Women’s History Month comes to an end, again
Back in November, I wondered whether I should run this interview series again this year. As I may have mentioned a time or ten, I’m trudging toward the first big deadline on this book. And while it may not be obvious, putting this series together takes time and energy. I changed my mind several times before I came to the conclusion that doing this project each year is important to me. (Not to mention fun.) I hope it is important to some of you, too. (Not to mention fun.)
Over the last few months I’ve had a chance to interact with some of my history-writing heroes, and find some new ones. I’ve added books to my TBR list and followed new people on Twitter.* I’ve promoted people who are doing wonderful work in our shared project of putting women back into history. And I’ve enjoyed being part of the online celebration of Women’s History Month. (And I’ve tried to answer some really hard questions—this year people posed some doozies!) I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.
As always, I feel a little deflated as the month comes to an end—it’s a little like the first week of January after the holiday season is over. And yet, much as I love the sense of celebration, I wish we didn’t need Women’s History Month, or Black History Month, or any of the other history months and heritage months that now mark our calendars. I wish history as we learn it would include people who were not as a center as a matter of course. That we didn’t have to put up big flashing signs that say “WE WERE THERE” once a year to remember. I don’t think that’s coming any time soon. In fact, I fear that Women’s History Month and its sister celebrations are more important than they ever were.
Dang it.
*And yes, I realize Twitter could crash and burn at any moment. But I haven’t found any social media format that suits me quite so well.
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Over the next few weeks, you can expect a couple of guest posts, a review of a book that I’m really excited about sharing, and more posts from the archives. May 1 is coming really soon.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Melissa Estes Blair
Melissa Estes Blair is an associate professor and department chair of history at Auburn University in Auburn, AL. She received her Ph.D from the University of Virginia, and her B.A. from the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on women and politics in the twentieth-century United States. Her first book, Revolutionizing Expectations: Women’s Organizations, Feminism, and American Politics 1965-1980 examined the role of mainstream women’s organizations such as the YWCA and League of Women Voters in the feminist movement of the 1970s. Her forthcoming second book, Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women Who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century, is a group biography of the directors of the Women’s Division of the Democratic and Republican National Committees in the middle decades of the 20th century. It will be released September 1, 2023 by University of Georgia Press. An early version of part of that work appeared in the 2020 edited collection Suffrage at 100 published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Take it away, Melissa!
Photo credit Miranda Beason
We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past. What are the challenges of writing about women from the mid-twentieth century?
A lot of scholars of the 20th century talk about drowning in paper, and that’s true for women’s history, even at the local level. Whether I was looking at records of YWCA and League of Women Voters chapters for my first book or DNC and RNC records for my current project, there was just so much stuff. And when you are traveling to archives and don’t have a ton of time, you have to triage pretty quickly to make your best educated guesses to ensure that you get through the best material.
The other big obstacle, especially when you are working on local or unknown women, is that even with all that paper it can be hard to figure out who’s who. If the meeting minutes and the mailing list of the LWV chapter, for example, list women by last name only (“In attendance were Mesdames Smith, Jones, Roberts…”) and the mailing list is “Mrs. William Smith,” but then the meeting minutes say “Dorothy suggested that…”, it can be quite hard to match all those names up. That, in turn, makes it hard to follow women into different aspects of their lives like paid employment or other organizations, or to find them for oral history. I did my dissertation research in the 2000s and wrote about the 1960s and 1970s. I’m sure many of the women I wrote about were still alive. But it was actually really hard to find them, because of the ways in which women’s names have historically been recorded. That’s one big reason there isn’t very much oral history in my first book, in spite of my chronological proximity to the topic.
What aspects of women’s history surprise your students most? What outrages them?
Almost everything surprises my students, which feeds into what outrages them. They are always appalled by how little they know, especially when it becomes clear that there are ample sources to teach about women throughout American history. Often these discussions go hand in hand. The last time I taught my women’s history class, for example, the students were particularly angry that none of them had heard about the women’s bread riots against the Confederacy during the Civil War. Their frustration with their lack of knowledge enabled us to have a really great discussion about the uses & misuses of history, how the history of white southerners’ frustrations with the Confederacy during the war were suppressed during the Lost Cause era and how that still shapes the education that my (majority Southern) students had received. Their outrage fuels amazing discussions because they are so eager to learn.
When did you first become interested in women’s history? What sparked that interest?
