From Male History to Women’s History: Pathways and Reflections

• In Event: Engendering Latin American History: “Pioneer” Women Historians and Their Stories

Abstract

This paper will examine aspects of the personal and the professional, so often intertwined though in individual ways, and can illustrate cultural attitudes toward women professionals that for younger historians---men or women---might seem unbelievable. It will address the challenges of fieldwork in the Brazil of the 1960’s, though the country did have a larger proportion of female history faculty than the United States; eureka moments of discovery; and the intellectual fellowship of the “children of “Fidel” generation of Brazilianists (to use the phrase of a Brazilian colleague), all in contrast with the ease of working in U.S. archives and libraries but with the frustrated attempts to secure job interviews, telephone conversations that ended with the words: “we are not hiring women.”
My research could follow a path from a first book on military-civilian relations in Brazil’s Old Republic in which the only woman who made an appearance was the princess Imperial Isabel to the next book on the urban poor to researching nineteenth- century women’s rights activities. The Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical profession had been formed in 1969 and the AHA Committee on the Status of Women the following year. Yet a senior male colleague could wonder whether there was room for two books, by two different scholars, on women in Latin American history. Working with a good group of colleagues at my university in the early 1970’s to improve the status of women involved many frustrations, and my efforts to establish a women studies program, one of the first in the United States, were not a very wise political move for a young, untenured assistant professor. A women’s movement in Brazil, which I closely accompanied, arose in the mid-1970’s, the ranks of female Latin Americanists in the United States kept growing, and more people worked for gender equity, as we can see examining gendered transitions across the generations.

Author

• June E Hahner, State Univ of New York/Albany