Dubious Investment Advice for Women**

**I am so going to get spam based on the post title alone. So comments stay open only for a week so I don't spend the rest of my life deleting posts by bots.
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I love a good shoe. Truly, I do. In fact, today, I was walking -- nay, strutting -- through the library at Hogwarts, and in no small part because of the pair of boots I am wearing. They are comfortable yet stylish. They work with skirts and jeans. They are perfect, and I will cry when I inevitably wear them out and can't find another pair like them.

But today, in my social media account, one of those ads popped up. It was from a women's magazine, and it was promoting what its editors thought (or had been paid to think) were the shoes to have this season (Yes, some people buy shoes by season. We call them "wealthy people"). I clicked on it, and found what I anticipated: there was one pair that was reasonably attractive; the others seemed designed to scream out YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE ME BEFORE I AM TOTALLY UNIQUE NO NOT UGLY HOW COULD YOU THINK THAT YOU SHOULD BUY ME RIGHT NOW FOR $800 SO YOU CAN WEAR ME FOR EIGHT WEEKS BEFORE THE INEVITABLE KNOCK-OFFS HAPPEN AND EVERYBODY HAS A PAIR AND YOU HAVE TO DISOWN ME AND BURN EVERY PICTURE YOU HAVE WITH YOU WEARING ME.

For $990 this (and its mate) can be yours.

But it's not that -- the inevitable disposable fashion -- that caught my eye. That's a given, as is the eyeroll that is my standard response. It was the title of the post. Usually, it's something like "18 handbags you can't live without" or "12 smoothies that will change your life" or something equally hyperbolic. This one, however, was called "Sixteen Shoes You'll Want to Invest In This Spring."  And that title raised a few questions for me:

• What is the projected rate of return on my shoe investment?
• Is my shoe-investment tax-deferred?
• Can I roll it over into an IRA?
• What are the investment manager fees for my shoe purchase?
• Will my employer match my contributions?

Oh, wait: by "invest", you mean "Spend the equivalent of 2.5 months' retirement contributions on a pair of shoes that will be fashionable for about the next 5 minutes because poverty in old age only happens to ugly people." Got it.

As the inimitable Twisty Faster used to say, this chaps my spinster hide. First, women are marketed beauty products with food to put on their faces to replace the food that they're not supposed to put in their faces; now, "investment" means "spend money on something whose value depreciates to zero in less time than it takes you to pay off the charge on your credit card."

What. The. HELL.

Women's Work

I'm starting this post off with a "caveat lector": this post is about women and women's work in academia, and about how we can and should support and promote it. Period. If you feel the need to put in a "what about the men?" or "notallmen" kind of comment, please see the first sentence of this short preface. Thank you.

Recently, I've been thinking about the work of a senior-to-me female colleague whose work is, in my opinion, vastly under-appreciated outside her field of specialization. Her own scholarship is wonderful. But the one thing I find myself coming back to time and again is her work as a mentor. She's got a couple of great books of her own, but she's taken time away from her own work to edit collections (that's plural -- when most people run from even one), chair important planning committees, and work to promote and informally mentor younger scholars in her field. It's almost impossible to find a young scholar in one of her fields of interest who hasn't benefited from her help and support.

This is the "women's work" of academia.[1]

I don't just mean serving on committees or developing new teaching strategies or mentoring young scholars; I mean doing these things to the point where you know you could have had out another book or two if you'd just pretended not to be there when people knocked.

Because here's the thing: if you want to get a fellowship or grant or promotion or raise or other professional recognition, your scholarly output weighs most heavily. People who volunteer for tough committees makes things run. People who edit collected volumes provide outlets for scholarly work on a particular topic. People who mentor young faculty -- who take them under their wing with no conceivable benefit to themselves -- make academia a better place to be, and model civility and humanity.

Shorter version: if these people went away, we'd be fucked.

I'm about 50-50 on this. I try to be a good worker/colleague/mentor, but I'm also serious about drawing boundaries. No value judgement in that either way; just that's how I roll. But that's just a full disclosure, because this ain't about me. It's about the fact that women (and, in my own personal observation, gay men -- but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish) are the ones who set up and clean up, who take meeting minutes while everyone else looks at their shoes, who step up and say "yes, I'll do that work that no one will ever see,"  who take the time to check in with a junior colleague and say "How are you doing? Let me buy you lunch and let's see how I can help."

And every hour spent on unseen-yet-essential labor is an hour that we could be reading, writing, thinking. We may actually enjoy the service and mentoring. But when it comes time to be recognized, and you stack up our CV next to the male candidates, chances are that they'll have more publications than we will. And committees will think they're making objective choices: "He's just more qualified!"

So, women have been told to "say no." Which is great, but it only goes so far, due to decades of cultural conditioning combined with pressure from above. And who's going to do the work, if not us? And if the work doesn't get done? Well then, we suffer too. One solution is to apply "see something/say something": if the women in your department are doing all the heavy lifting while the men get to be scholars, say something to your chair if you can, and ask if something can be done. Or say something to the men themselves if that's practical: I find a lot of men are simply blissfully unaware of how much work goes into getting things done.

So sure: we need to set boundaries to the degree that we can, and we need to point out inequities and agitate for change. But you know what we also need to do?

AS A PROFESSION, WE NEED TO RECOGNIZE WOMEN'S WORK. We need to promote its value, not just rhetorically, but also in terms of promotions, raises, professional honors, and all that other stuff. We need to point out the value of all this labor, and make sure that it gets taken into account -- really taken into account -- when it comes time to hand out tangible rewards.


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[1] Here, I could insert some stuff about how I know that men do blah-blah, and I know that not all women set their own work aside to do work for others... but I'm not gonna. Because there are lots and lots of people out there who say and write such things on a daily basis, and I really don't feel like apologizing for my own argument.  Fuck it.

Regretting the offhand title of the last post

...because frankly, in light of the Isla Vista shootings, the thought of bullets of any kind is making me a bit ill.

Here's the deal with me: I'm not 100% anti-gun. If I ever retire to my dream cabin in the woods, and if it's in a region where there are Wild Things, I'll likely even purchase a shotgun myself and get trained to use it defensively and, if at all possible, nonlethally.

Having said that, I firmly believe that the "no restrictions" crowd is 100% in the wrong, and the Isla Vista shootings make it clear why. What we're seeing here is a toxic mix of unrestrictive gun laws, possible mental illness, and misogynistic entitlement. A person who was mentally ill and/or racist/misogynist/homophobic might indeed do some damage. But the fact that he was able to legally purchase 3 semi-automatic weapons made him ever so much deadlier.

This is not the "well regulated militia" that the second amendment speaks of. This is mass murder driven by misogyny and entitlement and made all that much easier and more efficient by the easy availability of rapid-firing weapons and a culture that equates their use with nationalistic mythos and control over one's own destiny. Too many things in our culture say this kid was doing the right thing. And that's what makes me ill.

