Women

DC: This image of your mother will serve for us, however brusquely but not altogether illogically, as a transition point. When did you begin to become interested in women’s history?

NZD: Later in my career. Let me explain. When I was a student at Smith, I took marvelous courses in the Renaissance and Reformation and the English and French Revolutions. My professor, Leona Gabel, was a woman, like most of my Smith professors, but we did not talk about women in the courses. Maybe some of the Sforza women were mentioned when she lectured on the Italian Renaissance, but I have no memory of it.¹ Mary Ritter Beard’s Woman as a Force in History was published while I was an undergraduate, a pioneering work, and if I had read it then (and I don’t recall that I did), I would have thought “My, that’s interesting.”² But I would not have been disposed to follow up that subject ahead of my senior thesis on the radical Renaissance philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi.³

What was essential for me at that time was that I had a woman as a professor—not a scholarly topic or fancy methodology about women. I was at a women’s college where women were taken seriously as students; I had exceptional women as teachers; I could see the possibility of being a historian, of having a career.

Then while I was doing my doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, I took a seminar with a professor, Palmer Throop, toward whom I feel considerable gratitude—indeed, I feel it more now than I did at the time.⁴ Professor Throop had a sociological vision of history and he had us read Baldassar Castiglione’s Courtier side by side with Theodore Newcomb’s brand new text, Experimental Social Psychology.⁵ It was very fruitful, very avant-garde for a Renaissance history seminar in 1951. Throop suggested that I do my seminar paper on the amazing poet Christine de Pizan, whom I had never heard of until then. Reading her was a revelation. In my paper, I especially concentrated on her 1405 Cité des Dames [The Book of the City of Ladies], and her attitude toward herself as a woman writer and her demands for respect for women. I tried to do for her what I had done a year or so earlier in a paper on Guillaume Budé, written for a Harvard graduate seminar: connect her own precarious status with her thoughts and ways of writing about women. I entitled the paper something like “Christine de Pizan as a Prototype of the Professional Literary Woman.” But when Professor Throop suggested I write my doctoral dissertation on her, I bridled. I said to myself, “Not possible. He’s just asking me to write on a woman because I’m a woman.” By then I had discovered the printing workers of Lyon and the great questions of Karl Marx and Max Weber, and the life and writings of a woman in the world of kings and counts did not seem as important. I found her fascinating, but marginal to the big questions that interested me. I don’t at all regret the choice I made at that time, but twenty years later I could understand the significance of Christine de Pizan in a new way.

DC: What later led you to ask the question anew? What inspired you to take up female subjects again?

NZD: There was a conjuncture of personal, political, and intellectual experiences. I had married when I was nineteen, and had to figure out how to be a married woman and have a career at the same time. My women teachers at Smith were historians, but they weren’t married with families. And that was the case with most women with PhDs teaching in the 1950s in American universities: they lived with other women or perhaps had male lovers, but they were ordinarily not married; indeed, there was often prejudice against them if they were. Then, during the 1950s, while I was doing the research for my thesis, I had my three children. So now there was a huge organizational challenge, which my husband and I somehow met: Chandler gave me complete support from the start of my scholarly work and helped enormously with our children. Still, in the mostly male university world that I was trying to enter, I looked like a wife and a mother, while I considered myself a historian as well. In other words, I was in a situation that had some resemblance to that of the poet Christine de Pizan, who by the way had also been married and had a son; despite all the differences between the early fifteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, her question was becoming my question.

In the 1960s, I finally became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, where very few women were then teaching, even in the humanities, and where women graduate students were relatively small in number. With a group of women graduate students (including Louise Tilly⁶ and Germaine Warkentin⁷ and Alison Prentice,⁸ who went on to have spectacular careers), I organized a study of all the women we could locate who were combining doctoral study at UT with raising families. We asked them about their experiences as women at the University of Toronto and what suggestions they had for improving the situation. This may seem an obvious project now, but in 1965 to 1966, people thought it was daring. We mimeographed our report and gave it to some of the University of Toronto deans, who paid it no mind and dismissed the suggestion for a day-care center for the children of students as laughable. It took much turbulence at the University of Toronto before the center was finally set up. I tell this story as part of the background to the feminist movement that flowered on the University of Toronto campus at the end of the 1960s, as did the antiwar movement and the movement to restructure university life. I began to see the interconnection between issues concerning women and issues about other power structures. So much for my personal and political path to the study of women, but there was also an intellectual path.

