A letter to Professor Brown

Dear Professor Brown,

            As a historian, your article concerning how women's history has often been written and the limitations to this common way of writing history was fascinating in that it did not just address the complications of writing history but pushed historians to become better at writing it.  Particularly when you discussed the relational nature of difference, you suggested that historians not only take difference into account but look at difference as a guiding factor in relating the myriad actors in a narrative.  The line, "It is important to recognize that middle-class women live the lives they do precisely because working-class women live the lives they do,"(298) was so emphatic because for many works, historians assume that this is what they are doing.  They assume that by extensively exploring their subject, they shed light on the other actors involved.  However, as you show, this is often done incompletely.  Professor Evelyn Higginbotham's article, African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race, also addresses this issue by discussing how race in particular is not explored enough within other scholarship about identity whether it be gender, sexual or class.  Her analysis of the "racial constructions of sexuality" including her description of how Thomas Jefferson "conjectured that black women mated with orangutans," (263) reveal the hugely important implications of these intersecting identities - "Black" and "female."  The way in which race was conceptualized allowed Jefferson to use stereotypical views of people of African descent to support his claim.  Yet, the way in gender presented itself, i.e. the female bodies of his slaves, complicated this disdainful view of Black people and allowed Jefferson to disprove his own theory by "mating" with one of his female slaves, Sally Hemings.  This example helps support your point that such identities are many and conflicting and must be looked at together to get a fuller understanding of the historical implications of an issue.

            Another issue that you raised is that "The effect of [only acknowledging the way in which white women have shaped Black women's lives without the reverse] is that acknowledging difference becomes a way of reinforcing the notion that the experiences of white middle-class women are the norm; all others become deviant - different from," (300).  There is an interview with Toni Morrison in which she addresses her career as a female Black writer.  She discusses how many critics have told her to drop these "superfluous" labels in order to become a real, big-time writer.  One for the canons.  But then she discusses how such labels are no less valid than the label of "writer" without any adjectives and how by shedding such descriptions, she would reinforce these critics' beliefs that "Black" and "woman" are somehow less necessary or less valid.  This anecdote helped me understand more fully your concept of identity normativity and how important it is to not passively acknowledge difference.   When you discuss female authors and how female authors of color "do not have the privilege of deciding whether to acknowledge, at least at some basic level, their multiple identities," (301) you make it very clear how by asking different requirements of people based on the way they identify privileges certain identities over others.  This also makes it seem as if those who identify with the normative identity cannot have multiple identities in the same sense that those who are deviant from this normative can.  And this seems an enormous loss.  Not only does it further limit the extent to which universality can be a useful way of thinking about people as you describe many feminists wish to do, but it also makes it much more difficult to bring seemingly "different" people into conversation with each other on any sort of meaningful plain. 

            What your article helped me understand that by engaging these differences and completing a narrative with many conflicting, conflating differences is hugely important in describing as fully as possible the relationship between different historical actors or different groups of people.  Take the case of my honors thesis - I am writing about Reconstruction from the viewpoints of two major historical figures, Frederick Douglass and Henry McNeal Turner.  Both men were African American civil rights activists, but the struggle I have encountered is how to deal how their class and status affected their views on race.  It is this intersectionality of race and class that I need to address, because their differences are extremely important to understanding the political and social landscape of the nineteenth century. 

Very best,

Bianca