America’s Women
By Gail Collins
Morrow, 556 pages, $27.95
The study of women’s lives is almost as old as the modern study of history, though only recently has women’s and gender history won a place in the academy as a serious subject. In 1405, Christine de Pizan, a Venetian noblewoman, decided to refute male “calumnies and slanders” directed against her sex by telling stories of women of the past. With “The Book of the City of Ladies,” de Pizan thought she could end what we would call sexism merely by showing that women were indeed stronger, braver, more intelligent and more moral than men had ever acknowledged.
In the many incarnations of women’s history since then, this exemplar impulse has persisted. “America’s Women,” by Gail Collins, editor of The New York Times editorial page, is the latest in this long tradition. Like de Pizan, Collins and her team of researchers believe that telling the stories of women as individuals and in groups will make a difference in how women feel about themselves (the role-model school of history) and how men regard what 19th Century Americans called “the sex.” The question is, will it take this time?
The newest wave of women’s history began in the 1970s, partly fueled by women’s new access to institutions of higher learning and graduate programs, as well as by political movements for civil rights and women’s liberation. To paraphrase a popular bumper sticker of the time, feminism was the radical notion that women were people, too–a sly dig at the “universal subject” (inevitably male) that ruled popular discourse and academic disciplines such as history and literature. These “new historians” promised that uncovering the muted voices of women in the past would change many things, challenging not only how to do history but the very nature of the enterprise. What was history for?
This phase of women’s history unfolded within the politics of feminism, with its radical goals of making the personal political, of upending hierarchical structures, of giving as much consideration to the process as to the product. It seems fitting, then, for Collins’ volume to challenge the established order. Usually in such massive books, headed by a “name” author, the names of the researchers who do the spadework are buried deep in the acknowledgments. In contrast, Collins not only lists her able team on the first page of the acknowledgments but also tells us about their lives of “achievement and adventure.”
The small group of noted women’s historians that Collins also thanks is but a representative sampling of the impressive range of scholarship found in the extensive bibliography at the end of the volume. One could always cavil at exclusions (where is Nancy F. Cott’s groundbreaking “The Bonds of Womanhood”?), but it is clear that Collins and company did their homework and then some.
One of the promises of the new women’s history of the 1970s was that studying women’s activities would illuminate hitherto supposed universal subjects–such as sexuality and childrearing–as well as cast new light on the usual topics of history–such as wars and presidential elections. In that spirit, “America’s Women” could not only serve as a kind of informal textbook of U.S. women’s history, but it also provides new perspectives on the growth and development of major political, religious, economic and social movements, including the consumer revolution, evangelical Protestantism and the growth of the civil rights movement. In addition, the women’s-history mandate to tell all stories includes less-savory historical developments as well, most notably the imprisoning of Japanese nationals and American citizens in internment camps.
As far as the women themselves, the book is well divided between the famous–Pocahontas, Abigail Adams, Susan B. Anthony–and the obscure. These would include the perpetually cranky Mary Cooper, whose railings against her lot as a woman tell historians much about everyday life in Colonial America. More sobering is the story of Prudence Crandall, a Quaker teacher whose school was held under siege by the people of Canterbury, Conn., in 1831 because she presumed to teach young black women. Collins also uses individual women’s lives as a cultural lens, as when she relates the story of Lanah Sawyer’s rape trial, which resulted in a class riot in New York City in 1793.
“America’s Women” is strongest in its depiction of everyday experience, honoring the dailiness of most women’s lives by taking time out of the sweeping narrative of decades to answer all those mysterious questions about menstruation, sexuality, bathing and other issues you won’t see on the History Channel. Indeed, the specificity and detail Collins gives to, say, 19th Century gynecological experiences do more than impart to modern readers a sense of what it was really like. Suffice it to say that while modern men may dream of going back to the Civil War or the Old West, most of us women will be devoutly grateful our little house is not on the prairie.
The call to restore women to history has often been made in the interest of truth and justice. It is just not fair that the history of women’s accomplishments has been hidden or distorted. Collins and her team perform some of this remedial work, revealing, for instance, that activist Pauli Murray desegregated a Southern cafeteria 10 years before the famous male students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C.