DC: How were you gradually able to become involved in developing a form of history that, even though it didn’t offer or dispose of any special methodological tools, came to acquire the same standing as social or economic history?

NZD: As is so often the case in life, the persons one meets play a catalyzing role. Jill Ker Conway had come to the University of Toronto and by the late 1960s, we had become fast friends. An extraordinary and striking woman, Jill had grown up in Australia, had spent some years in England, and had come to Canada after completing her doctorate at Harvard. Her dissertation was on the first generation of American women to obtain doctorates, their experiences and their mentalities in the late years of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like me, she had chosen a country different from her own birthplace on which to do her research and a topic that represented a break with the standard historiography in her field. Through many conversations over lunch with Jill, I began to see how the history of women was linked to major issues of culture, social structure, and historical change. In the next few years, I started writing essays in the history of women, and Jill and I decided to teach a course together.

The first essay I wrote was on the Protestant women of Lyon in the sixteenth century. I had already written on the attraction of Protestantism to men in Lyon, especially in the printing industry and other artisanal trades. I asked myself, “Why not do the same thing for women?” I already had information on the wives of the Protestant men in all occupations in Lyon and on some well-known women. I went back to the archives to find women’s wills and other evidence—and rapidly made the same discovery that I had years before when people had claimed one couldn’t find anything about the lives of working people in the archives: that wasn’t true at all, there was loads of material on women if you looked widely. In fact, I loved the challenge of finding sources and I loved seeing where the women’s story paralleled or differed from that of the men.

The other essay I wrote in those first years concerned women as historical writers in late medieval and early modern Europe. Hardly anything was then known on this subject; scholars thought of women as poets and writers of romances and novels, but as unlikely producers of history books. And women faced many obstacles: they were not thought to have an appropriate voice for the grand themes of history, they couldn’t get ready access to the kinds of documents available to men of the law or diplomats who wrote historical accounts, and so on. So how did the women manage to write history, I wondered. It turned out that Christine de Pizan herself had been commissioned in 1404 to write a history of the life of King Charles V, whom her father had known from his days at court and whose former servants she could still interview. She scoured chronicles about his deeds just as she did for women for her City of Ladies, which she wrote not long after. Then in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you find examples of women writing histories of their husbands and families—a seemly topic for a good wife—but because they were married to major political actors, the histories widen out readily into histories of the events of their own time. The Protestant Charlotte Arbaleste⁹ accomplished this in her life of her husband Philippe du Plessis-Mornay,¹⁰ one of the most important figures of the French religious wars and a close associate of Henri IV.¹¹ And Margaret Lucas did the same in the Life of her husband William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, who was a Royalist general in the English Civil War.¹² By the eighteenth century, Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, a staunch republican, felt quite entitled to write a full-fledged and influential History of England and included a portrait of herself as Clio as its frontispiece.¹³ I collected information on many women historians on into the twentieth century, but decided to end the essay with Madame de Staël on the French Revolution.¹⁴ When it was finally published, I entitled it “Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers.”

DC: That’s a play on words that’s difficult to translate into French.

NZD: True—“gender” as the construction of sexual identity and “genre” as a literary typology are distinguished in English because we adopted your French genre into English. In concluding the essay, I commented on how different these women historical writers were—different in their politics, different in religion. But at some moment in their books, they all found a way to reflect on what it was to be a woman writing on a historical subject. And I, Natalie Davis, was doing the same thing in writing “Gender and Genre.” I even said so in the last paragraph.

DC: According to you, was it the fact that you highlighted in these women their own introspective search that enabled them to question themselves both as women and historians, that convinced you to do the same? Or rather was it you who earlier underwent this experience that you then transferred to your subjects of study? Don’t you believe that you sometimes allow yourself to become bewitched by your extraordinary, almost magical power as a historian thanks to this pleasure—which we’ve spoken about—in endowing persons from the past with your own role, your incredibly lively capacity to prompt self-searching?

NZD: No, I do not think I was projecting my own experience back on these women writers. For each case, I established the mental universe in which they wrote their historical texts, including what male readers expected from women writers. For each case, I found a text where the woman reflected on her status as a woman writing the kind of history she was writing. These women taught me, rather than the other way around.

