Linda K. Kerber

The Challenge of "Opinionative Assurance"

Note from Neil Sapper (H-Survey Co-Editor): Friends, just last week the Summer '97 issue of _National Forum_ arrived. The theme of the issue was "Writing History," and the lead article by Professor Linda Kerber, President of the Organization of American Historians (1996-97), was an attention-grabber because of its references to the survey courses in U. S. history. Both Professors Kerber and James P. Kaetz, editor of _National Forum_, were most cooperative and supportive of cross-posting "The Challenge of 'Opinionative Assurance'" on H-Survey. As part of its celebration of the new academic year, H-Survey has the honor of providing this thoughtful essay to its subscribers. Best wishes for a great year from H-Survey! +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

(C) Linda K. Kerber 1997 This article was first published in _National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi Journal_, Summer 1997.

There is no need for a Sherlock Holmes to serve as a detective in a search for the controlling or influential ideas employed in modern books, articles, reviews and published addresses dealing with men and women. Even a novice can discover one obtruding conception that haunts thousands of printed pages. It is the image of woman throughout long ages of the past as a being always and everywhere subject to male man, or as a ghostly creature too shadowy to be even that real.

With this 1946 book, Mary Beard set the agenda for many of the feminist historians who followed her. I have not seen the phrase "opinionative assurance" before or since, but when I read it I knew exactly what Beard was talking about: the certainty with which we clothe our opinions when we feel that they are beyond question. This certainty can be a special problem in introductory courses both in high school and in college. As teachers we inherit "survey courses" in which the lessons already seem to be well laid-out, marching in sequence from Columbus to as close to the present as we can get before the class sessions are used up. In face of the need to make our way efficiently, it is tempting to adopt a structure driven by outdated "opinionative assurance": the Progressive Era is a time of great political innovation; Washington, Lincoln, and FDR were the "great" presidents; the League of Nations failed, and the United Nations succeeded; matters related to women are less important than matters related to men. The tendencies Beard identified are present not only in the history of women and men but also in many other topics. Among these false certainties are the assumption that immigrants have been, compared with native-born people, insignificant historical actors, and that enslaved people had no agency in their own emancipation.

Beard emphasized the damage that this "opinionative assurance" has done. It would have been bad enough had male historians contented themselves with conveying that they _thought_ women had not done very much of anything; that they _concluded_, from evidence which they laid before us, that freedpeople had not had any skill in politics; that they _deduced_ that immigrants were absent from most intellectual histories because they had not thought many significant thoughts. Alerted that these conclusions were, like any other conclusions, perched on limited evidence and open to reexamination, it would have been relatively easy for historians to embark on fresh research, locate fresh evidence, and destabilize the conclusions -- just as we do with any historical opinions and judgments. The state of historical writing would have been healthier, and the profession would have been the wiser.

But these opinions were rarely offered straight, up front, in forms open to question and testing. Instead, opinion has often been offered with absolute assurance, opinion offered as fact, opinion offered as though it did not need to be tested, evaluated, or investigated. One of these opinions, as Beard phrased it, is that woman is "a ghostly creature too shadowy to be . . . real" and that the historical narrative can proceed as though she does not exist -- except, of course, when she occasionally disrupts the narrative, as in the Women's March on Versailles during the October Days in 1789 (an episode which, I was instructed in college in 1956 by a brilliant feminist historian who was befuddled by the "opinionative assurance" of her day, was carried out by men dressed in women's clothing). Latinos also have figured in most narratives of American history as ghostly creatures too shadowy to be real, embodied in confusing assortments of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Chicanos. Asian-Americans were especially ghostly; they were the immigrants who, unlike those from other parts of the globe, were generally denied the opportunity to qualify for citizenship.

Much has happened since Beard wrote. We are beneficiaries of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, of a transformation of immigration patterns that began after World War II and was enhanced by the immigration reform act of 1965, and of the second wave of the women's movement. Each of these social and political trends has affected the demography of the historical profession: the social backgrounds of those who practice as historians, the social identities of who our students are likely to be, the questions about the past that teachers and students are likely to ask. In the rest of this essay I want to offer, by way of example, some of the ways in which these changes have affected research and teaching in the last two decades, particularly in the field of women's history.

Thirty years after Pauli Murray's path-breaking "Jane Crow and the Law," which constructed sex-discrimination as congruent with race discrimination and therefore vulnerable to parallel attack, and some thirty-five years after Betty Friedan's _Feminine Mystique_ and Eleanor Flexner's _Century of Struggle_, from which Friedan drew most of the material in her historical sections, we have an enormous base of fresh research on which to stand. The number of dissertations in all fields with "woman" or "feminine" or some other similar marker in the title has increased more than 300 percent in the last decade alone. Few of us would now think of teaching without instructing our students in woman suffrage, sex segregation in the workplace, the careers of Ida B.. Wells and Eleanor Roosevelt (if we are Americanists) or of Rosa Luxemburg and Marie Curie (if we teach European history). Questions about women now appear on the advanced placement exams. Women's History Month is held each March, with its posters and essay contests.

