Construction of the Past Produced by Those in Power - Coursework Example

Introduction The person in power, prior to the 1960s civil rights movements, traditionally have been, in both Europe and America, the educated man. And it is the educated man who controlled the dissemination of historical texts during this period of time. Because of this, history for those not in power, ie, women and minorities, was distorted or ignored. Stereotypes were allowed to proliferate about black Americans, as the traditional viewpoint regarding this segment of the population was that they were violent drunks who were prone to rape white women. Erroneous views about the Chinese spread in Europe, views that portrayed the Chinese as rampant baby-makers who practiced bad medicine and perpetrated a trade imbalance with the rest of the world. Women were largely ignored, or, if they are mentioned at all, were subsumed under the analyses of men during any given period. These were the images that were presented by the typical “dead white man” analyses. However, these views have been largely corrected today, and, even in the era before the 1960s, were contradicted by individual, powerful voices that corrected these historical oversights and gave life and voice to those who were oppressed by the traditional historical analyses. Argument and analysis Typical historical analyses is not kind to the minority in any society. In Europe, for instance, there was an inherent bias against Chinese medicine, due to the way that Europeans historically viewed such treatments as acupuncture and herbal remedies, which is that these remedies are not based upon any empiricism. This is an example of a historical bias, and one that has proved, largely, to be wrong, for these treatments are based upon empirical observation. Yet traditional European canon dismissed these treatments because of the view that was held by the majority that the Eastern medicines are not helpful and are not well-studied (Goldstone, 2000, p. 176). Likewise the historical notion that the Chinese were historically not eager to trade with the West, while the West was eager to trade with the Chinese, ignoring the historical evidence that the Chinese in the 14th Century did attempt to trade with the West, sending large fleets to Africa, before pulling back (Goldstone, 2000, p. 176). The Chinese reason for pulling back is also under historical review, as the traditional historical view was that the Chinese pulled back on its trade because its despotic leaders ordered it to do so. This is also inaccurate revisionist history, argues Goldstone (2000), because China pulled back on it trading not because of a despotic order but because the cost benefit analysis did not favor this trading, as there “was nothing there to justify the costs of such voyages” (Goldstone, 2000, p. 177). Another European inaccuracy about the Chinese concerns its citizens’ supposed rampant fertility, which made the Europeans feel “more prudent, more individualistic, or more ‘something’ that enabled them to control fertility and restrict population growth, while Chinese families bred without limit” (Goldstone, 2000, p. 178). However, Goldstone argues that Chinese women actually delayed childbirth more than did European women, ended fertility earlier than European women, spaced their births apart more than European women, and had, on average, the same size families as European women (Goldstone, 2000, p. 178). Hence, the European canonical historical analysis of the Chinese is that they are rampant breeders, practice bogus medicine and that they historically did not pull their weight in the area of global trade – all erroneous historical assumptions, according to Goldstone. In America, the traditional canon contributed to a stereotyping of the African American population. The predominant viewpoint, as in Europe, is that of the whites, which filtered the societal view of blacks. This view is seen in the films of the early 1900s, films that were directed and produced by white men, such as D.W. Griffith, whose early film Birth of a Nation is widely reviled for its racist portrayal of the black race. The film, according to Hoffman (1986), portrayed the blacks as “lazy, stupid, corrupt, sex-crazed, and full of lust for white women” (Hoffman, 1986, p. 38). Some of the scenes that contributed to this portrayal include scenes where black men are seen at a legislative meeting drinking liquor on the floor, and taking off their shoes and putting their bare feet on chamber desks; and a scene where a black man attempts to rape a white woman, who jumps off a cliff to her death rather than be subjected to this (Hoffman, 1986, p. 38). The film seems, and is, horribly racist, but it really was in keeping with the films of the times, which portrayed blacks with racial stereotypes. Since the nature of film is that it is designed to reach a mass audience, and, in turn, influences that audience, these portrayals represent a particularly pernicious type of revisionist history that the whites in power perpetrated on the blacks during the first half of the 20th Century. Likewise, women have traditionally gotten short shrift in historical canons. One example is, according to Howkins & Saville (1979), is the British analysis of the 1930s, titled The Slump: Society and Politics during the Depression. In this analysis, according to Howkins & Saville, there not only