How far the International Congress of Historical Sciences (ICHS) has come in only 20 years since that august body gathered in San Francisco—its first meeting to take place outside Europe! That year, 1975, women were totally absent, both as subjects of historical inquiry and as participants on panels about other topics. This year, when the ICHS met for its second venture outside Europe, women’s and gender history was at the very center of attention—one of the three “major themes” that was granted a full day for plenary-style panels. The explosion of scholarship in the field might seem adequate to explain this change; it is, after all, time that pathbreaking historical research on women and gender be recognized at the highest levels of our professional organizations. Nonetheless, much quiet diplomacy preceded this year’s congress and helped to ensure that women’s and gender history would receive the recognition it deserves.
In 1984 historians of women and gender began the work of organizing an internal commission of the ICHS—the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH). By 1990 the IFRWH was able to hold its own parallel two-day conference at the ICHS congress in Madrid, impressing historians from countries as yet unexposed to the new history on women. The IFRWH participated in the preparatory meeting for the Montreal conference, which was held in Prague in 1993. And in Montreal the IFRWH again presented its own sessions; AHA member Nupur Chaudhuri was coorganizer of the sessions.
Fortunately, one of the preeminent historians of women and gender, Natalie Davis, now sits on the executive board of the ICHS. IFRWH efforts and a more receptive climate on the ICHS board resulted in “Women, Men, and Historical Change: Case Studies on the Impact of Gender History (The Role of Gender and Male-Female Relations in Major Historical Transformations—Political, Social, Religious)”—an unwieldy title, perhaps, but large enough to capture the spirit of our capacious enterprise. Francisca de Haan of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and I were named “coresponsables”—a cross between program chairs and panel chairs.
The task of soliciting proposals for ICHS meetings is left to officials in the various countries; indeed, in many countries there is no public “call for papers,” and participation in the international congress is possible for only a few well-connected historians. But women and gender history has its own unofficial channels for soliciting proposals. Thanks to the organizational strength and reach of the IFRWH and various other women’s history groups at national levels, “Men, Women, and Historical Change” came to the attention of an especially large number of specialists.
Francisca and I read over 100 proposals from 18 different countries, before choosing 25 papers from 17 countries. Canadian and U.S. papers accounted for nearly half of the papers accepted-reflecting the fact that many more than half of the proposals were from those two countries alone. In making our selection, we took note of the subject areas of greatest intellectual interest and created subgroupings of these, which resulted in four separate panels: “Methodology: Doing Gender History”; “The Multiple Meanings of Difference”; “Economic Transformations, Gender, and the State”; and “Family, Sex, and Power.” And finally, we attempted to include some junior scholars among the presenters in recognition of their importance to the further development of our field.
Tl1e format for the day’s sessions was established for us by the ICHS. Four rapporteurs, one for each grouping, presented summaries of the panelists’ papers. Even though tl1e format differed from the American model in which panelists present their own papers, it worked well. It made it possible to bring togetl1er the largest possible number of historians from the largest possible number of countries for an exchange of information on the state of our field. The panelists were seated with the rapporteur and had the opportunity to make brief statements to supplement the rapporteur’s summary of their work. The bulk of the time, however, was reserved for discussion be tween the audience and the panelists.
It was this discussion that conveyed the most excitement; on occasion, it even be came heated. Most notable were arguments positioning “gender history” against ”women’s history,” and theoretically formed scholarship against empirical research. Even those of us who have long complained that such dichotomizing does little justice to the best scholarship in our field were impressed to witness the international reach of these controversies. (And for those who know the debates in the United States, it was especially fascinating to hear one French historian after another rise to complain about “Anglo-American theorizing”!) In remarking on the discussion in my closing comments, I addressed the meanings of “gender” and its positioning in women’s politics at that very moment. That day, after all, was the opening day for the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women at which intense debate was already under way concerning the word “gender”—a word, it seems, of such loaded meaning that some governments refused to permit it in the proposed Platform for Action. It is moments such as these that us that our scholarly work never above the fray of political struggles.
Claire Moses is chair of the Women's Program at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is also editor of the journal Feminist Studies.
