victorian world a created a new one in which women went to work in department stores and offices, forsook their homosocial world for a heterosocial one, and turned their backs on feminism. The myth of the New Woman continues to exercise its tenacious influence on our thinking about twentieth-century women's history, and it is time that we realized what the New Woman shared with her nineteenth-century sisters. At the same time, historical scholarship has too often applied concepts shaped by nineteenth-century experiences to the twentieth without considering the differences between the two periods. We can only hope to create for the twentieth century the sort of rich materials that already exist for the nineteenth if we understand the nineteenth-century base of many of the existing concepts while using them to develop appropriate conceptual frameworks for the twentieth. This essay attempts to apply some of the approaches and concepts that have emerged in research and writing on nineteenth-century American women's history to the twentieth century. It focuses on three particular areas that have proven central to women's history: work, women's culture, and feminism. The impact of industrialization on women's lives is a central theme in