A noted Roman historian, when approached in the early 1970s by a group of women students requesting a course in women’s history, is said to have replied, “Why not dogs’ history?” That women, like dogs, are somehow outside history, doing nothing that could make a mark on the historical record, may perhaps, thirty years later, not seem so evident. Like men, women do things; we might think of “things done” as “facts” - what facta means in Latin. As E. H. Carr suggests (1961: 10-11), no fact begins as historical; facts acquire historicity by being pulled into the historical canon by historians. As for the question of whether, or how nearly, we can know any fact - the crux of postmodern theory in history - that is beside the point here. If all we can know is discourse - things written and made, records - the question is, can we turn our attention to discourse that concerns women? The desire to do so has depended on a change in the group here denoted by “we.”
The story of women’s history is then, to begin with, the story of historians of women. What made writing women’s history desirable, hence possible? Some women have always been noticed; even Carr, who largely ignores women, finds room for Cleopatra. What might be called “queens’ history” has a niche in the history of elite men, along with the exemplary women (Artemisia, Lucretia, Beruria, Mary) handed down to the Renaissance from antiquity. But only with the rising of the women, in the two waves of modern feminism, have women as a class been written into the historical record.
Jane Austen famously quipped, through the innocent mouth of Catherine Morland,
I read [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.
(Northanger Abbey., chap. 14)
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
Part of this passage indeed stands as the epigraph to Carr’s What Is History?; he leaves out everything before the last “I,” choosing to focus on the invention and not the skew. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), points out the constraints of family life and economics that kept most women out of the public record and from writing themselves. The second wave of feminism, springing out of the New Left in the late 1960s, soon took notice that half humankind is female and argued that a true history of the human world would reflect that fact; an early history of women in Europe was titled Becoming Visible (Bridenthal and Koonz 1977). The Berkshire Conference, a first-wave project that brought together women historians in the 1920s, was reinvented as a conference of women’s historians, starting in 1975 (J. Scott 2002: 1). From the beginning, these projects included attention to women in the ancient Mediterranean.
This movement was partly enabled by developments in the field of history itself, as the Annales school turned historians’ attention to “history from below,” and Marxist historians wrote of the laboring classes (S. Clark 1985; G. Turner 1990: 38-77). “Women in antiquity” became a recognized subfield of classics in the 1980s, as has been charted by Barbara McManus (1997). The publication of Sarah Pomeroy’s textbook Goddesses, Whores., Wives, and Slaves in 1975 can be taken as an important starting point. However, although Pomeroy, as a papyrologist, paid substantial attention to social history in this book, the field at first was dominated by attention to women in literary texts - to representations of women, or to stereotypes of women, rather than to actual women of whom we have direct evidence. The nature of classical training meant that most scholars in the field began from the “reading list” - the literary texts canonized by the set list for graduate qualifying exams; scholars trained in history departments were swimming against this tide.
This early start in literature, however, perhaps allowed historians of ancient women to confront at an early period the question of what can be direct about evidence, never mind evidence removed from us by two thousand years and more. We suffer from a dearth of first-person texts - diaries, letters, memoirs - and must view most accounts of women with suspicion, most literary characters as, to some degree, stereotypes. Still, by 1985, at a famous session of the Women’s Classical Caucus at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association, panelists who advocated reclaiming ancient poets (in this case, Ovid) as proto-feminists were confronted by women historians who argued that the proper occupation for feminists in classics was “counting the steps to the fountain house,” not reading poetry at all. In other words, except for our few instances of texts by women, we should be working on recovering the realities of everyday existence for the majority of ancient women (Culham 1990, with responses in the same issue of Helios). This project impelled historians of ancient women into the study of papyri, inscriptions, and material culture, though none of these in fact yields direct access to anything; yet, arguably, they get closer than any literary text can do. But we still need contemporary texts - histories, laws, ethnographies - to provide context.
The problems of writing women’s history partake of the general problem of the sources extant from antiquity: the texts are overwhelmingly written by elite males. Thus the question of women’s history has the same problems as all non-elite history, though elite women are somewhat more visible in the sources than are non-elite women. We always face a “lamp-post problem,” as in the old joke where the man is looking for his keys under the lamp-post because it’s dark in the alley where he lost them. Likewise, particularly for women’s history, it is not always the classical periods that provide the most evidence, so that historians of women in antiquity have called for a shift in our attention to the most promising periods, particularly late antiquity (Hallett 1993). The historian Joan Kelly asked whether women had a Renaissance (i. e. did this rising tide float all boats?); we might ask similar questions about Greek and Roman women (Culham 1997). And we need not only an expanded timeline but an expanded definition of “the ancient world,” which obviously was not made up just of Greek and Roman pagan cultures.
World History
