Professor Mix-a-lot Does Women's History

Hello. My name is Ray, and I'm addicted to mixing patterns.  When putting in my schedule and course request for spring of 2012 earlier this week, I asked to teach either a graduate readings seminar on early modern Europe or an upper level course on mixology.

 (Dress - Nine West (remixed), Cardigan - Population, Tights - We Love Colors (remixed), Boots - John Fluevog Bondgirls (remixed)

On a more serious note, what I'll probably actually end up teaching next spring  is a couple of survey courses and an upper level course on women in pre-modern Europe.

Strange.  If you had told me back when I started graduate school that I would teach a course on women's history, I would have laughed in your face.  A class that I TA'ed for early in my grad student career was taught by an older, white, male faculty member, and he repeatedly asked me (the only female TA in the class) if I wanted to give parts of lectures about women in modern American history.  I kept telling him no, and he kept saying, "oh, yeah, because you do the early stuff...."  To which I kept responding that no, it was that I didn't do women's history.

After dabbling in radical feminism, I had over time lapsed into apathy before slowly coming to the more moderate brand of liberal feminism that I began grad school with.  And part of that meant to me at the time was that I could choose what I wanted to do with my life, what I wanted to focus my studies on, what I wanted to write my dissertation on, and at that point what I wanted to research had nothing to do with women.  It surprised me to encounter such entrenched gendered assumptions on the part of a faculty member.  Surely he had seen women come through the PhD program before and not work on women's history; surely he noticed some of his female colleagues didn't specialize in the history of women!

Less than a year and a half later I had defended my MA thesis, made the jump from early America to early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, and somehow issues of gender were slowly becoming increasingly salient to my new research.  I won't give you the details, but part of that meant was that my choices had changed and my repeated claim that I didn't do women's history was no longer true -- even though I'll be the first to admit that it still rubs me the wrong way that someone would assume that just because I am a woman and a historian that I must be a women's historian.  While I still consider myself primarily a historian of Spain and of early modern Europe, I came to the conclusion that it would be a disservice to the actresses, female troupe managers, and women audience members I research to not be a women's historian, as well.  

So there you have it.  My confession.  I'm a women's historian.  And a pattern mixing addict.  I apologize for neither.

P.S. Were you expecting me to reveal my name?