by Doug Munro
mentorship could offset. Networks among women scholars themselves
provided some assistance, and Yale scholars were prominent in the most
well-organised and effective of all, the Berkshire Conference of Women
Historians. Viola Barnes presided over the group from 1933 to 1938,
while Mildred Campbell and Helen Taft Manning were also prominent
participants.65 As well as taking action in the interests of smoothing
60 Florence Cook Fast to CMA, 2 June 1935, CMAP, Box 35, Folder 396.
61 Frank J. Klingberg to EWA, 14 May 1948, CMAP, Box 46, Folder 500.
62 See American Historical Review, 43:2 (January 1938), 403–6, doi.org/10.2307/1839763; New England Quarterly, 10:2 (June 1937), 408–9, doi.org/10.2307/360050.
63 Florence Cook, ‘Procedure in the North Carolina Colonial Assembly, 1731–1770’, North Carolina Historical Review, 8:3 (1931), 258–83; A.R. Newsome, North Carolina Historical Commission, to CMA, 11 July 1931, CMAP, Box 30, Folder 351; Florence Cook Fast to CMA,
2 November 1931, CMAP, Box 31, Folder 355.
64 CMA to Florence Cook Fast (copy), 8 November 1938, CMAP, Box 39, Folder 433.
65 See Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Schlesinger Library, Berkshire Conference Papers, passim.
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12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
the paths of younger women scholars into scholarly activities, such as
conference presentations and promoting exchange plans that would allow
women greater freedom of movement between institutions, the Berkshire
group also addressed the issues of gender inequality and contemplated, as
recommended by Barnes as president, ‘a crusade in the interests of equal
opportunity for women in professional competition with men’.66
Less formal but undoubtedly sustaining was the network of women
scholars that grew up among the Yale-linked historians. Men, of course,
networked too, and occasionally gender lines would be crossed. Clarence
W. Rife, a PhD graduate of 1922, reported to Andrews in early 1929
on the recent American Historical Association meetings: ‘among the
Yale students of my day who were present were Malone, Hail, Van Slyck
and Miss Helen Gray. I had the pleasure of meeting Miss Barnes who
spoke ably at the Luncheon Conference on Colonial and Revolutionary
American History’.67 But there was also a clear separation, with the male
network relying principally on meals taken with colleagues at conferences
or on research sojourns, supplemented by visitations in summer or at other
times of family travel that would involve wives and children but were
determined essentially by the random crossing of paths.68 Undoubtedly,
as well as professionally related exchanges and general gossip, there were
gender-related issues to discuss on these occasions, especially for those
of the generation directly affected by the First World War. Frederick
Manning expressed to Andrews in 1926 the hope that ‘the passing of the
war generation of graduate students will do something to stop attempts
to combine full time teaching, matrimony, and doctors’ theses. It can be
done, but at a very high cost’.69
The women’s network, however, was more proactive, including contacts
associated with conferences or research travel but also extending to
frequent exchanges of news by letter and to visits for the sake of visiting,
sometimes across long distances. Key members were the Scottish women
who had been at Yale through the Commonwealth Fund, perhaps because
they were accustomed to being geographically mobile. Edith MacQueen,
66 Viola Barnes to [Beatrice] Reynolds, 4 May 1937, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, Viola Florence Barnes Papers, IV, 47; see also Reid, Viola Florence Barnes, 83–6.
67 Clarence W. Rife to CMA, 4 January 1929, CMAP, Box 27, Folder 320.
68 For examples, see Leonard W. Labaree to CMA, 2 August 1925, CMAP, Box 23, Folder 284;
Ralph G. Lounsbury to CMA, 7 August 1925, CMAP, Box 23, Folder 284; Cecil Johnson to CMA,
17 February 1930, CMAP, Box 28, Folder 334.
69 Frederick J. Manning to CMA, 14 May 1926, CMAP, Box 24, Folder 291.
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CLIo'S LIvES
in January 1929, was on the point of going to New York to visit Gertrude
Ann Jacobsen for a few days.70 Edith Thomson visited Bessie Hoon in
Seattle the following summer.71 The following year, Ruth Bourne – in
London for research – travelled to Oxford to meet Agnes M. Whitson
and her sister. Bourne also reported to Andrews that, at the Public Record
Office, ‘I have met your student Miss Barnes and find her exceptionally
charming … She has taken a very kind interest in me on your account’.72
London was certainly a networking hub, and in 1933 Whitson – who by
now had finished her studies at Yale – noted that she was teaching in the
Northamptonshire town of Kettering but had been at the Public Record
Office during the summer. She had not only lunched daily with Hoon but
had also met up with Thomson – who was in London briefly while now
living in Malta with her naval officer husband – and another unnamed
Yale friend, so that ‘we made a Yale quartette several times, at lunch’.73
Marriages and, later, warfare made meetings more difficult to arrange,
but letters continued to carry both professional and personal news and
allow exchanges that were sustaining in both of those areas of life.
