[Discussion] Writing Women's History

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	*Mary Spongberg.* /Writing Women's History since the Renaissance//. 
/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xii + 306 pp. Notes, index. $75.00 
(cloth), ISBN 0-333-72667-7; $23.95 (paper), ISBN 0-333-72668-5.

Reviewed by *Holly S. Hurlburt*, Department of History, Southern 
Illinois University, Carbondale.
Published by H-Women <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Ewomen> (May, 2004)


*A Herstory of Her Own *

In her recent consideration of the gendered nature of the discipline of 
history, Bonnie G. Smith has astutely observed: "despite the thrust of 
most historiographic accounts, history for the past two centuries has 
not mostly been written by men or even been concerned mostly with 
men."[1] Mary Spongberg builds upon Smith's work and repeatedly 
illustrates the veracity of the above statement in her Writing Women's 
History since the Renaissance. Spongberg has undertaken a massive 
project: to demonstrate women's engagement with history by tracing 
parallel developments in the history of women and the roles women played 
in the construction of that history. Spongberg bridges the Atlantic 
divide by drawing examples from both Western Europe and North America, 
producing a highly accessible and readable text, succeeding in her 
stated goal to "provide a broad history of the development of women's 
writing from the Renaissance until the twentieth century" (p. 8).

To introduce her survey, Spongberg places her work in the context of 
historians of women and gender of the last two decades, especially Joan 
Scott, who have problematized both the methodology of history and its 
subject matter, clearing the way for a reassessment of history in 
general, and women's role in shaping the historical record in 
particular. In the first two chapters of the work, Spongberg 
contextualizes her subject with a brief overview of how male-dominated 
history treated (or often failed to treat) women as subjects of history. 
The much longer subsequent section illustrates that women's historical 
writing ebbed and flowed with events such as the French Revolution and 
the reactionary response to it, the suffrage movement, and the 
professionalization of history as a discipline.

Each chapter is introduced with a brief and user-friendly overview of 
the chapter's objectives, especially valuable in Spongberg's last few 
chapters, in which she traces the development of women's history as a 
discipline within the context of second-wave feminism. Here she provides 
a particularly helpful introductory overview of the debate within the 
field generated in the 1970s over issues such as agency, "victim" 
history, and lesbian history. The work concludes with a consideration of 
some criticisms of the discipline that have called for the narratives of 
women's history to expand beyond the experience of white, middle-class 
women.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Spongberg's work is her repeated 
demonstration that in order to understand women's relationship to 
history, we must broaden our understanding of "history writing" to 
include genres to which society more freely allowed women to contribute, 
such as historical fiction, letter writing, biography and women's 
activist writings, and theory. The book achieves one of its stated goals 
of considering women's historical writing as a whole and objectively 
rehabilitating women's writing of domestic histories and biographies in 
the nineteenth century as a conscious strategy responding to the closed 
doors of academic history. Further, she demonstrates that women employed 
specific strategies not only in their writing of history (disguised in 
gendered disciplines) but in their deployment of that history to promote 
the suffrage movement, and to demonstrate the history of female economic 
and sexual oppression.

Spongberg's aim to create a broad survey of women's writing is largely 
successful, but her scope has resulted in notes that are frustratingly 
limited and, at least for the pre-modern period, largely secondary. 
Further, the text also lacks a bibliography that would have been 
particularly useful to those less familiar with this broad field. Her 
interests clearly lie in developments in women's history making and 
writing after the French Revolution, and as such she has perhaps given 
the pre-modern period too-brief notice. Despite her persistent use of 
"Renaissance" as a chronological reference point, she follows Joan Kelly 
Gadol in dismissing that period as being one where patriarchy and 
humanist traditions limited women's education and therefore their 
interaction with history. Spongberg celebrates, in later periods, 
women's flexible application of the ideas and models of history in their 
writing, yet fails to recognize Italian figures such as humanist Laura 
Cereta, who often employed historical examples in her public speeches, 
or Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni, who composed a chronicle and necrology 
about women for her convent of Corpus Domini in Venice.[2] While most 
would not dispute Spongberg's periodization in emphasizing the 
eighteenth century as a watershed, an ever-growing collection of 
scholarship suggests that important strains of female historicism exist 
throughout western history.

