The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice by Bonnie G. Smith

Author:Bonnie G. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-14T00:05:00+00:00

We have always known that political history was laced with values, and never more so in the modern period, as scientific historians in the West acted zealously and in countless ways on behalf of their nations. on whether a war had just been concluded, they might refuse to invite counterparts from other countries to international meetings or to collaborate in publishing. Many- wrote books and essays justifying government policies such as the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870-1871. But nationalist bias is one value for which it is always said we can correct. Belief in the superiority of one's country, once discovered by the discerning eye, succumbs, and then political history can be read as pure fact once more.

However, facts themselves-and indeed the very notion of political historv-are so fundamentally constructed of gendered values that this correction may be difficult. Hailing politics and the factual story of the state, scientific historians saluted men's gender interests. As math historians and theorists have shown, the modern contractual nation involved an unfolding egalitarianism of political rights among men that depended on a concomitant legal and economic subordination of women. History retold this story by foregrounding and universalizing the facticity of the individual man (who was the basic component of the nation), then interpreting it as part of the progress of political entities as a whole.77 Political history celebrated men's superior rights, actions, thoughts, and struggles, and their sacrifices to preserve that superiority in war-the final enactment ofthe hierarchy of winner over loser, victor over vanquished, male over female.

Although these values arc often difficult to discern and dissect as part of facticity, analytic philosophers have depicted some ways of seeing how facts and values may he conjoined. "I owe the grocer money," is an example of fact and value tightly intertwined.%s Such statements as Mommsen's-that the Romans were a united fatherland, while the Greeks were disunited; that the Romans werc all abstraction, while the Greeks were all body-show this intertwining in the simplest historical formulations practiced by the most scrupulous of professionals. Scientific historians wrote political history in ways that make it hard to distinguish the border between fact and value, thus making assertions that history is "value-free" often quite persuasive.

Assertions of political histor}'s apolitical, factual nature are held in place by various means. For example, seventeenth-century writing by French academicians (heavilN supported b) state and aristocratic patronage) worked to "cleanse" political traces from intellectual work, making the state appear more powerful, less interested.%'' in the nineteenth century compared their ~york to that of chemists because of the "purification" their procedures worked, ridding state politics and state papers of their partisanship and giving them status as pure factuality or reality. Methodology removed traces of' gender by pointing to itself and its production of facts, to its processes and scientific laws. Gesturing toward its own lawlike fairness, historical science purged itself and the narrative of the nation-state of an hint of gender hierarchy or other inegalitarian politics.

A second device was the professional consensus which grounded

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