A gender lens to the century

Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States, Viking, London and New York, 1997. xiv + 753 pp., £20.00 hb., 0 670 87420 5.

The briefest reflection on the scale of this undertaking is enough to produce vertigo, induced not so much by the challenge of twinning twentieth-century British and US history, as by the enormity of the conceptual and thematic issues attendant upon specifying 'women' as the object of inquiry. 'How', Sheila Rowbotham asks in her introduction, 'can the multitude of events which become daily news, decade after decade, along with all those submerged personal experiences which women's history has sought out - births, betrayals, ecstasy or even the washing day - be encompassed between two covers?' Her answer is that the writing of history is an act of compromise, born of 'a grappling between evidence and consciousness'.

Among the many fascinations on the empirical side of this equation, we encounter New York shirt-waist makers on strike in 1909; Marie Lloyd, English music- hall idol; Theda Bara, 'the Vamp', early sex symbol of the silent screen, born Theodosia Goodman, daughter of a Jewish tailor from Cincinnati; Ruth Thompson, hanged in England in 1923 for allegedly compelling her lover, the lodger, to kill her husband. We learn in passing that half a million single women under thirty entered the USA between 1912 and 1917, including the Japanese 'picture brides' chosen by working men; that the only anti-perspirant available in 1930s Britain, Odo-ro-no, took twenty minutes to dry and lasted a week; that one reason for American GIs' popularity with women in wartime England was that they earned £750 a year while British squaddies got less than £100; that the FBI opened a file on Marilyn Monroe following her involvement with Arthur Miller; that 'Hound Dog' was recorded by the black blues singer Willie Mae Thornton three years before Elvis Presley's version. Stories of injustice and exploitation proliferate: Alice Wheeldon, imprisoned for her pacifist views in England during the First World War; a semi-literate working woman's appeal in a Chicago black weekly paper for 'healp ... to get out of this land of suffring'; lobotomy proposed by some US surgeons in 1956 as a solution to 'the mad housewife syndrome'; the female employees of the firm American Cynamid, which, when reproductive hazards were revealed in the workplace in 1984, demanded that they 'be sterilized and then fired them anyway'.

But if the volume of evidence which Rowbotham has drawn upon is considerable (the corpus of feminist-inspired British and American women's history produced over the last quarter-century, of which Rowbotham is both pioneer and practitioner, supplemented by general histories and original source material), and amenable to a variety of interpretations, it is to the 'consciousness' side of Rowbotham's equation that we must turn for insight into the central concerns of this work.

Rowbotham declares two personal perspectives. First, there is her conception of the century as two lifespans, exemplified by her own and that of her mother. Second, she invokes her 'complex affair with the US', rooted in 1950s' popular culture but then sustained by internationalism and her links with US feminists. A third consideration is Rowbotham's involvement with 'women's history'. Since the 1970s, she explains, women's history, like labour history and black history, has been active in a 'recasting of historical "knowledge"'. In 'applying a gender lens' to the past, it has documented 'everyday life and culture', and raised new questions about the organization of work, the structure of the family, and attitudes towards sexuality. Its most general starting point is that 'women's lives matter' and should not be excluded from the historical record. But in seeking to redress that balance, the experience of women must be integrated: women, Rowbotham insists, do not exist apart 'from life, from society and thus from history'.

At the most basic level, this text provides two wide-ranging narrative histories of the lives of British and American women. Although Rowbotham is clearly fascinated by differences, similarities and interactions, she recognizes that the two countries are not 'homologous entities with synchronized impulses'; latitudinal and longitudinal thematic analyses are eschewed in the interests of an accessible, chronological structure which divides the century into decades, each dealt with in a chapter which looks first at Britain and then at the USA, subdivided into sections on 'Politics', 'Work', 'Everyday Life' and 'Sex', with particular attention to the two world wars. The recognition that women cannot be dealt with in isolation means that each of these sections - Politics and Work especially - has to treat the wider political and economic forces pressing on the 'destinies of women'.

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