writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

dialectics appeared more and more as a straitjacket.” 26 In the same vein, Davis stated: “I like the
concept of multiple axes around which the same society is organized and moves, as contrasted with
my earlier two‐dimensional Marxist model.” 27 Conway, studying the first generation of American
women college graduates, that she had to read between the lines, as many of these women adapted
their discourses and descriptions of themselves to the situations they found themselves in: “This set
me thinking about the ways cultures censor what can be thought and felt, many decades before
postmodernism and the study of narrative made these questions routine.” 28
These three women historians committed to Women’s History because they were convinced that
the study of the past could help change the future. As Natalie Davis explains:
Moreover, the study of the past provides rewards for moral sensibility and tools for
critical understanding. No matter how evil the times, no matter how immense the cruelty,
some elements of opposition or kindness and goodness emerge. No matter how bleak and
constrained the situation, some forms of improvisation and coping take place. No matter
what happens, people go on telling stories about it and bequeath them to the future. No
matter how static and despairing the present looks, the past reminds us that change can
occur. At least things can be different. The past is an unending source of interest, and can
even be a source for hope.” 29
Keywords: Women’s history, Female historians, United States, 1930‐1960, Universities
Inmaculada ALVA
University of Navarra (Spain)
alva.inma@gmail.com
Notes
1
Cfr. Jeremy Popkin, History, Historians & Autobiogrphy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press:
2005) 8; Jaume Aurell, “Performative academic careers: Gabrielle Spiegel and Natalie Davis”,
Rethinking History 13/1 (2009): 54
2
Natalie Z. Davis, A Life of Learning, Charles Homer Haskins, Lecture for 1997, ACLS Occasional
Paper No. 39: 8.
3
Gerda Lerner, A Life of Learning, Charles Homer Haskins, Lecture for 2005, ACLS Occasional
Paper, No. 60, 1.
4
Gerda Lerner, A Life of Learning, 3.
5
Jill K. Conway, The Road From Coorain, (London: Random House, 1998), Kindle edition, chapter
5.
6
Jill K. Conway, True North. A memoir (New York: Random House, 1995), 23.
7
Lerner, A Life of Learning, 6
8
Lerner, A Life of Learning, 10
9
Ibidem; in other text Lerner shows the same perplexity: “But a I entered academic life as a
student, I encontered a world of ‘significant knowledge’, in which women seemed not to exist. I
never could accept that patriarcal mental construct and resisted it all my through my training. My
commitment to women’s history came out of my life, not out of my head”, Gerda Lerner, “Women
Among the Professors of History: the Story of a process of transformation”, in Voices of Women
Historians. The personal, the political, the profesional, ed. by Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1.
10
Jill Ker Conway and Natalie Zemon Davis, “Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship” in Minds of
Our Own : Inventing Feminist Scholarship and Women's Studies in Canada and Québec, 1966‐76
ed. by Wendy Robbins (Waterloo, Ont : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), 80‐81.
11
Conway and Davis, “Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship”, 80
12
Conway and Davis, “Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship”, 79‐80.
13
Conway and Davis, “Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship”, 79.
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