In summary, the presence of 50 women’s names on the Dedication of
Essays in Colonial History to Charles McLean Andrews was significant and
revealing, although its nuances require some explication. Andrews was
no radical thinker when it came to gender differentiation, and he held
conventional views both on marriage and family and on suitable career
placements for women historians. There was also a paternalistic element
in his dealings with women graduate students that came occasionally to
the fore, as experienced by Barnes and others. Nevertheless, collective
biography reveals that Yale did at least provide an intellectual environment
where it was a matter of routine for the scholarship of women to be valued
and nurtured alongside that of men. Whether on his retirement, on his
80th birthday, in letters to Evangeline Andrews following his death, or
for no particular reason, women among his former graduate students
repeatedly praised Andrews in this vein. Two of the most poignant tributes
were delivered in 1940, one from Dora Mae Clark and the other from Edith
MacQueen. MacQueen wrote from a small farm that (following several
years of production work with the BBC) she had bought in Essex, where
she was doing freelance work on war propaganda broadcasts, participating
70 Edith MacQueen to CMA, 23 January 1929, CMAP, Box 27, Folder 320.
71 Bessie E. Hoon to CMA, 5 August 1929, CMAP, Box 27, Folder 327.
72 Ruth Bourne to CMA, 14 August 1930, CMAP, Box 29, Folder 340.
73 Agnes M. Whitson to CMA, 25 September 1933, CMAP, Box 33, Folder 377.
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in local defence and awaiting invasion by the Axis powers. ‘At this very
grim hour in our country’s history,’ she avowed, ‘I feel I cant [sic] let the
moment pass without saying in what may perhaps be a goodbye letter, how
very much I a
ppreciate all you have done for me in the past. My years at
Yale were some of the happiest in my life and to work with you was a great
inspiration.’74 Clark also wrote with apprehensions for the future, though
of a different kind. She was finding it difficult to know how to advise the
ambitious among her students at Wilson College. ‘Many of them,’ she
explained, ‘want careers. Some of them are very capable; but the graduate
schools are becoming exceedingly inhospitable to women. I regret that
your attitude toward women students is becoming very rare.’75 Clark’s
comment was far-sighted, in the context of the austere climate that would
be faced by aspiring women scholars following the Second World War.
It also recalled the bleak observations of an earlier generation of women
historians who had been quoted in Emilie J. Hutchinson’s 1929 analysis.
According to one, identified only as a college professor who had gained
her PhD between 1877 and 1915:
the problem for history women is to get a good teaching position in college
or university after taking the Ph.D. There are not enough positions to go
around because there is a prejudice against women on the part of men in
co-educational colleges and in men’s colleges.76
Andrews and Yale could provide no sovereign remedy for problems
that would become more entrenched during the late 1940s and 1950s,
and begin only gradually to be addressed thereafter. What did develop,
however, was a fragile ecology within which the biographies of women
historians could begin from social origins that had some admixture,
advance through scholarship that could genuinely thrive and – for a
significant number – emerge into life patterns that allowed for the balances
between employment and research and between career and family to
become negotiable, though always within limits.
74 Edith MacQueen to CMA, 29 May 1940, CMAP, Box 41, Folder 450.
75 Dora Mae Clark to CMA, 2 January 1940, CMAP, Box 41, Folder 446.
76 Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D. , 182.
299
13
Concluding Reflections
Barbara Caine
In the last couple of decades, many historians have sought to move
beyond the longstanding and probably futile quest to establish the precise
place of biography in history and instead explore a number of new
ways of thinking about the relationship between history and individual
lives. One of these ways focuses on historians themselves and on the
different kinds of insights that an exploration of their lives can offer.
As one can see in this volume, several different approaches have been
taken to this question, with some historians turning to write their own
autobiographies, and exploring the broader historical understanding that
can be gained from describing and analysing one’s own experience, while
others have sought rather to see whether a study of the lives of particular
historians, either individually or in groups, offers a new understanding of
the kinds of history that they wrote and of broader developments within
the discipline.
