Professors in Dialogue: Carol Berkin and Catherine Clinton Discuss American Women’s History
A conversation with 2020 Pace–Gilder Lehrman MA in American History Program professors about women’s history in America
Moderated by Jim Knable, Gilder Lehrman Institute Staff Writer
Jim Knable: Would you tell us about yourselves and the courses you’re teaching in 2020 for the Pace–Gilder Lehrman MA in American History Program, in which the students are all K-12 teachers?
Carol Berkin: I’m Carol Berkin, and I am teaching a course on “Women in the American Revolution” for the Pace–Gilder Lehrman program. I formerly was Presidential Professor of American History at Baruch College, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I have retired, and now I am in the illustrious state of being emerita.
Catherine Clinton: And I’m Catherine Clinton. I’m the Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas in San Antonio. I am emerita from Queen’s University Belfast. I’m looking forward to teaching “The Struggle for Women’s Rights, 1820–1920.”
Jim Knable: What led you to create these courses?
Carol Berkin: I have taught and given talks around the country about women in the American Revolution, but I wanted to do this in a formal semester long form. This way I could include much more than I usually can include when giving an hour or couple-of-hours talk. I think it’s critically important for any student of American history to understand the role that women played in every major and minor event in our past. And the Revolution has, for so long, been taught as an all stag affair. That is, only about men. This is an area where we have to educate people about the role women played in winning our independence.
Jim Knable: And Catherine, what about your course?
Catherine Clinton: Once people got their independence, they immediately started thinking about the power of their voices. Here we are, approaching 2020, a dramatic election year, a dramatic anniversary. It’s the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, women’s suffrage. And certainly reflecting on this, I have taught courses overlapping with women in the 19th Century — African-American women, enslaved women, women in biography. I was a co-editor of the Columbia Guide to American Women in the 19th Century. That led me right to this particular juncture.
Jim Knable: What got you interested in women’s history in particular? And then how did you get into your respective areas of research from that?
Carol Berkin: When I started graduate school, back in the “coal age,” there was only one history, and that was the history of white men, preferably older white men: generals, presidents, postmaster generals, heroes. There was really no such thing as women’s history. There were occasionally brief mentions of Pocahontas or Eleanor Roosevelt, but really, women did not come up at all.
Like other PhD students in that era, I wrote a dissertation about white, elite men. We wrote about loyalist leaders not ordinary loyalists. We wrote about the ideology of the leaders of the American Revolution not the ideas of farmers or artisans. It never occurred to our advisors or, for that matter, to us that there was anything you could say about women. I remember asking my advisor, “Could I write something about women in the Revolution?” And he said, “Well, that would be lovely, but there are no sources and there’s nothing to say.”
Several years later, when I got tenure and women like Mary Beth Norton and Linda Kerber got tenure — that is, when our jobs were safe and secure, having published those books about white men — we decided really there must be something to say about women, and there must be sources hiding somewhere. We individually and collectively decided to be rebels and to set aside researching white men for the moment, and study American women. This is how we began what has become a really rich and interesting field in the history of the 18th century, focused on women in the American Revolution, and in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. But we began, in essence, from scratch, because the only book that existed was written before the Civil War, by a woman named Elizabeth Ellet. It was a collection of anecdotes about women she knew or knew of. It was not a scholarly book at all. So we had to invent the field in the 1980s.
Catherine Clinton: And, I think that particular invention was innovative and exciting, and led to people in graduate school, such as myself, in the late ’70s, to take a leap of faith, even when our advisors told us there were no sources. Or maybe we should write a book in serious history, and then we could pursue this other interest. Luckily, women like Carol and Mary Beth and others were very encouraging. I do remember seeing Ellen DuBois writing about women’s suffrage and the Civil War. And I myself decided I could leap over that stage and write about the role of Southern white women. I was excited I was able to pursue my interests, and it was because of this pioneering generation.
When I was at Princeton as a graduate student, Carol came out and gave one of her inspirational lectures. I met her, and I remember her saying, “Oh, come along to the party. We have to talk more.” And that began a wonderful collaboration.