BONUS LINKAGE: There are some good pieces being written in the wake of this lobe-melting massacre. Here's one I particularly like, addressed directly to men.

Random Bullets of Berks

Here I am in Toronto, halfway through my first-ever Berks and, as usual, I'm not getting enough sleep. I've been having a truly excellent time, meeting people whose work I've known for ages, but have never met in real life. This is my third conference in six weeks, and frankly, I'm exhausted. But I'm also inspired. Conferences have a way of doing that. Book ideas, blog post ideas, people to write... Thank the gods I'm not doing any traveling this summer.

I would normally write a long, ruminative post about the experience, but as I said, I'm pooped. So here, in quick bullet-points version, are some of the experiences and thoughts running through my head at this, the halfway mark:

• Coming as it does at the end of the semester for most of us, and post-Kalamazoo for us medievalists, organizing a blogger meetup seemed to fall by the wayside. Fortunately, Belle from Scattered & Random thought to put up a "who's going?" post, so I got to meet up with her for a lovely and leisurely breakfast the first day, on a day when I hadn't any panels to go to until 1:30.
• That first premodern panel... let me say, I'm thrilled to know that the Berks organizers have, over the past decade, started to include more panels with premodern content. And the first panel on women in premodern courts contained everything from 14th-century Jewish women to women in colonial Virginia. Now, the next step is to get organizers to realize that we've got enough interest that we'll need bigger rooms (see photo below). Though, happily, the overcrowding seems to be not a symptom of neglect, but rather the fact that the organizers hadn't anticipated so many people showing up for the conference, period. All the rooms were overcrowded. Uncomfortable and possibly hazardous, but a good sign for the field in general.

We're gonna need a bigger boat.

•  Toronto is a great city. But holy moly, it's expensive here.
• 8 a.m. panel Friday honoring the contributions of Carolyn Walker Bynum... with CWB as a respondent. And I'm once again inspired by a combination of intellectual firepower and personal generosity. These are the kind of people I want to be when I grow up.
• The panel I chaired and did comment for was lovely, with some really interesting papers. My favorite thought-provoking quote from a paper: "Patriarchy doesn't need to be consistent to be effective."
• Lunches, dinners, and all sorts of chance encounters with friends and professional acquaintances who I haven't seen in years = very nice.
• You know what's gratifying? Meeting grad students and professors who have read my book and liked it. With as few copies as it's sold, I have sometimes wondered if anyone has read it at all. But they have, and it appears to be making a difference.
• Remember that book project that I long ago got scooped on? It appears to have become a growing field of inquiry in recent years. You know what's cool? I no longer mind.
• ZOMG. Giant crowd for the panel on rethinking key analytical concepts: "gender binary," "gender crisis," and "agency" all came under scrutiny. I scribbled like mad.
• Convocation! With Tenured Radical, who was there to announce that she had taken on the formidable task of designing a Berks website that actually made sense (yay!). I mentioned to the friend with whom I was sitting that I needed to dash down after we were done to say hi to her. "Do you know her?", she asked me. "Yes, for about seven years now... it's just that we've never actually met." But now we have. And she's excellent. And within 15 seconds of meeting asked "Do you want to be on my communications committee?" Uhhh... But because it's TR, and the Berks, I'll probably say yes.
• Great dinner with more fabulous premodernist feminists, including former commenter K and one of Historiann's regular commenters EJ, with whom I got to talk with for ages over Too Much Pasta. We talked about second books, mid-career crises, and learning how to set our own agendas for the first time in what may be decades. All promised as blog fodder.

 Also: there are 2,000 people here, and I'm eating way too much.

And there are still two days left to go...

The Daily Mail's "History Girls," or: Do I have to wear stilettos to the archive now?

By now, the internets are all abuzz with links and reactions to the Daily Mail’s Sunday article, “The History Girls,”[1] profiling seven young female historians who “have rescued studying the past from the clutches of fusty academia and changed our view of yesteryear for ever.” Atop the article is a fashion-style shoot of the historians in question, impeccably styled (including some serious stilettos all around) and posed like the ad for a new reality show. Most have PhDs, all are under 40, all are slim and attractive. In the body of the article, each deals with the same questionnaire: “Why topic X?”; “If you could travel back in time…?”; “Who would you resurrect for a dinner date?”

 

My first reaction? Oh, barf.

Yes, there are second and third reactions, but let’s get to the first one first. No, even before that, let’s get to a pre-reaction: Even in my initial revulsion at the piece, I am not interested in shaming the women themselves. They’re not betraying anyone or anyone’s cause. Chances are that the Mail called them up and pitched this as a piece on young women historians in the UK. If someone had called me up with that, chances are that I would have jumped at the chance to publicly counter the typical image of the old, white, bearded, tweed-jacketed history professor (times ten, since I’m a medievalist). By the time we got to the questionnaire and the photo shoot, I probably would have felt that it was too late to back out gracefully, and hoped that some shred of my original purpose (promote women in the profession!) would have remained.  And stilettos aside, I wouldn’t mind having someone dress me up all high-fashion, just to see what I would like if I were the kind of person who put more than five-minutes' effort into my appearance. 

So, I’m convinced of the good intentions of the historians in question until it can be proven otherwise. Nevertheless, I’m still pretty squicked out at this piece. What are the criteria for being a woman who is making boring old history (::sigh::) interesting again? Well, according to the Daily Mail's selection, you'll want to be young, white (I'm including the one of hispanic heritage), thin, and conventionally pretty. There’s nothing wrong with being any or even all of those things. But historians are not TV presenters (except for the ones that are); our effectiveness in bringing our work to our students and to the public should no more be predicated on broad physical appeal than would apply to a male historian in the same situation.

That, in a nutshell, is my first reaction. Now, let's get the strawmen out of the way. HERE'S WHAT I'M NOT SAYING:

• That academics shouldn’t be attractive
• That women shouldn’t be attractive
• That attractive women aren’t real historians
• That dressing up fancy is bad
• That the article is racist
• That only middle-aged and old historians should be taken seriously 

 Any of these things might be argued to be true, but none of them are what I'm saying. So don't bother arguing against them in the comments, lest you see mine eyes give a mighty roll.

We good there? Alrighty, then; moving on to my reconsideration (second, third, and fourth thoughts about the article):

1. The questionnaires are dumb, no doubt. But the women’s responses aren’t. Some participants seem to have refused to answer the “who would you date” question.[2] One of them straight-up challenges the idea that women write a different kind of history than men. One of them answers the time-machine question in the same way that I would: by clearly stipulating that she’d first think of loading up on immunizations; another notes that being a European woman in pretty much any past time period would have been much less preferable to being one now.
2. Some of these women are actually TV presenters on history shows. So for them, looking good and dressing up are part of the job description (whether it should have to be is another kettle of fish). 
3.  In my opinion, we (not just women) could learn a lot from people whose historical work appears on TV and in the general-readership press. I’m starting to think that we, as academic historians, are part of the problem when it comes to a general lack of historical literacy. If a potential reader needs to be halfway to a graduate degree before they can really “get” something we’ve written, then perhaps it’s time to rethink how we’re presenting our work. Or, at the very least, to think about having a couple of publication tracks going at the same time. And finally... 
4. It's the friggin' Daily Mail. What did we expect?

