05 26 1meyer JWH2014

The essay takes a look at the life of Gerda Lerner, her contribution to the field of Women's History as one of its pioneers, and her views on history.

Gerda Lerner (1920-2013) was one of the most influential figures in the development of women's and gender history. She knew the power of auto/biography and very consciously controlled her image through autobiographical writing. In this paper I want to analyze how Lerner built her scholarly persona to a large part on her autobiographical practices and how she kept on 'editing' this persona during her career and after it ended, aiming to integrate her various positions of exclusion and taboos as well as her diverse pioneering achievements. Looking more closely at three of Lerner's autobiographical representations and inquiring into the gendered nature of the scholarly persona (with special regard to domestic arrangements), I want to illustrate how she was grappling with the integration of feminist consciousness into her scholarly selfhood in the late 1970s. At the same time, she made sure that her care work for her dying husband would not be visible to the scientific community. Other identities also remained taboo and could only be revealed after her career had ended-these include not only her well-known autobiographical outing as a Communist, but also her twenty-year identification as a housewife, which could only be related after leaving academia.

Poetry and narrative are privileged media of life writing. Poetic and narrative presentations of the self, often related to discrimination and disease, interact with psychotherapeutic or medical treatments. In an ideal situation, the cooperating agents of life writing and narrative medicine yield an ulterior form of communal knowledge with a transnational reach transcending individual self-realization and creating a framework for integration. In my presentation I will focus on Audre Lorde's poetic and narrative account of breast cancer (Cancer Journals, 1980) which precedes her Berlin years as a guest professor in the 1980s when the knowledge derived from her own experiences as "a black lesbian feminist mother lover poet" provided the basis for discriminated Afro-German women to come out and claim their African heritage. Discussions in and out of the classroom led to the joint publication of their individual stories of diversity (Farbe Bekennen, 1986; Showing Our Colors, 1992) and to full-length autobiographical recollections. The shared experience of diversity between the American poet and the German women as outsiders, including social and medical stigmas, remembered and recollected in individual and communal narratives became the prerequisite for integration. The documentary about Audre Lorde's liberating work in Berlin, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992 (dir. Dagmar Schultz, 2012), presents the fellow feeling of the poet and her new partners in the common cause and adds a performance aspect to forms of life writing. At the same time, it reveals the status of diversity before and after the Fall of the Wall in 1989 and the differences in the political Regine STRÄTLING Regine Strätling is a Research Associate (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Bonn. She completed a PhD with a thesis on the autobiographies of Michel Leiris at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature, Free University of Berlin. Currently, she is working on a book project on the fascination with Maoism among European artists and intellectuals from the 1950s to the 1970s. Recent publications in the field of life writing and the history of subjectivity: the articles "Referentiality," "Michel Leiris: La Règle du jeu (1946-1976) [The Rules of the Game]," and "Roland Barthes: roland BARTHES par roland barthes (1975) [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

2014

Special thanks to my professors at Texas Christian University who encouraged me to consider pursuing a doctorate. Fred Toner, Linda Hughes, Bob Frye, C. David Grant, the late Jim Corder, and the late Neil Daniel saw something promising in me, and they looked past the seeming contradictions of my involvement in both the Honors Program and Army ROTC to show me it was possible to pursue two overlapping dreams. To my advisor, Donald Ross, Jr.: thank you for encouraging me to apply for the PhD program and for having faith that I would one day return to the University of Minnesota to complete it in residence. You remained optimistic even when I did not. To the other members of my committee, I greatly appreciate your guidance and support. Lee-Ann Breuch, you helped to prepare me fully to teach composition at West Point and to continue writing beyond my years at the Academy. Brian Goldberg, you encouraged me to consider less apparent connections between works, something that helped me considerably while crafting this project. And Dan Philippon, you helped me to rejoin the academic conversation after being away from it for eight years. To Colonel Scott Krawczyk, Head of the Department of English and Philosophy at the United States Military Academy, thank you for seeing the potential in me to return to Advanced Civil Schooling with a follow-on assignment back to West Point. And finally, to my family and, especially, to my husband James Michael Bozeman. Thank you for your love, support, and guidance. You remind me that success is a journey, not a destination. Thank you for joining me on the road less traveled.