Jim Knable: Why is it important to study women’s history starting with the American Revolution?
Carol Berkin: The reason it’s important to study women in the American Revolution is that it brings home, in a profound way, that the American Revolution was a long home front war. It was not a war waged in some distant place. It was fought right in the towns, in the villages, in the backyards, in the fields of Americans in every colony. And to tell that story without telling the story of how it affected women and how women affected it is to really get a skewed sense about how independence was won and how ideas about liberty evolved.
When I taught this course last year and would talk to the students about women’s role in winning independence, it was clear they were amazed. They had to re-envision what the war was like. It wasn’t just Washington’s Army marching off somewhere. It wasn’t just men at Valley Forge. It was about citizen participation in every aspect: in the decade of protest before the war, in the American Revolution itself, and in the debates afterward about what liberty and equality meant in the Declaration of Independence. I could almost feel students beginning to think, “The story was one-dimensional before, and now it is multi-dimensional.” Which is what I think women’s historians strive for. We don’t say women were more important than men or women were better than men. We strive to show that the story remains one-dimensional unless you include women. More than this, the women’s story is one-dimensional until you include African American women and Native American women.
One of the things I try to do in the course is to talk about the American Revolution, not as one revolution waged by the colonists against the British, but as multiple revolutions. The Native Americans fought for their freedom against the colonists who were going to take their land. The enslaved fought for their liberty from the very men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is such a complex story, and the more complex we make it, the truer it is. That’s why I don’t want people just to be able to say, “Oh, there were a lot of women involved in the American Revolution.” I want them to understand how it changes how we understand what happened and how it happened in the years between 1763–1783. That’s why a course like this is really important.
Catherine Clinton: And there were several wars, of course, during the struggle for women’s rights, the suffrage movement of the 19th century. Looking at the American Civil War in a different way must happen. Because, as Carol points out, home fronts are now being reexamined and seen for what they were, which is integral to the struggle for victory. And certainly integral to the defeats that might militarily be suffered, because of supply lines, because of a loss of will.
It’s not your grandmother’s Civil War anymore. From the 1990s onward, Nina Silber and I did a volume called Divided Houses, in which we tried to look at the way in which the war split families and challenged racial norms. It challenged matters of freedom. Who would determine the outcome? And we look at some of the great struggles that came out of the American Civil War, which led first to a division and then the reunification of the suffrage movement. I called my volume on the 19th Century The Other Civil War because I think we have to look at the way in which women were involved in the wars. They were involved in struggles. They were involved in labor, in the progressive movement, in reform, in social housekeeping. They were at the forefront during the late 19th Century.
Jim Knable: Should we just be focused on suffrage, the right to vote? What were the other rights that women were fighting for throughout the 19th century, and even during the American Revolution?
Carol Berkin: That’s a very good question because, in fact, in many ways, fighting for suffrage is a narrowing of what the demands were in the 19th century’s Declaration of Sentiments. But in the 18th Century, even though there was no “women’s movement” after the American Revolution, there was a great debate among intellectuals over, “What is the role of women in a republic? What are their duties to the republic? How will they uphold the republic?” The answer arrived at was that women were to remain in the domestic sphere but now had the important role of raising patriotic sons who would be willing to lay down their lives and their fortunes to keep the republic alive. But this prompted women to ask, “How can we possibly instill this patriotism if we don’t know the history of our country, if we don’t know the political philosophy of the revolution, if we don’t know political theory, if we don’t know English history?” And they demanded formal education for women. The result was an education revolution, in which women’s schools, called young ladies academies offered a curriculum that was as rigorous as the curriculum for boys in what today we would call preparatory schools.
