Three years old
It’s now three years since I started this blog (by some coincidence I started the day before Tenured Radical). There isn’t much to reflect on since the last anniversary as it’s been a fairly quiet year. This year I seem to have got more political (but when is anything not political?). Looking back at my style of writing three years ago I can’t believe how reasonable and equivocal it is. I might also be slightly less postmodern. Since reading Judith Bennett I’ve realised that strident empiricism can be the perfect companion for strident feminism. The Military History Carnival seems to have more or less died, and it looks like history carnivals in general might be on the way out. Not organising a carnival is kind of a relief as it’s freed me from the shackles of even-handedness. For me, the most exciting development in the history blogosphere was the horse in history and culture group blog, which grew out of that most rare of things – a genuinely interesting and enjoyable conference. And all the cool kids are on Twitter now, but I’m not.
This week I decided to make a few changes to my blog. Most radical is that the blogroll is now gone. It occurred to me that it wasn’t much use because it kept getting out of sync with what I was actually reading, and I doubt that many people take much notice of it anyway. Instead I’ve imported my shared items from Google Reader, which should give a more accurate impression of what I’m reading and what I think is good. Also there’s now a Publication Archive in the page links on the sidebar. As it’s well over a year since my first article was published in War In History the terms of my contract allow me to publish a self-archived version. In this case you can find two versions: as well as the final version, which is more or less the same as the published version, I’ve uploaded the original submission. If you’ve got too much time on your hands it might be interesting to compare them to see how peer-review and revisions changed the article and made it better. If you want to cite the article you’ll still need to use the official version, not least because the page numbers are different. There’s always room for more improvement (I wish I’d engaged with Malcolm Wanklyn properly, mentioned more women, and not used the word “bias”), but I still think it’s not bad for a first attempt.
As for the future, the coming year could be the last year of Investigations of a Dog. After the fourth anniversary I might want to stop it and do Something Completely Different. Or I might not. In the meantime things probably won’t change much.
Comment by Bavardess — 5:36 am, 17 October 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Congratulations on three years! I feel like such a newbie – I only really discovered the wonderful world of history blogs at the end of last year.
Your comments on Judith Bennett are interesting. I’m finding I’m engaging more and more with feminist poststructural theory these days, and although I was really impressed with History Matters the first time I read it (I think it was a couple of years ago now), I re-read it recently and found myself more critical of some of Bennett’s nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of 1970s feminism and ‘the sisterhood’. I still find her arguments about gender inequality/patriarchal equilibrium quite compelling (I’ve raved a bit myself in recent months about the disbanding of NZ’s pay equity office, despite a persistent gap between men’s and women’s wages). But I’m less convinced now than I was about the validity or usefulness of her wage comparisons between the late Middle Ages and modern England.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 8:57 am, 17 October 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Thanks! When I say less postmodern, I really mean that I don’t spend so much time agonizing about epistemology. Maybe that’s because I’ve decided that I don’t need to find a definitive answer, which possibly makes me more postmodern than ever. Feminist history definitely needs the postmodern insights that master narratives are always wrong, that politically committed history can’t and shouldn’t be dismissed as “biased”, and that objectivity and neutrality are false ideals. But I also think that empirical epistemology can be used as a powerful weapon against those who believe in it. I want to put Eltonian objectivists into a position where they either have to accept feminism or accept postmodernism.
I can see how there might be problems with directly comparing medieval and modern wages. That the gap happens to be the same is a nice coincidence which could be used to grab headlines, but maybe it also distracts from the more important point that Bennett was making: although things change, women have never achieved equality. Focusing on the wage gap being the same then as now could create the false impression that she’s saying that nothing has changed, which is not what she’s getting at at all. Her idea of patriarchal equilibrium has helped me to make sense of a lot of things and given me lots of ideas for future work, but I haven’t been as inspired by the lesbian-like thing. Maybe it went over my head, but I can’t think of anything that I can do with it.
Comment by Nick — 6:06 pm, 18 October 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Congrats on the anniversary, Gavin. Coming across your blog was one of the things which made me think “history blogs are great, why aren’t I writing one?”. I’ve always found it an inspiring read and you have introduced me to books and ideas I would never have considered otherwise. So thank you! And I hope you do keep the blog going, at least in some form or other.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 7:05 am, 19 October 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Thanks! I had the same “why aren’t I writing one” moment when I discovered Early Modern Notes and Carnivalesque. I’ve learnt a lot about print culture from your blog. If I ever stop doing this it’ll be to do something else, which I hope would be just as good.