The papers you have read offer assessments of Jane De Hart’s intellectual interventions over the course of her long academic career. In them she is all mind, thinking out problems, merging oral history into policy history, stretching the craft of women’s history.

But the Jane I know is not a disembodied mind, and the historical context in which she made her career is sharply different from the context that people entering the profession now encounter. We all know that the past is a foreign country; let me sketch out some of the specifics of that landscape as Jane experienced it.

Preparing these remarks, I was reminded that Jane and I published our first major articles in the same issue of the Journal of American History in 1975. Martin Ridge, the feminist editor of the JAH, had been looking for a way to convey to the profession his strong support for the women who were becoming more visible in it, and he decided to construct an issue completely composed of articles by women authors. But to accomplish that he had to delay the publication of some essays until he had enough to fill an issue. He held onto mine for at least two years, maybe longer, and I believe he did the same for Jane’s; her essay on the Federal Theatre appeared long after her 1967 book, and only a year before the publication in the American Historical Review of her next major essay, on abstract art and the Cold War.Footnote ¹ I have no idea whether, when the “women’s issue” finally appeared, anyone noticed.

It was not easy in those days to manage a personal life and a professional one. Jane married while she was in graduate school at Duke University. In the early 1960s, when she had passed her orals and was embarked on the project that was to become The Federal Theatre, 1935–1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton University Press, 1967), she and her husband moved to Princeton, where he had a position in the history department. Jane worked part-time for Educational Testing Service, and then was hired at Douglass, the women’s college of Rutgers, as a replacement for someone on leave.

When she was within a year of achieving her Ph.D., an opening occurred at Douglass, and she was offered a full-time position; a year or two later her book appeared, and now she was offered a permanent position at Douglass with an appointment to the graduate faculty at Rutgers; something of a dream job.

But in those days assistant professors at Princeton rarely if ever were considered for tenure, and her husband was offered a permanent position at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The concept of partner hires had yet to be invented; they returned to North Carolina, figuring something would work out, as it had in New Jersey.

Jane found that: (1) The UNC history department could not consider her as a candidate for any position because they had a nepotism rule; (2) The UNC American Studies Program, just beginning, had a line for a lecturer, for which, they adamantly insisted, she was “overqualified.” (3) Duke had a rule against hiring its own Ph.D.s. (4) North Carolina State, in Raleigh, already had one woman in its history department. The rumor was that the men had found her difficult and didn’t want another woman. (5) And UNC–Greensboro, less than an hour away from Chapel Hill, had never had anyone who commuted; an appointment was “out of the question.”

By now it was 1969. The next year the American Historical Association released what we know as “The Rose Report”—after its chair, Professor Willie Lee Rose, then of the University of Virginia—a critical evaluation of the status of women in the profession, calling it “a necessity … to remove existing disabilities and to establish a genuine parity for women historians,” and making clear how pervasive the problem was by publishing startling statistics that revealed the absence of women on the faculties of the most distinguished departments of history—no women were members of the departments at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Wisconsin, Berkeley. Institutions that educated women as undergraduates, institutions that awarded Ph.D.s to women, failed to welcome them as colleagues. Even women’s colleges had few women historians on their faculties. The Rose Committee placed the question of the teaching, placement, and career development of women in the historical profession squarely inside “the even broader question of women’s role in contemporary society,” arguing that “far from abandoning their professions for pure domesticity, their very eagerness to work has made women vulnerable to exploitation,” and implicitly condemning the academy for anti-intellectualism displayed toward holders of its own advanced degrees.Footnote ²

As it happened, there was a death in the department of history at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro, and not long before the appearance of the Rose Report, Jane was asked to fill in temporarily and then was offered a permanent position.

In 1969, UNC–Greensboro was making its own uneasy transition from being the women’s college of the University of North Carolina to a free-standing coeducational university. UNC–Greensboro had a distinguished feminist past, and once had a productive scholarly faculty drawn from northern as well as southern universities. But the memory of that past had faded as the college was redefined. “The first thing I did,” Jane recalls, “was to establish a women’s studies program.” Now the stumbling block was the administration’s insistence that the chair of a program couldn’t commute; that was solved by the appointment of a co-chair who lived in Greensboro. (“Though it was never clear to me why people couldn’t pick up the phone to call me in Chapel Hill if I were needed,” Jane observes now.)

She taught at Greensboro until 1981; after a year sharing the Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in Helsinki, she joined the history department at UNC–Chapel Hill; and then, in 1991, joined the history department at the University of California–Santa Barbara.

In the professional world of the 1960s and 1970s, in which woman was likely to be unemployed, underemployed, or the only woman in her own department, learned societies provided a refreshing context. One could submit an essay to their journals, which were blind-peer reviewed, and feel confident that it would be judged on its merits. One could volunteer to offer a paper on the program, and if they were impressed program committees would find a panel into which to fit it. Women could find each other at conferences and know they were not alone. We found men who welcomed us warmly; often men who had had their own harsh experiences during the McCarthy era and understood how it felt to be an outsider. Jane now looks at the list of her service to the profession and now gasps, “Goodness, I could have written another book in that time!” But of course she couldn’t have; it was the learned societies that saved our sanity, making possible the books we did write.