Those years, the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s were a wonderful turning point for me, so many discoveries. I was doing social and literary history of women. It was also the moment when I was turning to anthropology; gender themes were part of my essays on charivari and the world-upside-down. That’s when I wrote “Women on Top.” And in 1971, Jill Conway and I gave our course at the University of Toronto on the history of women, one of the earliest in North America: I did the first half on early modern Europe and she continued with women in colonial America and the United States. We called the course Society and the Sexes and I kept the title in later years, when I taught the early modern section of the course on my own, first at Berkeley, then at Princeton.

DC: In your career as a teacher and researcher, weren’t these years of extreme intensity also the most important years?

NZD: I don’t know that they were the most important years—working on Martin Guerre, film and book, was another turning point for me—but it was an amazing time. Oh, the excitement around the history of women—at Toronto, at Berkeley, in New York, across North America. We were all rushing around to find primary sources. I fished out all my notes on Christine de Pizan and opened my course with the City of Ladies. There was not a paperback of the book then, so I made copies for my students from the Renaissance English translation. I haunted rare book rooms, including medical rare book libraries, legal collections, and collections of religious books and sermons. I developed a bibliography of primary and secondary sources on women in western Europe—especially in France and England—mimeographed it, and sent it by mail to anyone who asked for it. We also circulated our course syllabus for Society and the Sexes. I was able to assign Glikl’s Autobiography from the beginning, because it did exist in English translation, and I helped get word of her to many others beyond the Yiddish specialists to whom she was then known.¹⁵ Other people were doing similar searching for their fields and were spreading word of their discoveries. I’ll never forget the meeting of the second Berkshire Conference on the History of Women held at Radcliffe in 1974: a few hundred people were expected, well over a thousand attended, women and men as well.¹⁶

DC: Female students must have certainly been quite attracted to your course at Berkeley, but what about male students?

NZD: There were always some men who took the courses, but they were a minority—although a very smart and imaginative minority. Still we always regretted that there weren’t more men, because from the beginning, Jill and I and younger colleagues like Joan Scott¹⁷ and Louise Tilly saw the history of women as a history of relations between men and women and the social and economic significance of these relations; a history of what it was to be a man as well as of what it was to be a women—these can’t be separated, they’re bound together in the same story.

Let me elaborate. The first task was simply “to put women into history”—facts about their activities, their roles, their attitudes in all features of life at a given period: family, sexuality, economy, religion, political life…For me, it was expanding the kind of work I’d done for workers and artisans. The second associated task was to think about this evidence in a relational way, to see women in relation to other women and in relation to men, to sort women out by class and religious status and education—by ethnicity and color and country, when these were part of the picture. The third associated task was the most challenging: what was the gender system at a given period? What was its significance for other systems of power and exchange at the time? What consequences did it have for historical change? By “gender system,” I’m thinking not only of the patterns of social and political relations in which men and women were involved with each other, as expected by their gender, but also of the symbolic systems defining the “masculine” and the “feminine” at a given period. These symbolic systems had meanings of their own in cultural life, quite apart from what role they played in shaping the activities and relations of men and women.

Such were the questions we were working on in the 1970s and afterward. It was very lively and there was much fruitful debate. Some scholars wanted to stress the history of women, and tended to see “women” as the grouping of importance in a given society; other scholars—and I was one of them—preferred the history of gender as the central concept, since it stressed the relationality of the idea of “men” and “women,” the changing historical definitions of the categories “man” and “woman,” and allowed a wider range of possibilities for description. We usually ended up, as in our program at Princeton and at many other places, with putting both “women” and “gender” in the title. Another debate was about which kind of social system “was good for the women”: did women have more power in aristocratic regimes or were they in a better position in republican contractual regimes? This debate ended up with important insights into the gender features of both regimes, of limits and possibilities for women in both settings, and into the gendered elements in eighteenth and nineteenth-century notions of citizenship. The same thing is true of Catholic and Protestant societies, as I mentioned earlier: you look at the possibilities and limits in both settings and how they work out in practice.

DC: It’s a very empirical domain, as I can gather from listening to you.

NZD: Empirical certainly, but important also for advancing our understanding of historical structures and historical change. For example, nowadays it is no longer possible to understand the establishment of sovereign power during the early modern period in Europe without taking into consideration royal policy toward families and the attitude of families toward the state; without noting the diverse roles of women in the political sphere, from grain rioters to queens; and without examining the implications of gender symbolism and prescriptions in the law, political writings, and public festivities. It is no longer possible to analyze economic transformations in the early modern period without looking at the different positions women had in the production, distribution, and consumption of objects and services, and the ways in which women were represented in the debates and policies concerning luxury and poverty. As for the religious transformations of the early modern period, including the religious aspects of European expansion, the role of women and the importance of the issues of sexuality, gender definitions, and marriage have been demonstrated in many studies.

