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Scholarly analysis of nineteenth-century women has included examination of gender roles and resistance on either side of the Atlantic, most often focusing on differences and similarities between the lives of women in the United States, England, and France.
- Women's Literature in The 19th Century
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- Society
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- Women in The History of Philosophy
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- Women's Literature in The 19th Century
Discover how attitudes to a woman's place changed, as charitable missions began to extend the female role of service, and Victorian feminism began to emerge as a potent political force.
8. März 2014 · There are a number of developments in 19th-century society which had many positive benefits for the wider population while conversely increasing the burden of unpaid work for women. As standards of hygiene improved, medical advances were made and urban infrastructure grew, child mortality rates fell and women found themselves caring ...
19th Century Feminist Movements. What has come to be called the first wave of the feminist movement began in the mid 19th century and lasted until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which gave women the right to vote.
- Miliann Kang, Donovan Lessard, Laura Heston
- 2017
- Overview
- Women’s history
- World history
In the 19th century, women’s history would have been inconceivable, because “history” was so closely identified with war, diplomacy, and high politics—from all of which women were virtually excluded. Although there had been notable queens and regents—such as Elizabeth I of England, Catherine de Medici of France, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Christina of Sweden—their gender was considered chiefly when it came to forming marriage alliances or bearing royal heirs. Inevitably, the ambition to write history “from the bottom up” and to bring into focus those marginalized by previous historiography inspired the creation of women’s history.
One of the consequences of the professionalization of history in the 19th century was the exclusion of women from academic history writing. A career like that of Catherine Macaulay (1731–91), one of the more prominent historians of 18th-century England, was impossible one hundred years later, when historical writing had been essentially monopolized by all-male universities and research institutes. This exclusion began to break down in the late 19th century as women’s colleges were founded in England (e.g., at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge) and the United States. Some of these institutions, such as Bryn Mawr College in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, had strong research agendas.
Although the earliest academic women’s historians were drawn to writing about women, it cannot be said that they founded, or even that they were interested in founding, a specialty like “women’s history.” Alice Clark wrote Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1920), and Eileen Power wrote Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 (1922), a definitive monograph, and Medieval Women (published posthumously in 1975). Many women (including some in the early history of the Annales) worked as unpaid research assistants and cowriters for their husbands, and it is doubtless that they were deprived of credit for being historians in their own right. An exception was Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958), who coauthored a number of books with her more famous husband, Charles Beard, and also wrote Women as a Force in History, arguably the first general work in American women’s history.
Since it was still possible in the 1950s to doubt that there was enough significant evidence on which to develop women’s history, it is not surprising that some of the earliest work was what is called “contribution history.” It focused, in other words, on the illustrious actions of women in occupations traditionally dominated by men. The other preoccupation was the status of women at various times in the past. This was customarily evaluated in terms of comparative incomes, laws about ownership of property, and the degree of social freedom allowed within marriage or to unmarried women. In The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), Gerda Lerner, whose work chiefly concerned women in the United States, examined Mesopotamian society in an attempt to discover the ancient roots of the subjection of women. Explorations of the status of women also contributed to a rethinking of fundamental historical concepts, as in Joan Kelly’s essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1977).
Another area of study, which was curiously slow to emerge, was the history of the family. Since in all times most women have been wives and mothers for most of their adult lives, this most nearly universal of female experiences would seem to dictate that women’s historians would be especially interested in the history of the family. Yet for a long time few of them were. The history of the family was inspired primarily not by women’s history but by advances made in historical demography, whose heavy quantification women’s history generally avoided.
This partly explains why the majority of works in women’s history have dealt with unmarried women—as workers for wages, nuns, lesbians, and those involved in passionate friendships. Evidence concerning the lives of these figures is in some ways easier to come by than evidence of maternal and family life, but it is also clear that feminist historians were averse to studying women as victims of matrimony—as they all too often were. There are, however, intersections between history of the family and women’s history. A few historians have written works on family limitation (birth control) in the United States, for example; one of these scholars, Linda Gordon, raised the important question of why suffragists and other feminists did not as a rule support campaigns for family limitation.
In the 19th century, women’s history would have been inconceivable, because “history” was so closely identified with war, diplomacy, and high politics—from all of which women were virtually excluded. Although there had been notable queens and regents—such as Elizabeth I of England, Catherine de Medici of France, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Christina of Sweden—their gender was considered chiefly when it came to forming marriage alliances or bearing royal heirs. Inevitably, the ambition to write history “from the bottom up” and to bring into focus those marginalized by previous historiography inspired the creation of women’s history.
One of the consequences of the professionalization of history in the 19th century was the exclusion of women from academic history writing. A career like that of Catherine Macaulay (1731–91), one of the more prominent historians of 18th-century England, was impossible one hundred years later, when historical writing had been essentially monopolized by all-male universities and research institutes. This exclusion began to break down in the late 19th century as women’s colleges were founded in England (e.g., at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge) and the United States. Some of these institutions, such as Bryn Mawr College in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, had strong research agendas.
Although the earliest academic women’s historians were drawn to writing about women, it cannot be said that they founded, or even that they were interested in founding, a specialty like “women’s history.” Alice Clark wrote Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1920), and Eileen Power wrote Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 (1922), a definitive monograph, and Medieval Women (published posthumously in 1975). Many women (including some in the early history of the Annales) worked as unpaid research assistants and cowriters for their husbands, and it is doubtless that they were deprived of credit for being historians in their own right. An exception was Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958), who coauthored a number of books with her more famous husband, Charles Beard, and also wrote Women as a Force in History, arguably the first general work in American women’s history.
