Rethinking History

The Journal of Theory and Practice

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Hayden White and Joan W. Scott’s feminist history:

the practical past, the political present and an
open future

María Inés La Greca

To cite this article: María Inés La Greca (2016) Hayden White and Joan W. Scott’s feminist
history: the practical past, the political present and an open future, Rethinking History, 20:3,
395-413, DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2016.1205813

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Rethinking History, 2016
VOL. 20, NO. 3, 395–413
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2016.1205813

Hayden White and Joan W. Scott’s feminist history:

the practical past, the political present and an open
future
María Inés La Grecaa,b,c
a
National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina;
b
Methodology, Statistics and Maths Department, Tres de Febrero National University, Sáenz
Peña, Argentina; cPhilosophy Department, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

ABSTRACT
My aim in this article is to reflect on White’s pessimism towards contemporary
academic history as manifested in his latest proposal of distinguishing the practical
past from the historical past. I will test White’s pessimism against one particular
mode of academic history, feminist history, and claim that the critical distinction
between the practical past and the historical past does not suit historical writing
by feminist scholars. Furthermore, I will reflect on how feminist history has
acknowledged and productively assumed Metahistory’s critical conclusions for
its own practice. To make my point, I will present Joan Wallach Scott′s reflections
on the development of feminist history as, in White’s terminology, motivated by
a practical interest in the past and a political interest in the present. However,
feminist scholars also wanted to established a historical past for women, that is,
a legitimate position in academia for producing women’s history. Thus, Scott’s
narration of feminist history manifests a productive confusion of what White urges
us to distinguish in his latest book. By appealing to Scott’s The Fantasy of Feminist
History, I will analyze the difficult relationship between criticism and narration that
the work of both Scott and White displays as they reach, from different directions,
the same pressing question: the need to refigure the relationship between
academic practice and social life.

ARTICLE HISTORY  Received 15 May 2016; Accepted 20 June 2016

KEYWORDS  Hayden White; Joan W. Scott; practical past; feminist history; historical writing

Introduction
When White published Metahistory in 1973, his aim was to offer a formal-
textual analysis of nineteenth-century historical work that would produce a
liberating criticism of the historian’s self-understanding of his or her academic

CONTACT  María Inés La Greca  [email protected]

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
396    M. I. La Greca

practice. Foremost, White aimed at highlighting the poetic function of language

in historical writing, an aspect of the historian’s task that was either repressed or
undermined in the traditional historiographical frame of mind. Moreover, he
optimistically concluded that, following his advice, historians would be ‘freed
to conceptualize history, to perceive its contents, and to construct narrative
accounts of its processes in whatever modality of consciousness is most con-
sistent with their own moral and aesthetic aspirations’ (White 1973, 434).
As we know, Metahistory concludes that when it is a matter of choosing
among alternative visions of history, the only grounds for preferring one over
another are moral or aesthetic ones: there can be no ‘proper history’ that is
not at the same time a philosophy of history because there are no apodictically
certain theoretical grounds on which one can legitimately claim authority for
a particular mode of prefiguration, emplotment, and so on, as more ‘realistic.’
This means that we are indentured to a choice among contending interpretative
strategies in any effort to reflect on history (White 1973, xxii).
The extent of the debate that White’s work provoked is equally well known.
Although some critics feared that White’s take on the fundamental function
of tropes, discourse and imagination in historical writing would weaken the
epistemic status of historical studies or, worse, conflate history with litera-
ture and fiction, recent publications reveal a spirit of celebration regarding
White’s critical intervention – the more optimistic writers even claim that the
key to reading his work is an existential exhortation for historians to produce
history-for-life.1
However, in 2014 White published his latest book, The Practical Past, in
which he does not seem to share the optimism of these recent interpret-
ers regarding the historical profession’s willingness to assume the linguistic
self-consciousness that he has been demanding of contemporary historical
writing. My aim here is to reflect on the pessimism towards contemporary
academic history visible in his new proposal to distinguish the practical past
from the historical past – or perhaps even to do away with the latter completely.
I will test White’s pessimism against one particular mode of academic history
that manifestly embraces a self-conscious practice of writing: feminist history.
I will claim that the critical distinction between the practical past and the his-
torical past does not fit historical writing by feminist scholars. Furthermore, I
will claim that feminist history has acknowledged and productively assumed
Metahistory’s critical conclusions for its own practice – even if feminist scholars
have not always read them.
In order to make my case, I will present Joan Wallach Scott’s reflections
on the development of feminist history. Reading Scott, we find that it is these
kinds of intellectual endeavors, motivated by a practical interest in the past and
a political interest in the present, that best realize what Hayden White has in
mind when rejecting a historical interest in the past. But it seems, on the other
hand, that feminist scholars also wanted to establish a historical past for women,
 Rethinking History   397

