A Week to Break Bias

THE SIXTH ANNUAL Women's History Week, which began at Harvard Sunday, celebrates how far the study of women has come since the event's inception, but it also demonstrates how much farther women's history has to go.

Graduate students first conceived of the event six years ago because they wanted to demonstrate to the Harvard History Department that it was neglecting a worthwhile discipline.

The organizers of the event should be congratulated because they have succeeded in their primary goal. Over the years, Women's History Week has grown along with interest in the role of women in history. This year's program includes lectures on subjects as diverse as women in 13th century Byzantium and the role of women in present-day South Africa. Harvard no longer completely ignores women's history, and Harvard students can now take courses like History 1326, Women and Social Change in Europe: 1789-1914.

However, mere recognition of women's history as a worthwhile field of study does not solve the problem which women's historians are trying to address.

Currently, students find that they must supplement their general courses with an additional course in women's history if they want to get a balanced picture of a historical period. One might go so far as to say that history--as it is taught in its traditional mode--ignores half of the population. Political history must, by definition, focus on men because until recently women did not have much of a political voice. However, social and economic historians who neglect women have no such excuse.

BUT WHEN ACADEMICS who do focus on the historical role of women call themselves "women's historians" they invite the ghettoizing of women's studies--the attitude of leaving it to the "experts."

Creating a separate discipline for the study of the role of women in history may not get rid of the male bias. As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted in another context, separate is rarely ever equal.

Distinguishing women's history as a separate discipline may be a necessary strategy for beginning the long task of rewriting history, of inscribing in it the voices and actions of women. However, that strategy is as dangerous as it is necessary; it may invite traditional historians to continue to neglect the role of women, to "leave women's history to the women."

As it stands, courses which focus on women draw a primarily female audience, as the all-female enrollment of the freshman seminar, Fiction and the Female Self in the 19th Century, makes only too clear.

The recognition of women's history is important, because the study of the historical role of women is too frequently overlooked. But as we celebrate Women's History Week, we should not lose sight of the fact that women's history is only the first step toward less biased scholarship.