Scott Says History Must Include Women's Views

Scholars must reexamine the relationships between historians and the subjects they study, a professor of social science told a crowd of about 200 yesterday in the speech that ended Women's History Week.

Joan W. Scott, a social scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, discussed the development of women's history as a field and the importance of integrating women into the study of history as a whole.

Although history should be an impartial and objective study, it is not, Scott said. "History is not a universal figure--it is not telling the whole story."

Historians have traditionally ignored women and their viewpoints, Scott said, adding that this perspective leads to biased research.

Scott said she urged people to ask themselves, "What is the relation of the historian to the subjects [he or she] writes about?"

Women's history, Scott said, questions "the priority of his story over her story."

Scott said that the study of history should be altered so that students would recognize the methods of interpretation that have traditionally framed the understanding of history. This approach would allow students to look for a different means of analyzing history.

The goal should be to integrate women into the discipline even though the issue of "women" is separate, Scott said. She said she believed women's history today should not and does not document women's struggle or oppression. Instead, it "focuses on positive aspects of women's experience."

Scott said that the study of women's history grew out of the feminist movement of the 1960s. During this time, women--partially stimulated by the Civil Rights movement--called for an end to subordination and demanded equal rights, legally, professionally and personally.

During the mid 1970s and 1980s, Scott said, the political movement evolved from demands for equal treatment to an emphasis on recognizing and accepting gender difference.

"Women's history is not just a reflection of feminism," said Scott, adding feminism today "has not disappeared. Its existence has just changed."

The speech, sponsored by the History Department, was followed by a panel discussion with Jane Jenson of Carleton University, Cora Kaplan of Rutgers University and Susan Pedersen, an assistant professor of history at Harvard.