Women in History 'On All Sides of Power Divides,' Duke Professors Say

During Women's History Month (March), it's important to remember that women have used their influence not only to resist domination through movements such as Women's Suffrage, but also to maintain unjust social systems such as slavery, say two Duke University history professors.

The field of women's history, having established women as powerful actors in history, is now more focused on examining how -- for good or ill -- women have used that power, said Susan Thorne, an associate professor of history, and Thavolia Glymph, an assistant professor of history and African and African-American studies.

Women's actions throughout history "certainly put them on all sides of power divides," said Thorne, who along with Glymph is organizing a conference this month at Duke on "Women and Empire." "The field has moved beyond a romanticizing search for foremothers."

Thorne points to research that questions the traditional understanding of the middle class, Victorian-era British home as "a haven in the heartless world."

"In the traditional narrative, the 'heartless world' was the economic world of capitalism and competition, and the 'haven' was the home, where morality and religiosity reigned," she said. "Women's history was initially focused on early feminist struggles to escape the restrictions by which these spheres were kept separate, struggles for equal access to education, property rights, child custody, suffrage, etc.

"What I think we've neglected until relatively recently is how respectable homes, by employing domestic servants, were always already a part of that 'heartless' economic system. And the employers of domestic servants, who were often female and who constituted one of the largest occupational categories in the industrializing world, were these very middle-class women."

Glymph, a contributor to "Blackwell Companion to American Women's History," finds another historical example of women being positioned on both sides of a power structure in her research on Southern plantation households.

"The history of 'Southern women' has skirted the question of white women as active agents in the construction of slavery and the production and reproduction of their own racial privilege," she said. "It has underestimated the power of plantation mistresses.

"Slaveholding women, far from leaving the exercise of power to solely to men, played a central role in the violence that took place on Southern plantations and in plantation households," she said. "There was a female face of power in the South as well as a male one."

The "Women and Empire" conference that Glymph and Thorne are organizing will be March 23 and 24 at Duke, and is open to the public. More information about the conference is available by contacting Glymph or Thorne.