I have been interested in history pretty much my whole life, thanks to my mother. She is a native Virginian and a history lover, so when we would go to Virginia to visit her parents, we would often do a little bit of historical sight-seeing, whether it was a trip to Colonial Williamsburg or just an afternoon on the grounds at Maymont, a Gilded Age mansion in Richmond. (Side note: Maymont is now one of the best house museums I’ve ever seen, but when I was a kid the house wasn’t open, just the grounds).
It’s hard for me to pin down when women’s history became my focus. I am exactly the right age for the original American Girl dolls, and I devoured those books, which of course narrated historical events from a girl’s perspective. I took a lot of feminist literature classes in college (I was a history & English double major), and that really grew my interest in gender studies broadly. But history has always been my passion, so I combined that interest in women’s experiences that I got from Dr. Ellen Rosenman and other professors at the University of Kentucky English department with my love of history when I got to graduate school.
A question for you: You seem to be a scholar of pretty much everything. How do you do it? How do you manage to keep through lines in such big projects?
There is a reason historians tend to sink their roots into a specific time and space. It is both terrifying and thrilling to drop the safety net of an academic field and explore scholarly foreign territory. And yet, as with any kind of foreign travel, the unknown slowly becomes familiar, freeing you up to push your boundaries one step further.
Since I chose not to follow the academic path long before I finished my doctorate, I have always been free to follow my curiosity where it lead me. And sometimes it seems like I’m curious about everything. That can lead me to really deep dives into specific topics, that are very similar to the type of research that an academic historian does. It also allows me to go wide—moving across fields to look at the ways different ideas or events are connected. Then once I have that web of linked ideas, I can go deep again in what biographer Eric Washington calls a “galaxy of rabbit holes.” Over time, one set of linked ideas connects with another, creating a very personal field of scholarship.
For example, like your students, I had not heard about the women’s bread riots against the Confederacy, so I paused in the middle of working on this post to go down the bread-riot rabbit hole. The bread riots throughout the south were fascinating in themselves, but they linked in my mind to other bread riots I’ve written about: in eighteenth -century France, in England in 1819 and in Russia in 1917—not to mention the related potato riots in Germany during World War I and Weimar Germany and the constant fear of bread riots in classical Rome, leading to the concept of “bread and circuses.” There are some obvious things that link them all together—economic instability for one. But I suspect that if I started going down those rabbit holes I would find something else that was interesting. Will I do it? Not for the next five weeks for sure. Maybe not ever. At a minimum I will probably play with the ideas in a newsletter down the road.
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Wanted to know more abut Melissa Estes Blair and her work?
Check out her website: https://www.melissablairhistorian.com/
Follow her on Instagram: @MelissaBlairHistorian
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Come back tomorrow for one last Women’s History Month post, in which I hope to wind things up in a meaningful way. No promises.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Diana Parsell
Diana Parsell is a writer, editor, and former journalist in the Washington, D.C., area. She has worked for publications and websites including National Geographic and The Washington Post, and for science organizations in Washington and Southeast Asia. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and Johns Hopkins University’s M.A. program in nonfiction writing, Parsell was one of the founding editors of the online Washington Independent Review of Books. In support of her debut book, Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees (March 2023, Oxford University Press), she received a
Photo credit: Lisa Damico Portraits
What was the most surprising thing you found doing historical research for your work?
Given the meager knowledge of my subject, the 19th-century author and travel writer Eliza Scidmore, it surprised me greatly to eventually uncover so much unknown information about her. Today, people know her mainly as the woman who fought a century ago to have Japanese cherry trees planted in Washington, D.C. But personal details about her have always been sketchy. There had never been a biography of her, and I learned early on that most of her personal papers were destroyed after her death. Because of this, I had little to go on when I started looking into her life. I didn’t know whether I would even find enough for a book. Because I’m not trained as a historian or scholar, I began with little understanding of standard techniques for doing historical research. I simply followed one clue after another. Over several years, this led me to an unexpected wealth of material, much of it buried in archives and “hiding in plain sight” in public records and databases. Digitization and other advances in research tools enabled me to uncover valuable primary sources that had long been overlooked.