Although Spongberg does an excellent job of discussing developments in 
history as a discipline that paved the way for feminist and gender 
analysis, such as developments in social history, she does not complete 
this contextualization by acknowledging the voice of those historians, 
male and female, who have, for various reasons, resisted the development 
of women's history/women's studies as a discipline or particular radical 
elements within the discipline.[3] In addition, through brief mention of 
Annalistes such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and the work of David Potter 
on the Turner thesis, Spongberg hints that, in some cases, the 
traditions of "male" and "female" historical writing might be inching 
towards a unified historical dialogue, a theme whose development would 
surely have been interesting and stimulating, particularly given her 
polarizing organizational schema.[4] Despite these limitations, 
Spongberg's book provides an excellent and clear introduction to the 
study of women shapers of history; no doubt this important overview will 
encourage further scholarship in this rich field.

Notes

[1]. Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical 
Practice(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 6.

[2]. Laura Cereta, Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, ed. and 
trans. Diana Robin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and 
Bartolomea Riccoboni, Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The 
Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, ed. and trans. Daniel 
Bornstein (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000). These and other 
titles in the University of Chicago Press's The Other Voice in Early 
Modern Europe series, in addition to countless other works, have nuanced 
Kelly-Gadol's conclusions in the last decades, suggesting that some 
women did have a Renaissance, and that history was a sizable part of 
that experience. In her notes, Spongberg does acknowledge the activities 
of learned women in the English Renaissance.

[3]. It is surprising, for example, that Spongberg does not reference or 
discuss Peter Novick's treatment of the controversies of women's history 
and women's historians in Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity 
Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1988), pp. 491-511. She also does not address in 
detail the debates engendered by Women's Studies programs, raised and 
debated in a good deal of literature, including the controversial and 
recently revised work of Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing 
Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies (Lanham: 
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

[4]. One area where male and female traditions of scholarship met early 
in the development of women's and gender studies is surely the history 
of the family. One example is the work of David Herlihy and Christiane 
Klapisch Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine 
Catasto of 1427(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).