I’m still on the whole skeeved out by the piece. I’d have thought that “academic historian” would be one place where I wouldn’t have to be hot or face irrelevance. But beyond the obvious idiocy and pandering, there are some things in this piece worth thinking about.

But don’t worry: You won’t see me posing draped across my desk in stilettos anytime soon.

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[1] Title is likely a take on the film "The History Boys." So I'm gonna give the "girls" thing a pass. 
[2] Or perhaps one or more of the "dates" were editorially excluded for being too boring or obscure or even -- saints preserve us! -- not men.

Well, crap -- this is enough to make me post something

Sound the bells!

Okay, so as I noted, this semester I have three regular courses, two independent studies, and am acting undergraduate advisor. Plus I committed to write an article. I'm dumb. And also not blogging.

Not that there haven't been blogworthy things. Oh my, yes. This semester I have:

• ...gotten verging-on-shouty with a colleague. In the hall. In front of students.
• ...refused to sign off on a thesis before some revisions were made, and gotten into it with the thesis chair about that.
• ...been on the receiving end of a couple of really weird personal interactions that have formerly comfortable situations suddenly awkward.
• ...sprained my ankle.
• ...gotten my credit card hacked

May I note that all of the above happened within a ten-day period?  Yeah, it was the most emotionally exhausting week and a half I've had in ages. And other than the ankle (healing well, thank you), I really can't blog about any of it. And though I could blog about the last two, I just haven't had the time (see above), nor does what I have to say (both things suck righteously) do much to embiggen the human spirit. So I forbear.

But... the Steubenville verdict. And, more importantly, the media reaction to it.

There is no shortage of commentary flying about the internets about this one, so perhaps you won't want to read my thoughts on this.  I'll keep it short:

1. Ew. Gross. Beyond gross.
2. I've seen this movie before. Like, 600 years ago.

Here's how it worked in the Middle Ages (and please note that this is coming from a Certified Historian of Medieval Women and Gender Who Wrote a Whole Damn Book about This):

1. Patriarchy exists. Boo. 
2. Patriarchal gender system sorts you into two categories, and if you're in the "female" category, then your sexuality is closely monitored and heavily regulated -- sometimes by your parents, sometimes by your spouse. If you're an adult single woman, then technically you're supposed to do it yourself, but in reality, you're in for some heavier-than-usual scrutiny by your entire community.
3. If you're going to be sexually active outside of marriage, you need to keep it under control -- limited partners, and preferably one that you're going to marry, and soon. This means you are a Good Girl, and entitled to protection when someone commits a crime against your property or person. You are also entitled to Special Protections for your Vulnerable Femaleness.
4. Step outside those boundaries, though (Where were those boundaries, precisely? Yeah, we don't really have a firm consensus on that, but we'll let you know), and you've in essentially done an opt-out on being a woman. This means that if you are beaten, raped, or otherwise harmed, you really don't have a case, because, by opting out of the gendered limitations on your behavior, you've also opted out of the gendered protections. You did this to yourself, missy.
5. And no, you can't opt for "human" protections; that would mean that there is an "outside" of patriarchy, and that's just plain silly. 

Okay, I have to go to work, so I need to be done. Have at it.

Want to (legally) beat your spouse? Move to Topeka!

Well, actually, you could move to most anywhere in Shawnee County, whose district court, due to lack of resources, no longer prosecutes domestic violence cases, and instead mandates that the (equally cash-strapped) municipalities prosecute them. But Topeka, so far as we know, is the only such municipality contemplating politically pushing back by actually decriminalizing domestic violence entirely, as part of a move to kick back all misdemeanor prosecutions to the state.

I'm not entirely sure what to say about this. What I'm not going to engage in is some knee-jerk Midwest-bashing. I lived in the Midwest on two occasions for a total of over 8 years of my adult life -- long enough to know that every part of the country has good people and bad ones, and most are a mix of both, just trying to get by. But still... on first reading, all I could do was make inarticulate noises in the back of my throat. And even on deeper thought, I'm going to be unable to form a coherent essay with a thesis statement (other than this). So here are my bullet points:

• Budget cuts are bad. Our public resources are strained. But is telling a person who has been brutally beaten by her or his spouse or partner that such conduct is no longer prosecutable where they live really the most sensible way to save money?
• Perhaps Topeka is trying to use this as a lever: "Budget cuts have forced us to immediately release batterers, who statistics show will most likely repeat their behavior. We don't want to do this. This is putting human lives on the line. So we need more resources, or we need counties and the state to step up. We're sending a political message on behalf of women!" But in the real world, messages don't mean shit when you're living in constant fear in your home, if you're not in a hospital bed or in the ground.
• And of the many things that counties and states have shoved off on municipalities (just as the federal government offloads its responsibilities onto the states), why is it women* whose bodies are being put on the line?
• That was a rhetorical question.
• Poverty and frustration with long-term unemployment increases the incidence of domestic violence (especially male-on-female domestic violence). There are complex cultural reasons for it tied up with American notions of masculinity. But the point is that the same massive long-term recession that is behind this move to decriminalize domestic violence is simultaneously going to cause rates of domestic violence to double or triple. So protections for women are disappearing at a time when they are likely to need them more than ever.
  
• The Topeka mayor assures his constituents that anyone who thinks that decriminalizing domestic violence means that said violence will go unpunished is "dead wrong." How, precisely, will punishment be effected if it's no longer a prosecutable offense in the municipal code, and if the D.A. has already taken a pass?
• Why the actual fuck is domestic battery only a misdemeanor? Here's an idea, Topeka: go ahead and save money by refusing to prosecute misdemeanors (not an ideal solution, granted), but legally bundle that decision with another one to reclassify domestic battery as a felony.**

Enough. The upshot is that the Topeka city council is seriously considering making it no longer a prosecutable offense to beat somebody up… as long as it's somebody who lives under your own roof. This is making me sick.

UPDATED: I've just written a professionally-worded e-mail to the Topeka City Council. Their general contact info, as well as contact info for the mayor and individual council members, can be found here. I encourage people to get involved however you see fit. As a suggestion: bear in mind that the most effective political communication is concise, to-the-point, and avoids ad hominem attacks. (So, yes: I wrote them under my real name and took out the swears...)


*Yes, I know that women are not the only victims of domestic violence, and I know that men are not the only perpetrators. But since 84% of spouse abuse victims were females, and 86% of victims of dating partner abuse at were female, I'm gonna go with the argument that women are the ones being treated as expendable here.

**Joel, who knows about such things, notes that the power to do this does not lie with the municipalities. Fair enough. But I still maintain my original outraged question: Why the actual fuck is domestic battery only a misdemeanor -- in Topeka, or the state, or anywhere, for that matter?

