Carroll smith rosenberg biography of rory

Louis, MO. I was twenty and a junior at Yale. My teaching assistant in a course on the history of the American West had passed it on to me, suggesting that I write a paper using diaries that women had written while traveling to California on the Oregon Trail. I was an English major and had never been in an archive.

Carroll smith rosenberg biography of rory: This first collection of essays

In addition to its path-breaking argument, the article maps, very clearly, what you must do to write good history. First, you must clearly state your epistemological stance. Then you must characterize your data, and say why you have chosen it: ideally, your archive would be manageable, but heterogeneous enough to produce a generalizable conclusion.

Writing against expert knowledge produced by men about women, Smith-Rosenberg proposed an intervention that was familiar to me from my radical feminist reading group: in this article, women would speak for themselves, teaching us something entirely new about the nineteenth century, and perhaps about ourselves. The article also spoke to me, as it did to many women, because I was coming out as a lesbian in a university where, except for my radical feminist friends, I was completely invisible as a sexual person and as a feminist, except to a small group of women who were struggling to understand our relationships with each other, and to feminist knowledge production, in the context of a male institution.

Suddenly, after reading the article, I understood that the quasi-subterranean, erotic, often unfulfilled intensity of our intellectual and social relationships as young feminists was not exceptional, nor was it a sexual detour in need of correction. I cannot describe to you what a relief it was to be able to reconfigure my fraught intellectual present in relation to a known past.

This requires emphasis because I had embraced the task of this essay on the American West in the first place because I had partly grown up there.