About Women's History

Four Perspectives

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3 Some women's historians reacted to the "discrimination" approach by pointing out that within it was an assumption about women's work and women's value: that women doing traditional work like housework and educating children are somehow doing "inferior" work. Is a scientist really more important or more worthy than a teacher of young children? How were the roles that women really did play also important? How did women exercise real power from their traditional, possibly more natural roles? Were women who moved out of those roles simply "buying into a male power trip"?

In this approach, which for convenience I'll label the "different spheres" approach, a women's historian might examine, for example, the role of women as nurses and midwives, and question whether the increasing power of mostly-male physicians really was a good thing for the field of medicine. That approach would reveal that as male physicians began to play a more active role in assisting women in childbirth, the death rate of women in childbirth rose -- at least until the discovery of the role of poor hygiene in producing childbirth fever.

The differences between these approaches are sometimes subtle. Plus,as with any categorization scheme, the lines between them are sometimes hazy. A "discrimination" approach might look at the way that male physicians worked to discredit midwifery as a profession; a "different spheres" approach might look at the way that a "male attitude" of looking at the body as a series of different parts, to be treated individually, missed the hygiene connection which a "female attitude" of holism would have seen more clearly.

Critics of the "different spheres" approach say that it often justifies real injustices, by defending traditional roles, assuming that how society has defined "male" and "female" is the "natural" division, simply raising the value on the traditional "female" role without examining how enforcing those separate spheres limited options for many women (and many men).

4 In the fourth approach to women's history, what happened to men and what happened to women are viewed as part of one larger picture, and "women's history" is seen as one essential but not primary part of "doing history." That is, the vision is of a time when any historian studying, for instance, the Vietnam War, will see both the men and women who participated, and the roles of each will be acknowledged and analyzed as part of a larger whole. This might be termed an "integrated history."

But because so much of the evidence of history -- written records, for instance -- are from times when women's role was not seen in this integrated way, special attention must be paid to developing from what evidence there is a better picture of many ways that women participated -- in public and private ways -- and also looking for ways that men participated in history in ways that haven't been acknowledged before.
 

My point in this article is not to defend one or the other perspective -- personally, I see them all as having value, and all shedding light in their own ways -- but rather to help newcomers to women's history to think about new ways to see the evidence they find, and new ways to examine the assumptions of the historians they read.

You may find on the web four or five different articles, for instance, treating a particular subject in women's history. Ask yourself: does this historian seem to be speaking from one of these four perspectives more than another? How is that influencing how she or he judges the evidence? Do I see other ways of judging the evidence, if I looked at this from one of the other perspectives?

If women's history is based on the assumption that we all have our biases or perspectives, then it's also important to look at the conclusions of a particular women's history article or book to see what the historian's perspective might be. If women's history is based on an assumption that questioning and acknowledging our own biases will prod us to look beyond them, then we need to know some of the typical perspectives even of women's history itself.

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Also in this series: A Short Overview of Women's History and Assumptions Behind Women's History

Related feature: E-Texts and Women's History

Illustrations in this article:
Modifications © 2000 Jone Lewis
Text copyright 2000-2001 © Jone Johnson Lewis. All rights reserved.