七月-第4篇-女權研究 (看似相關背景文章)

mercury01

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My title comes from a rueful observation of Elizabeth Ellet, the first historian to address extensively the relationship of women to the American Revolution. Ellet was a writer for popular periodicals; her grandfather had fought in the Revolution. In 1848 she published two volumes of biographical sketches of some 60 women who lived through the American Revolution. In her preface, Ellet addressed the practical problem of recovering their lives.

Ellet interviewed and corresponded with elderly survivors and with the children and relatives of her subjects. After a while, her problem ceased to be a problem of finding information and became the analytical problem of how to arrange and interpret it. She did not solve the analytical problem, but she did begin to sneak up on the solution.

Ellet deduced that there had been at least two sets of equally authentic wartime experiences, documented in different ways. Attested to by public records, "the actions of men stand out in prominent relief," she wrote. But the actions and influence of women occurred in the private "women's sphere," and for these activities documentation was deficient. Thus there were two perspectives on the Revolution, as there were of any great event, waiting to be written about; and of the two retrieving the women's perspective was the more challenging and the more difficult. Retrieval was difficult for the technical reasons of the paucity of official and personal records, for the inattention with which women's behavior was regarded, and for the scorn with which records of that behavior were treated by a "manuscript -destroying" generation. But it was especially difficult, Ellet suspected, because women's history necessarily had a distinctive psychological component. She thought that women shaped the history of their generation by personal influence, by the force of "sentiment," by feeling. This second factor, inchoate, ill -defined, which represented the difference women made, could not be measured and was not easily described. "History can do it no justice."

Ellet wrote in the now dated language of nineteenth-century romanticism, and it is easy to read her work in a way that stresses its naive celebration of domesticity and service, its simplistic narrative strategies, and its implicit racism. (She thought it was generous when a slave who had saved his master's plantation was rewarded by easier work and, only many years later, by the purchase of his wife from a neighboring plantation so they could end their lives together.) I would not agree with Ellet that sentiment and feeling are a female monopoly. But I do believe that it was an analytical improvement to recognize that there were at least two wars, a men's war and a women's war (just as there was a soldier's war and a civilian's war); that the two merged and often interacted; that one might serve the other but was not necessarily subsumed by it. As Justice William O. Douglas observed many years later, "The two sexes are not fungible."

bright1798

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