Something Weird Happened (again) Today

Today I rode my bike to the dentist's office, which is about 9 miles away. No, that's not the weird thing (though an 18-mile round trip is a bit out of my usual range). I ride my bike everywhere, and for more than the environmental, financial, and health benefits of it: the bike is one of the truly happy-making things in my life. I have, in fact, been known to let out a joyous "Wheeeeee!!!!" while riding, and on more than one occasion.

fig. 1: This is not me. But it IS completely awesome.
(image credit here)

Here's the thing I consider weird: On my way out of the office, I stopped by the receptionist's desk to schedule my next appointment, and the fact that I had ridden came up in conversation. How long did that take?, she wondered. 20 minutes or so? No, no, I demurred. I'm nowhere near that fast.** More like 40. But it's a gorgeous day for a ride. Yes, she agreed, and besides that, now when you get home, you can have whatever you want for lunch and not feel guilty about the calories.

Did you see what just happened there?

Now, for the record: I have, at various times throughout my life, chosen to watch closely what I eat. I have been medically overweight in the past, and was even obese as a child (back when that wasn't so common as today). But for years now, I've been quite obviously at a healthy weight, with a pretty average-looking body type. You'd have to have a pretty warped idea of what a woman should look like to think I should be dieting.

And really, that's not even the point, is it? I mean, I could weigh a couple of hundred pounds more than I do right now, and still I think it would be out of line for someone to suggest that "food = guilt" and "exercise = expiation" should be my points of reference.

Yet this isn't the first time this has happened. I know another woman who reacts to my perfectly reasonable food choices with, "but that's so fattening!"

I can't figure out whether these women are trying to do girl-bonding ("We all want to be thinner, right?") or projecting their own issues, or what. I don't detect any malice anywhere (and I'm pretty sensitive to malice). But I'm sort of offended on behalf of women in general that the unquestioning assumption is that any food- or exercise-related decision is based on poor body image, and that pure enjoyment, whether in eating or in moving one's body, isn't even a factor. And I'm always just left there, gaping like a fish, without a response.

I don't know what the point of this post is. Maybe it's a call to do things just because we enjoy them (see fig. 1, above).



**This would be 27 mph or so on average, some of that in traffic, and sustained for a while. With cargo. I'm not that ambitious.

The Fox and the Hedgehog, part 3: Should Feminist Scholars be Hedgehogs?

(point of irony: Blogger's spell-check function does not recognize the possessive "women's".)

When I began to post about the fox and hedgehog thing, it was a post that had been brewing for a few months, but that was most proximately inspired by this post at Historiann's. I mentioned this before, but never explained why.

Historiann asks, among other things, whether anyone would notice if women's history stopped being written. My passive voice formulation is intentional here, because "if women's historians stopped writing women's history" is circular and confusing and possibly tautological. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Authorial intent aside (we're all postmodernists now - wheee!), my reading of this post suggested two implications: the importance to the profession of doing women's history, and the fact that those with a vested interest in women's history (particularly but not exclusively feminist historians) should keep on keepin' on because -- lip service and an occasional grad seminar book aside -- no one else is going to step up and do it. Likely the same can be said for queer history, though I know less about that field's dynamics.

Each of these implications is fairly clear, but when viewed through the lens of my recent protestations about personal choice on the whole fox/hedgehog thing, combined with the recent post by Tenured Radical on the gendered dimensions of setting boundaries in our jobs, I end up in a nasty double-bind: we all choose whether to be foxes or hedgehogs, but women's/gender/feminist(/queer/?) historians who want to be foxes may feel that there is a moral obligation to be a hedgehog. If we don't do this very important work, who will?

!!TWEEEET!! Time Out: Let's all pause for a moment and think about that last sentence: what a girl thing to say. "Yes, we all agree that it's important, and I understand that no one else wants to do it, and I have written about it in the past, after all, so sure, I'll do it, even though I'd like to be moving in different directions, just like the rest of you. Better I give up on that ambition that anyone else."

Now, I know that there are plenty of women's historians (and in other fields too, of course) out there who are joyful hedgehogs by choice; we owe them a great deal as both scholars and feminists. And I also know that women's history is a subfield big enough that you can be a fox within it. But I'm not talking about them -- I'm talking about the feminist fox who feels pressured to be a hedgehog, to continue working in a field that is politically and/or personally important to her, when she'd rather be off writing about municipal institutions or poison or siege techniques of the Hundred-Years' War.

So, about a year too late, here's my "Lesson for Girls (academic version)": Just because you can, doesn't mean you have to. You're not a bad feminist if you write about stuff other than women. You're not a bad feminist if you selfishly follow your own scholarly interests of the moment. You may actually be committing a real feminist action by refusing to let yourself be defined by others' expectations, especially when those expectations allow your more misogynist colleagues to safely ignore or dismiss you. You can support woman-focused studies by buying the books, and assigning them in your classes, not just as tokenism, but as a way of teaching what you were taught: that the study of women fucking transformed the profession. You may choose to be a hedgehog because you have a career's worth of questions about women or gender in your field -- hedgehog away, sister! But that needs to be your choice, and if you choose to be a fox, it's really okay that you let yourself walk off and play somewhere else for a while. The boys get to do it, after all.

In Which I Receive an E-mail, Coin a Phrase, and Make a Recommendation

The e-mail: Several hours ago, I received an e-mail from an unknown correspondent, sent to my university account, with the subject line "student." Thinking that this was someone enrolled in one of my fall classes asking if I could provide a copy of the syllabus (a common occurrence here), I opened it. What I found was a helpful suggestion as to what I might "need," sexually speaking, complete with a couple of anatomically-based insults. No virusy attachments or links to unsavory websites; just a single, foul sentence.

Coining a phrase: I actually don't believe this was personal (I didn't recognize the name, and I've been on sabbatical, so my opportunities to piss students off have been minimal); most likely it was some random person trolling faculty websites looking for women to harass. It occurs to me that this type of behavior is part and parcel with catcalls and other skeevy behaviors from one stranger (usually male) to another (usually female), with the intent of asserting power, and that the whole spectrum of behavior needs a phrase to describe it. I propose gender terrorism.

The recommendation: So, finding myself more irritated than actually intimidated, I decided that I should at least go on record. I e-mailed my chair, and she wrote back almost immediately, telling me that it should be reported to our network security people, and to keep her informed. She is generally good about these things, and takes them seriously, preferring to be safe rather than sorry. The network security people, on the other hand, advised me to "ignore it" or call 911. They also helpfully advised me not to reply to my correspondent.** Fine. As I said, I'm almost certain that this was random, rather than personal, and I can't imagine that the university should go on red alert every time that some jerk decides this kind of thing is hilarious. But you know what would help to make women feel like they're welcome in the workplace? A simple statement of solidarity. Something like, "we have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to sexual harassment," or "we value the safety of our employees." Sure, they're platitudes. But knowing that the university has my back in case something were really amiss here would mean a lot.

