Public and Private History – The Integration of Women into History

In order to eventually write a history of the forgotten and unrecorded, historians have attempted to reconstruct female history by making women in a sense finally visible. To achieve this, feminist historians neglected the male dominated public sphere which was to be regarded the essential part of history and historiography and focused instead on what was traditionally considered to be the typical private and female sphere of household and family. This private sphere of women has for a long time been assumed to be outside history or to even be incidental to it.

By shedding light on the private and female side of history and society, the public-private divide was eventually challenged and the importance and interest of those areas usually labelled private, such as family and gender relations, reinforced. It became also obvious that the borders between public and private spheres are indeed fluid and both areas therefore connect, a fact often ignored by historiography. Women’s private sphere of life can consequently not be clearly cut off from male and public history. Indeed, women have not only been occupied with the private but also with the public spheres of life and history.

And as the roles women played in the private sector were examined and historicized, feminist historians also uncovered and recorded how women took part in public, formerly male, fields, such as politics, culture, or economy.

18 History has too long been the story of men’s lives. Feminists therefore began to play with language for political ends and eventually came up with the term ‘herstory’, pointing out that history so far has indeed been his/story and that the time has now come for her/story.

Ultimately, all areas of female activity, private and public, have to be reconstructed so that a full picture of women in history can be given. The history of women therefore has to be a history of mankind and of men as well, a history of the relationship as well as of the differences between the sexes. Her/story has to include women’s position in the world, their powers, their roles, their silence as well as their language (comp. Duby/Perrot, 9). And Gerda Lerner adds: “Women’s history must contain not only the activities and events in which women participated, but the record of changes and shifts in their perception of themselves and their roles” (Lerner 1979, 160/161). Both the role women played in society as well as the perceptions they have of themselves have certainly undergone many a change during the past decades as the picture of women in general has changed. This change of roles and perception, public as well as private, and the ongoing integration process of women into history and society are often reflected in the fiction as well as in autobiographical writings of women.

The roles women have assumed during the ages have often been imposed on them by a patriarchal society in which there was no room for female individuality. Hence these gender roles were mostly stereotypical and sexist. Even today, women are still influenced or even judged by those arrogated perceptions. Madonna, seductress, or muse were for instance the typical female archetypes of the 19^th century. Women were labelled mother, wife, lover, virgin, or whore and are thus in a way devalued or even reduced to their sex only. Women were glorified or reduced, seen as a saint or a whore, and thus devalued to a very one-dimensional picture which denied them not only a personality but individuality.

This pigeon-holing neglects the fact that there is more to a human being, that there is more to every woman.

Burdened with the roles society demanded them to conform to, women were hardly able to express their identity and individuality. It is consequently very important for women to achieve a specific female identity by reacting to those clichés imposed on them by society as Gymnich states as well:

Da Identität das komplexe Spannungsfeld zwischen Individuum und sozialem Umfeld erfasst und damit sowohl die grundsätzliche Möglichkeit zu Selbstbestimmung als auch die – mehr oder minder kreative – Verarbeitung gesellschaftlicher Vorgaben berücksichtigt, bietet die Frage nach weiblicher Identität wichtige Überschneidungen und Berührungspunkte mit anderen feministisch relevanten Fragestellungen, insbesondere mit einer Untersuchung weiblicher Rollenmuster und mit dem Problem weiblicher Emanzipation. (Gymnich 2000, 18)

The process of integration is at times and especially for women accompanied by certain self-sacrifices and a loss of individual identity since women are often neither sure of themselves nor of their identity. Finding one’s role in history and/or society without giving up one’s individuality is consequently a difficult task and the reason why women often find themselves in a dilemma. Marion Gymnich has examined this quest for a female identity in the fiction of contemporary British women writers. In the detailed introduction to her Entwürfe weiblicher Identität im Englischen Frauenroman des 20. Jahrhunderts she emphasizes that identity does not only depend on an act of self-definition, asking and answering who am I?, but also on the individual’s examination of his or her integration into society: “Identität, die Antwort eines Individuums auf die Frage ’wer bin ich?’, beinhaltet zwar eine mehr oder weniger individuelle Komponente, erfolgt aber gemäß sozialpsychologischen wie psychoanalytischen Vorstellungen stets auch in der Auseinandersetzung mit gesellschaftlichen Vorgaben und dem sozialen Umfeld, in dem das Individuum eingebunden ist“ (Gymnich 2000, 11).

Self-awareness, self-discovery, finally self-consciousness are the prerequisites for integration as well as individuation. And personal identity and external reality have to be connected in order to achieve an integrated self. By the end of the 19^th century women had, as their autobiographical writings prove, eventually developed a new self-consciousness and in society in general a new interest in women as both intellectual as well as psychological individuals can be sensed. This development and the changes in perception it brought with it, were also mirrored in society and eventually even led to a modification of women’s role in society. Women’s autobiographical writing followed these changes as well as it followed

“the course of women’s history, especially their efforts to defy or combat established institutions” (Jelinek, 151).

Autobiography is a genre which is used by women to voice their quest for identity and autonomy. Autobiography offers a possibility of self-discovery and focuses on a private history, a personal story, as well, thus presenting a perfect opportunity for women to shed light on their life and history. Women considered their domestic as well as emotional life an appropriate subject matter for their autobiographies. These women writers consequently allow us to gain an insight into the private sphere of history and thus complete our picture of the past. Summarizing the development of women’s autobiography from antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century, Estelle Jelinek concludes that they all share “a common

emphasis on the personal. Until professionalism becomes their means of self-validation, women’s approach is generally subjective. And they document not the events of male intellectual history but those of their own” (Jelinek, 87). Women’s autobiography is therefore a part of historiography as well and furthermore serves as a means to establish a female history which does indeed exist. The subjective has to complement the official record of history as the private completes the public. The self-discovery practised in autobiographies leads women eventually on a path to individuation and autonomy and at the same time establishes their part in world history. This genre consequently not only deals with the integration process of women in history and society but even pushes it ahead.

The female quest for identity and growth is not only an issue in the autobiographical writing of then and now but also features as a prominent topic in the fiction of today.

Especially the contemporary female historical novel exemplifies that women are indeed on a double mission – on a quest for identity as well as on a quest to achieve a role in history and society. As both are strongly connected, historical novels by women writers frequently take the quest for identity as a theme, thus creating what can be called the female historical