Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Between Individualism and Fragmentation: American Culture and the New Literary Studies of Race and Gender

American identity and has even been tempted to see itself as the special custodian of our sense of ourselves as a people and a nation. (What does it mean to be an American?) Until recently, American Studies, like our culture at large, tended to answer that to be an American meant to be, or to aspire to become, white, Protestant, middle class, male, and probably from the Northeast.1 From this perspective it naturally followed that first Longfellow, Whittier, and other representatives of the genteel tradition, and then Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and their successors represented the essence of American culture. The last two decades have shattered those illusions and turned American Studies into a battleground, with the concept of American identity as the stakes. Today we know Americans to be female as well as male, black as well as white, poor as well as affluent, Catholic or Jewish as well as Protestant, and of diverse national and ethnic backgrounds. On occasion, even southerners receive some attention, although white southerners rarely, especially the more affluent. The last two decades have also witnessed a growing restiveness with any complacent assumptions that the culture of a privileged few could adequately represent the specific beliefs and practices of the many varieties of Americans.

The Slave Economies in Political Perspective

The economic interpretations of the slave economies of the New World, as well as those social interpretations which adopt the neoclassical economic model but leave the economics out, assume everything they must prove. By retreating from the political economy from which their own methods derive, they ignore the extent to which the economic process permeates the society. They ignore, that is, the interaction between economics, narrowly defined, and the social relations of production on the one hand and state power on the other. For any economic system remains not merely a method of allocating scarce resources, but a system that, at least on the margin and frequently more pervasively, commands those scarce resources. Even an international market such as that which prevailed in the Atlantic world during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depends heavily on the state formations that guarantee the ultimate command of economic goods. Neoclassical economists achieve their theoretical sophistication by falling silent on the social relations of production that ultimately determine the prices of commodities in the market. In other words, these economists mystify reality by abstracting prices from the social relations of production and then blithely assuming that their abstraction provides an effective analytic substitute for those social relations. Even in a society such as our own where most facets of human life pass through the market, there remain pockets of nonpriced labor-for example, the household work of many women and the early reproduction of human capital. In the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, commercial capital organized the market and fed off it, but it did not evenly penetrate all productive sectors. Typically, commercial capital organized the surplus production of larger or smaller domestic units of labor before the transformation of labor-power into a commodity. In this respect, the slave plan-

Scarlett O'Hara: The Southern Lady as New Woman

classic, it has done so as much by its popular appeal as by any aesthetic merit. The components of its record-breaking success include all the classic ingredients of popular romance wrapped in the irresistible trappings of historical adventure and glamour-the hurtling saga of sectional catastrophe and rebirth, the nostalgia for a lost civilization, the green Irish eyes of a captivating and unruly Miss, and the langorous, steel-sprung dynamism of her Rhett Butler. But, if the novel fails to transcend its indebtedness to popular culture and to a sentimental female tradition, it nonetheless betrays a complexity that distinguishes it from the standard mass-market historical melodrama. The extraordinary overnight success of Gone With The Wind testifies to the immediacy with which it engaged the American imagination. Critical acclaim, which likened it to Vanity Fair and War and Peace, as well as popular sales, rapidly established the saga of Scarlett OHara as a significant addition to the national culture.2 Scarlett and her world entered the

Socialist-Feminist American Women's History

Socialist-feminist history has, during the past two decades, arguably moved from margin to center, from the pages of Feminist Studies to those of the Journal of American History. Today, it dominates American womens history, if only by setting the terms of many of the main debates, and is increasingly making its influence felt in American history in general.1 Yet its very success has tended to obscure the boundaries between socialist-feminist and mainstream womens history. The problems of identification and definition have become murky. Who, precisely, defines herself as a socialistfeminist historian?2 What, in these times of the triumph of poststructuralist literary theory and the related but incomparably more important collapse of the world socialist movement, does socialist feminism mean? Navigating uneasily between the establishment mainstream and a rising tide of postmodernism, which themselves are showing signs of merging, socialistfeminist history is losing its distinct identity.3 Contemporary American socialist feminism, which originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, embodied the attempt to resolve the tensions between second wave feminism and marxism. It stands, according to Alison Jaggar, as the most adequate of the feminist theories formulated to date,4 but also, in many respects, the most questionable of feminist paradigms, primarily because of the difficulty in distinguishing it from radical feminism on the one hand and marxism on the other.5 For Jaggar, socialist feminism differs from radical feminism in resisting the temptations of idealism and biologism and from marxism by fundamentally revising the entirety of traditional marxist analysis from domestic labor to imperialism.6 Socialist feminism shares with marxism a basic conception of human nature as created historically through the dialectical interrelation between human biology, human society and the physical environment, as mediated by human labor or praxis.7 But more than marxism, it emphasizes the psychological as well as the physical differences between women and men and remains primarily committed to overcoming all forms of alienation but especially those that are specific to women.8 This commitment has led socialist-feminists to argue that (mens) control of the productive resources of society has always included a struggle to control the reproductive capacity of women and has resulted not merely in struggles among classes but in struggles among women and men. In this perspective, the conceptual tool of the sexual division of labor figures as central to socialist-feminist political and economic theory, which