is not a voice for the poor, who, of course, was drastically affected by the Great Depression, but there also is not a voice for women, whose stories are “subsumed under the discussion of men” (Howkins & Saville, 1979, p. 94). Another example of this, according to Freedman (1974) is the article “What Happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920s”, which, in its analysis of the pre-World War I legacy of progressives, which included farm groups, labor unions, businessmen and social justice advocates, the fate of the feminists is largely absent (Howkins & Saville, 1979, p. 372). This oversight is particularly glaring in light of what was happening during this time regarding the feminist movement. This was the time of the “New Woman,” a time when womens rights such as suffrage, working status and birth control were just coming to the fore in politics around the world (Hemus, 2009, p. 6). This was a decade that saw the emergence of the woman who was not as concerned with being a mother and staying home with children, but had a job – “working on the assembly line, typing at secretarial jobs, using modern household appliance, or posing like mannequins in advertisements.” (Lavin, 1993, p. 2). That a comprehensive discussion of the progressive movements in the 1920s did not include the woman’s movement seems inexcusable, but this is really just one more example of history being reflected in the eyes of those in power, the educated man. An example of the tendency to neglect women in historical analyses is the Dada movement. This was an artistic movement that gained worldwide prominence towards the beginning of the 20th Century, and this movement was characterized by a hostility towards the past and towards mainstream art, and eschewing major publishers and gallery owners, choosing instead to display their art through their own showcases, relying on the Dada artists themselves for publicity of these exhibits (Hemus, 2009, p. 7). As the movement represented a break from the past, it would seem to be a natural fit for women, and women were prominent in the movement, but yet are downplayed in the traditional historical analyses of the movement. In these analyses, there is a definite bias in the Dada Movement towards male artists, a bias that has been perpetuated by the male Dada artists themselves, along with the times in which the Dada artists lived. In fact, there has been a dearth of great female artists in any movement, a fact that was noted by Linda Nochlin in 1971. (Jones, 2003, p. 293). This dearth of female influence is felt throughout the Dada movement, as the male artists have ignored the female artists, by and large, in their memoirs and autobiographies, and the female artists have not written their own side of the story to defend their own prominence in the movement. (Hemus, 2009, p. 3). The women of Dada are treated as footnotes in the historical biography of the movement, as the movement is narrated through the eyes of the Dada men, such as Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Richter and Tristan Tzara, each of whom wrote memoirs that mentioned the women of Dada only in passing. Moreover, the women have gotten attention mainly through their relationships with male Dada artists, such as Suzanne Duchamp was known as the sister of three male artists and the wife of another, with little attention given to her own accomplishments. (Hemus, 2009, p. 3). While the above examples represent the obvious bias in the way that traditional historical canons treat minorities, there are other viewpoints that try to correct these errors and omissions, as well as individual, powerful voices that bring light to these various groups and correct the historical oversight of them. For instance, in the Dada movement, while women were largely ignored in the movement, one woman came to prominence in the movement, and used the subjugation of women as a springboard for her art, thus turning the very historical oppression that silenced women’s voices into the impetus for her successful artistic career. Her name was Hannah Hoch, and her art protested the treatment of women, touching on such topics as abortion, suffrage, and the new woman (Sawelson-Gorse, 1998, p. 332). Toni Morrison is another such voice for the oppressed and ignored, and the novel Beloved is the vehicle for that voice. While acknowledging that the tendency is for American historical analyses to omit slavery, an obvious black mark on the nation’s collective soul, Morrison thought that it was important for the slaves’ voices to be heard (Rushdy, 1992, p. 568). Hence, while the traditional canon attempted to stifle the voice of the slave by virtually ignoring that it ever happened, Morrison was determined that this voice would be heard, loud and clear. Her novel Beloved gave the ignored slave this voice, giving effect to her desire to “invoke all those people who are ‘unburied, or at least unceremoniously buried’ and go about ‘properly, artistically, burying them’” (Rushdy, 1992, p. 568). In this tale, a slave woman commits infanticide, because she did not want the child to grow up in slavery, seeing “death as a better alternative to slavery” (Rushdy, 1992, p. 576). This is the basis for the powerful tale, which was designed to not only illuminate the plight of the slave, thus “clarify[ing] the roles that have become obscured”, but also serve as a form of