As soon as I announced my sabbatical project last spring, an otherwise supportive friend asked a question I haven’t been able to shake: “You will be interpreting as a male. How will you be sure you capture the Women’s perspective?”
The short answer is that I’m not sure I can. No doubt I’ll misunderstand experiences and perspectives that a female scholar would grasp intuitively. Perhaps that’s why there still don’t seem to be a lot of male historians doing women’s history. I don’t think the Journal of Women’s History has ever had a male editor; the only man on its current editorial board studies transgender history. So while I’ve had the idea for this project for several years, I hesitated to act on it because I thought it might be something that one of the women in our department would prefer to pursue.
But they didn’t, and for better or worse, I’ve become what passes for the institutional historian of Bethel. In any event, I don’t think we ought to take for granted that male scholars will simply neglect the study of women’s history. As I wrote earlier, gender “was neglected in my graduate training and has remained peripheral to my work in the classroom and archive,” so “I’m eager to try something different, learn new content, theory, and methods, and bring new insights back into the classroom.”
That means I’m on a steep learning curve. But whenever I doubt that I’m the Bethel historian to write this Bethel history, I try to reassure myself that all history is ultimately a work of empathy. Even when they have in common with their subjects a gender, religion, nationality, or university, historians are trying to understand people different from them, to “achieve some kind of contact with the mind of” someone else (as E.H. Carr put it in What Is History?). So when my friend asked how I could “capture the Women’s perspective,” I responded that I would do it “the same way I try to interpret European history as an American, or 19th century history as someone born in the 1970s, or military history as someone who’s never been at war. Listening to sources.”
All of this came back to mind recently, when I stumbled across a different version of the challenge while reading back issues of Bethel’s student newspaper.
In the spring of 1975, The Clarion published a multi-part series on “the successes and failures of racial integration at Bethel.” In a letter to the editor in the May 2nd issue, seven Black students professed themselves “very highly pleased to see that someone around here actively cares about the plight of the Black at Bethel.” But then they pointed out a crucial weakness in the March 21 and April 11 articles written by a white student-reporter named Steve Harris:
We feel that an article such as this requires quality Black participation of some type in order to be authentic, realistic and accurate. As far as we’re concerned, a white can accurately say what it’s like to be Black as much as a cat can accurately say, not speculate, what it’s like to be a dog. You’ve never experienced blackness from a Black perspective, so how can you accurately depict our situation? Authenticity and accuracy, through speculation, is lost, which we feel has been the case in these articles.
It wasn’t that they thought a white reporter inherently incapable of capturing another perspective. But they pointed out that The Clarion series had yet to include any direct quotations from the people Harris was writing about: “This strikes us funny especially since in the second article, first paragraph, the thesis question for the article is: ‘What are the causes of their discontent?’ From there on, we sit back and watch white analyists [sic] comment on the dramatic occurrences of the past. What-ever happened to the actors? Don’t they get a chance to say, how they felt?”
One of the letter-writers, Del Hampton, ended up collaborating with Harris on the last two articles in the series, both of which incorporated the voices of Black students Hampton and Harris had interviewed.
So while I’ll eventually do more sustained work of narrating and interpreting the women’s history of Bethel, right now it’s far more important to me to listen to the voices of Bethel’s women. Which is why I’ll spend countless hours this fall not just reading newspaper articles, administrative reports, and quantitative data about the women of Bethel, but paying attention to evidence left behind by the women of Bethel. It’s why I spent the summer conducting oral history interviews with three dozen of those women — and asked a female student to collaborate on that project — and why I am emailing even more of them during my sabbatical. And it’s one reason I’m starting with this blog, to give more women (and men) of Bethel a chance to speak into my research by commenting on posts.
But the pioneering historian Gerda Lerner would also remind me that “to interpret the female past from the female point of view, demands not only that we elicit the voices of women from the primary record but learn how to listen to them. It demands also that we question and redefine the values by which we order historical data. Traditional, male-centered history has focused on public actions and power as central concerns.” (On war, for example, the subject of so many of my classes at Bethel.) I don’t think that rules out male historians from studying women’s history, but it does suggest that I need to attune myself to “the ways in which women acted differently from men as agents in history.”
At the very least, I’ve already taken one of her key themes to heart, since the very existence of this project represents one small answer to what Lerner called “the crucial, transforming question” in her 1988 essay on the state of women’s history: “If women were at the center of our analysis regarding any period or any series of events, how would our account and analysis be changed?”
One goal of this blog is to help involve members of the Bethel community in doing the history of Bethel, so comments are always welcome! Just know that if you leave a comment at the project blog, I’ll take that as expressing your permission to quote it in the project.
The Women of Bethel 