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The New Political History and Women's History: Comments on The Democratic Experiment
Kathryn Kish Sklar
State University of New York, Binghamton
| THE NEW DIRECTIONS in American political history have been ably described by the editors of The Democratic Experiment.* These are now freshly out of the gate, but it is clear that they will continue to unfold in the years ahead. I read the book with distinct pleasure—so much so in fact that I wondered—more than once—whether it wasn't just a bit sinful. Why is this book so much fun, I kept wondering, when women rarely appear in its pages? Gradually I came to understand why. Its pages provide a fine context for evaluating the relationship between United States women's history and United States political history. The articles in the book brought to mind four paradigms of that relationship. I want to comment on these paradigms with the goal of understanding how scholars in the fields of women's history and political history are cooperating now and how they might cooperate even better in the future. |
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Paradigm One includes essays that don't mention women or gender, but offer interpretations that could be the basis for new cooperation between women's history and political history. We might call this the "hope for the future paradigm." The Democratic Experiment had some important essays in this category. |
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In Paradigm Two I classify essays that mention women or gender, but in a passing way and do not use categories of analysis designed to analyze women or gender. We might call this paradigm "add women and stir." The Democratic Experiment, had several essays that fit in this category. |
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Paradigm Three we might call "women's history, narrowly considered." This paradigm includes essays that use gender as a central category of analysis, include women as central figures, and view history through women's eyes but don't try to situate women's history in the broader political context. The Democratic Experiment, had no essays in this category. |
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Paradigm Four refers to essays that center around women or gender AND at the same time locate women or gender in the central narratives of American political history. Let's call this paradigm "women and gender in political history." This, it seems to me, is an extremely productive model for future scholarship. |
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These paradigms help us see that it is not so easy to bring women and gender into American political history. But they also help us see the rewards that might flow from that effort. A few words first about each paradigm. A good example of the first paradigm is James Kloppenberg's essay, "From Hartz to Tocqueville: Shifting the Focus from Liberalism to Democracy in America," in which he champions conflict over consensus as the chief characteristic of American political history. Kloppenberg's characterization of American political history as "a contest among diverse groups of people sharing neither common convictions nor common aspirations" opens up the political terrain to embrace those formerly relegated to the margins, as does his depiction of religion as "a central...component of American culture," and his emphasis on the importance of social democrats within American political culture. Conflict, contingency, religion, and social democracy are all women-friendly categories that invite cooperation between women's history and political history. |
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Perhaps the best example of this "Hope for the Future" paradigm is William Novak's essay, "The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth Century America." Here Novak convincingly argues that "citizenship" emerged as a political category only after the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 created a national citizenship with rights that derived from the nation state. His description of the legal framework for understanding "privileges and immunities, rights and powers" before 1868 has large implications for women's history. In Novak's words, that framework depended upon "each individual's personal pattern of residence, jurisdiction, office, job, service, organization, association, family position, age, gender, race, and capacity." Thus "rights and duties flowed from the bottom up, hinging on the particular regulations and policies of a panoply of secondary jurisdictions and institutional affiliations." Novak argues that the interstate management of slavery exploded this system in the 1850s and the Fourteenth Amendment only gradually took its place—a process that continues today. |
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Novak's argument helps us take a new look at the women's rights movements before and after 1868, and women's and/or gender history offer exciting opportunities for scholars to test Novak's argument. To me this match between political history and women's history predicts that scholars from these fields will soon begin to work very fruitfully on the same terrain. |
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Although neither Kloppenberg nor Novak drew on women's history, many authors in The Democratic Experiment did. Yet most who did treated women as honorary men—that is to say, they removed women from the historiographic and analytic categories used in women's history—and women became people just like men except that they had women's names. Years ago Gerda Lerner called this "contributory history"—that is, history in which women participate and make a contribution but history that doesn't add to our understanding of women as women. I think it's a good sign that many authors are "adding women and stirring." But it's a transitional phase rather than a model for the future. |
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For example, Michael Vorenberg's essay on the lack of constitutional amendments before 1865 mentions Ernestine Rose, a Polish-born abolitionist who urged an antislavery amendment in 1863. He might have taken this reference much further by venturing far enough into recent women's history to notice that Ernestine Rose participated in many women's rights conventions in the 1850s, many of which were organized in conjunction with state constitutional conventions that considered amendments to state constitutions. The vitality of these state conventions, which becomes even more evident when we see that the process included women and women's issues, may explain why the federal constitution remained unamended during these decades. |
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Other examples of "add women and stir" include Michael Willrich's essay on the importance of municipal courts as a source of legal transformation in the Progressive Era, which quoted a United States Children's Bureau publication that described that transformation. Tom Sugrue discussed localism, and Matthew Lassiter analyzed suburban politics without mentioning women or gender, even though we might assume that women were central actors in the communities they describe. |