healing (Rushdy, 1992, p. 587). While Morrison gave a voice to the minority women, thus illuminating the plights of two of the traditionally oppressed groups, blacks and women, and Hannah Hoch became a voice for women, others also gave voice to women everywhere. One of these voices was that of a man, Alexis De Tocqueville whose famed tome, Democracy In America addressed the roles of women, thus becoming “among the few – perhaps only – classic texts read by students of American history that seriously examined the situation of women in American society” (Kerber, 1988, p. 9). In De Tocqueville’s analysis, women, before marriage, were independent and self-confident, yet marriage restrained this same woman as “the inexorable opinion of the public carefully circumscribes her within the narrow circle of domestic interest and duties and forbids her to step beyond it”(Kerber, 1988, p. 10). De Tocqueville also spoke admiringly of women, stating that the “growing strength of American people ought mainly to be attributed…to the superiority of their women” (Kerber, 1988, p. 10). Likewise in 1959 Eleanor Flexor produced a feminist tome called Century of Struggle, which chronicles “women’s lives, work and legal rights in the colonial period, the first major section of the book detail[ing] the emergency of a self-defined woman’s rights movement in the years before the Civil War” (Lasser, 1987, p. 344). The women of this period sought to organize themselves, while fighting for the rights of slaves as well as fighting for better conditions in the early New England textile factories. Thus, Flexor’s book corrects a major historical oversight by detailing a story that cannot be read by a typical white man’s version of historical accounts, and that is that there was a woman’s movement long before suffrage. Flexor also tells the story of women in the late nineteenth century, and their struggle to broad their opportunities in trade unions, education, politics and clubs. The last part of the book details women’s suffrage (Lasser, 1987, p. 344-345). Through it all, individuals biographies of important women are weaved, such as the suffragette stories about Lucy Stone, who is characterized as a “gifted orator”; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an “outstanding philosopher”; and Susan B. Anthony, an “incomparable organizer” (Lasser, 1987, p. 345). Conclusion Before 1960, the people in power in society, which is usually and traditionally been the educated man, has had control over how historical stories are told to the masses. Thus, histories of minorities and women are either revised or ignored. The Chinese become ignorant baby-making machines who practice witch-doctor medicine and refuse to properly trade with Europeans; blacks become violent drunks who rape white women when they are not acting silly for their white “masters”; women are ignored. Yet this is not the accurate story, and individual voices have become prominent in giving a voice to the people that the traditional tomes either undermine or forget about. Feminist writers tell the women’s stories that were not told in traditional canons prior to 1960, as stories about women who organized in the pre-Civil War era came to light, along with the stories about the women’s movement and the prominent leaders in the movement. Alexis De Tocqueville is one of the only educated man writers of this era who did not ignore women, and gave them a voice. Hannah Hoch, with her protestations of women’s subjugation taking front and center in her art, became a voice for these women at a time when these voices were seldom otherwise heard. Meanwhile, Toni Morrison corrects the traditional oversight that minimized slavery, bringing a brutal tale of infanticide to the fore and shining a light on these oppressed people. What these voices, these powerful voices, show is that the story of oppression will be told, whether the dominant forces in society want them to be or not. Sources Used Freedman, E. 1974, The new woman: Changing views of women in the 1920s, The Journal of American History, vol. 61, no. 2, pp. 372-393. Goldstone, J. 2000, The rise of the West – or not? A revision to socio-economic history, Sociological Theory, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 175-194. Hemus, Ruth. Dadas Women. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Hoffman, P. 1986, “The Birth of the Nation” and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, OAH Magazine of History, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 37-39. Howkins, A. & Saville, J. 1979, The nineteen thirties: A revisionist history, The Socialist Register, pp. 89-100. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/ saville/1979/xx/1930s.htm Jones, Amelia. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003. Kerber, L. 1988, Separate spheres, female world, woman’s place: The rhetoric of women’s history, vol. 75, p. no. 1, pp. 9-39. Lasser, C. 1987, Century of struggle, decades of revision: A retrospective on Eleanor Flexner’s suffrage history, Reviews in American History, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 344- 354. Lavin, Maud. Cut With the Kitchen Knife: the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Rushdy, A. 1992, “Daughter’s signifying history: The example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, American Literature, vol. 64, no. 3, pp. 567-597. Read More