Women and the Historical Enterprise in America

by Des Jardins, Julie

• ISBN13: 9780807854754
• ISBN10: 0807854751
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

How women transformed the study of history and our national memory. In Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, Julie Des Jardins explores American women's participation in the practice of history from the late nineteenth century through the end of World War II, a period in which history became professionalized as an increasingly masculine field of scientific inquiry. Des Jardins shows how women nevertheless transformed the profession during these years in their roles as writers, preservationists, educators, archivists, government workers, and social activists. Des Jardins explores the work of a wide variety of women historians, both professional and amateur, popular and scholarly, conservative and radical, white and nonwhite. Although their ability to earn professional credentials and gain research access to official documents was limited by their gender (and often by their race), these historians addressed important new questions and represented social groups traditionally omitted from the historical record, such as workers, African Americans, Native Americans, and religious minorities. Assessing the historical contributions of Mary Beard, Zora Neale Hurston, Angie Debo, Mari Sandoz, Lucy Salmon, Mary McLeod Bethune, Dorothy Porter, Nellie Neilson, and many others, Des Jardins argues that women working within the broadest confines of the historical enterprise collectively brought the new perspectives of social and cultural history to the study of a multifaceted American past. In the process, they not only developed the field of women's history but also influenced the creation of our national memory in the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Abbreviations	xi
Introduction. Discovering Women's Hidden History	1	(12)
PART I. The Regendering of History, 1880-1935
1 From Feminine Refinement to Masculine Pursuit, 1880-1920	13	(39)
2 Social Activism and Interdisciplinarity in Writing and Teaching, 1910-1935	52	(39)
PART II. Perspectives from the Professional, Social, and Geographic Margins
3 Women Regionalists and Intercultural Brokers	91	(27)
4 African American Woman's Historical Consciousness	118	(27)
PART III. Constructing Usable Pasts
5 Womanist Consciousness and New Negro History	145	(32)
6 Remembering Organized Feminism	177	(40)
PART IV. Establishing Women's History as a Field
7 Creating a Usable Past for Women	217	(24)
8 Legacies for Women's History in the Twenty-First Century	241	(30)
Notes	271	(54)
Bibliography	325	(40)
Index	365