Wendy Urban-Mead
Achieving a balance between agency and victimization and avoiding neo-colonial versions of Orientalism were among the issues that sparked intense discussion at the IROW Workshop on Global Women's History, held in Draper Hall on Saturday, March 11. A a follow-up to the 1994 IROW Conference on Women in the Global Economy, the meeting highlighted the least scholarship on women from an international perspective. The workshop concluded with discussion of future research agendas.
In opening remarks on gender and European imperialism, Margaret Strobel of the University of Illinois at Chicago set the agenda for the day's meeting with her caution against privileging the experience of European women when writing of their place in colonial history. Instead, she urged that historians pay greater attention to interactions between European women and those of colonial countries.
Talks on Africa by Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Loyola University of Chicago, and IROW Director Iris Berger initiated vigorous interchange on the complex issue of female genital mutilation. In their presentations, both speakers stressed the need to deconstruct the idea of gender in a way that incorporates women's lineage and class identities as well as their multiple and shifting positions as mothers, wives, daughters, co-wives, and post-menopausal elders.
Presentations also offered new insights into particular historical events. Discussing the nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion in China, for example, Sucheta Mazumdar of Duke University revealed a political program that espoused a radical alteration of gender relations. The rebels prohibited foot-binding and arranged marriages and decreed that women be permitted to stand for imperial examinations.
In her summary of the latest trends in writing on the history of Latin American women, Kecia Albright-Ali of Duke University highlighted new work on the meaning of the domestic sphere in struggles for equality. Elaborating on this theme, and suggesting possible comparisons with the Middle East, she noted how often the words "house" and "street" represented the two poles of women's dichotomous roles. In her view, breaking down this separation has formed a key aspect of women's movements.
Judith Tucker of Georgetown University, speaking of attitudes towards women's history in the Middle East, provided one of the day's most startling revelations. Through her work in the region, she has found most local women scholars completely disinterested in investigating their own history. Rather, they favor "a clean break" with a past that they have repudiated. Making an eloquent appeal to reverse such attitudes, Tucker observed, "We don't have to validate past patterns by studying them."
The varied audience of graduate students and faculty added to the depth and richness of the discussion. They drew not only on their diverse interdisciplinary interests but on their own backgrounds in regions as diverse as Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa, Puerto Rico, and France. Summing up the contributions of the workshop, one participant noted that, while graduate students had benefitted from the suggestions on potential areas of study, faculty appreciated the sweep of the comparative and global presentations.