Quick Summary
- First Oxford Handbook on Womenâs American History
- Publication is timely in election season and âMeTooâ era
Ellen Hartigan-OâConnor and Lisa Materson of the University of California, Davis, collaborators in research and teaching of womenâs and gender history for 10 years, were keenly aware of many fascinating stories about women in history, as uncovered by female historians.
But getting those stories into the big narratives of history was more than one or two people could accomplish.
Then Oxford University Press asked the °”TV scholars, both associate professors of history in the College of Letters and Science, to create a womenâs history handbook.
Oxford publishes definitive handbooks on hundreds of academic subjects, but none had been done on women in American history. So Hartigan-OâConnor and Materson took on the project, determined to showcase not only womenâs and gender history, but also the scholars whose intellectual innovation continues to bring womenâs stories to life.
The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History
- Ellen Hartigan-OâConnor and Lisa G. Materson, editors
In a process that included a conference at °”TV, Hartigan-OâConnor and Materson discussed, sought, collected and edited dozens of historiansâ essays on topics ranging from slavery to politics.
The resulting book came out in October: .
The essays illustrate the history of an entire continent through women and their ideas about gender: migration, colonialism, warfare, free and unfree labor, incarceration, sexuality, race, music, and wome in the work force, in politics and in motherhood. As the first sentence of the bookâs introduction proclaims: âHalf of the people who have lived in North America and the United States have been women.â
Materson and Hartigan-OâConnor introduce the volume of 29 essays by explaining that female historians in previous generations âtrained themselves and each other within university departments that were teaching history as defined and dominated by men ⊠and as a result pioneered alternative methodologies and perspectives.
âThis book continues their innovations, by presenting new chronologies, transnational themes, and the integration of histories about diverse womenâs lives with the history of ideas about gender and their consequences.â
Timely publication
From the time of their conference four years ago, Materson and Hartigan-OâConnor knew the handbook would be relevant in todayâs society. But they had no idea how timely its publication in the fall of 2018 would be â amid the #MeToo anti-sexual assault movement and during the run-up to the midterm elections in which women made historic gains.
Audio: Women and history, and the Shirelles singing group of the 1950s, â60s and â70s. In the book, the authors look at how women in various walks of life have been interpreted. Materson and Hartigan-OâConnor read an excerpt here.
âThe handbook appears at a time when Americans are interested in understanding more about women and gender,â Materson said in a recent interview. âThere is an urgency; itâs so important for people to learn U.S. womenâs and gender history. There is direct relevance to our contemporary world.â
The editors, seizing on the timing of publication, wrote an article for the after confirmation hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In Materson and Hartigan-OâConnor make the point that womenâs history is often written from archives that have critical gaps.
âThe archive is shaped by those who preserve it: Notes can be filed or shredded. Calendars can be preserved or tossed. And whispered confidences can go unrecorded,â they wrote.
âMultiple institutions control who gets to interpret.â
With their new work, Materson and Hartigan-OâConnor have even more well-researched articles to cite and assign in âWomen and Gender in America,â a two-quarter course on the period before 1865 and from 1865 to present.
UC authors throughout the book
Nine, or nearly a third of the essays, are penned by UC authors, including Lorena Oropeza, a °”TV history professor. Said Hartigan-OâConnor: âThis just shows the long-standing important role UC plays in training and hiring scholars of womenâs and gender history.â
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, professor and chair of Asian American studies at UC Irvine, said she was honored that the authors asked her to write an essay on some dimensions of the history of feminism. âThe essay allowed me to explore the political, economic and sexual dimensions of U.S. feminisms, exploring the significance as well as limitations of these movements and ideas by foregrounding the agency and experiences of women commonly considered marginal to the U.S. nation-state,â she said.
Sharon Block, a professor of history at UC Irvine, said the editors approached her with the idea of writing a history of sexual violence across all of American history. âThis gave me a wonderful opportunity to link my interests in combating modern-day sexual harassment to my historical knowledge. Especially in this Me Too era, itâs crucial for us to understand the ways that sexual violence and coercion grow out of intersecting racial, colonial and gendered power inequities across time and place.â
More audio: Materson and Hartigan-OâConnor read from their book.
Media Resources
Karen Nikos-Rose, News and Media Relations, °”TV, 530-219-5472, kmnikos@ucdavis.edu