That is all.

UPDATE: I guess that's not all after all, because just before closing up for the night, another e-mail came in, this one with the name and number of one of my fall courses in the subject line. So I guess it's not random after all. Crap. This is going to be a huge pain in the ass for me, onacounta some jackass.


**Good to know, right? 'Cause my first thought was to strike up a fucking correspondence.

Negotiations, Part 1: The Gender Issue

There's been some talk around the academic blogs lately about gender and working conditions: issues of mobility, salary compression (also here), and spousal hiring in general. And I, got to thinking about how we do or don't ask for more when we deserve it. I, like most people I know, took my first (and currently only) TT job without much in the way of negotiation, just happy that I had a job. Hell, I had no way to know what to negotiate for. More money? Well, there was only a narrow salary window at our unionized school, and I was placed smack in the middle of it. Other resources? Well... what? See, they don't cover this in all those mock-interviews you do in grad school.

And then, Historiann sent me a link to an article in the New York Times about women and salary negotiation (in the context of non-academic jobs, but whatever), and I got to really thinking again about the gender dynamic. And so I sat my butt down to write a post. And it appears that I have Opinions, because lo, I did go on and on. So I present here part one of a two-part post, partially in response to the NYT article, and partially some other random thoughts. Even broken down into two parts, it's a bit on longer than my usual posts, just FYI.

Let me start off by pointing out a nifty feature of the article: it has some nice figures (with links to the studies) from the research on the pay gap. It's worth looking at, so you have ammo if you ever end up in a conversation with one of those boneheads who insist that the pay gap is a feminist myth. It's not. In fact, when I was in Exotic Research City, the newspaper published results of a study that showed that, in the most recent six months of that country's economic crisis, the pay gap between men and women there had gone from a difference of 12% (much less of a gap than U.S. figures) to 17%. So things may be even worse than we yet know.

But, on to some other bits and snippets:

Snippet #1: "Even now, when women represent half the work force, they’re still paid considerably less than men — and part of that pay gap may be a result of what happens at the salary negotiation table."

Well, yes. But for academics, we have to add the fact that the most critical moment for this is at the first negotiation: when you are offered the job. Once you account for deductions, an extra $1,000 a year may not be much to start with, but most of our raises are based on a percentage of what we are already making, so that adds up over the course of a career. Also, academia has very few institutionalized opportunities to negotiate salary after this point (more on the non-institutionalized ones below), so this is an important moment. Yet the moment comes at a time when you are feeling less powerful than you actually are – most of us were just grateful that someone wanted to give us a chance, so we didn't think to ask for more than we were already getting.

Snippet #2: "So what’s a woman to do if she feels her work merits a raise?"

There is a problem that the NYT skips right over here: that most women don't ever feel this way, or at least not strongly enough that they don’t talk themselves out of it. That's a gender thing, pure and simple, and it's the first obstacle to overcome. Look at the work you do, compared to the expectations of your institution. If you can, get hold of salary figures for comparable colleagues. Pretend you are evaluating someone who isn't you: Is this person being underpaid?

Snippet #3: "In industries where salary standards were ambiguous, women accepted pay that was 10 percent lower, on average, than men."

And that about characterizes academia: they offer you a job (hooray!), then name a number. You have no context. Even if context is available (for example, published salaries of state employees in some states), you probably don't know about it. Are they lowballing you? Can you ask for more? How much? I have no answers here, except to see if your state is one that publishes salary figures. If I could do it all over again, I'd find something that seems reasonable, then ask for $1,000 more, because chances are that if you're facing your first job offer, you're underestimating what "reasonable" is. Remember: they won't rescind your offer for asking. If you get really intransigent, they might decide that negotiations have broken down, but a reasonable employer won't walk away on the first volley.

Moving on to the deeper gender dynamics:

Snippet #4: "A new study concludes that women need to take a different approach than men. Women, it suggests, should frame their requests in more nuanced ways to avoid undermining their relationship with their boss. […] You may be asking yourself, as I did, whether negotiating in ways more favorable for women means that we’re just succumbing to stereotypes — or whether the ends justify the means. […] 'When a woman negotiates persuasively for higher compensation, she clears the path for other women to follow.'

[…]

"Instead of explaining why you deserve a raise directly, for instance, frame it in terms of why it makes sense for the organization or the person you’re trying to persuade. 'Make the company the focus.' "

I agree with the statement that we're helping other women when we help ourselves. But the column author completely sidesteps the original question of the dangers of catering to gender expectations in our negotiation strategies. And just as every successfully negotiated raise normalizes the process for the women who follow us, so too does negotiating within gender confines perpetuate those confines for the next generation. The suggestion that we frame it in terms of others' needs, rather than our own, is a bad trap to play into. On the other hand, most of us, including those who consider ourselves feminists, have at least in part internalized the "nice women try to get along and don't make waves" part of the feminine mandate, so this negotiation style may be the only one we're comfortable with. It's a problem, and not one that I have an answer to.

But the important thing is that, once you've decided you do deserve more, you act on it. I think it's a good idea to time your requests to specific accomplishments. For example, if your university is cutting faculty lines, lecturer positions, and classes, this is probably not the best time to ask for a raise. But it's not too early to think about it, and to plan your strategy. If your research or teaching has recently won a competitive award (internal or external), you've got a very good platform. But these accomplishments don't come along very often, so look for other opportune moments. Have salary freezes meant that your incoming colleagues have leapfrogged your salary? Negotiate on the basis of equity. Your university may even have specific procedures in place for equity raises, but they just don't advertise them. Talk to your union rep, if you have one; they will know. Do you need more non-monetary resources (lab equipment, for example)? Outline specifically why you need what you need, and what you will do with it. Did you just get a big grant that brings money and prestige to the university? Mention it. Likewise if your work has been the subject of a special profile in the alumni magazine or periodic newsletter: if your work is valuable enough to them that they're trumpeting it, then you should kindly but firmly invite them to put their money where their mouth is.

Most importantly (and this goes back to point #2), practice not underrating your own accomplishments. ("Oh, everyone gets an NEH sooner or later… I was just lucky." NO. Luck may play a role, but you also kicked ass. Don't ever forget it.) If you really have trouble taking reasonable pride in your own accomplishments for your own sake, then do it for other women who come after you, who need a model for success.

Okay, so this has been more about what to do once you're already in a job. But what about that first negotiation? What should you ask for? More on that tomorrow.

In Which I Convince a Roomful of People that I Am an Idiot, and Truly Come to Understand Some Critical Differences in Methodology

Historiann has an interesting post up today about the epithet "revisionism" when applied to historians. And this got me thinking about an unsettling encounter I had the other day, here in exotic research city, one that really brought home to me that historians in different places work really, really differently.

