Women Writing History: Looking Backward and Forward

Abstract

Women Writing History:Looking Backward and Forward Durba Ghosh (bio) Kathleen Canning . Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 224 pp. ISBN 0-8014-8971-6 (pb). Kate Davies . Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 336 pp. ISBN 0-19-928110-6 (cl). Julie des Jardins . Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 400 pp. ISBN 0-8078-5475-1 (pb). Devoney Looser . British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 288 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7905-1 (cl). Bonnie G. Smith , ed. Women's History in Global Perspective, 3 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004–2005). 960 pp. Volume 1: ISBN 0-252-02931-3 (cl); 0-252-07183-2 (pb). Volume 2: ISBN 0-252-02997-6 (cl); 0-252-07249-9 (pb). Volume 3: ISBN 0-252-02990-9 (cl); 0-252-07234-0 (pb). Reginald Zelnik . Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography (Seattle: Donald Treadgold Studies on Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, 2005). 152 pp. ISBN 0-252-07234-0 (pb). Devoney Looser's British Women Writers begins with a summary of "herstory," a mode of writing history that grew out of Second Wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bridging a political commitment between feminist activism and feminist scholarship, "herstorians" attempted to produce histories written by women about women (1–3). A generation later, the herstory movement may seem outdated, but it remains a reference point for explaining the emergence of the particular books in this review. Several of these books challenge this particular chronology of the emergence of herstory; Kate Davies, Julie des Jardins, and Devoney Looser [End Page 162] analyze women who felt themselves to be historians in periods when the writing of history by women was unusual. Reginald Zelnik's account of the life and work of Anna Pankratova treats her more as a historian and a committed Communist Party member than as a woman. All, though, reframe the project of herstory by arguing that women were always in one way or another engaged in writing history—collecting records, making arguments, and constructing narratives—well before they were recognized as historically significant and welcomed into the historical profession in the late twentieth century. While five of the titles reviewed focus on women writers of history in American and European contexts, the three volumes of Bonnie Smith's Women's History in Global Perspective, commissioned by the American Historical Association's Committee on Women Historians, chronicle another aspect of the early-twenty-first-century emergence of women's history as a field within the profession. The three volumes have distinct goals and ambitions, but they share a political commitment to integrate women's and gender history into the subdiscipline of global and world history, which has largely resisted critical feminist analysis. The essays in this series are synthetic accounts, written by distinguished feminist historians who address history writing and history making by women in both Western and non-Western communities. This review is organized somewhat chronologically and, in the spirit of dialogue, in pairs in order to read one scholar's methodologies against another's. Although the books themselves are wide ranging—three are academic monographs, one is a revised set of previously published essays, one a posthumously published book, and the final three a set of synthetic essays—each offers us rich possibilities for how one might write the history of women at particular sites and moments. Looser's British Women Writers takes up a broad timespan and a broader range of authors than does Davies's Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, which examines the correspondence of two women. Nonetheless, they have some significant overlaps, both in argument and in material. They both examine Catharine Macaulay, who was widely known in late-eighteenth-century Anglo-American circles. While Looser situates Macaulay among the other figures in her study, Davies examines...