Monday 27 January 2020

Women's History Today in Britain and Beyond (2004)

Women’s History Today in Britain and Beyond
Written By: Rachel Cohen
Date: April 2004
Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 21: Summer 2004  

The London Socialist Historians Group has organised a series of seminars on women’s history today to encourage further debate around women’s historical lives in a variety of periods and locations.

Some of the presenters are those that lived through the radical movements of the 1970s and whose academic research is informed by that period and politics. But women’s history is not only being written by the generation that gave birth to it. Therefore the seminars were organised with the idea of creating debate amongst a younger generation of researchers posing new questions in women’s history about women’s participation. For example Louise Raw’s seminar is entitled: ‘ “Poor Little Match Girls?” The Bryant and May strike revisited’.

It has become far more difficult, since the funding cuts that affected women’s studies courses and departments in the 1990s and because of the highly theoretical approach taken and expected by many academics, to emphasise women or gender and activism in history. Female labour historians are also thin on the ground. This can partly be blamed on socialist history and its traditional exclusion of women’s work (household and labour market), but also on how unlikely one is able to gain employment as a labour historian, male or female in this climate. The women’s liberationists and socialists who became academics (often as a result of teaching in adult education for years) have had to shift their academic interests in order to get tenure or research grants.

Despite all, this since the year 2000 various collections have appeared which examine feminist and radical history. For example, John Stokes (ed), Eleanor Marx (1895-1898): Life, Work and Contacts (2000) analyses her feminism and radical socialism as well as her life as translator and journalist. Griffin and Braidotti (eds), Thinking Differently (2001) challenges the Anglo-American dominance over the history of feminist activism by examining the history of feminist movements in a variety of countries across the rest of Europe. Other important recent publications include Gallagher, Lubelska and Ryan (eds), Re-presenting the Past: Women and History (2001) which includes essays on Britain and the commonwealth, Empire and colonialism, whilst Johanna Alberti’s Gender and the Historian (2002) looks at the history of feminist historiography. Although these collections include work which analyses gender next to race and class, it is class that is often neglected by feminist history.

In fact a history that embraces the interface between socialist and feminist analysis is engaging in a constant battle against more post modern, post feminist views of woman as historical subject. Therefore it is hoped that seminars like these being organised by the LSHG will at least point to the problem. Of course publications like History Workshop Journal have been traditionally been the place for these debates and HJW has pushed for a socialist, feminist history since its founding in 1966. Although it is arguable, Flett and Renton claim, in New Approaches to Socialist History (2003), that HWJ has not weathered the 1980s well and is increasingly concerned more with psychoanalytic discourse, personal psyche and the postmodernist ideas and debates to the exclusion of political and economic issues.

Clearly women’s history is functioning in various forms (e.g. Women’s History Network) and there are many feminist, socialist historians/ independent researchers who are writing creative history about women which refuses to be marginalised into the separate sphere of women’s history. Women historians have fought reasonably successfully against the separation of women’s history and history and the masculine compartmentalisation of knowledge into individual disciplines. Although sadly most history departments are still dominated by white males, there are some tenured female professors and many more female academics around the country who have been instrumental in encouraging a younger generation of scholars. However it should be pointed out that more female academics does not automatically mean a better quality of women’s history. An encouragement of radical women’s history is what is needed.

There is another positive and exciting development which I think must be mentioned in this discussion. This is a development which I think runs against the tide of high theory I have mentioned and is connected to the extent to which feminists and socialist academics are linked to the new anti-war and anti-capitalist movements. There has long been a growing body of literature in all disciplines on women in the developing world. For an important recent publication that draws on this literature see Ehrenreich and Russell Hochschild (eds), Global Woman (2003). This book analyses the extent of migrant female labour who come to the West for work and often end up as domestics, child minders and in some cases sexual ‘slaves’ and compares this with the situation of western women.

However the recent interest in gender issues and oppression around the world (particularly in the Middle East) partly as a result of the attention capitalist globalisation has received (thanks to the anti-capitalist/anti-globalisation movements) may yet, if it is not doing so already, bring forth a space for more left wing and radical histories/studies which allow for working class and poor women’s (and men’s) participation to be examined or re-examined in the North and the South. The extent to which feminist/socialist historians, and other scholars and activists tap into this burgeoning environment is up to them. Whilst this may not offer an opportunity for publication and recognition in the traditional areas, journals, the RAE etc, it will mean radical historians of women have to be more creative about where they write and talk (independent media, and conferences) and for whom. Of course this is made all the more difficult due to the trend towards the increasing privatization of university education in this country and the rest of Europe but it is certainly food for the historical imagination.

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