The Undivided Past

by David Cannadine

  106. By 1950, Hugh Trevor-Roper had concluded that “Marxism has been a great stimulus to historical study, but by now it has long succumbed to intellectual sclerosis”: Sisman, Trevor-Roper, p. 202.

  107. M. Taylor, “The Beginnings of Modern British Social History,” History Workshop 43 (1997): 155–76.

  108. R. Porter and C. R. Whittaker, “States and Estates,” Social History 1 (1976): 367–76; P. Anderson, “Origins of the Present Crisis,” New Left Review, no. 23 (1964): 26–51; E. P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” in R. Miliband and J. Saville, eds., The Socialist Register, 1965 (London, 1965), pp. 311–62; A. J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the First World War (London, 1981); G. Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Re-Making of a Working Class,” in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 179–238. For broader discussions of disagreements, see P. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1976); Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London, 1980).

  109. Runciman, Great Books, Bad Arguments, pp. 102–3; P. A. Brunt, “A Marxist View of Roman History,” Journal of Roman Studies 72 (1982): 157–63; P. Lekas, Marx on Historical Antiquity: Problems of Historical Methodology (New York, 1988); A. Girdina, “Marxism and Historiography: Perspectives on Roman History,” in Wickham, Marxist History-Writing, pp. 20–21.

  110. Wickham, “What Has Marxism Done for Medieval History?,” p. 41; Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 219; Runciman, Great Books, Bad Arguments, p. 101.

  111. Zagorin, “Social Interpretation of the English Revolution,” pp. 389–90; L. Stone, “The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth-Century England Revisited,” Past and Present 109 (1985): 44–54; Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 36, 40, 54–56; C. Russell, Un-Revolutionary England, 1603–1642 (Hambledon, 1990); A. MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History (Basingstoke, 1996); H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” in Aston, Crisis in Europe, pp. 59–95; J. H. Elliott, “Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe,” in Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700 (London, 1989), pp. 92–113; Elliott, “The General Crisis in Retrospect: A Debate Without End,” in Elliott, Spain, Europe and the Wider World, 1500–1800 (London, 2009), pp. 52–73.

  112. A. Cobban, The Myth of the French Revolution (London, 1955); Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1964); Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution (London, 1968); G. Cavanaugh, “The Present State of Revolutionary Historiography: Alfred Cobban and Beyond,” French Historical Studies 7 (1972): pp. 587–606; S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989), p. xiv. For other revisionist accounts, see W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1980); Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989); Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1999); F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981); T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Aristocrats Versus Bourgeois? (London, 1987); P. R. Hanson, Contesting the French Revolution (Oxford, 2009); W. G. Runciman, introduction to Wickham, Marxist History-Writing, pp. 5–6.

  113. R. M. Hartwell and R. Currie, “The Making of the English Working Class,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 18 (1965): 633–43; C. Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle (Chicago, 1982), pp. 60–94.

  114. W. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge, 1987), p. 195.

  115. R. Ruiz, The Great Rebellion: Mexico, 1905–1924 (New York, 1980); p. V. N. Henderson, Felix Díaz, the Porfirians and the Mexican Revolution (Lincoln, Neb., 1981); P. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police and Mexican Development (Lincoln, Neb., 1991); Knight, “Revisionism and Revolution,” pp. 165–97; Knight, “The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a ‘Great Rebellion’?” Bulletin of Latin American Research 4 (1985): 1–37.

  116. L. H. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth-Century Russia,” Slavic Review 47 (1988): 1–20; E. Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London, 1990); R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1990); R. G. Suny, “Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Soviet History and Its Critics,” Russian Review 53 (1994): 165–82; L. H. Siegelbaum and R. G. Suny, “Class Backwards? In Search of the Soviet Working Class,” in L. H. Siegelbaum and R. G. Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 1–26; O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London, 1997); S. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 1–15.

  117. A. Kessler-Harris, “A New Agenda for American Labor History,” in J. Carroll Moody and A. Kessler-Harris, eds., Perspectives in American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis (DeKalb, Ill., 1989), p. 219; D. T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), p. 93. See also D. Brody, “The Old Labor History and the New: In Search of the New American Working Class,” Labor History 20 (1979): 111–26; M. Frisch, “Sixty Characters in Search of Authority,” International Labour and Working Class History 27 (1985): 100–103; M. J. Buhle, “The Future of American Labor History: Towards a Synthesis?” Radical Historians Newsletter, no. 44 (1984): 1–2; D. Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York, 1987); Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia, pp. 1–15.