DC: If we were to characterize your position, could we say that the history of women definitely has its own dialectic, its own particular way to ask questions, its own claims to disciplinary autonomy, even though at the same time it shouldn’t be seen in isolation, that it should instead be fully considered a way to understand the whole of history better, an analytical tool just as useful as labor history or cultural history? That doesn’t mean we need to declare that gender history has a political aspect that pits moderates against radicals. But, to put it more concisely, haven’t you conceived of it, beyond its obvious ties with personal experiences and family memories, as a tool that always opens up more room to pursue this pleasure or this feeling about the mysteries of the past that we touched upon at the beginning of our conversation? Perhaps it’s even a means of conducting a form of self-analysis that otherwise you wouldn’t dare to broach?

NZD: “Disciplinary autonomy” would be too strong a term for me. I don’t think of the history of women and gender as a separate discipline any more than I do the history of the Jews or the history of Christianity or peasant history or urban history. These subjects are all part of the historian’s inquiry (which, to me, can draw on several disciplines). But yes, there are a distinctive set of questions, perspectives, and modes of analysis that one draws upon while concentrating on women and gender. And yes, these must always be linked to other features of the historical landscape and period, both to describe them better—and I’ve just given you some examples of that—and to be enriched and renewed by them. It’s a two-way process: the history of women contributes to history more generally, and questions generated elsewhere should modify the formulations regarding sameness and difference that overdetermine too much of women’s history.

As for your second question, I don’t see my inquiries about women and gender relations in the past as a form of self-analysis. Insights from the past can always turn out to have relevance to our own persons, but I experience this study as an expansion beyond myself, sometimes having a familiar ring, but often going beyond anything I’ve ever known or suspected. And I’ve found the study of gender a great enhancement of pleasure, as you suggest: the persons I’ve learned about, the books I’ve been led to, the conversations with students—just fascinating over the years. Right now I’m on the trail of two slave women in eighteenth-century Suriname, trying desperately to understand them, to find a way to catch their voices and hopes…

DC: The women you’ve studied are women who have found a certain measure of happiness in their lives, even if they knew, like Maria Sibylla Merian, that catastrophes lay on the horizon. But they created a relative kind of happiness in what might be called symbolic strategies—strategies involved in their writings, in their work, in their religious activism, in their collections of insect drawings, and so on. A sense of happiness or rather equilibrium that differs from men’s and accepted social mores. It’s a very optimistic history, which suits you well, I believe, because a woman sees you recognize in her a capacity to circumvent the selfish world of politically dominant men, to cast off their supposed fragility. In that way, history as you write it is never taken in a single sense or as immediately obvious. But don’t you believe that this optimism can lead you astray?

NZD: I’d much prefer to use the word “fulfillment” or “satisfaction” for the women I write about rather than “happiness,” and for myself “a history of hope” rather than “optimistic history.” I have always shied away from constructing women as mere victims or as remarkable heroines—though sometimes a life is marked by intense suffering or admirable courage. The people I research and write about, women and men both, more often follow a middle path of trying to cope, of trying to manage somehow in difficult situations that come along. I’m struck by their ingenuity, the craft by which they respond to challenges, obstacles, hardships—by their talent for improvising, their resourcefulness. I am struck by human resilience and want to understand its sources. With Maria Sibylla Merian, you have unusual gifts—she was a fine artist and naturalist—but she also used housewifely ingenuity to observe the metamorphoses of insects in her kitchen when she was cut off from the universities and academies of men. With Bertrande de Rols, the wife of Martin Guerre, you have an ordinary peasant woman, who, abandoned by her husband, used all the craft she had to fashion a marriage with a substitute, Arnaud du Tilh, and then to try to hold on to her honor and still save Arnaud when he was attacked as an impostor. Her situation was unusual, but her resourcefulness was nourished by the forms of behavior she learned from village women. Olwen Hufton described the improvisation of rural women in eighteenth-century France, their skillful patching together of ways to survive—I really loved that book.¹⁸ I found the same pattern in writing on women in the crafts in sixteenth-century Lyon, and now I’m noting how the slave women in Suriname have diverse strategies to make life tolerable for themselves and their children.