History is usually written by the winners. Their lives comprise the archival collections, and historically these have been white men enjoying political and economic privilege. So long as we rely on the materials at hand, we keep telling the same old stories." --Jean Barman (BCBW, Volume 23, No 3, Autumn 2007) interpretative strategies that are useful in understanding of Katie Gale's life with her non-Native husband Joseph. At the end of the piece, I'll introduce, also briefly, two other layers of imposed sensibilties...the tourist eye and the nostalgic eye...as they molded and distorted the presentation of Native American women in late 19 th and early 20 th century. The story of Katie Gale's late 19 th century life as an oyster farmer on Oyster Bay, Totten Inlet, southern Puget Sound is in some ways a uniquely new story. There were many women laboring in the rural west during this period. Some biographies examine these women's lives in detail. Some novels such as Willa Cather's My Antonia or Ole Edvart Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, have given these women an indelible place in literature. Bold Spirit, the memorable story of Helga Estby by Linda Lawrence Hunt, makes us wonder what other tales we have yet to learn about and makes us dig deeper. But what is perhaps exceptional about the Katie Gale story is that she was a Native American woman, one of many whose lives off reservation during the early post treaty period are seldom examined or given treatment in our texts. My representation of her life is also somewhat exceptional. 1 A straightforward biography of Katie Gale was not possible given the paucity of material about her or written by her. In fact, the only mark in the record decisively made by her hand is an X firmly inscribed on several court documents. Thus I strove to bring to what I knew of her life a perspective, and to work from what Monique Wittig 2 called an angle of approach that allows us to understand something of her in the context of her time if only from "out of the corner of the eye". I have more particularly attempted in my book and in this essay to articulate when possible the dynamic interplay of gender, race, and class as these operated in her life. That is I have tried to understand her life from the perspective of a woman marginalized by the dominant culture not just by gender but also by race. My depiction is a history from, so much as possible, "below," that is, from the perspective of the margin and told from the point of view of a subaltern experience of the 1 Research Files, Katie Gale's Tombstone: The Work of Researching a Life by Llyn De Danaan. Oregon Historical Quarterly. Winter 2005. 2 See "The Straight Mind and Other Essays" by Monique Wittig. She defines "angle of approach in the context of discussing Djuna Barne's work: "a constant shifting which, when the text is read, produces an effect comparable to what I call an ou-of-the corner-ofthe eye perception; the text bears the mark of that 'estrangement'. P. 62. period. 3 Though documents produced by either Gale are limited, I try through a study of other sources to examine her life through the examination of a particular place and time period, Oyster Bay in the mid to late 1800s. Oyster Bay is a kind of social historical laboratory...one that because it is in the developing west...offers many archival documents: homestead and donation claim papers, censuses, some diaries and journals, some letters, newspapers, and reports and letters associated with the United States Indian agencies and their officers. Thus it is not just Katie Gale's life that I represent (and in no way does the book claim to be a story of the Coast Salish people or any particular band or tribe), but a depiction of a maritime community of great diversity during the early commercialization and exploitation of its resources and statehood. The people of the bay in many ways did form a community of place and interaction in a shared historical period in a era of great change. 3 I owe much to the work of bell hooks, "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center," and Gramsci's post-colonial theories. See Kate A.F. Crehan, "Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology." Chapter five of Crehan's book discusses the power relations that maintain subordination of the subaltern and the "cracks and fissures that could potentially lead to their overcoming it." Karen Leong wrote an essay in which she rather optimistically said that biographical studies of non-white women have released a "plethora of unbound voices" that have reshaped the discourse of the western historical experience. 4 Still, most biography of western women is not analytical, 5 and the majority of these remain "fixated on white women." 