Gender, Class and Power: Some Theoretical Considerations

GENDER. class, and power are three abstract nouns that refer to social relations, but whereas gender and class refer to socially specific sets of relations, power-the ability to impose ones willrefers to an ingredient in all such sets. Power can vary from hegemony, perceived as legitimate, to violence or the threat of violence. Class is the relation to the means of production, especially the right of direct access to the fruits of production. Gender has been used to mean the social form of biological sexuality, but is best understood as the relations between men and women. The three together constitute the fundamental social, economic, cultural, and political relations that determine any social system. Power, the first born of historical and social analysis, has long figured as an object of celebration or castigation. Too frequently it has been presented as sui generis, as imposed on society and susceptible to analysis independent of social relations as a whole. Marx introduced class as a systematic category and argued that class relations determine the decisive relations of power in so-

The Crisis of our Culture and the Teaching of History.

U NTIL VERY RECENTLY, history enjoyed a privileged position in the liberal arts curriculum. An educated individual could be expected to possess a general familiarity not merely with the history of the United States, but with that of Western Civilization as well. Formal requirements confirmed and protected the status of history, which itself was taken to provide an indispensible introduction to political culture and the responsibilities of citizenship. The collapse of the entire structure of requirements in recent decades has exposed history courses, including the basic surveys, to fierce competition. But the broader cultural and political crisis, of which the abolition of requirements constitutes merely a symptom, challenges the very core of history as a discipline and a profession. Thus the current move, in some institutions, to restore requirements does not necessarily address the internal problems of historical writing and teaching any more than it reinvigorates the fragile relationship between academic history and the general culture.

Education of Women in the United States South

Northern, and increasingly national, attitudes toward southern education have typically ranged from condescension to contempt. The Souths history of segregation has only reinforced the tendency to dismiss southern education as backward, inadequate, and discrirrtinatory. And, sadly, according to aggregate statistical indicators, many southern states continue to fall to the bottom of the national heap in educational accomplishment. In the same spirit, it has been easy for many to assume that southern women remain caught in the tentacles of traditional ferrvininity, lagging far behind other American women in independence, ambition, and accompUshment. More often than not, responsibUity for both the Souths educational fatiures and its subordination of women is charged to the account of etite white southern men, who have arrogantly staved off justice to blacks, poor whites, and women, including the women of their own class and race. Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that the education of southern women has not figured prominently on the research agenda of womens historians. Even as growing numbers of womens historians have begun, however belatedly, to explore seriously the experience of southern women, the neglect of southern womens education has persisted. From one perspective, this neglect seems puzzling. The history of womens education does offer a high road into the fascinating world of womens perceptions of themselves and the world, primarily by providing a preliminary guide to what educated women may be expected to have read. From another, however, the neglect may be seen to foUow naturally from a widespread reluctance to dismiss the inteUectual and educational life of women who did not see education as a vehicle for the advancement of womens independence, which most southern women did not. Education has from the start enjoyed an important place in the history of northeastern women, presumably on the assumption that the development of womens minds and independent intellectual tradition rank high among womens legacy for succeeding generations. During the past 2 decades or so, womens historians have constructed a dense and satisfying account of the lives and careers of pathbreaking women educa

Poor Richard at Work in the Cotton Fields

Had Fogel and Engerman restricted themselves, like Conrad and Meyer before them, to investigating the economics of slavery they might not have provoked so widespread a reaction. In particular, they probably would have generated little interest in their psychological and ideological presuppositions. Under ideal conditions, all economics requires critical attention to those implicit psychological models and ideological biases which inevitably appear in social-scientific work. Under normal circumstances, however, economists succeed in barricading their deeper cultural and historical predispositions behind well-fortified walls of statistics, equations, and bloodless models. Fogel and Engerman have broken radically with such pretensions to pure science and &dquo;value free&dquo; neutrality. Whatever our reservations about their conclusions, they de-