The following is a guest post from
Felicia Kornbluh, who kindly responded to our request for guest posts on last week's
annual meeting of the
American Historical Association:
At a morning talk for the Committee on Women Historians titled "
Telling Stories: A Meditation on Love, Loss, History, and Who We Are," legal
historian
Barbara Young Welke issued a profound challenge to scholars.
As I heard it, the talk, which was structured around a series of
letters Welke wrote from the depths of her grief to her 18-year-old
daughter, Frances, who died a year and a half ago, called on us to stop
pretending that our lives don't matter in our work. Welke wants us to be
less objective in this sense, more normatively engaged. When we write
about horrible things that happened to people in the past (as in the
case of Welke's own work on the disabling and other effects of flammable
fabrics, or mine on poor people facing benefit denials and cuts), we
need to keep the rich, even tear-jerking details in view, rather than
draining them out (as I've certainly tried to do) to get at legal
principle, or historiographic intervention. Not that the history of
legal doctrine or practice stops mattering. But it is also ok-- even
urgent--to let people know that the horrible, rich details were part of
what drew us to the material on the first place. I cried at the NY
Municipal Archives the first time I read welfare recipients' letters to
Mayor Wagner, begging for (or demanding) help. I later thought through
their strategic and legally structured rhetorical strategies, the role of their urban citizenship claims in the recent literature on
citizenship, etc. Can we bring all of these levels of meaning into our
work? Can we be sympathetic, or enraged, or reminded of our own
families, financial challenges, struggles with bureaucracy without
losing professional credibility???? Let's think about it!
One
more note: this was an especially challenging conversation to have in a
room full of women historians (and male buddies). Can we afford to
display the mother's milk of human kindness??
Read more highlights from the AHA
here, at the History News Network.
