A Material World of Ideas

This weekend I am reading In the Company of Educated Women by Barbara Miller Solomon.  Though published in 1985, Solomon’s volume remains the standard survey of the history of (mostly white) women’s higher education in the United States.  It is briskly written and pleasant to read, and its narrative is comfortingly familiar to anyone who has taught the survey using a recent edition of any multi-authored textbook, because textbook sections that deal with women’s lives and aspirations clearly draw from this important work.

Solomon rings the changes from Republican motherhood to the moral reformer to the middle-class daughter to the modern co-ed.  This is the centuries-long story of how women in America made their way into the college classroom and became the majority of collegians (though not the majority of tenured or tenure-track professors).  Solomon gestures toward Black women’s higher education at various points, but her focus is on the white middle-class woman and on those women who aspired to join that class.  It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a very useful book.

While reading along, I noticed something – the absence of certain verbs, the verbs I am accustomed to encountering when I read recent scholarship about women’s lives, women’s thought, women’s intellectual work. They are the transitive verbs of women’s physical labor, but verbs applied as well to women’s intellectual work: “fashioned,” “crafted,” “shaped,” “weaved,” “embroidered,” “birthed,” “nurtured,” etc.

I am accustomed to encountering these verbs in the work of social historians, but I find them in the work of intellectual historians as well when they are writing about women.  Women “nurture” networks of communication, they “fashion” narratives, they “birth” intellectual communities, they “weave” arguments.

I always find these verbs jarring – though often in a good way.  They are a reminder that women’s lives were (!) relegated to the realm of materiality; to men alone belonged significant ideation.  So relegated, women nevertheless found ways to think and to pass that thinking down by means other than those available to people (men) whose work entailed thinking and writing for a living.  This is the intended import of such verbs, and this is one reason among many why I would not expect to find them in a history of women in higher education written in 1985.

But just as often I find these verbs jarring for their condescension – or, I guess, their submission to the status quo.

“Fashioned,” “crafted,” shaped,” “weaved,” “embroidered,” “birthed,” “nurtured” – in historiography, these are the action verbs of the subaltern.  This is how historians carve out (!) agency for those who, at first glance, seem to have none:  by describing the realm of will and intent and ideation in physical terms.

The ur-text for this materialist style is, I think, Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.  Genovese contended for the agency of the enslaved, but he presented that agency in mostly material, physical terms – within the grievous psychic constraints and physical sufferings of slavery, will did its work by hand, both literally and figuratively.

Take Eugene Genovese, combine him with Clifford Geertz, add some strains of feminist theory – Annette Kolodny, Carol Gilligan, Julia Kristeva – and I think you have the makings of a style of writing that manages to signal both the historical limitations women faced and their acts of will to overcome them.  My surmise is that, as is the case with so many other kinds of thought, the historiography using these verbs after Genovese (maybe before him?) appeared first in Black studies and African American history and then was ported over into women’s history.

But this stylistic emphasis on the physicality of women’s lives can have the unfortunate effect of reinscribing a traditional division between women and men as historical subjects, as thinkers.  In this style, women do their intellection metaphorically, concretely, while men do their intellection purely, abstractly – and we all know which kind of thinking is the “better” kind.

Or do we?

One promising route out of what I see as a historiographic cul de sac is not to set aside the metaphors of physical (and gendered) labor when discussing the history of ideas. Rather, it is to deploy those metaphors more widely, more inclusively.

Caroline Winterer does this in her fascinating work, American Enlightenments:  Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason.  Darwin, she writes, sought to “craft a new story about the development of life on earth,” and eventually “Americans and Europeans together…crafted a new story of their earth” (42, 44).  John Adams felt that America was bereft of the kinds of institutions “that had nurtured European political and intellectual life since the Renaissance” (15), while Adams himself “nurtured a pet theory that since antiquity priests and other fanatics had been burning all the books that would undermine the doctrines of their despotic religious regimes” (191).  John Adams as nursemaid to an idea – that is one way to remember the ladies!

The verbs of culture and care, the verbs of domesticity, the verbs of manual labor – these verbs, when reserved for the subaltern, the marginalized, the overlooked, the underrepresented or unrepresented agents in the historical record, sometimes grant those subjects either social agency at the cost of limiting their intellectual significance, or intellectual agency at the cost of limiting their social significance.

But in a discipline that (rightly) privileges the ideal over the material, but in which some insist that ideas ultimately can and must be extracted from their context and studied in the abstract in order to be properly understood, it is a salutary practice to deploy verbs that gesture toward the fact that all thinkers, women and men alike, are embodied beings, and all ideas have their origins and ends in the grit and dirt and homely fact of embodied human life.

“We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” – Virginia Woolf