I always tell my students, a little tongue in cheek, “You know what happens when Americans get educated? They begin to think about their place in society, and they begin to compare it to the place of other groups in society, and they begin to demand more rights.” It’s only about 70 years between the end of the American Revolution and the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls. And in a historical sense, this is just a little blip in time. People teach and are constantly talking about the radical impact of the Revolution on this group and that group, yet they don’t mention one of the most radical things impacts of the Revolution: female education. I focus on this intensely in the course that I teach for the Gilder Lehrman Institute.
Catherine Clinton: Tocqueville commented on his tour that he was really struck by American women. It was one of the big differences that he could see in the population. We have to see that, certainly the vote was important, but women saw the vote as an instrument. In some ways, it was an afterthought to trying to get women to be able to have rights of personhood, control of their own minds and bodies.
Women could be locked away by their husbands as insane, so there were laws during the period to protect women from vindictive husbands. There were also property rights. Women might lose any of the property, even property they brought to the marriage, unless it was properly protected. Also, a woman’s wages, anything she earned, were legally her husband’s. During the struggle for the vote, which often is referred to as the struggle for equality, we have to see that women were seeking their rights, which might be quite different from the rights of men during that period.
There were times where they coalesced, but it’s true that, by the late 19th Century, women could see the differences. Someone, in the very late 19th Century, early 20th, like Margaret Sanger, could make arguments about women having control over their reproductive rights. That is a movement that began earlier in the century, but continued into the 20th.
It’s, to me, quite amazing to look at the anniversary of suffrage, and to see the way in which women were so modern in their calls, in their demands. That there were women who were trying to call attention to the fact that they were being silenced. I found an example in the 1916 Democratic National Convention, where women staged a silent protest. They created what they said was a “walkless, talkless parade.” Democratic Convention attendees had to walk from their hotels to the convention center, so women lined the road. It was called the Golden Lane, with their colors of the white and gold of the suffrage movement. They were trying to shame these men into making women visible.
There are very modern ways in which women were calling attention to their own rights. There were women who looked at the 14th Amendment and said, “Oh, we’re protected by this. We will go and vote!” This led to a significant court case when one woman who attempted to register to vote in 1872 was denied her right, so she sued, and her case, Minor v. Happersett, went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1875 — where her right to vote was denied. I want students to be excited about the fact that it’s not just getting the vote in 1920. It is the struggle toward the vote, which led into many other movements, social reform, urban reform, educational reform, the kindergarten movement, the playground movement, the City Beautiful movement.
But importantly, as Carol was pointing out, we have to look to the non-white women, who began to speak out, to use their voices, to also be effective within their movement. A woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, was a leader of the anti-lynching campaign in the late 19th Century, and was a terrific reformer, taking her child with her on speaking tours. Again, I was so shocked discovering this, in the 1980s, when I was having my own children, that Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a forerunner of this, in the forefront, in the 1890s.
Jim Knable: What would you like K-12 American history teachers to take away from these courses with you?
Carol Berkin: Let me put it this way. When girls are in class and all they hear about is men, you can almost watch the shutters come down on their eyes. “This is not about me,” they think. “I am not part of history. No one like me was part of history.” The same is true of African Americans, when they only hear about white men and white women. And so, I’m hoping this course can stimulate a consciousness in the students who take it that teaching American history as a multi-gendered, multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic past is really important, because that’s what will engage their students, one and all.
Of course I want them to talk about women in the American Revolution, and I hope that I give them enough of an overview and enough of an analysis, especially the teachers in the younger grades. I try always to illustrate the point I am making through individual stories of flesh and blood people because I think, even through graduate school, you learn best by connecting with individual stories, with individual people, who represent the intellectual ideas being conveyed. Young people of all ages respond to that approach.
And so I want to arm the teachers in my course with stories. And, of course, I want to show them that every lesson they teach is incomplete unless women are included. I know that’s a pretty ambitious goal, but that really is what I hope my course and Catherine’s course and any other course in women’s history or African American history or Native American history or lesbian and gay history, or immigrant history does. The end result of it is that we all provide a richer, deeper story of the American past.
