so I want to start this course by going over the history the brief history of women who do history um so not women in history as much as women who are historians and um I'm gonna try to make this as brief as possible there's lots of more information in the notes on the slides um but just to give you a quick overview of women in the historical profession right so women have always been Central to the preservation of the story of the United States um you had women sort of path breaking in um early um efforts at preserving The History of the United States um by recording um information from the American Revolution so Elizabeth shiler Hamilton is um the person who saved and archived and petitioned the government to publish the writings of her husband Alexander Hamilton so um you know we know her from the musical right and the reason we know her is because of her own work as a historian Mercy Otis Warren wrote one of the first histories of the American Revolution um and so she is instrumental in um saving information from um people who had participated so she did sort of this early version of oral history right of interviewing people they weren't called historians that term didn't really exist yet but they were doing the work that historians do and then you have women in the late 18th and early 19th centuries becoming what we might call amateur historians today right so they're not um they don't have a degree in history but they're doing the work so Elizabeth ellett is this example she wrote women's history she wrote the women of the American Revolution in three volumes right as well as other his histories of women in the early history of the U.S um so she's a really a good example of doing historical research looking at Diaries and letters and interviewing descendants of participants in the revolution so kind of this amateur version of a historian and then we get the history profession kind of developing in the late 1800s the late 19th century and this is excuse me um a mostly male space women are involved but they are not leaders typically so you have the American historical Association which is the overall history scholarly organization and the organization of American historians for people who study U.S history specifically both of them lacked any women leading until the mostly in the 40s Clara Payne was secretary treasurer for 40 years beginning in 1916 but only because she took over from her husband who had died while in that position um very rarely did you have any women leading these organizations the men were making the decisions they were having social events among themselves that women were excluded from and so it really was an example of how women were being marginalized in the top levels of what became the profession of history for really about a hundred years um you also had places of Education becoming or being male only spaces so universities especially private universities were men only they only had men teachers and Men students right um they might have had a sister College like Harvard had Radcliffe but women couldn't necessarily access the archives and the libraries that some place like Harvard might have that were much more rich and useful so they were marginalized and excluded from even the the having the resources you can see I'm not going to read over the whole information on the slide but um State University's public universities typically um or many of them were open to women from much earlier and even at the very beginning like the University of Idaho um was co-ed from the very beginning and then finally in the 1970s so this is you know hundreds of years in some cases after the um founding of these institutions Title IX prevented discrimination against women in public universities this doesn't help the situation in private universities but it created social pressure that then LED as you can see um in the 60s 70s and 80s these private institutions becoming um open to all so this is a shift um over time for allowing women to access these institutions at the same time women are taking things into their own hands um uh as as not necessarily Scholars but just in the public eye they are creating their own spaces so public libraries often had reading rooms right you can sit and read in them and they would have separate sections for women you can see a picture here from the Detroit Public Library of a little section it's even got like a railing dividing it right and that's the women's room women would then sometimes say we want more than that and create their own libraries so you had women's libraries ladies libraries like this one on the left from Michigan typically women local women would start libraries in sometimes in private homes and then Lobby and fundraise to create physical public libraries this occurred in Pocatello women then had a public library started in someone's living room in their house and then did all the fundraising and got support from the city council to to create the Carnegie Library in Pocatello so and that was never separated always was open to the whole community so this is an effort that women were making even outside of academics and the history profession um women so we we were talking about how women were excluded from the history profession or marginalized in it at least so women historians created their own organization The Berkshire Conference of women historians and it um we it grew over time it started issuing book prizes and um article prizes in the mid 20th century and it today it's still going on every three years there's this the big Berks conference with thousands of women historians so it's um another example of women creating their own space in the profession and why are they having to do this right so they're not just marginalized but it's the work is seen as being a male space quite often or it was um professionalization created this peer group of male historians um and I love this quote from Bonnie Smith where she talks about um professionalization creating history as a social science um also creating highly gendered fantasies of historical work that enticed people into and