Memoirs from the Holocaust or the Gulag are filled with the same varieties of craft, improvisation, and resourcefulness, some of it put to horrendous and murderous ends, some of it for personal survival at the expense of or indifferent to others, some of it carrying the best of human qualities. Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz has it all—the book is an exploration of what it is to be human—but etched on my memory is the moment when Primo Levi recites the canto of Ulysses from Dante’s Divine Comedy to a young Alsatian student, translating it into French for him as they carry their hundred-pound water buckets on poles.¹⁹ He wants him to understand it now, for tomorrow they may be dead.

Historians have different goals in regard to the past, but my wish is to save or preserve people—women and men—from obscurity, from the hidden, and give some dignity or sense to their lives, even when they end tragically. This is part of what you might call a “mission” [laughter] to write a history of hope.

DC: The term “mission” leads us to the idea of history as a wondrous world made to seem real by virtue of the historian’s magical powers, but also as a form of engagement, of duty. I would like to ask you if, especially in the history of women, you haven’t had the feeling you’ve crossed a threshold, certainly already latent in your earlier work, by which you conceive of history as a way to fulfill an ethical duty. I don’t want to allude to a “moral” problem in the trivial sense of the term, but in an ethical sense where, through several characters chosen from amongst those offered up by history, you again endow with life a society of women who could not speak or write except within limits, who might have been unhappy, oppressed, and to whom you give an identity…An ethical duty to the extent that, for you, these reconstructed lives of women, sometimes difficult, cramped, suffocating, overly active, or intensely devoted to service or other persons, become worthy indicators of a hope that never dies. If we wanted to sum up your thoughts, it would be that, in human history, nothing is completely blocked or foreclosed, that there exist cracks in every system, even the most coercive ones, through which freedom can find its own expressions.

NZD: Yes, I do think there are cracks or possibilities in systems, but I’d add that it’s human cleverness that sees them and human resourcefulness that finds a way to take advantage of them. And of course, some systems have considerable flexibility.

I’d like to give an example of how I experience that “mission” that I spoke of. When I write of Marguerite de Navarre, I always enjoy it: her Heptameron has taught me much, and I’ve used stories from it to advance important arguments in my books on pardon tales and on gifts.²⁰ She’s one of the sixteenth-century observers I run things by, as I said earlier. But Marguerite de Navarre does not need me; many other fine historians and literary scholars have written about her and will continue to do so.

In contrast, I felt a woman like Glikl Hamel “needed” me, especially in 1970, when I started reading her. By now, other people have written splendidly on her—Chava Turniansky²¹ and Gabriele Jancke²²—but thirty years ago the one edition of her Yiddish autobiography was inaccessible to most people, and it was known primarily through a 1913 German translation by a male scholar, Alfred Feilchenfeld, who had mutilated Glikl’s memoirs.²³ In fact, an acceptable German translation already existed, made by the remarkable social worker Bertha Pappenheim,²⁴ but it had been circulated in a limited edition and was dismissed by the learned Feilchenfeld, who could win the interest of publishers for his translation. He showed little respect for Glikl and the intricate literary ordering of the text she had worked over so many years. He changed the order of her life all around to suit himself and omitted the folktales that she had carefully inserted at critical points in her narrative. For him, the stories interrupted the text, and were an embarrassing expression of backward Yiddishkeit; he thought the book useful simply as an antecedent of the prosperous German-Jewish bourgeoisie. What an idea! What a way to treat Glikl and her book. (I should add that the main English edition circulating over the years I taught Glikl was drawn from this Feilchenfeld mutilation; fortunately, a woman translator had salvaged the text somewhat in another edition I could have my students read. We still need a good critical edition in English.)

DC: Everything for you seems to go back to a feeling of injustice and the desire to redress it in terms of historical memory…

NZD: I wanted to give Glikl her due, to give her back to herself. And it was a fascinating project from an intellectual point of view. I enjoyed the search for the origin of all the stories she told, and figuring out where she could have found them. It was a way to understand her mental universe and the world of print and books around a seventeenth-century Jewish woman. And I enjoyed trying to figure out why she placed the stories where she did in the course of recounting her life: they were a way of commenting on her experience and posing moral questions to her children and herself—I called it “arguing with God,” an old Jewish tradition.