The increasing numbers of historians who have turned their attention
to autobiography in recent years has been widely noted, both by other
historians and by scholars of biography. Paul John Eakin and Jeremy
Popkin have both pointed to the importance of historical training and the
sense of being part of a disciplinary community evident in much of this
work. Autobiographers with a trained historical consciousness, in Eakin’s
view, may be uniquely capable of ‘explaining what it means to be living
in history’ and of offering both a personal account of major historical
developments and a sense of their impact on particular lives, families and
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communities.1 Australian historians, as Popkin points out, have taken to
the writing of autobiography with particular enthusiasm.2 It has offered
some, such as David Walker, a way to write a new kind of history in
which personal and family memory could be drawn on more extensively
as his loss of sight made other kinds of research more difficult, or others,
such as Tim Bonyhady and Graeme Davison, a way to explore aspects of
a family past that reflected wider historical patterns or placed Australian
experiences into an unexpected European or global historical context.3
Women have been significant players here too, as both Ann Moyal and
Sheila Fitzpatrick make clear.4 Moyal’s survey, in this volume, of the
Australian women historians who have written autobiography shows both
how rich and extensive this literature is.
While one approach of historians to the writing of autobiography has
centred on the extra insights their training might offer them in describing
the world in which they lived, others have turned their attention rather
to questions about the writing of history and whether and how it differs
from writing autobiography. For Manning Clark, as Mark McKenna
argues in this volume, it was impossible to write history without writing
autobiography – although this approach was not one that was well
received by his colleagues. But other historians have rather emphasised
the challenges that writing autobiography or memoir posed to their
understanding of history and to their sense of themselves as writers.
This question is addressed by Fitzpatrick in this volume in her engaging
discussion of the problems that she encountered as she moved from writing
history, in the course of which she had always stressed her objectivity and
impartiality, to writing memoir, which sometimes depended on fallible
memory – and made her much more aware of herself as a writer and of
the kinds of response she sought to produce in her readers. Fitzpatrick’s
essay also offers a useful reminder of the challenges to once dominant
notions of objectivity in history that came to the fore in the 1980s and
1990s, as women and people of colour began insisting not only on
1 Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 145–51, doi.org/10.1515/9781400820641.
2 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
3 David Walker, Not Dark Yet: A Personal History (Sydney: Giramondo, 2011); Tim Bonyhady, Good Living Street: The Fortunes of my Viennese Family (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011); Graeme Davison, Lost Relations: Fortunes of my Family in Australia’s Golden Age (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015).
4 Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010; Ann Moyal, A Woman of Influence: Science, Men & History (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2014).
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being included as objects of historical inquiry, but on the importance
of their perspectives and critiques of forms of objectivity that saw them
as insignificant.
One strand of historian’s autobiography that has become prominent in
some American, British and particularly French historical writing, but
is not explored here, centres on autobiography as a way for historians to
explain the link
between their personal lives and the historical questions
they chose to address. It is an approach closely connected to Pierre Nora,
who sought to collect autobiographical essays that examined their work
within the framework of their lives and beliefs for his collection, Essais
d’ego-histoire.5 Not all of those who wrote for Nora accepted his sense that
the life and the beliefs and commitments of a historian did, or should,
have an impact on their work. However, a number of those who worked
with him found the approach to be a very stimulating one and went
on to write at much greater length about the close connection between
their political experiences and beliefs and their historical writing. Luisa
Passerini and Annie Kriegel stand out as historians who have done major
work here.6 Inevitably, this discussion has raised issues related to those
dealt with by Fitzpatrick concerning memory and its place in the writing
of history.
The sense of exercising a disciplinary training in writing autobiography
and memoir, or of writing as a member of a professional or disciplinary
group has often meant that historians’ autobiographies eschew the
intimate or very personal aspects of their lives and concentrate rather on
broader social, political and institutional questions. This is not always the
case, however. Two of the really outstanding historians’ autobiographies,
Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) and, more
recently, Barbara Taylor’s The Last Asylum (2014),7 have both drawn
on painful and intimate experiences to explore major social questions:
the impact not only of poverty, but also of state agencies on family
relationships in Steedman’s case, and the end of the asylum and its painful
consequences for those with mental illness in Taylor’s. These works show
very clearly the importance of historical training and understanding in
the writing of lives in ways that enable those lives to explore historical
5 Pierre Nora, ed., Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
6 Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996); Annie Kriegel, Ce que j’ai cru comprendre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991).
7 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986); Barbara Taylor, The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014).