Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8kt4b Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-23T05:44:59.676Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Some Feminist Betrayals of Women's History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Brian Harrison
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
James Mcmillan
Affiliation:
University of York
Patricia Hilden
Affiliation:
Emory University

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Communications
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Historical Journal, xxv, 2 (1982), 501–12.Google Scholar

2 There is no need here to expound the argument and scope of our books, but for those who seek fair-minded reviews of Harrison's Separate spheres: the opposition to women's suffrage in Britain (London, 1978)Google Scholar, these can be found in, among others, Spare Rib, Jan. 1979, p. 37; American Historical Review, Oct. 1979, p. 1057; Times Higher Education Supplement, 6 Oct. 1978, p. 20; Times Literary Supplement, 1 Dec. 1978, p. 1401; English Historical Review, Oct. 1979, p. 944; Canadian Journal of History, xiv (1979), 499500Google Scholar. For reviews of McMillan's, Housewife or harlot: the place of women in French society, 1870–1940 (Brighton, 1981), see AmericanHistorical Review, July 1982, p. 794; Choice, Dec. 1981; Association for the study of modem and contemporary France newsletter, Feb. 1982, pp. 10–11; European Studies Review, Oct. 1982, pp. 491–3.Google Scholar

3 T. B. Macaulay, ‘Life and writings of Sir William Temple’, Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1838, p. 127: Davis, N. Z., ‘“Women's history“ in transition: the European case’, Feminist Studies, iii (1976), 84–5.Google Scholar

4 N. Z. Davis, ‘women's history’, p. 85.

5 O. R. McGregor, ‘The social position of women in England 1850–1914: a bibliography’, British Journal of Sociology, Mar. 1955; Banks, J. A., Prosperity and parenthood (London, 1954)Google Scholar; A., J. & Banks, O., Feminism and family planning in Victorian England (Liverpool, 1964).Google Scholar

6 Guilbert, M., Les femmes et l'organisation syndicate avant 1914 (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar and Les fonctions des femmes dans l'industrie (Paris, 1966).Google Scholar

7 D. Herlihy, The social history of Italy and Western Europe, 700–1500 (1978); P. P. A. Biller, ‘Birth control in the medieval west’, Past and Present, no. 94 (1982), pp. 1–26.

8 Lougee, C., Le paradis des femmes: women, salons and social stratification in seventeenth century France (Princeton, 1976); O. Hufton, ‘Women and the family economy in eighteenth century France’, French Historical Studies, spring 1975, pp. 1–22.Google Scholar

9 Sowerwine, C., Sisters or citizens ? women and socialism in France since 1876 (Cambridge, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mayeur, F., L'enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles sous la Troisième République (Paris, 1977)Google Scholar; Corbin, A.,Les filles de noce: misère sexuelle et prostitution au 19e et 20e siècles (Paris, 1978)Google Scholar; Zeldin, T., France, 1848–1945, I: ambition, love and politics (Oxford, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 N. V. Davis, ‘Women's history’, p. 90.

11 Liddington, J. & Norris, J., One hand tied behind us. The rise of the women's suffrage movement (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Walkowitz, J. R., Prostitution and Victorian society. Women, class, and the state (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, L., Women's body, women's right: a social history of birth control in America (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Dufrancatel, C. et al., L'histoire sans qualités (Paris, 1979).Google Scholar

12 Blumhagen, K. O'Connor and Johnson, W. D. (eds.), Women's studies: an interdisciplinary collection (Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 117.Google Scholar

13 Quotations from Cobb, R. C., A second identity. Essays on France and French history (London, 1969), pp. 221–2; Fiona A. Montgomery, reviewing Separate spheres with other books on women's history in Scottish Historical Review, Oct. 1981, p. 198.Google Scholar

14 Young, G. M. quoted in Stern, F. (ed.), The varieties of history from Voltaire to the present (2nd edn, London, 1970), p. 28Google Scholar; Butterfield, H., The whig interpretation of history (London, 1931), p. 63.Google Scholar

15 T. Judt, ‘A clown in regal purple: social history and the historians’, History Workshop, VII (1979), 67.

16 DuBois, E., Feminism and suffrage (Ithaca, 1978), p. 10.Google Scholar

17 Rémond, R., ‘Recherche d'une méthode d'analyse historique de la déchristianisation depuisle milieu du XIXe siècle’, Colloque d'histoire religieuse, Lyon, Octobre 1963 (Grenoble, 1963), p. 125.Google Scholar

18 Hartman, M. S. and Banner, L. (eds.), Clio's consciousness raised: new perspectives on the history of women (New York, 1974), p. vii.Google Scholar

