Feminist historian lectures

Sarah Siegel Life Editor

On Tuesday Feb. 19, acclaimed medievalist and feminist historian Judith Bennett delivered a lecture entitled “Feminism and the Future of History.”

Sanders 212 was almost completely filled with (mostly female) students and professors as Assistant Professor of History Lydia Murdoch introduced Bennett, a professor at the University of Southern California. Murdoch joked that it was oddly appropriate for Bennett, whose first book focused on female brewsters in medieval Europe, to be lecturing on the future of feminism at Vassar, a school founded by a brewer for women’s education.

Bennett’s lecture recapitulated the arguments of her newest book, History Matters, which examines the place of gender in history and the place of history in feminist politics.

Bennett stressed first that although history is traditionally understood as the study of change over time, gender histories and current feminist politics call for a greater focus on continuity, and an understanding of the distant or “deep” past.

“The wage gap between men and women has been remarkably consistent through time,” she said. “Since the introduction of the wage system in medieval Europe, women have earned between half to two-thirds of what men do.” She said that the relative stability of such forms of inequality was part of what she called “patriarchal equilibrium,” a theory that posits females’ real power has remained relatively constant and subordinate to males’ over time.

Her use of the word “patriarchal” was deliberate. Part of her discussion focused on the ways in which she says that over the past 40 years “feminist history has calmed down and behaved like a good girl.”

Bennett saw something disingenuous in a move from biting words like “patriarchy” that were used in the 1970s to more neutral terms like women’s subordination or inequality in the 1980s, which she sees as having become even more diluted in the current vocabulary of “gender inequality, hierarchy, or imbalance,” in which “you can’t even tell which gender is disadvantaged.”

Bennett spoke for about an hour and 15 minutes before a lively question and answer session.