Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer With Rebecca Grawl
Today I am pleased talk about women’s history with Rebecca Grawl, founding member and Vice-President of Education for A Tour of Her Own, a tourism company in Washington, D.C. That specializes in women’s history tours, book talks and virtual experiences.
Rebecca is a professional tour guide, historian, and author who holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Culture from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College.) She has over a decade’s experience in tourism, public history, and museum education. She works with a wide array of companies, organizations, and audiences to bring our nation’s history to life in engaging and innovative ways.
Rebecca can be seen on Mysteries at the Museum on the Travel Channel and heard as a lead contributor for the Tour Guide Tell All podcast. She is a past board member of the National Woman’s Party and a consultant for Above Glass Ceilings, a firm dedicated to advancing women in the workplace. Her book, authored with A Tour of Her Own president Kaiatlin Calogera, 111 Places in Women’s History in Washington, DC That You Must Not Miss, is a travel guidebook that encourages readers to explore sites and stories about women, many who are overlooked in traditional textbooks.
Take it away, Rebecca:
Is it hard to find women-centric places to include on your tours?
I actually love this question because on the surface, the answer is yes but in reality, it’s much more complex than that. One of the driving motivations for the founding of A Tour of Her Own is the lack of representation for women and women’s history in public spaces in D.C. We are underrepresented on the National Mall, in the Capitol Statuary collection, and on the names of buildings. And yet, the more you dig in and peel back the layers, the more we can find women’s history right under our noses. When we started working on our book 111 Places in Women’s History That You Must Not Miss, we were worried about finding 111 unique places in DC but by the end of the process, we had discovered that there are many places where those stories can be found – you just often have to look beyond the traditional ways in which we think history should be shared.
How do your virtual tours work? Are they also D.C. based?
Our virtual programs are presented via Zoom and ticket holders can either join live or access a recording after the event. Our guides present the tours in a lecture-style with a visual presentation, with participants asking questions or giving feedback via the chat box or a live Q&A at the end. While still focusing primarily on D.C. based stories and locations, this medium allows us flexibility that’s not always possible on the ground. As a guide, I personally love being able to integrate more media in my tours – virtually, I can share images, videos, and audio that bring the story to life in a new way. Place-based learning is so important and our goal is to bring people to the places where history happened but in a virtual tour, we’re not bound by what is open, accessible, easy to walk or drive to, or a price of admission. Creating virtual programs really allowed us to connect with a much broader audience and expand the way we tell these stories. We have developed some really exciting programs like our Mrs. America meetup, which used the popular FX on Hulu series to share women’s history of the 1970s. Currently, we are hosting a virtual book club once a month and sharing behind-the-scenes reflections of our book. Each meeting focuses on 11 chapters and we plan to cover the entirety of the book by the end of the year!
How do you define women’s history?
For me, women’s history is about taking a holistic and intersectional approach to understanding women’s role in our political, cultural, and social history. Just as we try to move beyond the Great Man theory of history, I think it’s important to look at women’s history as not just identifying a handful of key women that need to be part of a canon but rather exploring the varied and complex ways in which women have interacted and influenced the events of their day. Women’s history is not monolithic and it’s not a universal experience – it is complicated, vast, and diverse and I think we are still in the process of reconciling that. Additionally, we often say that women’s history is American history (and American history is women’s history) and while Women’s History Month is a vital and essential component is raising visibility and starting conversations on women’s history, the goal has to be taking a more balanced and nuanced view to how we discuss and interact with history every single day.
A Question from Rebecca: What’s your experience been like as a historian and writer who focuses on women’s stories?
I took an indirect path to writing women’s stories.
It’s where I started. As a kid, I read every biography I could get my hands on about historical women who ignored social boundaries and accomplished things—the kind that are written with the intention of inspiring young girls. I was indeed inspired. My grade school’s revolving library owned a whole series of them. Every week a new one arrived and I snatched it before anyone else could get it, eager to read about Clara Barton, Madame Curie, or Julia Ward Howe.
I never lost my interest in women’s stories, but my life as a history buff took an unexpected turn when at the age of eight or nine I fell in love with Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. (Kipling’s India put me on the path to a PhD in South Asia history.
