Observations from Women's History

At the moment, my job has me teaching a daily (mornings) creative writing class of grad students. And in my PhD work, I’m reading Born for Liberty.

In it the author, Sara Evans, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, writes that “to understand the force of women's experience . . . we must adjust our vision so that we can see the world not only through the major male figures in the foreground but also through the eyes of female figures—a Puritan good wife, an African slave, an Iroquois matron, a westering woman, a female immigrant, a settlement house worker, a secretary.”

Evans helps her audience jump into a variety of women’s points of view through her readable volume that describes the lives and times of females in America from the seventeenth century through the 1980s.

One of her observations is that women have become increasingly autonomous, yet that freedom has also often left them disconnected from other women. As I thought about this, it occurred to me that when the masses learned to read, we began to learn individually rather than being read to in community. When kitchens added appliances, women no longer met at the river to do their washing, nor did they work together in the fields.

I’m not complaining that I have a blender, toaster, stove, mixer, dishwasher, and a garbage disposal, not to mention a hot shower, a washing machine, and a bread maker. Still, women began to stand alone in their kitchens to work instead of hanging with their neighbors and raising kids in community. The move from urban to suburban housing further added to privitization.

Today I buy my peaches from the grocery store. In years past my foremothers canned peaches together. No doubt all this "going solo" contributed to woman’s loneliness and diminished view of herself.

Evans’s chapter on Freud dovetails with an academic book I read earlier this month, titled Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis. In it Mari Jo Buhle crafts a historiography in which she traces popular views of women influenced by the early-twentieth-century psychoanalysis imported from Europe. Think of words such as ego and identity and the public debate about women’s orgasms—all imports (thank Freud). Psychoanalysis and its doctrines firmly implanted themselves in mainstream American culture, and at first many feminists loved Freud because they felt his ideas brought them freedom to get some attention in the bedroom. Yet the link between feminism and psychoanalysis broke down when therapists insisted that women who sought work outside the home were undeveloped sexually. They had "penis envy." They were trying to be men.

I had thought a lot of the negative views of women working came from the church. But as it turns out, they came largely from a culture that had drunk deeply from the wells of psychoanalysis.