So, a couple of days before it happened, I saw an announcement posted for a mini-seminar on the history of women -- led by a woman, now quite senior, who was at the vanguard of women's history in this country. No, strike that: she was the vanguard. Her book (mid-70s) on the history of women in Exotic Research City in the Middle Ages** was a cry out against the old white d00ds that populated history faculties at that time. It was very typical women's history for that time: dig through the archives, find a much of documents about women, and then present them and say, "Look! Women have a story to tell, too, so stop ignoring them!" From all reports, her own work hadn't changed much methodologically since that time, but man, I had to go, if nothing else than to pay some respect to one of the foremothers. And besides, she was organizing the thing (and doing the closing presentation), but the others were going to be given by an advanced grad student and a mid-career professor, so fine.

But alas, to my dismay, it seems that things here haven't changed much. Or at least, not the way it's done at this particular university. Foremother is very sweet, but hasn't made any methodological changes (that I can see) since the 70s. Worse yet, those around her haven't, either.

And then there was a question period. Now, I should explain that the audience was mostly undergraduates (though many were in their 30s). So we're not talking heavy discussion here. But this is where I made my mistake: In the crushing silence after the presentations, I felt for the presenters (who likes to have a roomful of students staring dully at you?), and so I put my hand up and asked a question.

I don't want to go into too much detail, because this post is too long already. But the question, and the (rather condescending but missing-the-point) response made it clear that we are speaking totally different languages, methodologically speaking. Worse, the response was delivered in a tone that implied they thought that I hadn't understood a word they said.

Now, I know I did understand. Yet somehow I still feel like I'm the idiot.

But what I do understand is that I do things very differently from the people around me. And it's kind of lonely. My friends here are boy historians, working on more traditional topics for here (economic & political history). They don't think much about what I do, and when they do, they're bound to associate it with the rather simplistic work described above. Which is really, really too bad. Because without new blood and new ideas (and there are at least two women's historians here I can think of who are indeed using new approaches), this is a field on life support here.


**Of course, they didn't call it "Exotic Research City" back then. They used Latin.

Q, X, and Y

These are the letters that I have no headwords for in my index. I know, because I finished it last night.

And with that, barring anything unexpected, the book is DONE.


Totally unrelated linky goodness: my favorite new word for today is mansplainin'.

Goodness, Gracious!

My, but blog traffic has gone up since I posted on Mary Daly. Thanks to Historiann for the shout-out. And thanks to the commenters for a generally civil and thought-provoking discussion. I haven't seen this many visitors since last March's roundtable on Judith Bennett's History Matters. Apparently people who proclaim the death of feminism aren't really paying attention. I'm enjoying reading a diversity of thought-out opinions. I just want to underline that this blog and its component posts welcome critique and dissent, so let's keep our responses to each other respectful.

So far, the only states not to check in are Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Wyoming. So all you feminists from Barrow to Brown U., stop in and say hi! Come for the feminism, stay for the academic discourse...

R.I.P., Mary Daly

1928-2010.

[Note: comments to this post have been closed while I'm traveling.]
I read a little of her work for a feminist theory class in grad school. It didn't really speak to me, and I thought there was plenty there to criticize. But her influence on gender studies was undeniable, and truly transformative. Her works were also those rare books written by an academic that went out and transformed the lives -- yes, I do mean lives -- of women and men outside the university. She was an unapologetic radical feminist who put women first and never backed down from a position in order to avoid alienating men or women less radical than she (and face it, that's most people), a woman who once described herself as a "positively revolting hag" -- and meant it in a good way.

And that brings us to the other thing about Daly: the language. Mary Daly took the words of the English language, moved them around, combined them creatively, capitalized whatever she felt deserved to be capitalized, redefined terms with wild abandon, and just expected her readers to keep up. Reading her prose was a bit like being caught in an avalanche, and I was known more than once to roll my eyes at what seemed like lexical excess. But there was also something delightful and playful about all of it. Read one of her paragraphs, perhaps something from her middle or later work: Gyn/Ecology, or the revised preface ("reintroduction") to the second edition of Beyond God the Father. Don't worry about understanding it as you go along; just let the words bubble off your tongue. It's wild and delirious, like something by Ornette Coleman. It's also the language of someone who knows that seriousness of purpose shouldn't -- in fact, must not -- stop you from taking real joy in what you're doing.

That is what I'd like to take away with me.

The House Always Wins

So. This guy wants to know why women are so unhappy, why they're getting unhappier over time, and why they get less happy as they get older.

He presents the quandary: "Wherever researchers have been able to collect reliable data on happiness, the finding is always the same: greater educational, political, and employment opportunities have corresponded to decreases in life happiness for women, as compared to men."

He promises to tell us next week why this is. I'm worried about what the above statement portends. But I've actually got an answer of my own worked up, one that explains both the "decrease over time" and the "decrease with age" phenomenon. It's one that goes back to a grad school seminar on, believe it or not, revolts and revolutions in early modern Europe. In that seminar, we were introduced to some historian's theory of the "J-curve." I have only the haziest recollections, so someone else can fill me in, for certain. But here's what I remember. According to this historian, revolutions don't happen when things have been bad for a long, long time. By that time, people are used to it. Rather, they happen when there have been consistent improvements followed by a change for the worse, or expectations of improvements that suddenly fail to materialize. Imagine an upside-down letter J. Get it?

Now, imagine that women's** expectations of the limitless possibilities for their lives are thrown into contrast (a contrast that gets sharper as women age) with the realization that, in spite of (or perhaps because of?) all this, we're still expected to spend enormous amounts of our energy trying to be something we’re not: pretty, thin, young, compliant, non-swearing, perfectly-groomed, dependent, dumb, nurturing, self-sacrificing, quiet-voiced, unconditionally adoring, nonthreatening, patient, or simply never, ever angry. In other words: “feminine.” And the older we get, the more we realize that the house always wins in the end.

Yeah. I suppose that could make a woman a bit unhappy.

UPDATE: Rootlesscosmo provides a link in the comments to a site that exposes how the "problem" of women's unhappiness (often implicitly blamed on feminism) is based on dubious statistics, but keeps getting recycled every few years anyway. Kind of reminds me of that whole "you'll never get married after 35" thing. I'm now convinced that the premises upon which the question is based are specious, but still stand by my answer to this non-question -- if that's not too illogical.

**In light of the content of this post, I am bitterly amused that Blogger does not recognize the word "women's."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-buckingham/whats-happening-to-womens_b_289511.html

History Matters: The Grand Finale (A Guest Post by Judith Bennett)

Thanks to all commenters and fellow bloggers for making the month of posts on Judith Bennett's History Matters such a success. I think we've had some productive and interesting discussions. As many of you have gathered, the author has been following the discussion, and has written up some reflections, and points for further discussion (and lookee! graphs!), which I've posted below. So read on, and join in the conversation! --NPhD
=======================================

It’s been a fun ride for the last four weeks—enormously flattering to be the center of so much smart commentary, a bit nerve-wracking to see how others have construed my words, and occasionally flummoxing to navigate the mostly-new-to-me world of blogging (both “tool” and “troll” sent me straight to google for updated definitions.) I’ve laughed a bit and learned a lot. So first of all, thank you—to Notorious Ph.D., Historiann, Tenured Radical, and Another Damned Medievalist for hosting this blogfest, and to the dozens of you who have responded with insightful comments of your own. I am very, very grateful.

