EDITORS' NOTE
Wilma Mankiller
When Gloria Steinem called to ask if I would join her and Marysa Navarro as a coeditor of a women's history reference book, I did not hesitate to accept this honor. It had been part of Gloria's original discussions with Houghton Mifflin that at least four other contributing editors would participate, representing diverse strands of women's experience; later we welcomed Wendy Mink and Barbara Smith. Indeed, it has been an honor to work with this wonderfully strong team of women. From the outset we felt connected to one another by our friendship and by our individual and collective commitment to produce a volume that would provide the reader with new and comprehensive information about women's history.
I once participated in a tribal ceremony (not Cherokee) in which I was doctored by a traditional medicine man to "speak for those who cannot speak for themselves." In the course of reviewing dozens of pieces for the book, I tried to uphold this principle.
As The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History evolved, it became clear that even the most committed feminist scholars knew little about contemporary Native American women or our history. But then who can blame them when Native American people, women in particular, are not even a blip on the national screen? Because there is so little accurate information about Native American women in either educational institutions or the popular culture, stereotypes are pervasive. Most people are genuinely surprised to learn that in some tribes women have held and still hold powerful leadership positions. The editors were dedicated to working with the writers to do as much as possible to eliminate stereotypes about all women.
I hope the reader will be as inspired as I was by these pieces. Most of all I hope The Reader's Companion is useful and will encourage the reader to learn more about women's history.
Working on this book was kind of like sitting with four other women to weave a basket over a long period of time. During that time all of our lives changed, some profoundly. We shared our stories with one another, drew strength from encouraging other women to tell their stories, and stayed focused on the weaving. In the end, like a communal basket, the book is the product of many hours of labor by a great many people. It will now take on a life of its own. The spirits of all the women who contributed and all the women for whom they speak will be with it wherever it goes.
Gwendolyn Mink
The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History is a part of women's history as much as it presents the history of U.S. women. It is the first reference work to provide information and interpretation to a wide audience about women's diverse experiences across the centuries. It is the first such work devoted to exploring moments, topics, and events in U.S. history as they affected, and were affected by, women. It is the only work I know of that lets women who have made history showcase their own ideas, accomplishments, and expertise: scholars who have blazed trials constituting and reconstituting the field of women's history; activists who have generated agendas and strategies for social change; practitioners who have exposed problems of race, class, and gender inequality to better view.
The Reader's Companion also makes history in the way that it asks readers to think about the history of U.S. women. The articles invite readers to ask "which women?" whenever "women" are referred to in the text; to wonder how claims and gains made by middle-class white women—so often the feminist subject—affected women of other classes and races; to view the lives and struggles of less visible or less powerful women as foundational to U.S. history; and to consider the ways in which differences among women have interacted with differences between the genders to complicate and enrich women's varied contributions to the development of U.S. society.
My hope for The Reader's Companion was that it would follow the best work in women's history to make race, class, and sexuality analytically pivotal to how we understand our gendered past. Women's history—and feminism—have come a long way in thirty years: it is a rare scholar or activist who consciously insists that the experiences of middle-class white women stand for the experiences of all. However, in women's history and across feminism, the goal of inclusion often has been forwarded by purely additive means.
The addition of different groups' stories to the tableau of women's history has been tremendously important, for it has broadened the very category "U.S. women" to include women whose identities have been erased by the dominant culture or whose communities have been treated as irrelevant to the central plot of U.S. history. Still, the incorporation of more women's stories has not always altered the way we think. The incorporation of untold histories has not immunized us from exoticizing, "othering," these histories, for example. Nor has it necessarily moved us beyond a mere enumeration of diversity to reconstruct visions and agendas because of that diversity.
Taken together, the articles in this volume complicate what we mean by "women's history" and so advance approaches that make differences the starting point of historical analysis rather than the afterthought to white women's stories. The articles do much more than give less privileged women an equal but separate place on the stage of U.S. history. They suggest that women's diversity runs to the core of U.S. women's collective history. Each article bears the imprint of its author, of course, so none fits a singular mold or speaks from a singular perspective. However, I think most authors honored our mission and have helped to construct a pathbreaking narrative.
Inventing The Reader's Companion and shepherding it to its final form has been a labor-intensive, sometimes frustration-filled, endeavor: thousands of manuscript pages to review, hundreds of galleys to proof and edit, my own essays to write, and sticky issues to settle. But every aspect of our work and collaboration has been instructive and rewarding to me. Some of our knottiest disagreements have been about lived differences—underscoring the importance of foregrounding distinctions of privilege and experience even as we commonly celebrate the history of U.S. women. All of our work gave me opportunities to learn for which I will always be grateful—about painting, dance, Woodlands Indians, and other subjects about which I know far less than I should. I only wish that readers could read each article as many times as I have!
