Abstract
Reviewed by: Amanda Dillon, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
As Maria Bucur observes in her new book The Century of Women, whilst we have made great strides in terms of gender inclusivity in history, ‘women tend to fall by the wayside’, particularly in longue durée histories (2). Bucur’s book goes some distance towards righting this imbalance, providing a whistle-stop, fully globalized narrative of the major areas of the twentieth and early twenty-first century where women have had an explicit hand in changing the world. The book’s argument sits somewhere between historical textbook narrative – just from a different point of view with an emphasis on different historical actors – and critical historical intervention, but is a welcome addition to work on women in the twentieth century in particular. Such a book seems particularly apposite in the present day, when recent strides towards gender equality and intersectionality in all areas have begun to slip backwards, as Bucur notes in her epilogue. As such, a piece not just focusing on but valorizing women’s place in recent history is a welcome partial antidote to the horrors the media machine provides for us on a daily basis. Indeed it would be difficult if not impossible to read this book apolitically, and it is all the better for it.
Bucur’s narrative is split into six parts that look at topics from the wide-reaching ‘population’ section (which also includes issues on the link between literacy and fertility and heteronormativity in addition to expected topics like the development of the contraceptive pill and legalized abortion) to the very broad ‘culture’ section (which should perhaps be renamed ‘cultural creation’ or ‘creative artefacts’ given its focus on the arts), following multiple strands of influence from around the world. Indeed, one of the strengths of Bucur’s book is that it does not just cover the usual suspects: it would have been very easy to cover only characters like Lady Astor, Toni Morrison, Margaret Mead or Marie Stopes, but she also includes figures that are lesser-known but no less important, such as Qunfei Zhou, Killiroi Parren, Saroj Khan and Margaret Sanger. Indeed, it is tempting to write a review made of nothing but names: Bucur’s remit is enormous, global, multi-racial and completely inclusive, and a short review cannot pay tribute to the amount of work that has gone into this, nor to the women given screen time here. Bucur’s narrative through these topics is necessarily brief, and at times bitty (again necessarily), but as a whole the reader is left with an astounding amount of hidden history that traditional patriarchal historical narratives simply leave to one side.
Where Bucur’s work falters is not in its research (which is extraordinary – the endnotes here are a goldmine of resources for student and researcher alike) but its presentation and structure, both on a micro and macro scale. Individual chapters are less narrative than one might expect and more free-associating in their links between figures and movements; the thematic chapters themselves seem cut off in terms of influence from other chapters. I would have expected some cross-over between the chapter on economics and that on population – and politics – but the relationship here and in other instances is left sadly unexplored. Indeed, the developments themselves often feel isolated from one another, even in the same chapter or subsection. In a sense, this feels deliberately subversive: in a number of ways, these are only isolated because we know the other ‘half’ of the story, which leads us to question why this is not necessarily (or ever) the case in male-focused histories. Still, it also suggests that a women-focused history may not be the curative we would like it to be in practice, and that what we might prefer in the end is something more holistic. It is a telling problem, though, and one that requires the reader take a step back and consider their own assumptions about the construction of historical narratives.
The themes explored also seem odd choices, particularly in how they are organized and named: I am not convinced that ‘culture’ and ‘knowledge’ are necessarily so distinct as Bucur seems to argue. For example, history as a discipline is categorized as knowledge, but fiction is not. The interdisciplinarians among us might argue that the reverse is true, particularly in the timespan examined here, with the rise of postmodern theory in both history and literary studies as well as the professionalization and professorialization of the fine arts in the academy occurring over the same period. Everything is here, though it may not be where a reader expects it. But this is to nit-pick in what is otherwise an impressive and concise piece of work that will prove useful to researchers and accessible to students studying gender in the twentieth century and beyond. Bucur’s narrative is simple but subversive: women are everywhere in history and our impact on the world is undeniable.