I also felt complicity or solidarity with Glikl’s first translator, Bertha Pappenheim, who lived on to the early years of the Hitler regime. She had been one of the first patients of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, who had treated her for hysteria. There are three faces to Bertha Pappenheim. There’s the clinical, hysterical Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O in the early Breuer-Freud writings. There’s Bertha Pappenheim the social worker, reformer, and feminist in Frankfurt, especially attentive to issues concerning Jewish women. And there’s Bertha Pappenheim the writer and storyteller, who had begun with a translation into German of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, had gone on to translate Yiddish tales into German, and then turned to Glikl’s book.²⁵ She herself was descended from one of Glikl’s in-laws, but that wasn’t the important thing. She saw in Glikl’s active life and stories a model and a message to transmit to the Jewish women of her day.

DC: Don’t you believe that, in this context, we should replace this idea of history as devoted to “human science” [science humaine] with an approach informed by this ethical regard you have for other people, an approach that would be the story about or study of human differences? Don’t the various methods of studying humanity, as opposed to the social sciences with all their assumptions, still remain sterile because of the underlying modernist premise that people, in all their anthropological diversity, are still basically the same when it comes to the ways they act and think, albeit in anonymity? When reading or listening to you, we sense that you’re seeking out the Other, with the aim to recognize and restore what makes every individual unique, less perhaps for them personally than for all the other men and women like them who have lived in the world.

NZD: I like your formulation about seeking the difference and distinctiveness of people in the past, and your comment about finding a link among them that’s more meaningful than an abstract anonymous universality. We tend to say “humanities” rather than “human sciences” in English, and I don’t want to get bogged down in a discussion of whether history is a science. But I do want to hold on to the knowledge and distance suggested by the word “science,” which must always be in tension with the interpretive and imaginative movements of the historian’s self.

DC: We return at our peril to the question of subjectivity. I would be more radical than you in asserting that I understand mutual sympathy not as some kind of process of emotional osmosis but rather as a tension in the very formation of an identity, however incomplete, through exchange with written documents. This doesn’t mean we need to buy into the personal mythos of the self, but rather to be open to a kind of inverse introspection in which messages inherited from the past become realized by the self. This doesn’t signify negating the irreducible distance between the past, with all its own words and signs, and the present, but that rather this distance conceals in its depths and by necessity the strange otherness of the subject of research. In other words, our encounter with the past goes in both directions because the past is nothing but a shared memory. After all, we only know the past by what’s remembered or written by someone connected to the past. Indeed, a portion of the past actually lies dormant in the recesses of the historian’s mind, ready to be awakened through the rigors of research.

Let’s all admit there’s no pure history, but instead it only arises through personal experience. It thus becomes a form of self-delusion, conscious or not, on the historian’s part. Consequently, once we’ve identified and designated the relevant “real” sources, it’s mistaken to oppose objectivity to subjectivity, history to historicizing, rationality to fantasy, and fiction to truth. Can’t the historian dream, if only for a brief while, of intermixing, reintroducing, and reshaping some part of this strangeness of the past and those who live in it? Isn’t the past always prologue to the future, with infinite possibilities that all virtually coexist until one of them finally takes shape in the historian’s mind, giving us at least the illusion that the historian can penetrate individual as well as collective imaginations from the past?

NZD: Yes and no. The historian seeks to find and communicate the strangeness and the familiar in the past. In doing so, she may end up with a new understanding of the strange and the familiar both. For me, “subjectivity” isn’t just a philosophical question—though the history of that term, currently being explored by Lorraine Daston²⁶ and Peter Galison,²⁷ is very interesting—subjectivity is also a daily practice. I want to push my research as far as I can in order to discover and understand the mental and affective worlds of persons and communities of the past. In approaching the traces and texts that they’ve left me, I’m simultaneously helped and constrained by my own subjectivity and abilities. I want to hold on to that tension. The historian’s work finally goes on in her head, but I want to always remember the existence outside of me of those traces from people of the past. I want to be a storyteller, not a cannibal.

DC: If you were to define present prospects for the history of women, which would you consider the most important?

