Tackling the Contested Categories: Culture, Race, and Nation in American Women's History

Abstract

Reading the panel discussion has reminded me of my debts to the pioneer scholars in the field, and it has also helped me to see my specific location in the field of women's history. Unlike the scholars on the panel for whom their introduction and commitment to women's history was inseparable from their own participation in second-wave feminism, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s outside of the United States and never had a first-hand experience of U.S. second-wave feminism. Consequently, while the second wave is quite central to the way I think about U.S. women's history, the agenda and/or the problems of the second wave have not defined the way I conceptualize women's history in the same way they have for my predecessors. Furthermore, although I read almost no texts by or about women throughout my undergraduate curriculum at a Japanese university, by the time I entered graduate school in the United States in the early 1990s, women's studies had already become a well-recognized field and feminist inquiry an established tool for historical analysis in the American academe (at the graduate school I attended, anyway). On the one hand, I was fortunate to be able to take for granted that women's experiences, gender analysis, and feminist politics would be incorporated into all of my and my colleagues' works, including those that would not be identified first and foremost as "women's history." On the other hand, the set of epistemological questions postmodernism raised and the politics of knowledge postcolonial studies addressed have posed a more immediate and continuing challenge in both my development as a scholar and my presence in American academe as a "woman of color."