| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Bonnie Smith, ed., Women's History in Global Perspective, 3 vols. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2004)

ONE OF THE MORE arduous yet intellectual challenges of teaching at a small liberal arts university in a conservative region is convincing students (and, at times, colleagues) that women's and gender history have an authoritative genealogy. In an era of economic tumult, students seek degree programs that clearly promise financially profitable career prospects. The fact that women's and gender history command an underwhelming sum of institutional recognition, in Canada at least, undermines the field's credibility. Thus for many, women's and gender history appear an unlikely guarantee of professional advancement.

However, women's and gender history are extraordinarily vital as this three-volume set edited by renowned Rutgers University scholar Bonnie Smith, and published with the support of the Women's Committee of the American Historical Association, affirms. Both seasoned readers and neophytes will be impressed with the remarkable theoretical, methodological, and historical achievements of women's history since the 1970s as reflected in nineteen essays enhanced with rich appendices and footnotes. Undergraduates, graduates, and teachers across women's history, global history, regional history, labour history, gender, feminist, and women's studies will benefit from this collection featuring the following scholars many of whom have played leading roles in the development of women's history. Volume one has essays by Margaret Strobel and Majorie Bingham, Ann B. Waltner and Mary Jo Maynes, Julia Clancy-Smith, Alice Kessler-Harris, Pamela Scully, Mrinalini Sinha, and Susan Kent. Volume two has essays by Sarah Shaver Hughes and Brady Hughes, Susan Mann, Barbara N. Rumusack, Judith M. Bennett, Ann Twinam, and Kathleen Brown. Volume three includes Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Nikki R. Keddie, Judith P. Zinsser and Bonnie S. Anderson, Barbara Engel, Asuncion Lavrin, and Ellen DuBois.

Each author synthesizes the thematic and theoretical trajectories of the literature to date and subsequently tenders constructive suggestions for future exploration. Most explicitly fulfill the pedagogical agenda promised in Smith's introduction. For example, those studying the history of Japan, Korea, and China will be aided by Susan Mann's essay on women in East Asia with a practical appendix gauging the "gender-friendliness" of current textbooks in East Asian history generally. (2:47–100) Strobel and Bingham summarize how world and global history have neglected, or situated women providing basic definitions of women's and gender history and offering a 'women's history chronology' and thematic guide to assist teachers of world history curriculum to integrate women into a survey narrative. (1:9–34) Kent's global summary of organized feminist activism, "Worlds of Feminism," will fill a gap in many women's studies course readers. (1:275–312) Zinsser and Anderson highlight sources on European women's engagement in imperialism, conquest, and exploration (1:111–144) that complement the theoretical overview on gender and nationalism by Sinha. (1:229–274) Some chart new territory beyond the region with which they are identified , as exemplified by Alice Kessler-Harris in "Gender and Work: Possibilities for a Global Historical Overview." (1:145–194) Whereas the seven articles of the first volume are topic-driven, volumes two and three are organized by region or geography as in Johnson-Odim's "Women and Gender in the History of Sub-Saharan Africa" (3:9–67) and "Russia and The Soviet Union" by Barbara Engel. (3:145–179) Some address specific national movements or periods within regions such as Asuncion Lavrin's "Latin American Women's History: The National Period," (3:180–221) Kathleen Brown's "The History of Women in the United States to 1865," (2:238–280) and "Women in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam" by Nikki R. Keddie. (3:68–110)

Smith's brief introduction, repeated in each volume, tracks the theoretical and transnational reorientation from women's history's founding ambition of recovery and revision to theories of femininity and the notion of gender as a central category of analysis. Early precedents of a global perspective on women were exemplified, for instance, in 1835 by Lydia Maria Child's History of the Condition of Women. International activism for human and women's rights as represented by Child's campaign for abolition of the Atlantic slave trade or Ida Wells Barnett's anti-lynching campaign widened women's solidarity across the globe. Campaigns organized around imperialism, abolition, and feminism increased intercontinental exchange among women. Yet, by World War I, notes Smith, the growth in solidarity across continents largely ended. With an eye to reviving the international solidarity evident in earlier campaigns and by linking knowledge to activism, the series moves women's and gender history beyond national and regional preoccupations. Global systems of oppression, the writers imply, animate a pressing need for the renewal of political and cultural commitment among women. Smith invites students and researchers to participate in this current stage of historical and theoretical enquiry by marshalling effective links between the local and global in women's and gender history. The goal is to ground gender as a global concern.

The shift from women's history to gender history ignited an analytic opening for historians who illuminated the ways women reproduced the binaries of femininity and masculinity and were complicit not only in their own oppression but the subordination and oppression of others. The initiative of scholarship from the 'margins' and 'third world' inspired historians to strive towards inclusion to integrate "insights and information from recent scholarship from all geographic regions ... inclusive topical chapters ... bring into play women's experience of such large scale institutions and movements as nation-state, feminism, and religion from around the world ... written by specialists in a variety of geographic fields." (1:4) Motivated by a desire to rectify the exclusionary tendencies of the first generations of North American and European scholarship, myopia is declared obsolete. (1:5) Another notable theoretical shift that is effectively adopted by authors in this collection is expansion beyond the well-exercised triumvirate of race, class, and gender. Medieval women's lives and circumstances, Bennett determines, were not only contingent on conventionally employed categories of differences but by other categories of identity such as marital status, religious status, legal status, sexual status, ethnicity, and regional differences. (2:143–144)

This collection is timely. As contemporary politicians, economists, and corporate CEOs harmonize over the virtue of globalization, and national leaders claim impotency in pulling us back from the precipice of multinational war, it is urgent for women historians to insert a gendered perspective on our global circumstances. As Sinha observes, political chatter readily exploits women as identifiable icons of their nation with concepts of femininity and masculinity bound up with state needs and cultural expression. (1:229) Women, these historians illustrate, have been both victims and agents of the global traffic in ideas (colonization, nationhood, imperialism, modernity, virtue, femininity, charity, maternalism, feminism) and their bodies, by will or coercion, have been mobilized across nations, continents, and among men in kin and family systems. Nonetheless women actively created "national and international political systems," with "activism that flowed across nation-states, and economic structures," as noted by Zinsser and Anderson. (1:131)

Grassroots anti-globalization campaigners, including feminist and rights activists, have exposed questionable labour practices of GAP, Starbucks, and other corporations who now operate in tax-advantaged zones of 'free' trade. Armed with a firmer understanding of the ways women's labour and agency within poorer circumstances and settings advance the prosperity of women residing particularly in North America or Europe, it is no longer plausible to plead innocence regarding women's plight. Many women in almost all nations work double or three shifted days and are, as a rule, mired at the bottom of the labour hierarchy. Smith's declaration of "the centrality of gender to the organization, remuneration, and conditions of work globally" reaffirms the political awareness of the worldwide impoverishment for women that arises from neo-liberalism. (1:5) But knowledge potentially stimulates action. As public intellectual and peace activist Charlotte Bunch wisely advised in Passionate Politics, to strategize for change feminists initially engage in description and analysis of past and present experience. These writers concur.

Women's History in Global Perspective is an impressive and financially accessible series indispensable for teaching or as a core reference for private or public collections. Suitable for upper level and especially graduate students the series convinces readers that women will profit from the end of historical and continental isolationism.


Carol Williams University of Lethbridge

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