But it is, after all, very hard to disrupt the inherited narrative. It is all too easy to cower in the face of "opinionative assurance." My guess is that women still enter our basic survey courses mostly in three ways: (1) insofar as they help men do what men wish to do, whether it is to settle the frontier or to keep factories running; (2) for shock value, as witches or prostitutes or Women Air Service Pilots in World War II; or (3) in the politics of woman suffrage, which is understood to have ended in 1920.

FOUR STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

I recently spent some time consulting with my counterparts at an old and distinguished college, and examined the first portion of the core course in American history. The students read John Smith and John Winthrop, Cotton Mather and Thomas Jefferson -- and Abigail Adams' letters to John. When I observed that the course went through two hundred years of American history before a woman offered a thought that was deemed important enough for the students to read about and study, and then it was in the form of private exchanges, the staff responded that they were very careful to convey that women were _silenced_ in colonial America, and that they, as teachers, certainly did not approve. They were teaching, after all, the oppression of women.

Faced with this sort of opinionative assurance, how can historians best respond? More than fifteen years ago, Gerda Lerner suggested that the writing of women's history can be arranged in successive stages of development, each stage more complex and sophisticated than the last, but all useful and necessary. Lerner called the first stage "compensatory history." In this stage the historian wanders around like Diogenes with a lantern, seeking to identify women and their activities. This work is not trivial; at its best it can lead to the creation of major reference works such as _Notable American Women_, first published in 1971, with an important supplementary volume published in 1980. The challenge of doing "compensatory history" remains a strong one, as we see in the hearty welcome offered to the _Encyclopedia of Black Women's History_, edited by Darlene Clark Hine when it appeared three years ago, and the continuing need for a new supplementary volume for _Notable_.

Lerner called the next level "contributory history": women's contribution to topics, issues, and themes that had already been determined to be important. The women of Hull House "contribute" to Progressive era reforms; the women in the cotton mills of Lowell "contribute" to industrialization. There is no standard theme -- frontier, abolition, urbanization -- in American history in which women have not, in some way, participated or contributed. Identifying their work enriches the narrative and makes it more accurate. African American history has also gone through a stage like this one, in which "Black heroes" of the American Revolution or the Civil War are identified, Black scientists like George Washington Carver or Charles Drew added to lists of distinguished Americans, and room was made for the Harlem Renaissance in the sections of textbooks devoted to cultural affairs.

The third stage is one in which we test familiar generalizations and question things we thought we knew, an approach called for nearly thirty years ago by the historian David Potter. For example, the frontier did not unambivalently represent opportunity, particularly for women, who were more likely to find their opportunity in cities. The slave diet, marginally adequate for men, generally condemned pregnant women and nursing mothers to malnutrition. The Hull House women did not merely "contribute" to welfare reform in this country; they virtually invented it. The home is not a "haven in a heartless world" for women; it is a workplace, the site of heavy labor and unremitting toil. Indeed, housewives' labor and energy often provided the savings that transformed below-subsistence wages into subsistence wages. We can now (thanks to the work of historian Jeanne Boydston) locate the period -- the 1830s and 1840s -- when Americans developed an ideology which denied that housework, done for love of family rather than wages, is work at all. In the 1980s a farm woman in Iowa told the anthropologist Deborah Fink, "I plant the garden. I feed the chickens, I sell the eggs, I put up a year's worth of vegetables. I don't have _time_ to work!"

We have only just begun, also, to reconsider how all that we have learned about African American history in the last generation has reshaped what we thought we "knew" about the general narrative of American history. When lynching is taken seriously, then the nation that served as a haven for immigrants in the Progressive Era was _simultaneously_ a polity that colluded in terrorizing a large proportion of native-born citizens. Indeed, from the African American perspective, the Progressive Era requires a quite different name.

We find ourselves now in a fourth stage of interpretation, in which we understand that gender itself is a social construction. Historians are asking questions about how people construct meaning for their historical experience, and how differences of class, race, and gender operate simultaneously to shape the construction of meaning. We ask _why_ housework has not been construed to be "real" work; why gender difference has generally meant disadvantage. We distinguish between sexual difference, based on anatomical and hormonal factors, and gender difference, the behaviors learned as each society instructs its members from infancy through adulthood as to what behavior and personality attributes are appropriate for males and females of that generation. We take note that the earliest slave laws transferred the rules of descent from the father's line to the mother's line, and we recognize such a transfer as a radical reconfiguration of gender and race relations simultaneously in the interests of constructing a new class system that made room for slavery at the bottom of the social hierarchy. We ask why immigrant men were so often stereotyped as effeminate. We inquire into the complex definitions of masculinity and femininity that were developed in communities of gay men and of lesbians.