Catherine Clinton: I certainly echo that. In the course I taught on the Civil War, I tried to emphasize the aspects of the Civil War that are not often found in the standard textbooks, to bring up the human stories. During the Lincoln bicentennial, I went around the country with a lot of scholars, many of whom would comment on Lincoln and his greatness, which was very important, certainly — the Emancipation Proclamation, the law, Lincoln, commander-in-chief — but telling his human side is equally important, pointing out that he had a conflict with his father, who was aggravated by his son’s interest in book-learning, and he credited his mother with being the one who really encouraged his learning and made him who he was.
Looking at these people who struggled for education is important, someone like Harriet Tubman, who was herself illiterate but nevertheless became a leader, who became a speaker, who became someone who could be representative of the poor, the downtrodden, even the disabled, as she herself had a lifelong disability. Harriet Tubman died the very month that Rosa Parks was born, and we look at the way in which the torch is passed for struggles for women’s rights, for black rights, for indigenous people. Raising these issues did not just come in the 20th century or the 21st century, but it is something that has been a part of the fabric of our nation.
The new birth of freedom that came out of the Civil War was a birth that many people tried to participate in. Many people tried to lay claim to changing status, improving their lot in life. The way in which immigrants saw American shores as a beacon of liberty, and continued to feel that way into the 21st Century, is something that can be incorporated through many women’s stories, the human side of American history.
Jim Knable: You have both taught in the Pace–GLI American History MA program. What have your experiences been with this particular cohort of students?
Carol Berkin: I love teaching people who have decided of their own free will to come back and learn. That is, those who are taking the course not because it is required, or their parents are making them do it. For each of the GLI online courses we do six online meetings with the students, who are all actually teachers, and the questions asked and the exchanges we have are wonderful. I get to know the students as individuals. I get to respond to “Tell us more, tell us more. I want to hear more about this. I want to hear more about that.” It’s really very rewarding.
I am struck by the knowledge the students bring from their life experiences and from their teaching experiences. We always have an exchange of teaching skills. Someone will raise the question, “What kind of lesson can I prepare on that?” And someone else will say, “Well, maybe you could try this.” And I think, “Woo, I wish I were teaching again, because what a great idea. I never thought of that.”
As they go on to plan their research paper for the course, these sessions allow me to suggest archival sources to them or ways to narrow their topic. For me, this is such a satisfying mentoring experience.
Our exchanges are not all serious. For example, I have a cat and the cat appeared in front of my computer, so my students and I had a little side conversation about cats and dogs. We all revealed something about ourselves, our personalities. All in all, I would say it was a terrific experience getting to know them.
Catherine Clinton: It’s more of a forum, which I like. There is a team that puts it together. I’m very grateful to GLI for having moderators, and certainly the teaching assistants are there to help, too.
Carol Berkin: When I can’t remember an author, I can ask the teaching assistant, “Who wrote that book?”
Catherine Clinton: And they pop it up on the side, and there’s the article. It’s like having Wikipedia spring out of your mouth, but also, you’re getting to look at people. You see people from week to week, and again, it adds the human touch. Carol points out that learning more about the interests of teachers, we learn more about classrooms. I always make people tell me where they’re speaking from and give a little bit about their part of the world.
This is an online forum of learning and people exchanging ideas, and getting to know more about the learning techniques going on, and the challenges. I am so admiring of the teachers trying to take this on, to be integrative, to add new material, to meet the needs and demands of their classrooms, which are enormous.
I’m excited when someone tells me they want to do a topic. Maybe four or five years ago, I would’ve told them, “Oh, I don’t know where you can work on that.” And now, because of research connections, again the Gilder Lehrman Institute has so many programs, the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Lincoln Prize, that keep us apprised of all the new literature, that we feel like a conduit, that we can get some of these exciting new ideas into our classrooms all across the country. And perhaps, eventually across the world.
Jim Knable: We’re all very grateful for your efforts and your expertise, as you reach out to these teachers and their students, and the future generations of historians.
To learn more about the Pace–Gilder Lehrman MA in American History Program visit the Gilder Lehrman Institute website here.