I am indebted to the many authors who changed their schedules and personal agendas to develop the several hundred articles contained in The Reader's Companion. They make this volume—and it is one of which they, and I, can be proud. I am particularly indebted to Dana Frank, whose own contributions to the volume improved its quality and upon whose encyclopedic knowledge of women's history and labor history I have come to depend. My mother, Patsy Takemoto Mink, let me rant and moan about the various obstacles I encountered along the way and always gave judicious advice. Although Theodore J. Lowi did not choose this role, he provided sage feminist counsel when I was unsure of how to proceed and showed me how political science (after all) could offer solutions to dilemmas of both history and feminism.
Marysa Navarro
The idea of participating in The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History was irresistible from the first moment Gloria Steinem mentioned it to me. We were going to be working together in a project that would involve the widest possible array of feminists—Native Americans, Latinas, African Americans, Asian Americans, old, young, early visionaries, guerrilla actresses, labor organizers, lesbian and gay leaders, activists of all kinds, and scholars. Our purpose would be to write a book that would tell the different histories of U.S. women, histories shaped by their race and ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and class. It would also include the history of ideas about women at present and in the past. It would encompass the history of Cherokee and Pueblo women, Kongo- and Yoruba-speaking slaves, English-speaking indentured servants and mill workers, Spanish-speaking Hispanas, and young brides in Chinatown.
I have never regretted saying yes, despite the mountain of articles piled on my desk every so often, the endless conference calls, and at times tense discussions. My enthusiasm for this project was generously nurtured by the people at Houghton Mifflin, by my fellow editors, and by the extraordinary commitment of the writers who believed in the effort as much as we did.
We were inclusive, but this does not mean we were able to do everything. Very early on, for example, we agreed that we would exclude biographies and that certain subjects would receive greater emphasis than others. The women's health movement has been an important component of the women's movement, so this book contains many entries covering health issues. Readers are directed to such subjects as birth control, breast cancer, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, and mental health.
The knowledge, activism, and information produced by U.S. women and represented in The Reader's Companion are truly dazzling. The Reader's Companion has nineteen different articles on feminism—twenty, when we include the piece on womanism. There are more than a dozen entries on specific labor unions, numerous articles on immigration, legislation, and religion, with entries on Buddhism, fundamentalism, and Wicca, among others.
Some articles provide information about subjects where the research is limited or where the cross-cultural perspective has been lacking or is dispersed among various scholarly articles. The essay "Images of Women," for example, required the culling of information from multiple sources. There are long interpretive essays written by scholars, practitioners, or activists. Some topics are traditional, but the interpretation is new. The general overview article on literature does not simply provide information about women's contribution to this field, although it does mention the names of women who have distinguished themselves in particular genres. It also discusses how literature has been defined and, from a cross-cultural perspective, it seeks to explain what literature has meant in the lives of women, how it has been affected by their writing, and its relationship to the women's movement. The Reader's Companion is a unique reference work because it represents much of what U.S. women have written about themselves at the close of the twentieth century.
Barbara Smith
When I was invited in 1992 to be one of the five general editors of The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History, I was of course intrigued, but I also had serious questions. Because I was aware of significant political differences among the potential editors, I wondered if it would be possible for us to work together and to shape a volume that would be true to each of our visions of feminist activism, theory, and scholarship. After much soul-searching and stimulating, productive discussions at our first meeting in January 1993, I decided to commit to the project.
All of my previous work as a writer and editor has been shaped by my various identities and by my political activism in liberation movements that I see as fundamentally connected to one another. I am an African American woman from a working-class family, born into segregation in 1946. I am a Black feminist, socialist, and lesbian, and it is these perspectives that I have tried to bring to this book.
When I was still in graduate school in the early 1970s and teaching courses in African American literature and Black women writers, I often thought how fascinating and useful it would be to teach so-called American literature (that is European American authors) from a Black and feminist perspective. Such a course would not merely add a few token people of color and women to the syllabus, but would actually interrogate the white male literary canon, which would inevitably reveal oppressive ironies that are as integral to the formation of "American" literature as themes such as the quest for identity, autonomy, and freedom in a "new" land. I never had the opportunity to teach this course, but I was excited that work on The Reader's Companion would be an opportunity to do something similar, to redefine an area of knowledge.
It was not enough to have specific entries about women of color, lesbians, and working-class women, but material about women of color, lesbians, and working-class women needed to be addressed in every article whose subject matter would logically encompass their experiences. I think that attempting this level of inclusiveness was the most difficult challenge of the project and also what makes this history of U.S. women so unique.