It wasn’t a straight path. And it wasn’t a short one. The first day of my PhD program at University of Chicago, my advisor said, “You know there are no jobs, right?” I knew, but I didn’t care. Without the promise (or perhaps the threat) of a teaching job at the end of the road, I kept wandering down fascinating by-ways.
After I got the degree, there were still no jobs, so I started writing for a popular audience and I kept chasing whatever historical story caught my imagination. What I wrote about probably looked pretty random to an outsider, but by and large it clustered around one central theme. I feel strongly that as a society we need to hear the stories that don’t get told in high school history classes: the history of other parts of the world as well as history from the other side of the battlefield, the gender line, or the color bar.
As a result of my historical wanderings, in 2015 I was asked to write a work of historical non-fiction about Civil War nurses as a companion volume to the PBS historical drama, Mercy Street. That book took me back to my history-nerd roots and a topic that had fascinated me for years: the roles women play in warfare and how those roles are rooted in and occasionally help change a society’s fundamental beliefs about women.
And that’s where I’ve stayed.
***
Interested in learning more about A Tour of Her Own?
Check out the website: https://www.atourofherown.com/
Follow them on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atourofherown/
Follow them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/atourofherown
***
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Deborah Wastrel, host of the podcast Dinner Party Dames
The Only Woman
The concept behind Immy Humes’ The Only Woman is fascinating: one hundred photographs that include one woman in a group of men, ranging in time from the 1860s through 2020, drawn from hundreds of examples Humes collected over the years. Some are well known—both the woman and the photograph. Others are literally unknown, including a woman identified only as “Mascot.” (Grrr.)
Humes presents the pictures twice. First she shows the photographs as full page images accompanied by a brief essay, in no particular order that I could discern, though given the thoughtfulness of the work as a whole I have no doubt there is an organizing principle. Then she arranges the photographs in chronological order as black and white thumbnail images, with the only woman in each image identified with a white circle. I found this version fascinating. It not only made it possible to go back and find the woman in the larger photos—something I found difficult to do in many of the pictures*—but it gave many of the women a prominence that they otherwise did not enjoy. (Maybe that’s two ways of saying the same thing now that I think about it.)
Humes sums up the impact of the photographs as a whole in the brief, provocative essay that accompanies them: “Against this wild variety of time, place, occupations and cultures is a repetitive counterpoint of sameness. The same ludicrous constellation of many men, one woman, over and over again.”
I’ve been dipping into the book for several months now, considering the stories and images that Humes shares. I’ve read her introductory essay several times. There are women I want to know more about and ideas that I want to think over.** (I’ve also come to the conclusion that if you are going to be the only woman in a photograph of formally dressed people arrayed in rows and facing the camera, you should wear a hat if you want to be seen: the biggest, wildest hat you can manage.)
It’s been an interesting counterpoint to the book I’m writing about a woman who was often the Only Woman in the Room, except when she wasn’t.
*Think a real life version of “Where’s Waldo?”
**Just so you know, some of those ideas and thoughts may well appear in my newsletter, which will resume publication once I turn in this book manuscript. (May 1 or bust!) You can subscribe here http://eepurl.com/dIft-b —May 1 is practically tomorrow.
* * *
Come back on Monday for 3 Questions and an Answer with Rebecca Grawl of A Tour of Her Own.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
Einav Rabinovitch-Fox is a modern U.S women’s and gender historian who teaches at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. Her research examines the connections between fashion, politics, and modernity, particularly the role of visual and material culture in social movements. Her recent book, Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism explores women’s political uses of clothing and appearance to promote feminist agendas during the long 20th century. Her writing has been published in academic journals and books including the Journal of Women’s History, the International Journal of Fashion Studies, American Journalism: Journal of Media History, as well as popular media such as The Washington Post, The Conversation, Public Seminar, and History News Network.
Take it away, Einav!
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 early to mid-twentieth century?
In a sense, the past is always a foreign country, and although we are less removed from the modern period, and are more familiar with it, I think some of the challenges remain. This is especially true when writing about women, as for so long, these histories were considered frivolous or not important, so I think that even when writing about women from the early to mid-twentieth century, there are still challenges in finding sources about them, or in finding sources that really center women’s voices and experiences. This is especially true with regards to women of color, working-class women, or other marginalized women, for whom there is still scarcity of sources.
