Via Book Riot, where Derek Attig reminds us that “In a very real way, the Fourth of July is a huge, national holiday celebrating a piece of paper and a scribble of ink. Yes, the celebration is for what that paper and that ink did—ideologically and politically, if not practically or militarily, separate the colonies from Britain—but it’s still, at heart, a celebration of paper and ink.”
Attig carries on the revolutionary spirit by listing four revisionist looks at the American Revolution:
The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History by Jill Lepore
“The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro,” by Frederick Douglass
The Coquette by Hanna Webster Foster
I was pleased to see that Attig included two books by female authors and one by an African American author. This led me to think of other ideas for Independence Day reading about women’s history.
Of course, I immediately came up with the two books I was assigned 
in my graduate women’s history seminar, taught by Mary Beth Norton at Cornell University (right). Naturally, Norton assigned her own book, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. She paired this with Linda Kerber’s Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. It was interesting to see how two books on the same topic could take such different approaches. It was also great to hear about how Norton met Kerber in an archive while doing research in the same topic.
Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in graduate school, and my field is 20th-century history, so I went to Google books to find what else had been published since the 1980s. My first hits were not recent books,
but two from the 1840s that I had never seen before: Women of the American Revolution and Domestic History of the American Revolution by Elizabeth Ellet (right). These were published in the mid-nineteenth century as part of Applewood’s Series on the American Revolution.
In her book Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence, Carol Berkin describes how Ellet’s work, and that of other “amateur” historians, were forgotten in the late nineteenth century. By the 1880s, Berkin argues, “the writing of history had become a profession rather than a hobby or passion, and it required credentials few women could attain. The new professional historians turned their attention to the great men and formal politics, to generals and diplomats, to public figures and political institutions. The canvas they painted was too grand to include the small heroisms that Ellet had so carefully portrayed, and thus it was that a gendered amnesia befell the study of the nation’s war for independence.” Nevertheless, “amateur” local historians and antiquarians created an “Ellet underground” that kept her work alive. According to Berkin, “Women may have been absent from the formal narratives of the Revolution, but their stories were preserved.”
During the 1970s, as Title IX fully opened the doors of higher education to women, universities began producing female Ph.Ds in history, and many of these newly-minted scholars became historians of women. As Berkin writes, “They set about the task of reconstructing women’s experiences, confident that since Clio, the muse of history, was a woman, she would watch over her own kind. By the 1980s, the painstaking but often exhilarating task of restoring women to the canvas of American history had begun to reap rewards.”
Yet these historians also emulated the professional snobbery of their male counterparts. They still considered Ellet a “mere” amateur. Moreover, because Ellet didn’t use women’s experiences during the Revolutionary war to advance women’s rights (i.e. she wasn’t a feminist or even a proto-feminist), her work wasn’t considered worthy of serious attention. Ellet’s books were aimed at a popular audience. During graduate school, I learned that these books were not “scholarly” and therefore should be avoided except perhaps for gathering basic biographical details.
Ellet’s books are worth reconsidering for two reasons: first, it’s remarkable that a mid-nineteenth-century publisher found the subject of women’s history worthy of inclusion in a series on the American Revolution (although Ellet’s books only included white women). Second, although Ellet was not a “professional” historian (in fact, the academic field of history didn’t exist yet), she used the same historical methods that today’s professional historians consider to be essential to solid historical scholarship. In order to get as complete a history as possible, Ellet looked for private, unpublished letters and diaries; and interviewed descendants of Revolutionary-era women. She was the first historian of the American revolution to engage in such methodical research. So much for the difference between “amateurs” and “professionals”! Perhaps Ellet should be considered the “mother” of women’s history? Just a thought.
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— Naturally, Norton assigned her own book, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. —
“Naturally”? Mary Beth has told me that she earned a summer home from her Am Hist textbook, but teaching from one’s own work is surely a bad habit. It needs a bold set of students to challenge the author of the set text, though this habit is all too common in survey courses.
Friends in the UK have taught subjects as senior seminars until their book was published, and then stopped, starting a new area of teaching, related to the next book.
When I was teaching such subjects as the history of witchcraft or of women, for example, I would avoid topics on which I had written, although students saw references in the footnotes, and I would only allow the very strongest to write on related topics. Teaching the history of medicine to seniors, I avoided my own period of research. Teaching the history of science to grad students, I avoided medicine. Rarely, to show young students how to gut and criticize an article, I would tear one of mine to pieces, referring to the author in the third person. More generally, I told all my classes that there were no Brownie points for telling me what I already knew.
Why teach, if one does not want to learn from the students? The best moments in a class are surely when one cannot immediately answer a question.
There were no “professional historians” in the mid-19th century. Those who tried to introduce the close study of primary documents, at Manchester and Oxford in the late 19th century, were regarded with horror. Until Trevelyn at Cambridge and Powicke at Cambridge, the Regius Professors are largely forgotten for their historical work, although the Cambridge holders Thomas Gray, Charles Kingsley James Stephen, and Lord Acton are remembered for other reasons.
Ranke’s creation of professional history, as Professor at Berlin from 1834 to 1871, was a positivist history of the state, using the tools of diplomatic and palaeography. This eventually became the standard everywhere. The rich social history of the “Life and Letters” genre, mainly composed by women, was excluded. So too such writers as Michelet and Burckhardt.
Thucydides, supposedly objective and scientific, was the model in the 19th century, not the more ethnographic Herodotus. This waned slowly, and has yet to vanish. For all his sympathy for the lower classes, Trevelyan’s important “English Social History” (1942, 1944) was conceived as “history with the politics left out,” a tendency that remained throughout the 1970s, especially in the US, as Geoff Eley and others noted.
For the exclusion of (mainly European) women, see the very readable book by Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (1998).
Also, implicitly, Peter Novick, “That Noble Dream:The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession” (1988), a book that barely mentions women, except to notice their disappearance from the profession after WW2. Schlesinger and Barnes might call for the study of women, but this was not the route to posts in research universities. The obligatory search for token women’s historians and token African-Americans opened up the academy to previously excluded subjects, even where they remained marginal.
Thanks for your comments, David. The course I took with Mary Beth was a graduate seminar on women’s history in the U.S. I thought it was very useful to hear about how she researched the book. This was in the mid-1980s when women’s history was still trying to establish itself as a “legitimate” area of scholarship, so it was also very helpful to hear about how she was able to find a publisher. Pairing her book with Kerber’s showed us how historians can use the same resources very differently.