Melissa Diaz, Primary Source Analysis and Response

Melissa Diaz

23 February 2016

History 209S

Response to “Historians Who Love Too Much”

              Jill Lepore’s Historians Who Love Too Much, helped me realize that one of my biggest concerns is that my primary sources and my overall argument would be dismissed as selective and not representative. Lepore emphasized that, unlike biographers, micro historians try to ask important historical or historiographical questions that expand on the stories of the protagonists. I have found it difficult to make larger claims about the time period or even about the group of women that I will be focusing on, because I am limited by time and number of sources. So far, it has been a challenge to determine whether someone’s story is ordinary and when is their story an epic anomaly. Unlike a micro-historian, I am using the cases of about five different women to make an argument about the agency of women who lost their citizenship due to marriage. Since I am looking at multiple cases, I am still closely analyzing them in the context of the historical period, but I also want to be careful about implying that the stories of the women were representative of the time. 

             On a different note, Lenore explained the micro-historian’s methods by framing the subjects as natives, and the historians as the colonists. While I think this metaphor is too simplistic and risks trivializing the experience of Native Americans with colonialism, I think it functions to talk about the invasive nature of historical research. It is important to be careful when analyzing personal stories, and I am interested in learning more about the idea of exploiting personal narratives for the historian’s use.  Is it possible to make the retrieval of personal narrative and the historian's analysis and use of personal narrative in academia beneficial to both the subject and the micro-historian?

Primary Source Analysis:

House Hearing Relative to the Citizenship of American Women Married to Foreign Men, 1918 

             This source would allow me to analyze the way women challenged the Expatriation Act of 1907, and the way wealthy white women in particular were able to exercise their privilege to prove that upper class American women deserved to be considered part of the American nation. In 1918, Representative Jeanette Rankin from Montana introduced a bill that would allow women to resume their American citizenship if they were married to a non-American citizen. In the above source, she is defending the need for her bill in a Congressional hearing. This is only an excerpt of the hearing, many other suffragists and female lawyers argue for independent citizenship after Rankin. I want to pay close attention to Rankin’s characterization of Canadian men, and compare this language to the way other foreign men were depicted. I am also interested in the perceived privileges of female citizenship, from the more concrete, the ability to own land and vote, to the more abstract, to be considered American and part of the nation.