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      <td width="80%"><font size="+2"><b>Mary Spongberg.</b> <i>Writing
Women's History since the Renaissance</i></font><i>. </i><font
 size="+1">New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xii + 306 pp.
Notes, index.
$75.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-333-72667-7; $23.95 (paper), ISBN 0-333-72668-5.</font>
      <p><font size="+1">Reviewed by <b>Holly S. Hurlburt</b>,
Department of History, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.<br>
Published by <a href="http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Ewomen">
H-Women</a> (May, 2004) </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1"><br>
      </font></p>
      <center><font size="+1"><b>A Herstory of Her Own </b></font></center>
      <p> <font size="+1">In her recent consideration of the gendered
nature of
the discipline of history, Bonnie G. Smith has astutely observed:
"despite the thrust of most historiographic accounts, history for the
past two centuries has not mostly been written by men or even been
concerned mostly with men."[1] Mary Spongberg builds upon Smith's work
and repeatedly illustrates the veracity of the above statement in her <cite>Writing
Women's History since the Renaissance</cite>.
Spongberg has undertaken a massive project: to demonstrate women's
engagement with history by tracing parallel developments in the history
of women and the roles women played in the construction of that
history. Spongberg bridges the Atlantic divide by drawing examples from
both Western Europe and North America, producing a highly accessible
and readable text, succeeding in her stated goal to "provide a broad
history of the development of women's writing from the Renaissance
until the twentieth century" (p. 8). </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1"> To
introduce her survey, Spongberg places her work in the context of
historians of women and gender of the last two decades, especially Joan
Scott, who have problematized both the methodology of history and its
subject matter, clearing the way for a reassessment of history in
general, and women's role in shaping the historical record in
particular. In the first two chapters of the work, Spongberg
contextualizes her subject with a brief overview of how male-dominated
history treated (or often failed to treat) women as subjects of
history. The much longer subsequent section illustrates that women's
historical writing ebbed and flowed with events such as the French
Revolution and the reactionary response to it, the suffrage movement,
and the professionalization of history as a discipline. </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1">Each chapter is introduced with a brief and
user-friendly overview of
the chapter's objectives, especially valuable in Spongberg's last few
chapters, in which she traces the development of women's history as a
discipline within the context of second-wave feminism. Here she
provides a particularly helpful introductory overview of the debate
within the field generated in the 1970s over issues such as agency,
"victim" history, and lesbian history. The work concludes with a
consideration of some criticisms of the discipline that have called for
the narratives of women's history to expand beyond the experience of
white, middle-class women. </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1"> Perhaps the
greatest strength of Spongberg's work is her repeated demonstration
that in order to understand women's relationship to history, we must
broaden our understanding of "history writing" to include genres to
which society more freely allowed women to contribute, such as
historical fiction, letter writing, biography and women's activist
writings, and theory. The book achieves one of its stated goals of
considering women's historical writing as a whole and objectively
rehabilitating women's writing of domestic histories and biographies in
the nineteenth century as a conscious strategy responding to the closed
doors of academic history. Further, she demonstrates that women
employed specific strategies not only in their writing of history
(disguised in gendered disciplines) but in their deployment of that
history to promote the suffrage movement, and to demonstrate the
history of female economic and sexual oppression. </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1">Spongberg's aim to create a broad survey of
women's writing is largely
successful, but her scope has resulted in notes that are frustratingly
limited and, at least for the pre-modern period, largely secondary.
Further, the text also lacks a bibliography that would have been
particularly useful to those less familiar with this broad field. Her
interests clearly lie in developments in women's history making and
writing after the French Revolution, and as such she has perhaps given
the pre-modern period too-brief notice. Despite her persistent use of
"Renaissance" as a chronological reference point, she follows Joan
Kelly Gadol in dismissing that period as being one where patriarchy and
humanist traditions limited women's education and therefore their
interaction with history. Spongberg celebrates, in later periods,
women's flexible application of the ideas and models of history in
their writing, yet fails to recognize Italian figures such as humanist
Laura Cereta, who often employed historical examples in her public
speeches, or Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni, who composed a chronicle and
necrology about women for her convent of Corpus Domini in Venice.[2]
While most would not dispute Spongberg's periodization in emphasizing
the eighteenth century as a watershed, an ever-growing collection of
scholarship suggests that important strains of female historicism exist
throughout western history. </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1"> Although
Spongberg does an excellent job of discussing developments in history
as a discipline that paved the way for feminist and gender analysis,
such as developments in social history, she does not complete this
contextualization by acknowledging the voice of those historians, male
and female, who have, for various reasons, resisted the development of
women's history/women's studies as a discipline or particular radical
elements within the discipline.[3] In addition, through brief mention
of Annalistes such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and the work of David
Potter on the Turner thesis, Spongberg hints that, in some cases, the
traditions of "male" and "female" historical writing might be inching
towards a unified historical dialogue, a theme whose development would
surely have been interesting and stimulating, particularly given her
polarizing organizational schema.[4] Despite these limitations,
Spongberg's book provides an excellent and clear introduction to the
study of women shapers of history; no doubt this important overview
will encourage further scholarship in this rich field. </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1"> Notes </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1"> [1]. Bonnie G. Smith, <cite>The Gender of
History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice</cite>(Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1998), p. 6. </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1"> [2]. Laura Cereta, <cite>Collected Letters
of a Renaissance Feminist</cite>, ed. and trans. Diana Robin (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Bartolomea Riccoboni, <cite>Life
and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus
Domini</cite>,
ed. and trans. Daniel Bornstein (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
2000). These and other titles in the University of Chicago Press's The
Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, in addition to countless
other works, have nuanced Kelly-Gadol's conclusions in the last
decades, suggesting that some women did have a Renaissance, and that
history was a sizable part of that experience. In her notes, Spongberg
does acknowledge the activities of learned women in the English
Renaissance. </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1"> [3]. It is surprising, for
example, that Spongberg does not reference or discuss Peter Novick's
treatment of the controversies of women's history and women's
historians in Novick, <cite>That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity
Question" and the American Historical Profession</cite>
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 491-511. She also
does not address in detail the debates engendered by Women's Studies
programs, raised and debated in a good deal of literature, including
the controversial and recently revised work of Daphne Patai and Noretta
Koertge, <cite>Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in
Women's Studies</cite> (Lanham: Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2003). </font></p>
      <p><font size="+1">[4]. One area where male and female traditions
of scholarship met early
in the development of women's and gender studies is surely the history
of the family. One example is the work of David Herlihy and Christiane
Klapisch Zuber, <cite>Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the
Florentine Catasto of 1427</cite>(New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985). </font></p>
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