Teresa Anne Murphy. Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States

In Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States, Teresa Anne Murphy sets herself a difficult challenge: to analyze a tradition of women's history that has never announced itself, one that began in the New Republic, predated academic women's history, and anticipated uses of history during first- and second-wave feminism. This task is fraught for many reasons, not the least of which is that there was not yet in this period a culturally accepted notion of history as knowledge about realms of experience in which women primarily participated. Nina Baym tried to surmount this problem in the 1990s, in the end writing insightfully about largely apolitical women subjects and authors of largely apolitical texts. Murphy takes up where Baym left off but presumes that domesticity is political, and hence that women—presumably domestic beings—can be political agents, and their histories tools of social and political change. By mining texts for their underlying, sometimes competing, views on “domestic citizenship,” Murphy allows women's agency as historical writers and subjects to come to the fore. Some of the texts she analyzes are books, others essays intended for varied publics and purposes. Nevertheless, she shows that women (and some men initially) invoked the past to define women's roles as citizens in present-day society.

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