Comment on Carolyn Lougee's "Review Essay: Modern European History" (Vol. 2, No. 3)Author(s): Hilda SmithSource: Signs, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1978), pp. 726-727Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173195 .

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726 Letters/Comments

contrary, it is just the sort of effort which can protect Jung from the "unwarranted dismissal" which Chesser fears.5

Department of Religious Studies University of Ottawa

Comment on Carolyn Lougee's "Review Essay: Modern European History" (vol. 2, no. 3)

Hilda Smith

I was most interested to read Carolyn Lougee's review essay, "Modern European History" and flattered by her attention to my articles on "Feminism and the Methodology of Women's History" and "Ideology and Gynecology in Seventeenth Century England."' However, I am obliged to take exception to her categorization of my position as a "victimization" approach to studying women's past. This representation of my thesis obscures the main focus of what I believe was then (1973) a quite new direction in studying women's history. The theme of the arti- cle on methodology, as set forth in the introductory section, was that "sexual division has been one of the most basic distinctions within society encouraging one group to view its interests differently from another," and that if we apply the criterion of sex distinction to the past we will ask questions different from those based on class, religious, or political categories.

This position led me to a critique of Philippe Aries's analysis of the Renaissance quite similar in certain respects to Joan Kelly-Gadol's, which Lougee presents as being of a markedly different school of women's history. While Kelly-Gadol and I do differ in some respects, our main emphasis is on the importance of sex distinction as a social phenomenon and its centrality in interpreting the past. Both she and I point to the relational aspect of women's gains and losses, for example, in literacy. "Those scholars who look merely at what Renaissance figures have to say about women and find it more encouraging than medieval views, assume that the Renaissance opened new educational opportunities for women. .. [But] one must ... look at what is happening to both sexes during a

5. See my article, "Jung's Theory of Revelation-Its Importance for Feminist Work in Religion," Women's Caucus-Religious Studies Newsletter, American Academy of Religion (Winter 1976), pp. 1-4.

1. "Feminism and the Methodology of Women's History" was originally presented at Iowa State University in March 1973 and appeared in Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice Carroll (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 369-84; "Ideology and Gynecology in Seventeenth Century England" also appeared in Carroll, pp. 97-114.

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Spring 1978 727

particular period to gauge women's progress, for if men take a giant stride, and women only a tiny step, woman may easily be worse off than she was before her slight advancement."2 Similarly, both Kelly-Gadol and I argue that there may be an inverse relationship between the status of men and women in "periods of so-called progressive change."3

Lougee uses the term "victimization of women" several times in describing my work and once employs quotation marks around the term "victims," which might unfortunately imply to some that these words appeared in my work. While I do accept that an understanding of the general oppression of women is essential to a correct appraisal of women's past, this was not the main premise of the articles in question. As I wrote: "Complaints about the position of women ... do not, by themselves, constitute feminism .. . [which requires] an understanding of women as a sociological group. .. . Feminism is a system of thought devised to explain the relationship between men and women."4

Department of History University of Maryland

Reply to Smith's Comment

Carolyn C. Lougee

Hilda Smith's letter clarifies both the chronology and the intent of her articles. However, my analysis of her work did note her emphasis on sex distinction as a social phenomenon and specifically likened her article to Kelly-Gadol's on those very grounds. Furthermore, Smith's methodolog- ical article is pervaded by a focus on "restrictions," "overt and covert controls," indoctrination, denied fulfillment, and unmitigated decline in status; as such, it does contrast with the stress on the persisting power of women as well as on their participation in the definition of roles and values which marked many of the other theoretical and applied studies my article reviewed. And the suggestion of misquotation is belied by Smith's own thesis statement: "Unfortunately, women, both as patients and as medical practitioners and midwives, often were the victims of the physicians' quest for respectability."

Department of History Stanford University

2. Smith, "Feminism and Methodology," in Carroll, pp. 381-82. 3. Joan Kelly-Gadol, as quoted by Carolyn C. Lougee, "Modern European History,"

Signs 2, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 632. 4. Smith, "Feminism and Methodology," in Carroll, pp. 370-71.

signs

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