TOWARDS A HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE FIRST RUSSIAN WOMEN HISTORIANS OF THE LATE 19TH — BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY: LEISURE AND RECREATION

The article focuses on the study of the anthropology of everyday life of persons of intellectual labor. The subject of the study are the leisure peculiarities of the everyday life and home life of the first Russian women historians of the pre-revolutionary period, the variety of forms of free time available to the first women scientists among professional historians, as well as the budget and the ratio of their working and free time. Reflecting on the peculiarities in the study of the everyday life of the academic and teaching communities and describing the main forms of leisure of “learned ladies”, the authors give examples of how they organize and attend intellectual “evenings”, reading professional and fictional literature, forms of public engagement, including charitable activities. Various documents of personal origin—memoirs, diaries, personal correspondences of the first Russian women historians—made it possible to draw conclusions about the complex interweaving of free and working time in the life of women scientists, the flow of work into leisure and vice versa. The authors also demonstrate that the gradual entry of women into the male academic environment significantly influenced the practice of leisure: the contamination of work and rest was sometimes forced, and the adaptation to an academic career went, among other things, through the assimilation of appropriate leisure practices, which became an integral part of the lifestyle of women scientists. The marginalized position of the first Russian women historians forced them to try to keep being involved in social interactions. For this purpose, they sought to consolidate professional acquaintances at informal evenings, where it was possible to understand the unwritten rules of conduct and corporate norms of the academic environment. That said, the real joy for women was the presence of personal space in which they could devote themselves to the scientific process—engaging in fruitful research work.

The Women-Historians in F.W. Maitland’s Scientific School: Mary Bateson

Women-historians make up a small part of the scientific school of the outstanding British historian and lawyer F.W. Maitland (1850-1906). The gender profile of F.W. Maitland’s school was not the subject of special study. The women’s coming in the historical science of Great Britain in 1880-1890s was the result of a broad suffragist movement, granting women equal rights with men in higher education in national universities. The formation of “female” medieval studies was influenced by F.W. Maitland as a scholar and a professor of Cambridge University - his methodological approach, relevance with archival records as the main base of the historical studies, his fruitful publishing activities. Three prominent women-medievalists - Mary Bateson (1850-1906), Helen Maud Cam (1885-1968) and Bertha Haven Putnam (1872-1960), specialized in different spheres of the English medieval history, but in line with the teacher’s methodology, represented F.W. Maitland’s scientific school the most clearly. The scientific activity of Mary Bateson, a recognized and direct student of F.W. Maitland, one of the most famous British scientists in the field of medieval studies, is being investigated.

Introduction

The movers and shakers of women’s history during second-wave feminism and particularly the women who in 1970 founded the Southern Association of Women Historians (named changed to Southern Association for Women Historians in 1985) would likely be surprised as well as delighted by current strides by feminist scholars and women historians in all fields, but particularly in Southern women’s history. They doubtless would be amazed by how the Southern academy has adapted to female colleagues and feminist agendas. Coming together to celebrate fifty years of organizational outreach, mentoring and fundraising, prize-giving and programming, it is a good time not only to take stock of this organization but also to reflect on our academic enterprise: the challenges and accomplishments at half a century. The fluidity and dynamism of women’s history has combined with important recognition of race and region within the American past, and twenty-first-century shifts take into account the dramatic acceleration of historical revisionism.

A Place Where Women Can Feel Valued, or Why Academic Professional Associations Matter, Especially for Women

The Southern Association for Women Historians provided a place where female historians felt validated and emboldened. By providing this space over the past five decades, the SAWH has done two important things: advance the careers of individual female historians while encouraging, developing, and legitimizing the study of women’s history. In the process, as several of the scholars here have already suggested, the SAWH helped transform the historiography of the American South by refocusing many of the lenses that scholars have trained on the past. The history of the SAWH demonstrates the crucial role that scholarly professional associations play in shaping fields of knowledge and the careers of individual scholars.

Present at the Birth of a New History

The Southern Association for Women Historians, has had two missions since its founding in 1970: to support women historians and to promote women’s history. From the beginning, it was an inclusive and non-hierarchical organization that took mentoring colleagues seriously and built structures within the institution to foster it. The SAWH welcomed men as members, along with those scholars who worked independently or outside of the academy, and supported graduate students. The SAWH’s collaborative model and conferences provided a robust forum for the exchange of ideas. At the SAWH’s founding, it was a caucus within the Southern Historical Association. In 1975, however, members decided to form a separate organization that could better foster its model of activism for women and women’s scholarship. It worked to increase women members in the SHA and to shape that organization’s rules and culture to be more accepting of women and their scholarship. In addition to this activism, the SAWH helped birth the now robust field of southern women’s history.

Sisterly Networks

Tracing the development of the field of southern women’s history over the past half century, Sisterly Networks shows how pioneering feminists laid the foundation for a strong community of sister scholars and delves into the work of an organization central to this movement, the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). Launched in 1970, the SAWH provided programming, mentoring, fundraising, and outreach efforts to support women historians working to challenge the academic establishment. In this book, leading scholars reflect on their own careers in southern history and their experiences as women historians amid this pathbreaking expansion and revitalization of the field. Their stories demonstrate how women created new archival collections, expanded historical categories to include gender and sexuality, reimagined the roles and significance of historical women, wrote pioneering monographs, and mentored future generations of African American women and other minorities who entered the academy and contributed to public discourse. Providing a lively roundtable discussion of the state of the field, contributors comment on present and future work environments and current challenges in higher education and academic publishing. They offer profound and provocative insights on the ways scholars can change the future through radically rewriting the gender biases of recorded history.