What’s in a Field?

The last fifteen years have witnessed major changes in the ways historians define and conceptualize the study of the past. One of the most far reaching of recent developments has been the historical profession’s recognition of the importance of women’s history.

The exploration of women’s past has become one of the most flourishing fields for historical research, and many universities and colleges have estab­lished permanent faculty positions for women’s historians. Over the same peri­od of time, women themselves have come to occupy a new place within the historical profession. Women now earn over 32 percent of the PhDs awarded each year in history, and more have found employment as historians and participated in professional organiza­tions than ever before.

Despite these gains, the fact remains that women continue to be underrepre­sented on history faculties. There have been several explanations advanced for this persistent underrepresentation. One centers on the ways women histori­ans are distributed throughout the vari­ous specialties that make up the profes­sion.

According to this argument, women are to be found in disproportionate numbers in a few fields—most notably women’s history and social history—and are difficult to find in others such as diplomatic or political history, or in tra­ditional period specialties such as the Jacksonian Era. Even with the best of intentions, an academic department may find it difficult to hire women un­less it can define its openings in wom­en’s or social history. Women on the academic job market, then, compete with one another for positions in these fields. In short this means the under­representation of women is due to sex segregation in the historical labor mar­ket: women cluster in a few fields while men continue to dominate the tradition­al specialities.

What can historians do about this situa­tion? Some suggest that we encourage our female graduate students to special­ize in fields in which women are underrepresented. We could work to create more positions in social and women’s history. We could define academic posi­tions as broadly and flexibly as possible.

None of these remedies, however, gets to the heart of the matter. Sex segregation in the historical labor mar­ket is a real phenomenon, but I do not believe it is due entirely on skewed dis­tribution of women historians across re­search specialities. Another major factor that contributes to sex segregation is the very way that we define fields of special­ization. Consider the following hypo­thetical example:

A history department is recruiting a historian of the post-Civil War Ameri­can South. Candidate A is writing a monograph on Mississippi politics from 1890 to 1940. Candidate B has complet­ed a dissertation on female textile oper­atives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both candidates have substantial course work in southern history. Given traditional defini­tions of the field, Candidate A is clearly a southern historian.

Candidate B, however, might well post problems for the hiring depart­ment. Is Candidate B a southern histori­an, a labor historian, or a women’s his­torian? Is Candidate B capable of teach­ing courses in southern history? Or would this candidate be better suited for a position in women’s history? Would not Candidate B’s interest and expertise be redundant, given the fact that this particular department already has a specialist in women’s history? It is quite possible that an academic department would decide that Candidate B is pri­marily a women’s historian whose re­search deals with women who happen to live in the South. Candidate B will thus be disqualified as a serious contender for this academic position.

In classifying Candidate B as a wom­en’s historian and not as a southern historian, the academic department is making implicit judgments about what constitutes “real” southern history­ judgments that rest heavily upon tradi­tional notions of historical significance. What is more, the department has con­tributed to the problem of sex segrega­tion by defining women’s history and southern history as mutually exclusive fields: one dealing with the private realm of human experience and with a group that has had little political power, the other traditional specialty dealing with the public realm of human experi­ence and the uses of political and eco­ nomic power. But are not both job can­didates, in fact, historians of the New South?

To break down patterns of sex segre­gation and to help end the current frag­mentation of historical knowledge, we need to view women’s history as a field that overlaps and intersects with virtual­ly every other area of historical research and teaching, rather than solely as a discrete specialty that is the responsibil­ity of a single member of an academic department.