NZD: Thinking now of the United States and Canada, I would want to distinguish between undergraduate programs and advanced research and graduate teaching. On the undergraduate level, there is a continuing need for the classic introductory history-of-women courses, enriched by comparative material drawn from non-Western countries and other new materials. In our big cities, many of our students have been born into immigrant families or have themselves been born abroad. Most of them have attended high schools where themes on the history of women have a scant place in the curriculum. For women undergraduates, these courses are really important. The students attend them in large numbers; they enjoy them and get perspectives helpful for other courses and their own lives.

For advanced research and graduate teaching, I think it’s important to prevent ghettoization. When we started programs or departments in the history of women and gender, the idea always was that they would have porous boundaries and be in close dialogue with different disciplines. When that’s not present, there’s the danger of recycling the same set of questions and theories, and getting predictable answers. The study of gender groups routinely opens with locating the women and locating the men and asking about likeness and difference. Superb books have emerged from this approach, some of them models for the comparative study of other groups (like ethnicities) as well. But new directions are opened when the gender axis, the axis male/female, is not the central issue at the beginning: you start with an important issue of another kind and gender can show up in a fresh way, along with other findings.

I urge my own students interested in women in history to vary their themes, sometimes focusing around a gender question, other times on something quite different—but keeping their eyes open for places where male/female matters enter into the story. And I’ve certainly found this in my own work. I centered Women on the Margins around gender, and hoped it would also be useful in thinking about margins more generally. With Pardon Tales and The Gift, I started with another theme, and was delighted by the moments when contrasts between the practices or sensibilities of sixteenth-century men and women suddenly emerged.

DC: But hasn’t there been a movement among historians of women, especially in North America, to ask new kinds of questions?

NZD: Of the first generation of historians of women in North America, some of them have redirected their interest toward the history of the colonies, postcolonial studies, the history of ethnicities and immigration. The more classic histories of women have been sustained, both by younger scholars and by some of the pioneers as well. But some of the most interesting insights into questions of power and difference have emerged from postcolonial studies.

DC: And slavery?

NZD: Slavery has been one of the most important areas of scholarship in the last twenty years, and matters of gender and sexuality have been cast in a new light in that context. And while we’re talking of the recentering of historical inquiry, we should not forget all the writing on the history of sexuality, especially gay and lesbian sexuality—by now, I should say the history of sexualities. In North America, one talks of “queer theory.” Is this discussed in France?

DC: Yes, but they haven’t met with the same startling enthusiasm that greeted them in the United States, or at least not yet. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I won’t say.

NZD: Queer theory takes French post-structuralism and deconstruction as important ancestors, so it should have French echoes! Queer theory goes well beyond earlier approaches to the history of sexuality, in which sexual practices and identities were thought of as partly constructed over time and related to different historical milieux. The main debates in the 1970s and 1980s concerned the amount of construction: how much input was there from biology? Was there an identifiable current of, say, homoerotic culture in the West from antiquity on? But whatever the fluidity in sexual practices and identities, the binary of heterosexuality/homosexuality was the main frame.

Queer theory effaces that binary. It argues for no “natural” or biologically determined sexuality. One’s DNA has no necessary consequences for one’s identity or one’s sexual preference or practices. I’m not sure how psychoanalytic theory plays into queer theory, but you can see that it argues for particularity and particular choices. To me, it seems a reaction in gay studies to the kind of routine repeating of questions and approaches that I mentioned as a danger in the history of women and gender. In that sense, queer theory has cleared the air and challenged historiographical categories, and it has prompted some interesting writing in philosophical and literary criticism. But it’s hard to see how its radical and individualist particularity can be a practical guide to historians, who really do need to look at the play of culture and social experience in defining possibilities in a particular period. And some recent work by geneticists and specialists on infant physiology is showing a whole new way to think of the nature/nurture binary—much more porousness and interchange between genetic codes and life experience than believed before.

DC: I would like to ask you the following question: In France, despite the big projects to which you’ve contributed, such as the Histoire des femmes, directed by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, there doesn’t exist as strong a commitment to the history of women, perhaps because of certain methodological shortcomings.²⁸ Take, for example, the awkward translation of “gender” as genre. There have been noteworthy works for sure, but—perhaps because French university life has been and remains more or less secretly misogynistic—there still hasn’t been a truly original work, properly speaking, for the early modern period. We could cite Éliane Viennot’s book, but it remains very much a classic in the sense you spoke of earlier, because it treated Queen Margot…

NZD: A very good book!

DC: Certainly, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s a work of a historian of literature. Tell me precisely what you see it contributes, if anything, in terms of methodology.