Jane’s work in the learned societies, beginning in the early 1970s, includes service on the Program Committees of the American Studies Association and the Southern Historical Association, the Nominating Board and Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians, and the Board of Editors of the American Quarterly. She chaired the AHA’s Committee on Women Historians and the ASA’s Program Committee, and in both roles has had lasting impact.Footnote ³ It’s important, I think, to understand this work in its context. Peter Novick’s magisterial—and often delicious—account of the historical profession in the twentieth century is on the mark on most things, and he does understand that until the 1970s, women historians were “almost as marginalized as blacks.” But his patronizing account marginalizes and misinterprets the role gender has played in shaping the contours of the profession, and leaves no room for women’s agency: “‘Affirmative action’ of various kinds, which many denounced as an umbearable affront to universalist and meritocratic norms, was undertaken to countervail a legacy of gender discrimination,” he wrote. “In the professional associations (which still didn’t matter that much, and where concessions could be made without substantial cost), women went from tokenism to substantial overrepresentation.”Footnote ⁴

It was not, I believe, a matter of overrepresentation. The professional associations were more quickly responsive than were colleges and universities to the claim that women’s marginalization undermines the intellectual health of the profession; and their willingness to welcome women as colleagues on boards and committees like the ones on which Jane served provided the peer review and institutional recognition that could be used to leverage change in more resistant academic institutions. Publication in blind-reviewed journals, appearances on conference panels, and service on the committees of learned societies provided opportunities to practice one’s profession even though unemployed, and simultaneously demystified the academy. Many women devoted their energies to learned societies and, in return, earned their place in them.

Jane’s work on the Federal Theatre positioned her to contribute to the development of arts policy, linking academic scholarship with public programs. She served on the Carter-Mondale Task Force for the Arts and Humanities and on the North Carolina Governor’s Council for the Arts and Humanities. When she was completing The Federal Theatre, the NEA and NEH were being formed; some in these agencies were hungry for their history. In her work, Jane identified a potential conflict between the principle of government accountability and the principle that government should not interfere in government-subsidized art. The Associated Council of the Arts—an association of state councils of the arts—with funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, invited her to study the boundaries of artistic freedom as experienced by institutions that received public funding—for example, Joe Papp’s Shakespeare Theatre in New York City. “I sent questionnaires and did interviews, asking whether they had experienced government interference and how they dealt with it. When I sat down to write up my findings, I did it in the context of American experience of public funding of the Federal Theatre and other New Deal projects.” And she concluded that although “the most recent problems had been presented by Communism, my prediction was that the next major conflict would be over arts related to sexuality.” When Jane presented this work to Nancy Hanks, the head of the NEA, then at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, she was dismissive. “‘I know you’re a historian,’ Hanks said, “and that you think about the past. But we’re focusing on funding. I can’t conceive of the situation you predict. We’re much too sophisticated for any congressman to ever criticize the NEA for anything that offended!” There have been many times in the years since that conversation that Jane has found herself thinking, “A little policy history would have helped.”

Jane and I met in 1970 at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the following year found ourselves together on the American Historical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women—the permanent committee formed at the urging of the Rose Report. I remember at the first meeting I attended, the chair, Patricia Graham, asked whether any of the eight members taught women’s history; none of us did at the time. But all of us were intrigued by it, and someone suggested that the low level of women’s status in the historical profession was somehow (in ways we didn’t yet understand) linked to the absence of women from the historical narratives that we wrote and taught. If no woman since Queen Elizabeth of England had thought a thought worth teaching in the survey of Western Civilization, could not our students and colleagues be excused when they dismissed women in the present?

Committees generate paper: reports to the Council, letters to constituents, manifestos. Jane and I discovered that we finished each other’s sentences or wrote alternating ones. We practiced this craft in the first major project of the committee, published during the time Jane chaired the committee [1973–75]: A Survival Manual for Women (and Other) Historians; a pamphlet meant to demystify the profession. The Survival Manual offered sensible good counsel for how to manage a job interview, get on a program, give a conference paper, submit an essay to a journal, publish a book. The original manual was updated many times; the latest version, redrafted by Melanie Gustafson, is still in print. Its language is no longer gender-specific. I often wonder if the men who now turn to it for good counsel understand that they are the beneficiaries of the women’s movement in the profession?

Some years later, Jane wrote the 1989 Reassessment of the Rose Report, undertaken at the request of the AHA’s Committee on Women Historians. She undertook to assess what had changed in the last twenty years, what had not changed, and to suggest where we might focus our attention in the future. Much had indeed changed by 1989, and we have lived the last twenty years as beneficiaries of these changes. The severe nepotism rules that kept Jane from consideration at UNC in 1968 have been softened. Most institutions have adopted modes of keeping one partner from judging another; it’s the rare department now that would admit to holding the position that women are worse colleagues than men are. Still, the most recent evidence, analyzed in the most recent report of Robert Townsend, associate director for research of the American Historical Association, shows that “women and minorities remain only a small part of the history profession, despite decades of efforts to increase their relatively modest numbers.”Footnote ⁵

The ability to be a parent and a professional remains elusive, although not as crudely voiced as it was when Jane joined the history department at the University of North Carolina in the early 1980s. The few women historians shared a single office; one of them was pregnant. The men jovially referred to the office as “the rabbit hutch.” The first woman professor with children had borne them long before she joined the department; the mother of the first child born to a tenure-track woman in the entire history of the UNC department waited until she was a full professor, for fear of jeopardizing her situation. Tracking the dates of the first child born to a tenure-track woman in a dozen departments, Jane found that none were born earlier than the late 1980s—stunning testimony to the fact that male historians were far more likely to be parents as well as professionals than were women, and to do that early in their careers. She called upon her readers to compile the dates of the birth of the first child to women members of their own institutions. Long before the flurry of such reports in the 2000s, Jane identified the enduring work-family conflict in the academy, and noted the particularly harsh problems facing men who embraced authentically equal family responsibilities.Footnote ⁶

In and outside the academy, Jane has asked whether power itself can be redefined, its meaning enlarged to include responsibility, altruism, and nurturance. Is it possible to be tough and caring? To examine the place of women is simultaneously to evaluate male authority in society. Many of the papers offered at this conference in the last three days demonstrate that we have taken these instructions to heart; many missed opportunities show how far we have to go.