Women and the Historical Enterprise Term Paper

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As an anthropologist, as she observed hoodoo practices of Southern blacks and became such a hoodoo priestess herself, she embraced subjectivity. (79) historian and woman ahead of her time, Hurston thrived not only, out of necessity on the physical margins of academia, but also on the professional margins of 'writing history.' But her techniques not only "became spaces of perspective" and "turned black folk" into legitimate subjects. Her perspective also made for a better writing of American history in general because it included the voices of marginalized figures. (118) Zora Neale Hurston took advantage of her "heightened penchant" for interdisciplinary study "to forge some of the first substantive academic research on African-Americans" but highlighted the need for interdisciplinary and openly subjective historical study in general, particularly of those peoples deemed to be marginal to mainstream 'written' American society and history. (138)

Hurston studied Black culture partly to recover her own heritage, which she feared losing as the result of her education. But many women after Hurston who "did not find conditions conducive to the study of women or American culture in history, sociology, or economics departments," turned to Hurston's blending of historical recording and lived anthropology because it offered them the option of "observing peoples other social scientists ignored," particularly Native Americans, and thus gave them unmined academic territory, in which they could make their careers. Moreover, unlike historians, anthropologists studied the Native American past unapologetically to address present social injustices and to shed light on historical wrongs that they could identify with -- and also make their careers from. Even in the 1970's the Oklahoma native named Angie Debo chose to become a historian of Americans Indians partly for that reason.

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(65) She became the author of a compassionate text called the Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic, which painted native Americans not as stoic savages, but attempted to penetrate Indian life in a real and meaningful way, based in experiences with the tribes as well as common cultural images. (112)

Do the winners write history? Quite often they have -- but socially marginal historians have strived, in America, to bring the voices of other marginalized people to the forefront, by using unique historical narratives such as oral history, the cataloguing of legends, and anthropological observations, to create a more balanced view of history. Thus, it does matter who writes history -- not because women and men are biologically different, but because the female historical experience on a personal and academic level have created different professional and personal needs for female historians. However, as Hurston's and Debo's examples illustrate, brining the voices of the margin to the center has enriched not simply the careers of female academics, but the study of history a whole.

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