Gender and Race: Together at Last?


	Gender and Race Introduction	9:47
	The Slavery Experience	10:04
	The Idea of Race as Nation	13:44
	The Future of Black Women's History	17:32
	Black Women Historians	16:25
	Black Women's Academic Experience	10:40
	Interaction Among Panelists	13:20
	Audience Question and Answer: Part One	21:13
	Audience Question and Answer: Part Two	18:30

	Dean Drew Gilpin Faust: The Slavery Experience
	Drew Gilpin Faust, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and professor of history at Harvard University, opens the panel with a focus on "the relationship between slavery and gender" as seen through historians' changing lenses. Quoting from the 1861 autobiography of former slave Harriet Jacobs, Faust begins, "Slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women." Jacobs's <i>Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl</i> became "an important abolitionist text," in her own day, but generations of historians were "curiously slow…to embrace Jacobs's insights and to see that slavery was a different experience for women and men," according to Faust. Indeed, the Dean asserts, "the study of women and slavery represents a telling example of what history has and has not seen."<br> <br> Faust recounts how the Civil Rights movement "stimulated a reassessment of the place and meaning of slavery in American history." In this rich and burgeoning new field of historical inquiry, scholars abandoned the "racist assumptions that had undergirded" earlier studies. From its inception, the scholarship produced in the 1950s-1970s was, Faust states, "centrally, essentially, and almost completely unself-consciously about gender." In these "path-breaking" historical works, "categories of gender and race were intricately intertwined" as "the very language of the field…was suffused with the imagery of masculinity." But in the context of that era, Faust says, "almost no one noticed." These and subsequent studies "focused almost exclusively on illuminating the experience of male salves. Men's lives were seen as generic. Their experience generalized as normative." As a result, Faust states, "After two decades of extraordinary historical work on slavery, we knew almost nothing about women slaves at all."<br> <br> Then, starting in the 1970s, thanks to the unprecedented work of historians Gerda Lerner, Deborah Gray White, and others, a "perspective of slavery through a gendered lens" started to "emerge," according to Faust. "We began to see that America had had slaveries—not one slavery—and a key component in these differences of experience was gender…. Slave women were less likely to have the chance to become skilled laborers than were slave men, less likely to be able to travel beyond the plantation, less likely to run away, and when the Civil War came, they did not have the opportunity to claim their freedom through Union military service. We began to understand the realities of slavery and freedom as gendered in important ways."<br> <br> Since then, Faust believes that "Paying attention to women's lives in slavery has transformed our understanding of the dynamics of power on which the slave system rested, as well as our understanding of the nature of human experience during the two centuries and a half of bondage." Moreover, coming to terms with the history of women and slavery has taught us other significant historical lessons as well: "It has forced us to interrogate our understandings of gender and the fixity of gender categories…. Understandings of womanhood have been inflected by race.… Exploring how this began and evolved in the history of women and slavery has taught us a great deal about how to study the constructiveness of gender, how to recognize the arbitrariness of gender categories, how to understand the racial nature of womanhood and the gendered nature of race. We have found that gender and race are not together at last, as the title of this panel suggests, but have rather been together from the very first." <br> <br>