shaped the profession and I love to show Indiana Jones as an example of this he's an archaeologist but it's similar to a historian in the way that he's presented he's handsome he's very traditionally masculine he's very independent right he just runs off he doesn't even finish teaching his classes for the semester and he's not um he doesn't have a wife and children the way that uh he doesn't have to care for a family the way that a woman historian at this time typically would have um and so he's sort of this very romantic figure that would be attracting men into the field um in a gendered way right this is not a space for women it's not something women can aspire to necessarily now Indiana Jones is a modern fictional character but it's this is an example of how the figure of his a historian or a scholar would have been really through that or even early 20th century even today even more recently um you can see examples here all the way up until the 2000s women are also marginalized in their relationships with historians right so you have a historian a man writing a book and his wife who could also be a historian or a scholar of some kind is helping right is participating she might be doing part of the research she might be um uh transcribing the book she might be proofreading it she might be creating the bibliography in the index so she's deeply involved in this scholarly work um and even when as this example from 1996 on the slide is saying she deserves to be a co-author she's not and so you get this vision of my wife was my typist right she's acknowledged it's nice right but there's no opportunity for that woman to be publicly acknowledged for her own scholarship it's just hashtag thanks for typing so this is um an ongoing issue even today right in addition to gender we also have race um involved in this historical profession of and its marginalization um women are being excluded from universities and at the same time black people in general are excluded from many universities in the early 20th century so we have the development of historically black colleges and universities hbcus and you have this example of Dorothy Porter so she's a librarian she's the first black person to get a library degree from Colombia and she creates this Historical Research Center at Howard University which is an HBCU um about African-American history and she so she knows she's she has had deep knowledge of the field um really comprehensive all the sources are available to her and she is categorizing this and organizing it and she refused to use the Dewey Decimal System which was the standard at the time um because in that system Black authors are only classified were only classified under two categories at that time in the 1930s international migration and colonization and slavery and emancipation so no matter what work you're doing as a historian if you are black your work gets categorized into those two sections which is really ridiculous and so she's not going to do that so she classified any black author's work the historian under the applicable category right and so she's really creating This Modern accurate view of black history and black historians work but it's again marginalized separated into a black only scholarly space similarly to the way that women overall are experiencing the historical profession at this time but things are improving right so you have examples of other women of color who are um achieving finally um uh acknowledgment of their scholarship and highest um you know honors Vicky Ruiz here Dr Ruiz um is a important scholar of Mexican-American and Chicana women's history from UC Irvine where I went to school and got my bachelor's degree she got the National Humanities medal Dr Gene O'Brien founded the Native American and Indigenous studies Association and is a really important Native American Scholar of Native American history she's a white Earth Ojibwe Nation member and writes about colonial era Native Americans so these types of women of color have historically been excluded but are now finding much more opportunity in the historical profession so women in colleges in in higher education today are much more represented right so things are getting better um women increasingly make up more of the total number of college graduates particularly in the bachelor's degree level they greatly exceed the number of men getting bachelor's degrees um but when you get a little bit higher women really are only making up about 40 percent of phds in general and only 35 percent of college faculty in history so there's still we still have a ways to go in the historical profession and just to finish up really quick um you have women historians also taking this um marginalization um into their own hands and trying to do things um uh on a different level right in in addition to their own scholarship so why are there all male history conferences right this does still happen right where you have um even at um you know at the highest levels you have a conference on applied history at Stanford and every single person participating in the conference as a speaker is a man right in 2018 right that should just not be happening so women have developed this organization called women also know history they created that hashtag on Twitter and it's a website with a directory of women historians and they're pointing out that you know it's only in the best interest of the historical profession to have diversity to include everyone right that women should be consulted by journalists and and conferences for their knowledge as experts in the field um you know if you have a a journalist writing about the war in Ukraine there's no reason that they shouldn't consult with a woman who has studied the history of Russia and Ukraine it doesn't automatically have to be a man so just to sum it up the history historical profession has a history itself of marginalizing women even though they were some of the first amateur historians in the U.S but things are getting better the The Arc of progress is moving along toward better diversity and better representation for women as historians