History Theory Discussion Reading Notes

Popkin Women’s History and the History of Gender Relations French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique “More than a reaction to the ideas of a few writers, however, the growth of women’s history was a collective process, carried out by participants in the feminist movement that began to develop in the radical atmosphere of the 1960s. The developing interest in the suty of women in the past was directly linked to a concern about the status of women in the present, including demands that women be given great access to jobs in the academy and that women students be protected from harassment and sexual exploitation from professors. The rise of women’s history thus affected not only the content of historical studies, but also the substance of historians’ careers and the nature of interactions between students and teachers.” (148) “The development of women’s history from the 1960s to the 1980s was part of what is now commonly labeled the “second wave” of feminism, going beyond the “first waves” of the movement in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries that had concentrated on the political usse of women’s suffrrage and on obtaining access to higher education for women, but without seriously challenging the nature of institutions or the content of curricula.” (149) “Adopting the term popularized by Thomas Kuhn, Gerda Lerner wrote that, “Women’s history asks for a paradigm shift.” (149) → What does this mean? What can we apply to our knowledge of historical paradigms and paradigm shifts? → the answer to this is on page 49 directly under this above quote “Did women have a Renaissance?” “Using the language of ‘seperate spheres’, Smith-Rosenberg sought to go beyond demonstrating that women had been oppressed by patriarchal social systems and ideologies by showing that there were areas where women had been able to exercise agency in their lives. Her investigation of the bonds of friendship among nineteenth-cenutry American women became a model for historical scholarship in many other areas.” (149) “Women’s historians themselves critiqued the emphasis on an unchanging model of “patriarchy” that they often found in the work of feminist theorists from other disciplines. By making it seem that the situation of women was essentially the same in all times and places, the concept of patriarchy disregarded the notion of historical change and ignored the basic insight of history, they warned.” (151) “Gender identities, Foucault and Scott argued, are not determined by biology but are culturally constructed, and these constructions affect men as much as women. These theoretical perspectives helped stimulate new research on the history of masculinity and the history of “homosexuality”, a subject brought into the limelight by the devastating AIDS epidemic that began in the early 1980s and claimed the life of Foucault himself.” (151) “Even if the expansion of women’s history into the domains of gender, masculinity, and the study of sexual minorites means that scholarship had moved a long way from the original concerns of the pioneering women’s historians of the 1970s, however, there is no doubt that the new perspectives first generated by the interest in women’s history have profoundly changed the historical profession and the content of scholarship.” (151) Foucault’sHistory of Sexuality excerpt