19 Perrot, M., ‘La femme populaire rebelle’, in L'histoire sans qualités (Paris, 1979).Google Scholar

20 Bridenthal, R. & Koonz, C. (eds.), Becoming visible: women in European history (London, 1977). P. 2.Google Scholar

21 E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (revd. edn, 1968), pp. 12–13 (preface); Evans, R. J., ‘“Women's History”. The limits of reclamation’, Social History, v, no. 2 (May 1980), 276.Google Scholar

22 Branca, P., Women in Europe since 1750 (London, 1978), p. 99, cf. p. 106Google Scholar; see also McMillan, J. F., ‘Clericals, anticlericals and the women's movement in France under the third republic’, Historical Journal, xxiv, no. 21 (1981), 361 ff; Housewife or harlot, pp. 88–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Cott, N. F., The bonds of womanhood. ‘ Woman's sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977), p. 199.Google Scholar

24 Oakley, A., Housewife (London, 1974)Google Scholar; Smith, B., Ladies of the leisure class: the bourgeoises of northern France in the nineteenth century (Princeton, 1981)Google Scholar; Perrot, M., L’éloge de la ménagère dans le discours des ouvriers français au XlXe siècle’, Romantisme, 13–14 (1976), pp. 105121.Google Scholar

25 Wilson, S., Ideology and experience: Antisemitism in France at the time of the Dreyfus affair (London and Toronto, 1982).Google Scholar

26 These were the authors cited (in fns. 42, 90, 94) at the points in ch. 4 to which Hilden objects.

27 C: Degler, N., Is there a history of women? an inaugural lecture (Oxford, 1975), p. 9.Google Scholar

28 Woolf, V., A room of one's own (Harbinger Books edn, 1957), p. 27Google Scholar; Hilda, Smith, ‘Feminism and the methodology of women's history’, in Carroll, B. (ed.), Liberating women's history. Theoretical and critical essays (Illinois, 1976), p. 374.Google Scholar

29 C. N. Degler, Inaugural lecture, p. 9.

30 G. Lerner in B. Carroll (ed.), Liberating women's history, p. 362, cf. Ann D. Gordon et al., Ibid. pp. 75–6.

31 American Historical Review, July 1982, p. 794; Association for the study of modem and contemporary France newsletter, Feb. 1982, p. 10.

32 That French women could be as militant and tenacious as men in strike activity has long been known from the work of Madeleine Guilbert. Unlike Guilbert, however, Hilden refuses to face up to the fact that male trade union leaders also had occasion to castigate women workers for their lack of proletarian solidarity. The case of the Nancy print workers’ strike in 1901, where the feminist Marguerite Durand assisted the employers in their recruitment of female labour to replace 12 men on strike, became notorious. In any event, female militancy was by no means always inspired by revolutionary ardour. Guilbert cites the examples of women strikers at Mazamet in 1909, and the sardine curers of Douarez who, in 1905, invoked the intervention of the Virgin to bring about a successful outcome to their industrial action. See Guilbert, Les femmes et l'organisation syndicate, pp. 241–2.

33 Cobden quoted in P. Hollis (ed.), Pressure from without in early Victorian England (1974), p. 142.

34 C. N. Degler, Inaugural lecture, p. 14.

35 H. Butterfield, The whig interpretation of history, p. 25.

36 E. P. Thompson, Working class, p. 13.

37 Ann D. Gordon et al., ‘The problem of women's history’, in B. Carroll (ed.), Liberating women's history, p. 77.

38 J. S. Mill in Edinburgh National Society for Women's Suffrage, 3rd annual report, p. 12, cf. R. B. Haldane in House of Commons debates, 11 July 1910, c, 82.

39 Chamberlain, Sir A., Politics from inside: An epistolary chronicle, 1906–1914 (London, 1936), P. 137.Google Scholar

40 Young, G. M., Victorian essays (ed. Handcock, W. D., London, 1962), p. 97.Google Scholar

41 R. J. Evans, ‘Women's history’, p. 281.

42 Orwell, G., Collected essays, journalism & letters, (ed. Orwell, S. and Angus, I., Harmondsworth, 1970), iv, 513, writing in 1948.Google Scholar

43 Taylor, A. J. P., The origins of the second world war (1964 edn, London), p. 8 (‘Second thoughts’).Google Scholar

44 Richards, J., The sceptical feminist. A philosophic inquiry (London, 1980), p. 19; cf. p. 16.Google Scholar

45 G. Orwell, Collected essays, journalism and letters, iii, 27, writing in 1944.

46 American Historical Review, July 1982, p. 794.