The challenge of women's history has been that we develop a way of looking which allows us to see economic and social relationships not as "natural" but as socially constructed arrangements that benefit one group at the expense of others. That challenge has now been met with a new concept of understanding the gendered practices that are central to so much of our historical experience: the denunciation of non-conforming men as "sissies"; the denigration of unwanted immigrant groups as "effeminate"; the nineteenth century practice of placing voting booths in "male spaces" such as taverns and barbershops, sending stern signals.

"Our choices about what to teach, how to teach, and how to interpret the texts we teach are ethical choices," observed the educational philosopher Jo Anne Pagano. The new histories, not only of women but also of African Americans and other minorities, challenge us to develop a new narrative in which we make clear what might be called "the work of gender" as it is accomplished by institutions, indeed by whole societies, over time. In the last twenty years we have learned to recognize gender in apparently gender-neutral places. Beginning this project may be easiest in the schools, for no one is better equipped than teachers to understand a gendered educational system in which high school principals are more likely to be men and kindergarten teachers are more likely to be women.

OPPOSING VOICES

From time to time the ethics of the choices we make about what to teach is heightened by fresh recognition of what is at stake. Now is one of those times. We are now hearing, in tones of great assurance, that women's historians and those who call for more attention to the history of black people and of other minorities are splintering the historical profession. Once upon a time, these voices say, there was a grand unified narrative, which could be easily found in textbooks for high schools and colleges and in popular histories accessible to a wide reading audience. And now, it is sometimes said explicitly, sometimes implied, now all those folks who demand attention to women, to blacks, to Chicanos and Hispanics, to working class experience -- in short to class, race, and gender -- are ruining the narrative and doing a major disservice to the profession.

Sometimes these attacks are direct, but more often they are subtle; they often begin by deploring trends toward "specialization" or "fragmentation" but end by offering attention to women, family, race, and ethnicity as "examples" of such splitting or fragmentation. Recently the attacks centered on the National History Standards, frameworks for teaching developed by an unprecedented coalition of teachers of history in K 12 and in colleges and universities. Often the attacks were framed as the assertion that the Standards undermined attention to national politics, an assertion which ignores the criticism of many historians that national politics have been incompletely understood because of a wilful failure to pay serious attention to the activities and responses of many groups in American society. But last year the revised Standards were enthusiastically approved by the Council for Basic Education, and throughout the country we are seeing state accrediting councils, school curriculum committees, and individual teachers make use of them to invigorate their classrooms.

CLAIMING SPACE

It is long past time to shake off intimidation by opinionative assurance. We have begged for a little bit of space in the survey course long enough; it is time to make our claim to space frankly, openly, passionately. We must make this claim because to claim space for the experience of people of all classes, of all races, or varying ethnicities is to be true to the state of historical knowledge as it has now developed. And there is another, deeper reason as well.

There is a connection between the respect people can claim in their daily, public life, and the extent to which they are understood to have a history that is worth respect. As teachers we know that the names, dates, and "facts" that are explicitly part of the curriculum are only a portion of what is actually taught. Students will forget those dates or remember them with resentment. As teachers we know that what is conveyed in our subtext is at least as important as what is conveyed explicitly. It is not necessary for emotional and intellectual health that what students learn about historical experience be always pleasing or flattering; men and women have been victims as well as agents, capable of evil as well as of good. But those who are only part of someone else's story, as Peter Pan is of Wendy's, can make no claims of their own. If Africans are only a chapter in the history of imperialism, if Jews are only a chapter in the history of heresy, if women are only a part of the history of "universal man," then living people who are African American, or Jewish, or women, are marginalized into consumers of or supplements to other peoples' stories. What is necessary is that we recognize that the past has been constructed by men and women of many backgrounds and identities, individually and in their relations with each other. Lowered self-confidence is a perfectly reasonable conclusion if one has been subtly instructed that what people like oneself have done in the world has not been important and is not worth studying. The promise of democracy is that we always seek more stories to tell.

We now stand firmly on a base of a quarter-century of exciting research and writing. We at last have the capacity to disrupt old ways of telling historical stories. It is time for a little "opinionative assurance" of our own.

[Linda K. Kerber is the May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and professor of history at the University of Iowa. She served as the president of the Organization of American Historians in 1996-97.]

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