6 and, as Susan Armitage has said, do not challenge much at all. 7 However critical attention to women's stories, where it occurs, allows us to understand how gender and race, interacted with structures of power in the west. In Katie Gale's case, these dynamics take on different significance due to her status in the post treaty /early statehood period of Washington. Hers is 4 Karen Leong cited by Margaret Jacobs, Pacific Historic Review, p. 592 and Susan Armitage "Wetern Women's Biographies," Western American Literature, 41, No. 1 (spring 2006), 72. Cited by Margaret Jacobs, ibid. West (2001), pp. 1-5. Vancouver, and Fort Nisqually to name a few. 21 Through these "tender ties" 22 bonds were made between and among whole groups of people. Though much of the discussion in the literature concerns the marriages between trappers, esp. French and indigenous women, a fair amount has been published that depicts Native women in alliance with men who were either in positions of leadership, for example, in Hudson Bay Company, at Fort Astoria, or in nascent European villages or towns, and or rose to those positions during the relationship. 23 In many ways, these cross-cultural marriages could be positive and could change the climate or character of a community from one exclusively Eurocentric to one decidedly 21 Forthcoming book by Candace Wellman, The Peace Weavers: 19th The Peace Weavers: 19th Century Intermarriages at the Edge of the Salish Sea Century Intermarriages at the Edge of the Salish Sea. . This is to be a group of biographies of indigenous women married to army officers group of biographies of indigenous women married to army officers and settlers on the 1850s in one geographic cluster of and settlers on the 1850s in one geographic cluster of intermarriages in the Bellingham Bay in Washington Territory. Also intermarriages in the Bellingham Bay in Washington Territory. Also see Jean Barman's new book, French Canadians, Furs and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest. Jean more cosmopolitan (given that the woman usually joined the husbands business or home). They could shift the meaning of home to one that was local rather than distant for the male. They certainly could and often did establish a reciprocating bond with the local indigenous community of the wife's family. They also provided for intimacy for both partners. For the woman, given the depredations of the era, the loss of home and home territory, and the uncertainty of the future, the marriages provided or helped her to establish a certain stability and economic as well as social space. Of course the cultural differences between the pair often continued to be obstacles to truly successful relationships as did racism and the rules and legal obstacles the surrounding community of laws and prejudice placed in the way even when husbands defended and fully embraced wives. The children of these marriages, often referred to as Metis informally, were variously accepted, assimilated, and/or faced with ambiguous or changing legal status during the last half of the 19 th century of Washington. In terms of official United States policy viz the indigenous population, this period is known as the Assimilation Era. 24 In keeping with the dominant culture's 24 Assimilation Era in Federal Indian Policy was 1887, the beginning of the allotment period, and 1943. sentiment, in some instances, a husband wanted to eradicate any relationship or identification the children of the marriage had to Indian roots. He might also wish to erase or eradicate the woman's own race and culture in any way possible. This was the case of Joseph Gale. Thus, to quote Stoler and Hurtado, The "tender ties" were also "sites of production of colonial inequities and therefore of tense ties as well." 25 Stoler writes that "matters of the intimate are critical sites for the consolidation of colonial power, that management of those domains provides a strong pulse on how relations of empire are exercised, and that affairs of the intimate are strategic for empire-driven states." 26 During the economic panic of 1893, Katie Gale feared that Joseph, in whose name their tidelands were recorded, would lose their wealth. Also, she had, she said, been treated as a menial laborer though she was a full partner in their enterprise. Joseph paid her for her labors at the same rate he 25 ultimately ran her own oyster business, and left considerable holdings to their two children. Her modest home was on the site of what is now the still successful Olympia Oyster Company. Her story from the point of her suit against Joseph is one of many that reflect the perseverance of women during territorial and early statehood as well as the complexity of the "encounters" between and among people in the early territorial days of the Northwest. She went to court to protect her holdings and during the proceedings she defined and spoke from her subaltern status as Native woman. She is an Indian Woman Pre-colonization Native American women in the region were full participants in economic activities of their families and bands. There are many instances of leadership of women in the literature and oral histories. There were a number of paths by which women attained power, including spiritual...