But pursuing truth, especially when it involves human beings, almost always gets one into unexpected places. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more complicated, more interesting and, in the end, more, well, true. Rosa Parks, whose defiant refusal to go to the back of the bus sparked the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., has long been presented as “a simple woman exhausted from a hard day at work,” just too tired to move. But as Parks herself stated, ” `The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.’ “
Her act did not invent the notion of a bus boycott either; such an action had long been the goal of the men and women of the civil rights movement. With Parks, they had just the right person as a catalyst for action and as a symbol for white America. When Parks showed up for her court appearance, she invoked all the privileges of ladyhood, with her demure dress, rimless glasses and white gloves. A girl in the crowd outside the courthouse sang out, ” `They’ve messed with the wrong one now.’ ” Indeed they had. But the men in charge would only let Parks speak symbolically. Later that night, at a mass rally, when every black male leader in Montgomery got to speak, Parks was silenced. ” `You’ve said enough,’ ” she was told.
One of the major intellectual accomplishments of the late 20th Century wave of women’s history lies in the discovery of the analytic category of gender. Gender acknowledges that the reality of women and men’s lives–what individuals actually said, did and thought–co-existed with systems of masculinity and femininity–what men and women should do and be.
Without using the “g” word, Collins sets up this dichotomy from the start. She recognizes that American women’s lives have a contradictory quality, one that allowed a pioneer woman to ride sidesaddle to shield her modesty, wearing gloves to protect her hands, and then crawl up the side of a mountain lugging a newborn baby. Collins notes with amusement the trend started by Catharine Beecher (and continued by Phyllis Schlafly and Martha Stewart) of women who make a public career and achieve fame by telling other women how to run a home and take care of the children. Beecher, whose best-selling how-to book, “A Treatise on Domestic Economy” (1841), showed women how to run a home and raise children, was unmarried and had no home of her own, due to her extensive traveling. Collins puzzles through this contradiction but cannot resolve it. Like de Pizan, she realizes that just telling the stories is not enough.
The answer may lie in the newest uses of the concept of gender, which understand that the systems of masculinity and femininity go far beyond just behavioral prescriptions of what a man should do and a woman should be. Rather, historians of women’s lives and gender have discovered that most cultures in most times divide their worlds of language, religion, politics and power into the categories of male and female. It seems, then, that gender is about power, and the real change in women’s lives–abolishing the tough but tender contradiction Collins sees–lies in changing the system. Though she never takes her argument that far, Collins has a good sense of the big picture and strives to make historic generalizations from her individual women.
Though “America’s Women” is an easy and entertaining read, it also fulfills the radical promise of women’s history. The unfolding tales will challenge much of what passes as so-called family values in the public discourse. Women’s history demonstrates that though America might have been a Christian country from the start, it was quite often a nominal Christianity, or existed in forms we would not recognize. Likewise, people who think of our ancestors as sexual prudes will be intrigued by the constantly changing boundaries that mark American sexual practices.
Woven among the stories of women of all races and classes is the truth that the idea of mother at home with the children was only an ideal, not available to a significant group of families until the 1950s and then only for a short time. Women have always worked, and their work is central to the U.S. economy. They worked in their homes and in the homes of neighbors when the home was the center of production. When capitalism pushed production out of the home, women went with it and worked at home as well. Finally, in the sections about sexuality and birth control, Collins and her team demonstrate that women’s desire to control their bodies was a constant through our history, and the minute they could limit family size they did, overcoming technological, legal and cultural obstacles.
In the end, Collins, ably aided by her team of historians and researchers, has given us a wonderful array of women. And she has given us much to think about regarding our history, the American dream and even what it means to be human. Collins has affirmed that old bumper sticker: It turns out that women are people, too, and like people, they cannot be contained in their quests for power and achievement. The men who ruled the worlds of the past tried to harness women’s potential, allowing them just enough freedom of movement to make a war possible or enough learning to be fit companions for their husbands. Once the genie was out of the bottle, however, women began to wish, create and accomplish for their own sakes.