NZD: Methodological shortcomings of the history of women? I don’t think that’s the issue in France, for there are, as I’ve just tried to suggest, several ways in which the history of women and gender can be practiced. I think it has more to do with the different settings in the two countries. In France, the first wave of feminist criticism after World War II was dominated by literary and philosophical thinkers—Simone de Beauvoir²⁹ first, then Luce Irigary³⁰ and Hélène Cixous³¹ (Julia Kristeva³² in the next generation). Beauvoir had a historical chapter in her Second Sex, but it was just one long refrain of women’s subordination. In the United States, the first wave was less infused with high literary/philosophical theory. (The contrast between Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique of 1963³³ and Beauvoir’s Second Sex of 1949 is fascinating, and is not just a matter of generation.) Important though the French school was, there was more space open in the U.S. for pioneering critical thought in other fields. A second difference was the greater commitment in France to the primacy of social class as the exclusive category of analysis, and the sense that categories like “women” and “men” were just a diversion. I felt that this was the issue in the reluctant and tardy interest of some of my Annales friends in the study of gender. Resistance to the history of women and gender in the United States existed, but it was less likely to hinge on that, partly because “class” had fallen into disrepute as a mainstream term during the cold war (“social stratification” was preferred). The main quarrels I recall on that subject were among us on the left: there was a famous debate in Paris, where Joan Scott, Louise Tilly, and I took on Edward P. Thompson—we wanted gender to be part of the story along with class, and we felt we won the day.³⁴

Another contrast is in the more decentralized structure of American universities compared to France. In France, decisions about curriculum and examination subjects were made by central bodies. In the United States, it was easier to get courses and research projects going in universities, and skeptical colleagues had the chance to see what the possibilities were for gender history.

In any case, one of the most exciting places intellectually in France that I knew during the 1970s was the seminar—we might even call it the “salon”—that Michelle Perrot organized at Jussieu for historians and other scholars to talk about research methods and topics concerning women.³⁵ I used to attend whenever I was in Paris, and marvel at Michelle’s role of leadership, great historian as she was of the working class in the nineteenth century. Out of this ferment was born a whole network of historians of women and gender. Michelle Perrot and Georges Duby drew together the team that did the collective volumes of A History of Women in the West, published in several languages. A periodical was founded, Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés, now in its fourteenth year, which includes outstanding historians such as Christiane Klapisch-Zuber and Gabrielle Houbre³⁶ on its board of editors. And as for innovative writings and methodologies in the late medieval and early modern period, you can hardly do better than Klapisch-Zuber’s books and essays on family, kinship, and wives in late medieval Florence and Arlette Farge’s studies of women as part of the world of protest, public expression, and criminality in eighteenth-century Paris.³⁷ Éliane Viennot is in some ways the Michelle Perrot of her generation, as she’s been the leading figure in founding the new International Society for the Study of Women of the Old Regime (SIEFAR in French), which has an enthusiastic following. Every week my email brings news from SIEFAR of activities and publications.³⁸ And what’s interesting about Éliane Viennot’s study of Queen Margot is not just the queen’s life and career within the political universe of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, it’s her long study of the myth of the Queen Margot.

DC: France, whatever else it might be, has never succeeded in becoming fully attuned to American research approaches to the history of women. There don’t exist, as far as I know, in the great Parisian universities any professorial chairs in the history of women.

NZD: American research approaches are not the relevant criterion. It would be helpful to have a chair or two in France focused on the study of women and gender, and maybe that will come in the not-too-distant future. But the more important thing is that the history of gender became part of the teaching of history more generally. And that’s happening. Catherine Coquéry-Vidrovitch,³⁹ celebrated Africanist in France and worldwide, has published on les Africaines, African women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and her work has been snapped up for use by others. At the Collège de France⁴⁰ itself, there are scholars working on themes central to the study of women and gender: the anthropologist Françoise Héritier⁴¹ in her explications of kinship and Mireille Delmas-Marty⁴² in her reflections on gender relations in her courses on law. And long since, Georges Duby was teaching there on medieval marriage (I wrote the introduction to his wonderful book on the subject, when it appeared in English),⁴³ and Michel Foucault on the history of sexuality, while more recently Daniel Roche⁴⁴ included women in his fascinating research on the history of clothing. So themes on women have penetrated the august halls of the Collège de France. Much more could be done on masculinity, the other part of the story, but maybe that requires more daring.