Abstract
Making Women’s History is a welcome contribution to the growing field of transnational women’s history. American University’s Pamela S Nadell and Kate Haulman have compiled a highly readable, stylistically even and discursively productive volume that engages themes of identity, politics and power. Although it draws on other disciplines, the volume is firmly grounded in history and historiography. It combines personal commentary, often invoking stories from graduate life prior to the institutional establishment of women’s history, with academic studies across a wide range of geographic areas and time periods. Taken together, the material in Making Women’s History will be of great interest to those in transnational history, world history, feminist studies and a vast array of area studies.
Divided into three sections, there is an introduction and 10 chapters. The first section, ‘Imagining new histories’, examines the recent past of the historical field and potential future directions of academic study in the United States, Russia, Africa and Europe, taken as discrete entities. Given that the chapters are authored by senior scholars and well-regarded experts in their individual fields, Kathy Peiss, Barbara Alpern Engel, Claire Robertson and Anna Clark, it will be of particular interest to early career scholars, researchers, teachers compiling syllabi and those who wish to gain a quick overview of the above particular locales, either for the purposes of orientation or for future reference. As a whole, the book promotes a comparative and global lens when examining women’s history. It is no longer enough to study the United States, say, in isolation without considering what is happening elsewhere. Methodologically too the authors are interested in cross-disciplinary conversations, which suggests a gradual expansion of history’s purview.
The second section, ‘Engendering national and nationalist projects’, focuses on nationalism and challenges to it in Britain, Egypt and India by Arianne Chernock, Lisa Pollard and Mytheli Sreenivas respectively. Each scholar is attuned to how transnational history offers a different way of organizing social relations such that power, identity and politics can be re-read productively. Where does Britain begin and end? How do Egyptian women operate in discourses about the nation? What does India make of its post-colonial present in light of the presence of women from all classes in the national imaginary? How should we read the tension between exceptional women ‘worthies’ and everyday ordinary workers? These questions are answered, but in doing so the contributors all read nationalism and the nation from an intellectual standpoint that does not see it as bound, static, certain. The nation here is dynamic, contingent and porous and we are a long way from history being the handmaiden to nationalism.
The third section, ‘Exploring transnational approaches’, takes up the transnational project hinted at in the first two sections in a more explicit manner. There is writing on Latin America by Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman and on US–China relations by Cristina Zaccarini. The book concludes with a more theoretical piece on feminism and transnationalism by Jocelyn Olcott. These chapters, in a way similar to the first section, argue for a history that is concerned less with national boundaries and more with themes and trends. Transnational history is the major recent shift in academic studies and the final chapters are examples of the recent turn.
While the content of the book is rich in itself, there are notable geographic omissions in Making Women’s History. Discussions of the ‘Caribbean’, the ‘Middle East’, ‘South East Asia’ and ‘Oceania’ are all absent. The other notable absence is thorough theoretical discussion of transnationalism and feminism, which is surprising given that theory frequently lays claim to universality. Only Olcott’s ‘Happier marriage’, the book’s ultimate chapter, discusses this in detail, even though it is consistent with the style of historiography and history throughout the book rather than a theoretical investigation per se. This absence is not problematic, but it does suggest another project that could complement Making Women’s Histories, namely a work that engages with ideas of the discipline as theory. However, the essays are informed by the post-cultural, linguistic or post-structural moment and it is Michel Foucault who casts the longest shadow. It is difficult to overstate his importance to sexuality studies and by extension feminist history and while he is invoked it is pertinent to ask: what do we mean when we say Foucault or post-structuralism? Do we mean his early work or the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality? And what of the differences between say Foucault in France and the colonies? Asking these questions might enable us to ask what the post-structural moment was and how it should be taken to task by intellectual historians interested in ‘that noble dream’ as it applies to sexuality and gender studies in the transnational era.
The more pronounced criticism I have is not about the content of any particular essay but a structural observation about the work as a whole, namely that every author undertook her doctoral studies and currently works at a university in the continental United States. In highlighting this limited positionality of contributing scholars I agree with contributor Robertson about the need for greater reflexivity, or in Simon Jarvis’s words, for an ‘undeleted criticism’. That Making Women’s History is on transnationalism seems only to highlight this need more starkly. For all the diversity of American higher education, including the distance from the University of California Irvine to the University of Pennsylvania, there are important perspectives on transnationalism that are undoubtedly different from those inside these national bounds. Heterogeneous though the contributors may be, Making Women’s History is an educated American view of the world. What are Chinese university historians in China thinking about women in the world? What about Africans in Africa? And how might questions of method change from place to place? We must not only ask what is the archive like in each place, but how do we search through it – what are the daily practices of homo academicus like from Canberra to Cambridge? One could imagine additions to the discourse by non-academics to Making Women’s History as well. What are activists in America or Myanmar or Jamaica thinking about women in the world? This criticism does not necessarily detract from Making Women’s History. Instead it offers possibilities for fruitful conversations that can engage and be produced because of it.
Making Women’s History is an impressive edition that adds to the literature on history, transnationalism, feminism, gender and sexuality and area studies. Nadell and Haulman have produced a stylistically uniform, well-rounded and authoritative book that examines the themes of identity, politics and power from a variety of perspectives. Making Women’s History will be of great interest to students who wish to gain an overview of the field, early career researchers looking for inspiration and information from established colleagues and experts who want to maintain their pre-eminence in a changing discipline. Despite its shortcomings, it offers exciting new directions for scholars working in women’s studies, gender and sexuality and transnational history fields.