Standing: Cora A. Allen, Hermann Charles Henderson, Faith Benita Clark, Louis Grant Whitehead, George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Amy Eliza Tanner, Kiichi Tanaka, Addison Webster Moore, Jacob Dorsey Forrest Seated: unknown, Edward Scribner Ames, Albertina A. Forrest, Simon Fraser MacLennan, James R. Angell, Ella May Flagg, Helen Thompson Wooley
The Chicago meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (November 8-11) offers several papers and at least one whole panel on gender in American thought. Looking through the program, I am pleased to see how the use of gender analysis appears to be growing among our ranks, a decisive move forward from the first conference I attended in 2009. A quick glance at the papers and panels with gender in the title, which may very well underestimate its presence, demonstrates some interesting possibilities:
- Melissa Morales, Fordham University, Paper “‘Mrs. such a one acts out of her sphere’: The Gendered Politics of Revolutionary Action”
- Anne M. Blaschke, College of the Holy Cross, Paper “Reckoning with Johan Galt and Swami Nirmalananda: Gendered Leadership and the Ideological Legacies in the ‘Long1990s’ Free-Enterprise Fitness Cu”
- Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, The New School, “Women, Sex, and Gender” in a roundtable entitled “Trumpian Themes in Context”
- The panel chaired by Susan J. Pearson, Northwestern University, “Uses and Abuses of the Common Man Mythology: Race, Gender, and Anti-Intellectualism in the United States”
“The Gender of Intellectual History,” a panel with the chair and commentator Rosalind Rosenberg, Barnard College, is a presentation of the Gender in American Thought (GAT) Project. GAT is an initiative to bring more thorough gender analysis to intellectual history. The three papers presented on Friday, November 9, 10-11:45 AM include:
- “Finding Gender in “Free Range” American Thought” – Lilian Calles Barger, Independent Scholar
- “Sex in Brain, Gender in Thought: The Case of Helen Hamilton Gardener” – Kimberly Hamlin, Miami University (OH)
- “We Can’t Gender Intellectual History Without Women’s Voices: The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy as a Case Study” – Andrea L. Turpin, Baylor University
As a continuation of the plenary conversation at the 2016 conference “The Many Faces of Gender in American Thought: Considering Our Methods,” this year’s panel introduces the GAT Project to conference participants and offers theoretical frameworks, methods, and possible areas that would benefit from gender analysis and examples of research already underway.
The objective of GAT is to follow up on the historical recovery of women that since the 1970s has produced a significant body of scholarship, by considering gender as a central category of analysis in U.S. intellectual history. While we applaud the increased study of women intellectuals in their own right, we also seek to gender the category of “intellectual” by probing more deeply into who or what counts as intellectual. This means we must interrogate the ways gender has created and sustained the category of “intellectual” and defined the social place of women and men.
GAT seeks to redress the current underutilization of gender analysis by focusing on how it operates as a set of ideas and relative power relations through theoretical scrutiny and reconsideration of our methods. To this end we remain open to new approaches that identify the effects of gender in broad subject areas such as capitalism, pragmatism, ecology, religion, anti-intellectualism, and internationalism, just to name a few. And we are open to new sources and archives that expand the object of our study into multiple realms of thought.
It’s helpful to think about gender as a cultural context for arguments or in applying discourse analysis—skills which intellectual historians are specially prepared to wield. Foregrounding gender as a context brings attention to the cultural and symbolic power of “man” or “woman,” allows for analysis of cross-gender social networks, and enables examining how gender affects the articulation and dissemination of ideas. The GAT project holds that the stakes in eliding gender and its intersectionality are no less than missing the consequences of how ideas emerge and change as they move through the wider culture.
Those interested in GAT as an ongoing project are especially encouraged to attend “The Gender of Intellectual History” panel. If you cannot attend, please join us for lunch right after the panel at noon at Beatrix, located at 671 N. St. Clair St. (one block from hotel). Over lunch, we will discuss the way forward to a workshop and publication. Otherwise, please speak to one of the GAT committee members, Kimberly Hamlin, Andrea Turpin or Lilian Calles Barger, at the conference. You can also send a request to join the GAT Project here through google groups.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and invite all interested scholars to join us in the GAT project. See you in Chicago!
2 Thoughts on this Post
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This sounds like a promising initiative. Unfortunately, it looks like the lunch would overlap significantly with the USIH business meeting (which starts at 12:30). Maybe some of us who are already working with “gender as context” would be of more service to the aims of this project to attend the business meeting rather than the lunch, since gender plays an (often unexamined) role in the workings of academic societies and professional networks, including this one. I’m very glad that there is an opportunity to engage in important conversations either at your lunch meeting or at the business meeting; I just wish there were ample opportunity to do both.
To clarify, the GAT Project is not addressing the issue of the advancement of women scholars in the profession which would be better addressed at the business meeting as a significant concern. GAT is also not an official initiative of the S-USIH. GAT is for those working on gender analysis in historical research and writing. The GAT lunch is only one way to connect with the project. Other opportunities include the panel, online google group or through personal contact with the steering committee as indicated in the original post. So if anyone is interested hopefully you will catch any one of those opportunities. See you in Chicago!