Major breakthroughs occurred along the way. As one example, I was a couple years into the research when I discovered that Scidmore wrote her newspaper work under a pen name. That opened the floodgates to hundreds of articles she published. This body of work, never previously examined in full, proved enormously important. For one thing, it showed that Scidmore deserves greater recognition as one of America’s pioneering female journalists—a contemporary of the early newspaperwomen historian Alice Fahs describes in Out on Assignment (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). The newspaper datelines provided a core chronology of Scidmore’s life and early travels. And of course, the columns gave me her own words, as well as insight into her character and personality.
Another major surprise was discovering the significance of Scidmore’s reporting on China. In a couple of monographs that turned up, two different scholars described her as one of a handful of Western writer-travelers who “opened” China to mass tourism at the end of the nineteenth century. Even though I knew she published a book on China, this perspective offered a whole new dimension. In the end, I found so much material relevant to her travels in China that had I not been limited by a tight word count, I could have written a lot more about this important and little-known aspect of her life.
Writing about a historical figure like Eliza Scidmore requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have her as a constant companion?
I came to my research on Scidmore motivated by many questions. Among them, I hoped to find out what inspired her obsessive efforts to have Japanese cherry trees planted in Washington’s newly developed Potomac Park a century ago. More personally, it was questions about her personal life that intrigued me. I had read in general about her accomplishments: pioneering traveler to Alaska and author of the first tourist guide on the region; first woman elected to the board of the National Geographic Society (in 1892); activist in the burgeoning U.S. conservation movement, in affiliation with John Muir and others; recognized expert on Japan and author of a half-dozen travel books. I couldn’t help but wonder how she managed to achieve so much, at a time when few women had careers and society frowned on female ambition. I came to realize that Scidmore was still in her twenties when she first pitched her idea for cherry trees in Washington to the men in charge of the city’s public parks. What would have given a young woman of that era the confidence and audacity to make such a bold move. Who was she and where did she come from? What influences led her to act as she did, not just on D.C.’s cherry trees but in her larger life?
These, then, were the kinds of questions that ultimately drove my research. Searching for the answers made her not just an inviting companion in the decade it took me to write this book, but a subject in whom I hoped to better understand what it takes for women to succeed in a male-dominated world. She became a compelling figure because of questions I had about her that resonated with my own experience and that of other women I knew. Questions of how to make a life when one’s instincts don’t accord with family or societal expectations; how to reconcile a hunger for freedom and creative expression with the need to make a living; how to stay true to one’s values in a society that values conformity.
In writing the first-ever biography of Scidmore, I tried to make the writing accessible to general audiences, to spread her story as widely as possible. But I was also quite conscientious about documenting my sources thoroughly as a “blueprint” for further studies and analysis of her life and career. I feel sure she’ll continue to be in my life for some time, and I can’t wait to learn even more about her.
What work(s) of women’s history have you read lately that you loved?
One book that comes immediately to mind is Carolyn Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I found it impressive for the marriage of biographical insights and Fraser’s geographical rendering of the American plains as the backdrop of pioneer life. I’m a big proponent of master biographer Robert Caro’s conviction that place and setting play a crucial role in shaping a subject’s feelings, drives, motivations and insecurities. Fraser addressed this masterfully. I also loved A Woman of No Importance, by Sonia Purnell, and All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner. Both of these elevate biography to a higher order in using the dramatic techniques of storytelling to illuminate critically important historical events.
As far as a top recent favorite of women’s history, however, my hands-down choice is Gillian Gill’s Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her World. Like many women with strong literary leanings, I’ve read a lot of Woolf’s work. I’ve also read biographies about her. But nothing I’d read before matched the level of insight and analysis I got from Gill’s book. Focusing on Woolf’s heritage, she describes various women in the family who greatly affected Woolf’s growth and development–as both an unconventional woman of her day and a radical writer. Reading this book made me want to go back and reread all of Woolf’s work!
A question from Diana: Given how far history has lagged in giving us the important stories of women, as well as other marginalized groups, do you have any ideas for strategies on how to move the narrative forward in leaps, instead of through individual efforts and incremental progress?
I wish I did. Unfortunately, I suspect the only way this happens is one story at a time, until the narrative reaches the point at which “women’s history” is accepted as mainstream history. (I picture this as a narrative rockslide, where erosion occurs over time and then BAM! it happens. Though, of course, this would be positive and non-destructive.*)
*Am I getting loopy as I approach the deadline on this book? Why yes, yes I am.
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Want to know more about Diana Parsell and her work?
Check out her website: www.dianaparsell.com
Follow her on Twitter: @DianaParsell
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historian Melissa Blair.