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Meg Jacobs's essay on the impact of consumer mobilization on modern state formation added more women than most. She refers to consumer boycotts led by women and also notes the importance of women's organizations like the National Consumers' League in forging public policies that promoted mass consumption, full employment and higher wages in the 1920s and 30s. But her emphasis is on men like Leon Keyserling rather than women like Mary Dublin Keyserling. Looking at the ways that elite women in the NCL used gender as a surrogate for class in their policy proposals of the 20s and 30s may have shed new light on the consumer policies of men like Leon Keyserling. |
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This strategy of keeping women's history at arm's length might be a prudent one since it prevents one from getting embroiled in categories of analysis and historiography that require more attention than may be convenient. For example, Brian Balogh's essay on interest groups as mobilizers of voters and popular opinion in Herbert Hoover's election campaign of 1928 depicted the centrality of women in that election, but seems to run aground and draw confusing conclusions about that centrality. Temperance brought women into Hoover's camp, he said, concluding that "gender...should be viewed as just another interest around which groups could and did organize." Yet he added, "This is not to say that women constituted an interest group.... Nor is it to argue that the influence of gender was limited to the interest group model." I find this confusing. |
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The author's problems seem to arise from treating women as a homogeneous group—a cardinal sin among historians of women. Why more women supported Hoover than Smith is the question that remains offstage in Balogh's essay. If posed, this question might have led the author into the rich historiography on women's political activism in the 1920s, including the sea change in women's politics around 1925, in which attacks by hyper- patriotic women destroyed the coalitions that had dominated women's political activism since 1890. These attacks have been described by Kim Nielsen in her 2001 book, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Ohio State U. Press, 2001) and by Kristin Delagard in her forthcoming book, Woman Patriots: The Rise of Conservatism and the Transformation of Women's Politics, 1919–1932. |
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The lesson here is an important one. For political historians and historians of women to draw on one another's work requires more than a nominal exposure to the other historiography. It requires an ability to locate one's own question in the other historiography. This is why it is so hard to do and why "the add women and stir" paradigm will remain "add just a few women and stir." |
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Not surprisingly, The Democratic Experiment has no example of what I've identified as Paradigm Three, "women's history narrowly considered" — essays that uses gender as a central category of analysis, include women as central figures, and view history through women's eyes, but do not at the same time locate women and gender in the central narratives of American political history. Such an essay might, for example, examine the internal workings of women's organizations without offering connections with the wider political culture. |
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The book does have an example of Paradigm Four, which I'm calling "women and gender in political history." Rececca Edwards's essay, "Domesticity versus Manhood Rights: Republicans, Democrats, and 'Family Values' Politics," centers around women and gender and at the same time locates women and gender in the central narratives of American political history. Edwards's essay tells one story from two perspectives—that of women and families and that of the Republican and Democratic parties. |
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In many ways Edwards's essay is a model of the rich terrain that lies waiting for scholarship where women's history and political history merge and the author draws on historiographies and categories of analysis from both fields. One story seen from two perspectives is a way of understanding how we might bring the insights of women's history and political history to bear on one another. |
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In conclusion let's consider other examples of Paradigm Four. Every historian has her own favorite in this genre. A few of mine are:
- In the early republic—Catherine Allgor's 2000 book, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and A Government, which shows how public politics needed to draw on relationships formed in venues outside formal institutions. (An example of William Novak's argument.)
- In the antebellum era—Susan Zaeske's 2003 book, Signtures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, &; Women's Political Identity, which shows how the petition campaign against slavery (the use of an old political tool) generated new ideas about rights. (This book contributes to but modifies William Novak's argument, demonstrating how rights-seeking activity was well underway before 1868.)
- In the Progressive era—Glenda Gilmore's 1996 book, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920, which demonstrates the participation of African-American women in Southern Progressive-era politics.
- In the 1930s—Landon Storrs's 2000 book, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era, reveals the centrality of women's legislative reform activism to labor organizing in the South.
- Nancy Cott's 2000 book, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, illuminates the public and very political history of a central aspect of private life.
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All these works tell one story from two perspectives—that is, they advance our understanding of women and gender at the same time that they advance our understanding of American political history. They are new and welcome contributions to what might be called women's political history, which has the capacity to recast the mainstream narratives of American political history. |
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This new current of scholarship complicates the task of scholars in political history, who heretofore might have thought that women and gender lay safely beyond their purview. That safe haven no longer exists. Women's history needs to be taken into account by all scholars who write political history and political history needs to be taken into account by all scholars who write women's history. |
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As the essays in The Democratic Experiment show, the stage is set for an important historiographic change because:
- many of the basic interpretations in political history have become friendlier to women and gender analyzes
- many scholars are adding women to the populations they study;
- and scholars in women's history are finding their own place in the mainstream of political history by telling one story with two perspectives.
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Notes
* The Democratic Experiment, edited by Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer. Princeton University Press, 2004.
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