Now, thanks to Notorious Ph.D.’s willingness to host me, it’s my turn. Three topics stand out for me as worth more discussion in this our last week. I hope you’ll agree.

1. THE POLITICS OF FEMINIST HISTORY
To be honest, I was going to let this part of our discussions stand without comment, as I’ve had my say fully enough in History Matters. But John Hope Franklin died this past week and an NPR remembrance had a clip from a 2005 interview in which he said, in the context of African American history, what I think about women’s and gender history. He said, “We have to confront history. We have to face it down, to be certain that it won’t haunt us again.” It’s easy to agree with this statement, isn’t it? Then, why are we so often so uncomfortable with applying the same aspiration—to face down the past so it doesn’t haunt us—in the case of feminist history?

2. MY GENERATION
I’ve been struck by how often our conversations have constructed an age gap between readers (younger) and myself (older). Sometimes this generational divide was adduced to explain my seemingly “retro” arguments; sometimes it seemed a source of tension, as if the critiques in History Matters were especially aimed at younger scholars. This generational divide was something I certainly never intended or, indeed, imagined.

• Not really so old: I’m 58, for the record, not really all that old, especially in a profession in which most of us don’t get going until 30 or so, and many of us now carry on into our 70s. Also, I’m not old enough to have participated in the earliest struggles to establish women’s history in the 1960s and 70s. I came of intellectual age after that beginning, so my professional worldview was formed from a position of awe in relation to older-than-me scholars who had forged the way—scholars such as Gerda Lerner, Linda Gordon, and Alice Kessler-Harris in U.S. History; Joan Scott and Louise Tilly in modern European history; Joan Kelly, Jo Ann McNamara, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Natalie Zemon Davis in medieval and early modern history. These and others were the pioneers; my generation (doing doctorates in the late 1970s) followed in their big footsteps.
• Not grumbling about young'uns: My anxieties about the depoliticization of women’s history long predate the work of scholars now in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. I first noticed the waning of feminist discourse in women’s history in the mid-1980s when I was in my early 30s. I felt too vulnerable to articulate my concerns until tenure, but as soon as I had that brass ring in hand, I fired my first salvo—aimed at the waning feminist content of history being written by historians in my generation and those older. To put this another way, those of you who are in your 20s, 30s, and 40s did not create the problem of waning feminist engagement in women’s and gender history that I first articulated in 1989—it was a pre-existing condition by the time you came on board. I very much regret that anyone can read History Matters as a critique leveled at younger scholars by an older scholar. My hands are not clean; the hands of my generation are not clean; I hope that all of us might acknowledge and cope with the challenges that depoliticization presents.
• Not nostalgic: I have been horrified to realize that History Matters can be read as evoking a golden age of 1970s feminism. I do, indeed, wish we could recover some of the feminist forthrightness of that era, but I have no illusions about either the feminist politics of that decade or the quality of some of the history it produced. I offered caveats on both scores in History Matters, but I must not have offered them sufficiently clearly or emphatically. So, I ask your indulgence and help. If you ever find yourself thinking “Oh, that Judith Bennett, she’s just built her own golden age of feminist history back in the 1970s,” please reread what I said towards the bottom of pages 4 and 65.
• Not divisive: I sought in History Matters to provoke conversation among historians of women and gender. We are, of course, a diverse group, but as I explained on pages 3-4, I believe we should make strategic common cause. In talking together, it is important, of course, to recognize our differences, but it is also important not to let those differences become a reason for dismissal or non-engagement. Yes, indeed, I am older than most people who talk in the blogging world; yes, indeed, my intellectual formation was different from those who went to graduate school in the 1980s or after. But this is just one difference among many (e.g., I’m a lesbian, too, but that seems to have generated no cause for division in our discussion . . .), and in any case, I hope we can speak across such divides, rather than letting them obstruct our conversation.

When all is said and done, though, I have to accept that History Matters has struck some of you as suggesting that my generation had a purer feminism or a more feminist approach to history than those who have come after. This is precisely counter to my hopes for the book, because more than anything else, I want the book to engage younger scholars. After all, the future of women’s and gender history is in their (your?) hands. I regret profoundly the book’s deficiencies in this regard, and I apologize for them. Believe me, these were unintentional and unwanted.

What do you think? Have I protested too much? Can we indeed put generational issues aside? Am I just hopelessly out-of-touch? Does my inadvertent offense in this regard nevertheless offend?

3. PATRIARCHAL EQUILIBRIUM
If I am ever to contribute something enduringly useful to women’s and gender history, I hope it will be the idea of “patriarchal equilibrium.” Until ADM’s hosting this past week, the term had not, I think, come up at all in postings or comments. I’ve been delighted by the discussion this past week (and also by the discussions at Magistra et Mater), so I thought I might try to move it along a bit more.

To indulge in the weird pleasure of summarizing myself . . . I contend in chapter 4 that a hard look at the past suggests a “dynamically stable” pattern in the story of women’s oppression: lots of small changes, but rarely (perhaps never) a transformation in the status of women vis-à-vis men. This is what I call “patriarchal equilibrium.” I’m a bit hesitant to offer this, but I think a couple of graphic representations might provoke discussion.

Here goes:
What I’m trying to suggest with this graph is that there is lots of dynamic change in women’s status—hence, the constant ups and downs. There are lots of differences too. The different colors—of which there could be many more—represent both different ways of measuring status (legal, economic, political, etc.) and the diverse experiences of different women (considered by race, class, sexuality, marital status, etc.). So, yes, there is change, and yes, there are differences among women too, but there’s also a self-adjusting equilibrium that seems to keep that change and diversity within a set range.

Now, here’s another way to schematize patriarchal equilibrium:

This graph shows a narrower range of movement at any moment. It also shows the possibility of times of substantive change, albeit within a limited range.

I’m not sure which graph might be better to think with . . . maybe both are useful. In any case, I think we need more research to figure if either graph works or if something else would do a better job.

I’m also not sure about the upper and lower limits of a patriarchal equilibrium. In both these schematizations, I’ve shown women’s status ranging from roughly 20 to 80 percent of “full humanity,” but that’s arbitrary. If I had to pick a range right now, I’d likely revert to what I know from wage data—and use a range of roughly 50-80 percent. But it would be madness to base the range on one index alone, and so I’ve opted here for a more expansive one. All told, I think it’s too early to be talking about firm limits, high or low.

So, there’s a lot of uncertainty and arbitrariness here, but I think that the patriarchal equilibrium of History Matters might look something like one of these two graphs, and if so, this graphing might help us to recognize patriarchal equilibrium, study it, and eventually explain it.

[Please don’t over-interpret these graphs. I am a poor artist with an unsteady hand.]