In our guidelines for contributors we gave the following instructions: "The scope of each article should provide a multiculture and inclusive perspective, including information on race, ethnicity, class, social status, sexuality, religion, and politics as relevant to the understanding of the subject matter." I regret that this statement did not also mention disability and age. Those omissions indicate that working toward inclusiveness has been a challenge for us as editors as well. Some of the contributors were already used to thinking about the implications of their subject areas for all women, but for many more our expectations were quite new. In one case a historian was assigned to write specifically about a group of European American women but refused to discuss their race and class privilege, instead treating European American women's experience as generic. We reassigned the entry. In contrast, Ruth Harriet Jacobs points out in her article, "Aging," how race, class, and sexual orientation affect different women's experiences of growing older. Ellen Bravo's entry, "Clerical Work," describes how racism excluded women of color from this predominantly female occupation until the civil rights era.
Although I participated in countless hours of telephone conference calls to arrive at our entries and assignments and read and edited thousands of pages of manuscripts and galleys, the most arduous task by far was trying to make sure that no racism, elitism, or heterosexism either by exclusion or by factual or interpretive distortion appeared in this book. Fortunately, the majority of contributors were open to expanding the coverage in their articles.
As comprehensive as we have tried to be, which to me is one of the book's most appealing strengths, some gaps remain. Early on, we chose to exclude biographical entries because of space limitations. There are entries that we tried very hard to obtain but frustratingly could not. The political differences that had concerned me at the outset did not, for the most part, prevent our effectively working together. Not surprisingly, the article on capitalism and socialism and what developed into two different articles on feminism were focal points for significant disagreement.
Despite these many challenges, I am very glad that I signed on to the project. I hope that The Reader's Companion will make a unique and useful contribution for years to come to our understandings of the diverse communities of women who have shaped the history of this land.
Gloria Steinem
This book has many mothers, but the first was Liz Kubik, who believed that readers deserved a guide to the newly emerging history of the female half of the country. As editorial director of reference at Houghton Mifflin, she had seen the old definition of an encyclopedia—a reference work with alphabetically arranged articles on a variety of topics—expand to encompass good writing, conceptual thinking, and new popularity. She decided to create The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History.
When Liz suggested that I become the outside editor that each such Companion has had, her enthusiasm was contagious. For one thing, I, too, love the format of short descriptive entries and longer evaluative essays. It rewards the researcher, invites the reader, and offers all of us the serendipitous pleasure of discovering unexpected treasures on the way to whatever we started out to find. For another, I had been hoping to find ways of getting women's history out of the classroom and into everyday life. As someone from the days before Women's History, African American History, and other courses best described as Remedial History, I was painfully aware of how difficult it was to find this knowledge off campus, and how crucial to a view of the country as if women mattered.
In other words, I wanted The Reader's Companion to exist. Just couldn't imagine trying it by myself.
Secure in my knowledge that my suggestion wasn't possible within the Companion format, I said I couldn't imagine attempting such a task as an individual. One of the few advantages of exclusion from history is the determination to end exclusion; thus women's history has tended to be more inclusive by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, ability, and region that other histories. Even to symbolize the diversity of women's experience on this subcontinent would take a group of editors.
"All right," Liz said gamely. "We can have a group of editors."
Still looking for an out, I added that such a Companion would have to begin with the first nations on this land, not with the arrival of the first Europeans. After all, many Native American cultures were based on the idea of balance between males and females, a prepatriarchal past that could help give us faith in the possibility of a post-patriarchal future. Though the political limits of scholarship would make this enlarging of the American canvas difficult, it also would make us conscious of blank spaces and perhaps turn up new parts of the big picture. Liz agreed.
I got to musing about the redefinition of categories—for example, expanding "work" to include the labor of homemakers, or "art" to include what has been called "crafts" if created by women. I knew I was hooked; there was no way I could resist this adventure.
After that first meeting in early 1993, Wilma Mankiller, Wendy Mink, Marysa Navarro, Barbara Smith, and I formed the editorial group. You are meeting each one in her own words here, but all said yes with courage and generosity. Together, I think we've disproved the theory that "there has to be one boss." We've done collectively what none of us could have done alone.
There were many moments when I wondered what I had got myself into. Computer printouts of entries and essays could have felled a small forest. Telephone conferences went on for so long that separating the phone from my ear seemed to require surgery. Reading and commenting on manuscripts took unexpected amounts of time, and scheduling meeting of busy women required almost as much energy—especially on the part of the Houghton Mifflin staff—as did the meetings themselves. When different experiences and viewpoints created tension, I had to have faith that encompassing difference would create a broader viewpoint and benefit readers.
There have been epiphanies of learning from our group of editors, advisers, and more than three hundred contributors. Each has been part of the labor of birth. I doubt that such a diverse collection of scholars, activists, and writers has ever tried to cover so much new territory in such a concentrated form. As a wider view of history began to emerge, I remembered the breadth of Liz's early instruction to "redirect history." But like all mothers who watch their young one go off into the world, I know this is a beginning, not an end. Because the message of this project goes beyond the past: We are all forces of history.