American Communist History, 2018

In 1972 I applied to graduate school and wrote an application essay that indicated I would explore my mother's (Sophie Melvin Gerson) move from labor organizer and activist, to wife and mother. Steeped in the very particularand limitedconsciousness of early women's liberation, I accepted an all too simple narrative of Sophie's life: a narrative of a gendered loss of agency and activity. Fortunately, I never wrote that Master's thesis, but rather went on to research and write about The Families Committee of Smith Act Defendants. 1 About 20 years later, I was sitting in a Kings County (Brooklyn) courthouse at a guardianship hearing for both my parents, who were in their nineties and increasingly frail in both mind and body. My father (Si Gerson) turned to the judge and asked him, "Do you know why we're here?" The judge, quizzical and curious, awaited further elucidation. Si began a rambling, but very familiar to me, explanation. We were in Brooklyn because Pete Cacchione, New York's first Communist councilman, had died while in office, and Simon W. Gerson was picked by the CPUSA to replace him. 2 While Si never got to serve as City Councilman and the electoral reforms known as proportional representation that allowed left and minority party candidates to get elected were shortly eliminated, the Gerson family was in Brooklyn-for good. So the narrative centers on Si's political trajectory and the story of Sophielabor militant and youthful organizeris subsumed. In 1948, when the family moved to Brooklyn, Sophie was wife, mother of two children, and homemaker for a household that included Si's elderly and frail mother, Helen. While Si's political and logistical trajectory were realized within the Communist Party, Sophie had to find and develop arenas for action feasible within the constraints of childrearing and homemaking, helpmate to her husband "in leadership," and the political landscape of a Jewish and Italian Catholic neighborhood. The past as prologue Like many other activists of the early 20 th centurybut unlike her husband, Sophie Melvin was born in a shtetl in the Ukraine, the second to youngest in a family of five brothers. At a young age her wage labor became necessary for household maintenance. She recalled with sadness, but without blame or self-pity, "I was in school until I was fifteen. And then I went to work. My mother was home. It was a big tragedy when I left school. She and I cried all day. But the older ones had left home. They married. My mother…we couldn't think of her

History Australia, 2005

Zemon Davis talks about her passion for history, and forthcoming publications. These take her into such diverse contexts as early modern Islam, the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Rumanian-Yiddish literature. Natalie Zemon Davis began her career as a specialist in the history of Reformation France, and is wellknown for her contribution to the successful movie The Return of Martin Guerre. In this work and in more recent projects, she has explored the history of impostors, immigrants and cultural crossovers, and the ways in which individuals have fashioned their own identities. She has also made a distinguished contribution to the history of women in the early modern period. Having had a long-term association with Princeton University, she is now retired and based in Toronto. It was a major disappointment that sudden illness made it impossible for her to participate in the 20 th International Congress for Historical Sciences in Sydney last July. Nevertheless, Professor Davis very generously agreed to conduct our planned interview by email. MA + ML: In conversation with Denis Crouzet you spoke of historical study as an adventure, in which you have a kind of emotional engagement with your subject (Davis 2004). Your first major article on the Reformation in Lyon was published about 40 years ago now-so can you reveal the secret of sustaining this sense of adventure over a long and rewarding career? How do you keep it up? NZD: How do I keep it up? It's easy: the past seems so full of inviting stories and people, of surprising situations and perplexing problems, of astonishing and terrible things. My curiosity is aroused. And when I start reading sources, especially primary sources, I am swept in. To be sure, I have this restless habit of changing the areas I work in-even while perhaps pursuing certain common thematic issues. I've just finished a book where I was thinking about the cultures swirling around the Mediterranean and now I'm going over to the Caribbean. It's also true that I like to focus on 'cases'-lives, or stories, or transactions (like the charivari or gift exchange), or places-rather than overall general movements of change. I sometimes write general essays-say, a critique of evolutionary schemes-but I never enjoy this as much as these cases. MA + ML: You are a historian who has always been open to interdisciplinary influences-we're thinking now of the influence of anthropologists like Clifford Geertz and Marcel Mauss-and as a historian of early modern France you have had some affinity with the Annales School. How would you assess your relationship with these influences? What historians have done most to inspire or influence your own work? HISTORICAL PRACTICE

