92 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY SPRING French Theories in American Settings: Some Thoughts on Transferability Nell Irvin Painter The JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY begins publication by reprinting an essay by several French historians connected with the prestigious French historical journal. Annales, which has long stimulated the thinking of historians working in several fields. A lively debate should ensue, further encouraged by the responses by American historians that accompany the French essay. Although its style may challenge American readers, we enrich our own thinking through exposure to that of other intellectual worlds.* In the last generation, for example, Europeans have contributed analytical subtlety and concepts of class formation and revolutionary potential to American scholarship. The Annales piece says much that is either new or bears repeating: that the field of women's history began with militants rather than with scholars; that habit of thought and action are fundamental components of women's culture; that women's culture is a basic part of society; that violence and vengeance pervade relationships between women and men; that women got the vote later than men—on purpose; that political (or public) history ignores women. Yet not all here translates smoothly into the American context. Even as I remain mindful of the frustrations that feminist historians continue to face in the United States, I suspect that feminist theory may weU have made more headway here than in France. Many of our colleagues ignore our insights, but at the same time, others heed our messages. In many intellectual circles in this country, feminist history has become exceedingly influential. Much remains to be done, but feminist theories of history are altering the writing of history in general and have spawned the (controversial ) new field of men's history. If part of the message of the Annales essay now seems somewhat stale, it should be remembered that it was first published in 1986, at about the same time that Joan Scott was offering an appropriate paper on the subject at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.2 My main concern, however, is that Europeans sometimes provide Americans inappropriate, or should I say incomplete, models. In my field of labor history, for example, the enormous contributions of European styles of analysis must be balanced against their silence on fundamental facts of American history: the existence of race as a potent social and economic category and the relationship between race and class. It is true that Euro- ©1989 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. i, No. ι (Spring)_________________ 1989 COMMENT 93 peans like Comte Joseph de Gobineau invented the scholarship of racism in the late eighteenth century, but until quite recently race has not figured as an important theme in European social thought. In the United States, however, race and labor have gone hand in hand ever since the institutionalization of slavery. Despite the salience of race and racism in American history, they have been difficult for American historians who were not black to confront. (Genocide, gays and lesbians, and, of course, women also have long histories of oversight. These are topics that have been, as the French would say, "occultes.") The civil rights movement and the concomitant black studies movement would have seemed to have ended the silence on race: Most certainly the field of African-American studies has grown tremendously, with many of its most active participants being non-black scholars. Yet the very vigor of African-American studies provided historians of labor a pretext for continuing to produce lily-white analyses—race, they could say, belonged exclusively to black studies. Turning their backs on AfricanAmerican studies, many labor historians took the further step of embracing paradigms from European history that seemed more sophisticated theoretically than American analyses but that have disregarded race. The result has been an outpouring of interesting yet flawed labor history that pretends that non-black workers are not affected by the existence of a workforce segmented by race.3 Although they know that nonblack as well as black workers have been affected by racism in this country, labor historians sometimes only admit to this fact when the question is put to them directly. They often prefer to wrap themselves in...