Reply to Responses

Abstract

Reply to Responses Gerda Lerner (bio) I greatly appreciate the four respondents' thoughtful and challenging re-actions to my article. I hope other readers will be stimulated to join in this discussion with comments and criticism. To start such a discussion and to stimulate some introspection about what we, as practitioners in the field, are doing for the future of Women's History was the primary purpose of my undertaking this survey of the field. I should, perhaps, have stated more clearly at the outset that mine was not a historiographic article nor was it a review of outstanding works of particular interest. What I was trying to do was to get an overview of where the field is and where it seems to be going. The method I selected was to take a three year period and look at everything that was being done under the heading of Women's History. It was a labor-intensive method and one that has many pitfalls. I discuss some of these in my article. My method, like all such methods, had a certain arbitrariness to it. Why select those three years and not others? Why accept the JAH selections and not others? The respondents all pointed out my many omissions and criticized the criteria of selection. All I can say about that is that any method selected would have had some arbitrariness and some shortcomings. My method forced me, for example, to leave out of the discussion the outstanding work of several of my students and colleagues, simply because it was not published in the time frame I had selected. My respondents selected for their discussion books and articles that illustrated their argument, regardless of when they were published. I deliberately avoided doing that in order to consider a true cross section of work being done during a given period. Jennifer Spear, Kathi Kern, and Leslie Alexander offer valuable historiographic essays, which counter-balance or contradict some of my concerns. By ignoring the statistics I present, they feature mainly the positive examples of a minority of practitioners. My point is that while the positive examples are there and are fine, there should be concern about the major trends that seem to point in the opposite direction of the positive examples. Jennifer Spear endorses my concern with the modern bias of Women's History practitioners and offers a sophisticated and persuasive survey of excellent work and new trends in colonial women's and gender history. She suggests many useful approaches for future work and stresses the need for more work on African American and Native American women. [End Page 61] Her arguments for comparative history and cross-ethnic studies are persuasive. Kathi Kern makes a strong case for the relevance, vibrancy, and social connectedness of studies of cultural representation and cites several fine examples that support her point. These would all fall within my definition of works that contextualize the study of representation within socially lived experiences and which, therefore, "can offer valuable insights into the female past." I mention this as a generalization in my article and also in the discussion of the prize-winning books. Kern and I agree on this, but I see as exceptions what she sees as a dominant trend. Kimberly Springer in characterizing my "segregating" African American women's history as "akin to 'positive stereotyping'" misunderstands my intent and distorts my meaning. All I did was to observe a different pattern in works dealing with African American themes and call attention to that fact. Had I not done that I could have been justly accused of insensitivity to the factor of "race." I fully agree with Springer on rejecting the dichotomy of representation/culture and social/political history. Her observation that "the social, political, and organizational histories of women shaped their representations, identities, and cultures and vice versa" is right on target. I said the same thing several times in my article. Leslie Alexander offers a brief historiography of African American scholars' critique of Women's History and two challenges: 1) " . . . although feminism is a useful paradigm for White women, the attempt to force Black women into the same interpretive model is not applicable" and 2) " . . . women...