Women’s History, Active History, and the 2014 Berkshire Conference

Later this month the University of Toronto’s downtown campus will host the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. This is a big deal for a number of reasons. It is the first time that this venerable and highly visible conference has met outside of the United States. And there is also the sheer scale of the event. There are about 1,300 scholars involved in the conference in over 250 sessions, and still more involved in poster sessions, workshops, film-screenings, and cultural programming. At 167 pages, the conference programme is staggering. The 2014 Berks also suggests some of the ways that women’s and gender history is a particular kind of active history with the power to speak to our complicated present.

The demand that the academic discipline make room for women as subjects, authors, and teachers of history was inseparable from the revival of feminism in the so-called second wave in the 1960s and 70s.  Since then, women’s and gender history has had notable success in gaining entry to – and institutional authority within – the academy, at least in the United States and Canada. Joan Wallach Scott was critical to this push for women’s history, and in 2004 she accessed the changing status and meaning of women’s history in the American university. Scott argued that women’s history had attained a substantial level of success as measured by “an enormous corpus of writing, an imposing institutional presence, a substantial list of journals, and a foothold in popular consciousness….”[1] Of course this is a truncated version of Scott’s argument, and hers, in any case, is not the only possible reading. We might access the trajectory of women’s history in light of the capacity of neo-liberal regimes to undermine feminist scholarship, something that becomes clearer every time a women’s studies department is shuttered. We might also more rigorously situate these gains within the particular terrains within which they have been most clearly felt and more carefully register those constituencies that occupy small and insecure places within the mainstream academy...