CE: Okay. I want to start with just your life growing up. Could you just tell me, give me a picture of what that was like? AS: Yes, I had a very pleasant life. We, as I said, had an au pair who lived with us, and I played with her a lot. I had friends. We went to school, we took summer vacations, we went swimming and ice skating-swimming in a pool, of course; Austria's inland. We just had a very pleasant life. I had a lot of friends. Some were Jewish, some were not Jewish, didn't seem to matter. I was not conscious of it at all, the fact that we were Jewish. My mother was more conscious of the fact that we were Jewish. I remember that in particular. We were not religious. We belonged to a synagogue because everybody did. Every Jewish person was registered as Jewish and belonged to some kind of temple or synagogue. But we were very inactive. We would go on occasion, but we did not observe any of the minor holidays. I remember we observed just the two major holidays, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. That's when we would go to temple, but beyond that we really did nothing. We didn't have Shabbat candles on Friday night, we didn't have a Seder, we didn't observe Hanukkah. As a matter of fact, we had a Christmas tree. I felt we were very assimilated Austrians who just happened to be Jewish. There was a Jewish section where a lot of Jewish people lived, mostly people who had come in from Poland, and we lived in a totally different area. CE: Did your parents talk about being Jewish to you? AS: Not that much, not that much. And they also had friends who were Jewish and non-Jewish. It was not a major factor in my life at all. CE: So would you say your major identity, then, was being Austrian? AS: Absolutely. CE: And what about school? AS: I went to a public school, grammar school. And as I said, I had friends, Jewish and non-Jewish. We did have a subject called religion. Austria was a Catholic country, and so the Catholic children once a week had Catholic studies and we had once a week Jewish studies. I remember the teacher; none of us wanted to be there, and we gave her a very hard time. CE: (laughs) AS: Her name was Ms. Wolf. I remember it to this day. And I'm so sorry, Ms. Wolf, that I gave you such a hard time, because she tried her best, but we really didn't want to be there and we were not that interested. CE: Were you a good student? AS: Yes. I wouldn't say I was outstanding, but I was a good student. CE: And would you say your parents were upper class? Middle class? AS: Middle class. CE: Middle class. AS: Yeah. My father was very well educated, and my mother went to a private high school, actually, but she didn't go to college. My father had some university-I'm not quite sure-but he was a very, very bright man. CE: And could you talk a little bit more about his profession? AS: Well, he worked in an international bank, which it turned out saved his life, the fact that after the Anschluss they helped some of their middle and top management people get out. 1 It was called Banque des pays de l'Europe centrale; it was based in Paris, and my father spoke fluent French. 1The Anschluss was the annexation of Austria by Germany on March 12, 1938. CE: Could you spell what you just said? AS: Oh, my goodness. CE: Oh, if not-AS: Banque laCE: If you-AS: I'm not sure I can. (laughs) CE: Say it one more time, then. AS: Banque des pays de l'Europe centrale. CE: Okay. AS: And in Austria it was called Länder Bank, which means "a bank of all lands." So, obviously, they had a branch in Vienna. And after the Anschluss, after a while when it became so dangerous, they helped some of their middle and top management people get out. As I said, my father was very well educated. He was a very wonderful man; everybody loved him, including me. (laughs) I had a marvelous relationship with him. And he lived to be eightyfive, and he really wasn't ill; he just one day went to bed and didn't wake up, at age eighty-five. CE: We should all be so lucky. AS: Yes, and he had all his marbles. He was very bright. He was an excellent chess player. In later years, when they moved to Clearwater [Florida] many years later, he was the chess coach at Clearwater High School. CE: Oh, wonderful. AS: And he played correspondence chess. So, he was a very special figure in my life. CE: So you were very close to him as a child. AS: I was very close to him. CE: And what about your mother? As a child, your relationship? AS: As a child-to be quite honest, I was always closer to my father. My mother was very, very protective. My mother is-my parents were married six years before I was born. My mother was told she would never have children. When I was born, I was a little princess, of course, and my mother was very protective of us, too much so. Of course, I will never forget what she did to send us to England; that must have been such a horrendous thing for her to do, because she really watched over us so, so carefully. Of course the doctors were wrong. I was born, and four years later my brother was born. She really thought these two children were a miracle, and she was really going to watch over them. CE: And tell us about your brother as a child.

2012