| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945. By Julie Des Jardins. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiv, 380 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2796-7. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5475-1.)

As Peter Novick has pointed out in That Noble Dream (1988), historians have tended to view the history of historical writing in terms of a "great man theory" of historiography. Julie Des Jardins challenges this "great man" view of historiography by demonstrating the influence of women on American historical writing from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Des Jardins defines the category of historian broadly to include not just academic historians but also librarians, archivists, popular writers, and social activists. According to Des Jardins, the professionalization of history at the turn of the twentieth century obscured the role of women historians by defining history in masculine terms. While she emphasizes the way that these historians used history to further their own political and social purposes, Des Jardins argues that those purposes enabled her subjects to develop a sophisticated conception of history that anticipated modern-day perspectives on the nature and meaning of historical truth. Most important, she shows that, long before the rise of the new social history of the 1960s and 1970s, women historians questioned the traditional preoccupation with political history and sought to broaden the scope of historical inquiry to include ordinary people and everyday social life.

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