  118. Kaye, Education of Desire, pp. 169–72; Kaye, “E. P. Thompson, the British Marxist Historical Tradition and the Contemporary Crisis,” in H. J. Kaye and K. McClelland, eds., E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 252–75; G. Eley and W. Hunt, eds., Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill (London, 1988); R. Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and the Transition to Capitalism,” in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. M. Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 271–304; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commerical Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1663 (Cambridge, 1993); G. C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revolutionary Challenge (London, 1987); E. J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (London, 1990); C. Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change,” in C. Lucas, ed., Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford, 1991), pp. 69–118; H. Heller, The Bourgeois Revolution in France (1789–1815) (London, 2006); R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998); G. Eley and K. Neild, eds., The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2007); MacLachlan, Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England, pp. 298–325.

  119. Rodgers, Age of Fracture, p. 253.

  120. Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 40, 43; C. Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965), p. 3; Hill, “A Bourgeois Revolution?” in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980), pp. 109–39; Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York, 1984).

  121. Hobsbawm, On History, p. 239; Hobsbawm, “Marxist Historiography Today,” p. 187.

  122. E. P. Thompson, “The Making of a Ruling Class,” Dissent (Summer 1993): 380; Cannadine, Class in Britain, p. 16; P. Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1995), p. 2.

  123. V. Kiernan, “Revolution and Reaction, 1789–1848,” New Left Review, no. 19 (1963): 75.

  124. Hunt, Engels, p. 343; Stedman Jones, introduction to The Communist Manifesto, p. 143.

  125. Judt, Ill Fares the Land, pp. 140–42; Stedman Jones, introduction to The Communist Manifesto, p. 9; Hobsbawm, On History, pp. 237–38; Runciman, Great Books, Bad Arguments, pp. 115, 120; R. Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (London, 2007), p. 51; R. H. S. Crossman, in A. Koestler et
al., The God That Failed (London, 1965), pp. 5–6.

  126. G. Best, review of Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, Historical Journal 8 (1965): 278; Runciman, Great Books, Bad Arguments, pp. 109–10. Even Victor Kiernan, who was more aware than his fellow Marxists of the importance of religion, had little time for or understanding of the importance of the nation: Kaye, Education of Desire, pp. 82–83, and references cited there.

  127. I. Deutscher, “The Wandering Jew as Thinker and Revolutionary,” Universities and Left Review 4 (1958): 13; R. Miliband, “The Politics of Contemporary Capitalism,” New Reasoner 5 (1958), p. 47; S. Hall, “A Sense of Classlessness,” Universities and Left Review 5 (1958): 30.

  128. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, esp. pp. 177–92; Hobsbawm, On History, pp. 5–9, 266–77; Hobsbawm, “Marxist Historiography Today,” pp. 184–85.

  129. Hunt, Engels, pp. 308–13; Stedman Jones, introduction to The Communist Manifesto, p. 4.

  130. J. W. Scott, “Women in The Making of the English Working Class,” in Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), pp. 68–90; A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995); P. A. Custer, “Reconfiguring Jemima: Gender, Work and Politics in Lancashire, 1770–1820,” Past and Present, no. 195 (2007): 127–58; Hobsbawm, On History, p. 71.

  FOUR: GENDER

  1. W. Thompson, Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (London, 1825; reprinted, London, 1983), pp. xxi–xxii; B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1983), pp. 22–24.

  2. M. Walters, Feminism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005), pp. 43–45; D. Wahrman, “ ‘Middle-Class’ Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class and Politics from Queen Anne to Queen Victoria,” Journal of British Studies 32 (1993): 410–14.

  3. T. Ball, “Utilitarianism, Feminism, and the Franchise: James Mill and His Critics,” History of Political Thought 1 (1980): 110–12.

  4. Thompson, Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race, pp. 39, 77.

  5. Ibid., pp. 17, 35, 53, 61, 68–69.

  6. J. W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), pp. 2, 32.

  7. B. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 2001 ed.), pp. 511–12; G. Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York, 2008 ed.), p. 131.

  8. A. D. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 4.

  9. S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, 1989 ed.), p. xxv.

  10. J. W. Scott, “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 286–87.

  11. M. Dowd, Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide (New York, 2005), pp. 7, 80, 199–200.

  12. C. Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York, 2010), p. 39; L. Brizendine, The Female Brain (New York, 2006), pp. 7–8.

  13. The classic Aristotelian texts are reprinted in R. Agonito, ed., History of Ideas on Woman: A Source Book (New York, 1977), pp. 43–54; J. English, ed., Sex Equality (Engelwood Cliffs, N.J., 1977), pp. 20–31. For recent feminist attempts to “recover” Aristotle, see C. A. Freedland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (University Park, Pa., 1998).

  14. Stansell, Feminist Promise, pp. 4–5.

  15. 1 Timothy 2:12–15; O. Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, vol. 1, 1500–1800 (New York, 1996), pp. 30–33; S. Mendelson and P. Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 32–34.

  16. English, Sex Equality, pp. 42–47; Stansell, Feminist Promise, p. 14; J. Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (London, 1985), pp. 7–32.

