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Feminists Revision History.
I picked up this collection of essays as I was putting the finishing touches on a project that had taken me away from women's history for several years; Feminists Revision History was a wonderful welcome back to my first and enduring love as a scholar and as a teacher. Together, these essays present an engaging look into the state of feminist historical writing and the use of feminist theory in this work.
Ann-Louise Shapiro has brought together essays that "bring the critical challenges of feminist theoretical work to the discipline of history," and demonstrate the ways in which feminist scholars have reshaped the agendas and assumptions of historians (vii). The pieces in the collection address these issues in three ways: some articles, like Sylvia Schafer's on the gendered nature of child welfare policy in late nineteenth-century France, constitute models of scholarship that use feminist theory as their starting point; some, like Regina Morantz-Sanchez's on Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman physician in the United States, make explicit the contributions of feminist theory to the author's own historical understanding; and others critically examine the traditions of historical writing in their specialty.
In the article, "When the Child is the Father of the Man: Work, Sexual Difference and the Guardian State in Third Republic France," Sylvia Schafer argues that state policies regarding abandoned children reinforced certain norms and values regarding gender roles. Although many of the policies used supposedly gender-neutral language, a closer look at the use of key words demonstrates that these policies "universalize[d] masculine values and [made] the feminine a troubling exception" (175). Schafer bases this analysis on the work of literary theorist Luce Irigaray, who explores the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed by language.
Language and discourse seem to be the major empirical domains that feminist theorists have opened up for historians. When Ava Baron began to problematize male gender in her study of male and female printers, she began looking at how men spoke about gender, finding abundant resources. Her study...