[Also, please note this caveat: Attainment of “full humanity” (by which I mean something like the ability to fully exercise all the potential of the human condition) might be achieved only by men, but it is not achieved by all men. Only men privileged by class, race, sexuality, religion, and the like can enjoy full humanity. I’m not sure how I would graph men’s approach toward full humanity over time, but it would certainly vary by race, class, sexuality, and the like. And there would be some men—such as slaves—whose experiences would fall by some measures within (or even below) the range I’m showing for women.]

In any case, both of these graphs imagine the history of women’s status relative to men as moving differently from schemas that were dominant when I started studying history and are, I think, still dominant today. One of those schemas—linked to liberal feminism specifically and whiggish history generally—sees an upward movement. The other—linked to socialist feminism—sees a downward one. What I’ve graphed here has ideological roots that are closer to radical feminism.

What I’ve graphed here is also dangerous, as it can seem to play into antifeminist arguments that male dominance is “natural” or “right” just because it has always been . . . and therefore that it is rooted either in biological differences (e.g., women must stay in their place because they bear children) or functional imperatives (e.g., societies work best when women stay in their place). I see this continuity differently. I see it was as showing how difficult and challenging—and, indeed, how radical—must be solutions to the problem of women’s oppression.

So. Might these graphs help us talk about patriarchal equilibrium in new and deeper ways?

===========================================

There we have it! Happy Women's History Month! And (in the immortal words of Maurice Sednak) let the wild rumpus start!

Judith Bennett, Radical Style (and a bonus!)

Hey all!

Sorry I've been a bit late out of the gate getting the toss posted (crazy day here at Urban U!), but for those of you who haven't already, get yer bad selves over to Tenured Radical's place for the third in our series of posts on Judith Bennett's History Matters. For those of you who have been clamoring for one of us to pay some attention to Bennett's "L-Word" chapter (and the concept of "lesbian-like"), TR has it all.

PLUS!!!

...I'm pleased to announce that the fifth week in our four-part series will take place right back here, with a guest blogger who is Not To Be Missed. Stay tuned...

Some really great news, and a reminder

First, the really great news: good friend and fellow medievalist Clio's Disciple just landed a tenure-track job! So head on over and give her your congratulations, and bits of random advice (the latter of which she solicits in this later post).

Second, the reminder: Installment two of our History Matters roundtable will be taking place tomorrow (Monday) over at Historiann's place. So do check it out. I'll be there with the jello salad.

Should politics be historical? Should history be political?

(First installment of the March History Matters bloggers' roundtable. Click on the following links for part 2 [Historiann], part 3 [Tenured Radical] and part 4 [Blogenspiel].)

While rereading Judith Bennett's History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism this past week, I found myself thinking about an incident about four years ago, when I was involved in a mildly serious bicycle accident about a quarter of a mile from my home. I remember seeing my front wheel connect with the car door that had opened into my path, then the next thing I remember I was sitting up on the curb in the middle of a conversation with people who had gathered around. I eventually ended up in the emergency room for a CT scan, but by far the worst part of the whole ordeal was looking around me, knowing that I should recognize the street I was on, but for about three terrifying minutes I was a mostly blank slate. There was something that I was supposed to know, and that in turn would tell me where I was supposed to go next, but until I recovered it I was stuck there on that curb.

Judith Bennett is a historian of medieval English women. She is also a feminist who has worked for decades to reconcile her feminism with her love of history – and not just any history, but medieval history, a chronological specialty that can at times breed charges of insularity and irrelevance. Bennett's book is no less than a manifesto, urging feminists to think more historically, and women's historians to consider their work in terms of larger feminist projects. If you've gotten into the book (and I hope you have), you'll have realized that there are dozens of big ideas in there, all of which deserve discussion (hence the "roundtable"). But since I have but one post, I'm going to confine myself here to the two linked questions in the title:

Should (feminist) politics be historical?

That Bennett's answer to this is a clear yes should be a no-brainer. Yet she outlines how women's history, once a driving force in feminism, has been relegated to near-irrelevance. This seems to be especially true for history from before the twentieth century. How can I, as a committed feminist, make my work on the Middle Ages anything more than a curiosity to non-academic feminists, many of whom may assume that there is little to learn from a distant past that is assumed to have been a bleak wasteland of oppression?

But as Bennett points out, a deep historical knowledge gives us a vantage point from which we can see important continuities. I especially like these when I'm teaching. I actually teach a course on women in premodern Europe, and while I suspect that many students sign up expecting to be outraged at the Bad Old Days, I make sure to point out continuities (even broad ones) with our present. That knowledge is like the knowledge that I struggled to regain after my bike accident: until I knew where I was, and what had been going on up to that point, I couldn't know where I was supposed to go next.

Should (professional/academic) history be political?

The answer to this second question is more complex, I think. One of the first things they drum into our heads in graduate school (if not before) is that historical objectivity is a chimera. We can never tell history "the way it actually happened," completely stripped of our own experience, biases, and agendas. As historians, our job is meaning-making: taking the Stuff That Happened, and making sense of it. We aim to be fair, and not decide our conclusions before the evidence is in, but whenever we ask a particular question, choose an analytical framework within which to place it, make critical decisions about what's relevant and what's not, we are making a political decision.

So why are historians who are also feminists (and I number myself among these) so often hesitant to wear their feminism openly in their work? Why the temptation to all but retreat into positivism or antiquarianism, whether in the seminar room, the conference panel, or in our published work? Why, when we care so deeply? I have three half-baked ideas on this score:

1. It makes us seem old-fashioned. By talking about patriarchy, we are rhetorically aligning ourselves with scholarship from three to four decades ago – the last time that a critical mass of academic historians had an openly, unapologetically feminist agenda. We – especially younger scholars – want/need to feel that we are doing something new and exciting.

2. It makes us seem unprofessional. Despite all that time reading Peter Novick in graduate school, we're still allergic to anything that would make our work seem agenda-driven. Academic women especially may still struggle to be taken seriously, and this may be even truer of women studying women's history topics. I myself have tied myself in knots, worrying about whether I was being intellectually rigorous enough. This is not a bad habit to be in in general, but historians (especially female ones) studying women's topics often start out in a defensive posture.

3. It scares the men. Or at least, we fear it will. If I talk about "patriarchy", will male colleagues write off my work? Will potentially sympathetic readers turn away at the first whiff of openly feminist language? Wouldn’t it be better to find some less confrontational way of saying this so as not to alienate my readers?

I've been guilty of all of these. Bennett, on the other hand, encourages us as historians to be "less safe, and more offensive." It's a big step, and there is a certain comfort (again, especially as a medievalist) to burrowing into your documents and living there for a while. But part of the point of feminism is that we not get too comfortable.

There are, of course, many more aspects of this book that I have not hit on, and I'm sure my fellow roundtable members will in the coming week. In the meantime, I hope to have at least gotten the conversation going. Jump into the comment section and share your thoughts.

And don't forget to check in over at Historiann's place next Monday for the next installment!