  17. T. Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings (New York, 1995, ed.), p. 11; Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, pp. 249–63; C. Darwin, The Descent of Man, in P. H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman, eds., The Works of Charles Darwin (London, 1986), vol. 21, pp. 556, 564, 605, 614.

  18. Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, pp. 265–69, 297–322; P. Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 2, The Tender Passion (New York, 1986), p. 85; C. Thompson, Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development (New York, 1950), pp. 131–33; S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York, 1933), pp. 170ff.

  19. J. Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Definitive Guide to Relationships (London, 1992), esp. pp. 1–5, 7, 10.

  20. S. Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference (London, 2003), pp. 1–6, 78–80, 129.

  21. For similar arguments to those of Baron-Cohen (and Gray), see Brizendine, Female Brain; S. Pinker, The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Gender Gap (New York, 2008).

  22. G. Greer, The Whole Woman (New York, 2000), pp. 70–80.

  23. Gray, Men Are from Mars, p. 7; A. Kessler-Harris, “Gender and Work: Possibilities for a Global Overview,” in B. Smith, ed., Women’s History in Global Perspective, 3 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 2004–5), vol. 1, pp. 147–51.

  24. K. V. Thomas, “The Double Standard,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 195–216.

  25. H. L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics and the False Universal in England, 1640–1832 (University Park, Pa., 2002), pp. 1–38.

  26. Quoted in S. Jones, Y: The Descent of Man (London, 2002), p. xv.

  27. B. Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1990), pp. 24–68, offers an approving summary of these views.

  28. For the United States, see N. F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977); M. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, 1981). For the United Kingdom, see C. Hall, “The Early Formation of Domestic Ideology,” in S. Burman, ed., Fit Work for Women (London, 1979), pp. 15–32; L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987).

  29. T. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); M. McKeon, “Historicising Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” Eighteenth Century Studies 28 (1995): 295–322; T. Hitchcock, “Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England,” History Workshop Journal 41 (1996): 72–90; Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke, 1997), esp. p. 49.

  30. A. Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 385; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 160–206; C. Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1 (1975): 9–10; M. Vicinus, Independent Woman: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London, 1985), p. 3; M. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England (London, 1989), pp. 6–7.

  31. Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?,” pp. 383, 388; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 11, 454.

  32. Reprinted in Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, pp. 397–402.

  33. M. Hines, Brain Gender (Oxford, 2004), esp. pp. 222–23, 226–28.

  34. Plato’s classic text is reprinted in Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, pp. 23–39; English, Sex Equality, pp. 13–19. For Plato as a feminist, see J. Annas, “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” Philosophy 51 (1976): 307–21; N. Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato (University Park, Pa., 1995). In other contexts, however, Plato does not maintain this view of women, as in the Laws or in the Timaeus: see C. G. Allen, “Plato on Women,” Feminist Studies 2 (1975): 131–38; M. Canto, “The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Reflections on Plato,” in S. R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. 339–53. For a judicious appraisal of these issues, see G. Vlastos, “Was Plato a Feminist?,” Times Literary Supplement, March 17–23, 1989, pp. 276, 288–89.

  35. Stansell, Feminist Promise, p.
6; K. Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, 2000), p. 34.

  36. Stansell, Feminist Promise, p. 15; Offen, European Feminisms, p. 57.

  37. Hufton, Prospect Before Her, pp. 461–62; J. W. Scott, “French Feminists and the Rights of ‘Man’: Olympe de Gouge’s Declarations,” History Workshop Journal, no. 28 (1989): 1–21; Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), p. 42.

  38. Hufton, Prospect Before Her, pp. 453–55; Stansell, Feminist Promise, pp. 20, 23; M. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York, 1988 ed.), p. 175.

  39. Colossians 3:18; Galatians 3:28; Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, p. 31.

  40. Stansell, Feminist Promise, pp. 42, 45–46.

  41. R. J. Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840–1920 (London, 1977), pp. 46–47.

  42. Stansell, Feminist Promise, pp. 69–71; A. S. Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (Boston, 1973), pp. 413–21.

  43. English, Sex Equality, pp. 54–65; Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, pp. 223–48; Evans, The Feminists, pp. 18–22.

  44. H. Ibsen, A Doll’s House and Other Plays (New York, 1965, ed.), p. 228. This play has become a canonical feminist text: see Beauvoir, Second Sex, pp. 464, 478, 616; Friedan, Feminist Mystique, pp. 140–41; Greer, Female Eunuch, p. 22; Stansell, Feminist Promise, p. 143.

  45. T. Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (London, 2009), pp. 309–14; F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York, 1942, ed.), esp. pp. 128–29, 134–39; Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman, pp. 273–88.

  46. S. Steinbach, Women in England, 1760–1914: A Social History (London, 2004), p. 273.

  47. Stansell, Feminist Promise, p. 173; C. A. Lunardini and T. J. Knock, “Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage: A New Look,” Political Science Quarterly 95 (1980–81): 655–56.