American Jewish women have been prominent within the historical profession. Indeed, many have been on the cutting edge of historical scholarship since the 1960s. In particular, Jewish women were at the forefront of developments within social history and in the creation of women’s history. While women generally, and Jewish women in particular, rarely made careers as historians in the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish women represented a significant proportion of academic historians both in American and European history as discrimination against Jews and prejudice against women lessened in the decades after World War II. Perhaps because of their sensitivity to the situation of powerless groups, most of them focused their attention not on traditional power elites but rather on those social groups traditionally ignored by academic historians: ordinary people, workers, peasants, minority groups, Jews, and especially women. They helped create, and were influenced by, new trends in historical scholarship that favored the study of such groups.

field_section_text_value

field_section_text_value

In the 1970s and early 1980s, most women’s historians concerned themselves with uncovering the experiences of women, both famous and ordinary. By the late 1980s, many of these historians had turned instead to a concern with gender, that is, with the social construction of female (or male) identity. Influenced by developments in literary criticism such as deconstructionism and postmodernism, some women’s historians increasingly turned to theoretical issues. Once again, Joan Wallach Scott was at the forefront of this development. In her Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1988), Scott argued that poststructural theory as developed by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault offered feminism a powerful analytic tool to explore how gender hierarchies are constructed and legitimized. In a series of articles, she explored the varied and inherently unstable meanings attached to gender. Always interested in power relations, Scott insisted that studying gender as a category provided an excellent way to analyze all hierarchies of difference in society. Scott hoped that her studies of gender would alert people to inequalities, which could then be rectified. Other volumes of essays, including Learning about Women: Gender, Politics and Power, edited with Jill Ker Conway and Susan Bourque (University of Michigan Press, 1989); Feminists Theorize the Political, edited with Judith Butler (Routledge, 1992); Feminism and History (Oxford, 1996); and Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere, edited with Debra Keates (University of Illinois Press, 2004), continued these theoretical concerns.

Similarly, Estelle Freedman, who has taught at Stanford University since 1976, turned from analyzing the experiences of women to focusing on feminism and gender. Her early books included Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (University of Michigan Press, 1981), Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (with John D’Emilio; Harper and Row, 1988), and Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1996), but she then explored the relationship between feminism and gender in No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (Ballantine, 2002) and Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics: Essays (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). She has also edited several books, including a collection of essays on lesbians. In 2013, she published Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press). 

Other historians have continued to write social history, often with a focus on women and gender. Elaine Tyler May, professor at the University of Minnesota, for example, has written several books on the family in America: Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (University of Chicago Press, 1980); Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (Basic Books, 1988); Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (Basic Books, 1995), and America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books, 2010). She has also written Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy (Basic Books, 2017). Paula S. Fass, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has written primarily about children in such books as The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (Oxford University Press, 1977), Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (Oxford University Press, 1989), Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (Oxford University Press, 1997), Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization (New York University Press, 2006), and The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton University Press, 2016). Regina Morantz-Sanchez of the University of Michigan and a specialist on women in medicine has authored Sympathy and Science (Oxford University Press, 1985) and Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn of the Century Brooklyn (Oxford, 1999). Sonya Michel, professor at the University of Illinois and the University of Maryland (retired), published Children’s Interests/Mother’s Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (Yale University Press, 1999) and several edited collections of articles on gender and the welfare state.

Linda Gordon, who taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, the University of Wisconsin, and New York University, began her career by writing about women and birth control in Women’s Body, Women’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (Penguin, 1976), wife abuse in Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (Viking, 1988), and single mothers in Pitied but not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (Free Press, 1994). She later turned to study the careers of female photographers in Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits (Norton, 2009) and Inge Morath: An Illustrated Biography (Prestel, 2018). After a career of writing about women, she also decided to study the Ku Klux Klan, publishing in 2017 The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (Liveright). Kathy Peiss, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote two books on women’s social history, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the Century New York (Temple University Press, 1986) and Hope in a Jar: the Making of American Beauty Culture (Henry Holt, 1998), and then studied American society more broadly in Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe (Oxford University Press, 2020). Cindy Aron, a women’s historian who retired from the University of Virgini( also studied both men and women in Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (Oxford University Press, 1987) and Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1999). 

On the other hand, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a professor at Cornell (now retired), began her career writing about an evangelical missionary but devoted most of her career to studying women, publishing Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Harvard University Press, 1988) and The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (Random House, 1997). Annelise Orleck of Dartmouth College has written extensively about women, focusing mostly on women’s political activism in such books as Common Sense and A Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Beacon, 2005), Rethinking American Women’s Activism (Routledge, 2015), and “We Are All Fast Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising against Poverty Wages (Beacon, 2018). She has also written about Soviet Jews in the United States in The Soviet Jewish Americans (Greenwood, 1999).

field_section_text_value

field_section_text_value