Book Review

Methods/Theory

Bonnie G. Smith has written a fascinating and important book. Its revisionist feminist historiography provides a powerful and persuasive account of the deeply gendered structure of the professionalization of history in the modern West, from the late eighteenth century to the present, focusing primarily on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Smith traces, in female and male historians' practice over time, the complex interplay of a feminized, devalued, but influential amateurism with a highly masculinized, defensively dominant professionalism. Smith's erudition and range of reference are impressive—she draws on diverse and plentiful literary and theoretical as well as historical materials—and her writing is at once pungent and engaging.

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One of Smith's central and most brilliantly innovative arguments is that, in the aftermath of the violent upheavals of the revolutionary period, women's historical writing, increasingly denigrated as amateur in contrast to emerging triumphal male scientific professionalism, was "symptomatic of a relationship to the past . . . filtered through trauma. Revolutionary times brought unbearable pain, and the resulting modernity led to disorientation" (p. 8). Smith uses various current theorizations of trauma to argue that women historians used the compensatory "better story" of women worthies and panoramic (synchronic, richly detailed) or narcotic (hectically emotive, hyperbolic, literally drugged) modes of narrative to handle socially unacknowledged, sexualized women's trauma without witnessing or confronting it directly.

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