Moreover, this sense of familiarity with the recent past can be deceiving. There is always the risk of interpreting things wrong or to draw conclusions based on our own experience and not necessarily on the experience of women in the past. Things have changed so dramatically in the life of women during the first decades of the twentieth century, that even for a woman living in the 1930s, the 1900s didn’t seem so liberating, not to mention for someone living in 2023. I always try to meet the women I write about where they are, to understand their world and how they were able to navigate it, and what challenges they had to overcome that maybe I don’t anymore.
Another thing to consider, especially when writing about more recent periods, is that the women I write about are perhaps still alive or have family members who are still alive. And while this is also true when writing about the distant past, I think that the real-life presence of women who lived in the recent past can bring more challenges to writing about them. I often feel I have more responsibility towards them to get the story right, but also to be more sensitive in how I tell their story. I also take into consideration what would be the repercussions of writing about personal or uncomfortable aspects of their lives. In that sense, it is the sense of familiarity that actually presents a challenge to distance yourself from the subjects of your writing.
Your work focuses on the way visual and material culture shapes and reflects class, race, and gender identities. What do we learn when we use images as more than just illustrations?
In a way, an image is just like any other historical source that can tell us something about the past. Especially when researching women’s history and other marginalized communities, what we often have is visual and material evidence, so it is actually a very important source to understand women’s history. Not many women left for us written records in the form of letters or diaries, but we can learn a lot about their everyday life and what they cherished and enjoyed from their dresses, embroidery, and small possessions.
Photographs, paintings, and illustrations contain a lot of information about the past, and so we need to learn to read them just like we read written sources. Material objects offer us even more information, as one can tell a lot when examining wear-and-tear of clothes, or use of other items. I think once we train ourselves to look at images more than just illustrations, but as historical sources, we can also begin to ask questions about them and discover that they can tell us a lot of things about the past.
What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?
Writing about fashion, I got to do research not only in archives but also in costume collections, which are archives made of dresses and other clothing articles and accessories. The most surprising thing about it is how different dresses look and feel like in real life, compared to an image or an illustration. Looking at an actual garment: How it is constructed, from what materials, as well as how much of it worn and torn, can tell you a lot not only about the piece itself, but oftentimes also about the person who wore it, as items that arrive to costume collections are almost never anonymous.
One of the most exciting finds are the times that you can match an actual dress to an image of the person who wore it, or a description of them wearing it and how they felt in this garment. Yet, exciting finds can also happen when you get to feel and touch the garment and understand better issues of comfort and proportions, something that often gets lost in images.
One example of that, which to me was very surprising, was when I got to see a bathing suit from the 1920s in one of the collections I visited, which was in Smith College. Bathing suits in the 1920s were quite revolutionary at the time, because they exposed women’s hips and shoulders and were very revealing of the body. It even caused some municipalities to try and ban them on the beaches as they were considered “inappropriate” and even “immoral.” Bathing suits were really the symbol of a feminist consciousness and liberation in the 1920s, so imagine my surprise when I got to touch it, and discover it was made from wool, maybe the last material I would like to go into the water dress in. Realizing that bathing suits were made of wool not only made me appreciate the invention of Latex, but also got me thinking differently about what comfort meant to the women who wore these suits and what made them so revolutionary, and how we today judge comfort.
Question from Einav: You write historical works for popular audiences, how do you make your audience care about women’s history? How do you show them that women’s history matters, that it is important?
When I was writing my dissertation, I had a day job that required me to work with a great many tradesmen, many of whom had doubts about taking instructions from me. (Probably all of them had doubts at the beginning. Some of them were simply more polite about it than others.) I changed their minds one guy and one project at a time.
In many ways, making readers care about women’s history is very similar. Other than this annual series of mini-interviews, I don’t try to make my audience care about women’s history in the abstract. Instead, I do my best to make them care about a particular woman or group of women or a specific story. Part of doing that is to make it clear why that story and that woman matter and how putting them back into the historical record makes our understanding of the past richer.
***
Interested in learning more about Einav Rabinovitch-Fox and her work?
Visit her website: www.einavrabinovitchfox.com
Follow her on twitter: @DrEinavRFox
***
Tomorrow it will be business as usual here on the Margins with a women’s-history- related blog post from me. (Subject to be determined.) But we’ve still got more people talking about women’s history from a lot of different angles next week. Don’t touch that dial!