Since it was still possible in the 1950s to doubt that there was enough significant evidence on which to develop women’s history, it is not surprising that some of the earliest work was what is called “contribution history.” It focused, in other words, on the illustrious actions of women in occupations traditionally dominated by men. The other preoccupation was the status of women at various times in the past. This was customarily evaluated in terms of comparative incomes, laws about ownership of property, and the degree of social freedom allowed within marriage or to unmarried women. In The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), Gerda Lerner, whose work chiefly concerned women in the United States, examined Mesopotamian society in an attempt to discover the ancient roots of the subjection of women. Explorations of the status of women also contributed to a rethinking of fundamental historical concepts, as in Joan Kelly’s essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1977).
Another area of study, which was curiously slow to emerge, was the history of the family. Since in all times most women have been wives and mothers for most of their adult lives, this most nearly universal of female experiences would seem to dictate that women’s historians would be especially interested in the history of the family. Yet for a long time few of them were. The history of the family was inspired primarily not by women’s history but by advances made in historical demography, whose heavy quantification women’s history generally avoided.
This partly explains why the majority of works in women’s history have dealt with unmarried women—as workers for wages, nuns, lesbians, and those involved in passionate friendships. Evidence concerning the lives of these figures is in some ways easier to come by than evidence of maternal and family life, but it is also clear that feminist historians were averse to studying women as victims of matrimony—as they all too often were. There are, however, intersections between history of the family and women’s history. A few historians have written works on family limitation (birth control) in the United States, for example; one of these scholars, Linda Gordon, raised the important question of why suffragists and other feminists did not as a rule support campaigns for family limitation.
World history is the most recent historical specialty, yet one with roots in remote antiquity. The great world religions that originated in the Middle East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—insisted on the unity of humanity, a theme encapsulated in the story of Adam and Eve. Buddhism also presumed an ecumenical view of humankind. The universal histories that characterized medieval chronicles proposed a single story line for the human race, governed by divine providence; and these persisted, in far more sophisticated form, in the speculative philosophies of history of Vico and Hegel. Marxism too, although it saw no divine hand in history, nevertheless held out a teleological vision in which all humanity would eventually overcome the miseries arising from class conflict and leave the kingdom of necessity for the kingdom of plenty.
These philosophies have left their mark on world history, yet few historians (except for Marxists) now accept any of these master narratives. This fact, however, leads to a conceptual dilemma: if there is no single story in which all of humanity finds a part, how can there be any coherence in world history? What prevents it from simply being a congeries of national—or at the most regional—histories?
Modernization theorists have embraced one horn of this dilemma. There is, after all, a single story, they argue; it is worldwide Westernization. Acknowledging the worth of non-Western cultures and the great non-European empires of the past, they nevertheless see the lure of Western consumer goods—and the power of multinational corporations—as irresistible. This triumphalist view of Western economic and political institutions drew great new strength from the downfall of the managed economies of eastern Europe and the emergence in China of blatant state capitalism. It is easier to claim worldwide success for capitalism than for democracy, since capitalism has been perfectly compatible with the existence of autocratic governments in Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; but history does suggest that eventually capitalist institutions will give rise to some species of democratic institutions, even though multinational corporations are among the most secretive and hierarchical institutions in Western society.
Modernization theory has been propounded much more enthusiastically by sociologists and political scientists than by historians. Its purest expression was The Dynamics of Modernization (1966), by Cyril Edwin Black, which made its case by studying social indexes of modernization, such as literacy or family limitation over time, in developing countries. Extending this argument in a somewhat Hegelian fashion, the American historian Francis Fukuyama provocatively suggested, in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), that history itself, as traditionally conceived, had ceased. This, of course, meant not that there would be no more events but that the major issues of state formation and economic organization had now been decisively settled in favour of capitalism and democracy. Fukuyama was by no means a simple-minded cheerleader for this denouement; life in a world composed of nothing but liberal nation-states would be, among other things, boring.
A much grimmer aspect of modernization was highlighted by Theodore H. Von Laue (1987) in The World Revolution of Westernization. Von Laue focused on the stresses imposed on the rest of the world by Westernization, which he saw as the root cause of communism, Nazism, dictatorships in developing countries, and terrorism. He declined to forecast whether these strains would continue indefinitely.
The stock objection to modernization theory is that it is Eurocentric. So it is, but this is hardly a refutation of it. That European states (including Russia) and the United States have been the dominant world powers since the 19th century is just as much a fact as that Europe was a somewhat insignificant peninsula of Asia in the 12th century. Some modernization theorists have caused offense by making it clear that they think European dominance is good for everybody, but it is noteworthy how many share the disillusioned view of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who compared the rational bureaucracies that increasingly dominated European society to an “iron cage.” More-valid criticisms point to the simplistic character of modernization theory and to the persistence and even rejuvenation of ostensibly “premodern” features of society—notably religious fundamentalism.
Linda L. Clark surveys women’s achievements in literature, art, music, theater, charity, education, medicine, law, and public administration, and examines the relationship between womens professional ’ and philanthropic activity and the rise of feminist organizations.
29. Mai 2024 · The women’s suffrage movement made the question of women’s voting rights into an important political issue in the 19th century.