that is, a legitimate position in academia for producing knowledge about wom-
en’s pasts. I will show how Scott’s narration of feminist history manifests a
productive confusion between the kinds of approaches to the past that White
urges us to distinguish in his latest book. Furthermore, by appealing to a recent
book on feminism’s history by Scott, I will reflect on the difficult relationship
between criticism and narration that both Scott and White demonstrate by
their mutual concern on the same issue: the relationship between academic
practice and social life.

The practical past: Hayden White against the historical past

In the preface to The Practical Past, White states that, throughout his life, he
has been interested in the relationship between history and literature (White
2014, ix). For any reader of his work this is obvious; we are, after all, dealing
with one of the most representative theoreticians of the relationship between
fact and fiction, narrativity and historical knowledge, figuration and historical
understanding. He adds that, when he has previously spoken of history writ-
ing as a mixture of fact and fiction, or even suggested that – through being
narrative in kind – history writing could be best understood as literature, and
therefore fiction, this was misleading. He failed to make clear, he says, that he
was employing ‘fiction’ in Jeremy Bentham’s sense of ‘a kind of invention or
construction based on a hypothesis rather than a manner of writing or thinking
focused on purely imaginary or fantastic entities’ (White 2014, xii).
He goes on, however, to affirm that historiography is a genre of writing that
belongs to the category or class of artistic prose discourses. Here, what follows
is White’s well-known critical narration of the way historiography acquired its
professional academic status after the early nineteenth century on the basis of its
claim to ‘objectivity,’ by distancing itself from – and repudiating and repressing
its common origin in – rhetoric and belles lettres. This self-perception seemed
not to conflict with historians believing that ‘the truths of history were best
conveyed in the idiom of well-told narratives.’ White adds:
So let me make clear on this occasion that, as far as I am concerned, the past is
made up of events and entities which once existed but no longer do; that histori-
ans properly believe that this past can be accessed and made sense of by studying
the traces of this past existing in the present; and that finally, the historical past
consists of the referents of those aspects of the past studied and then represented
(presented) in the genres of writing which, by convention, are called ‘histories’
and are recognized to be such by the professional scholars licensed to decide what
is ‘properly’ historical and what is not. (White 2014, xiii)
White thus yields some ground to the professional historian’s conviction that
‘history’ and ‘historicality’ ‘are whatever practicing historians considered
them to be.’ Knowing the strong criticism that White’s work provoked when
his position was interpreted as attacking the historical profession’s ability to
398    M. I. La Greca

offer reliable knowledge of the past – or, even, as denying the existence of past
entities and events – this formulation may seem to be a retreat from his earlier
controversial claims.2
But we may quickly reject this reading as White moves toward his charac-
terization of ‘the historical past’ by following Michael Oakeshott’s distinction
between the historical and the practical past. Although White’s use of this dis-
tinction supports the readings that highlight his ongoing call to historians to
liberate themselves from the limits that a commitment to a naïve and literalist
conception of language has imposed on their practice as writers, it seems that
this latest reflection expresses a profound pessimism concerning the histori-
cal profession’s will, or even interest, in embracing more ethically committed
writing practices.3
White describes the historical past as: (a) a theoretical construction, a highly
selective version of the past, with no interest in anything that could be related
to the present situation of the historian or his/her readers; (b) a study of the
past as an end in itself and for its own sake; (c) a strictly impersonal and neutral
object, built by historians, that only exists in books and academic essays; (d)
a past that teaches no lessons of present interest and that no-one could have
experienced, by virtue of its retrospective-description nature. Thus, White is
saying that the historical past is useless for ethical decision-making or political
action and, if we have any doubt, we can confirm this by listing the features of
its opposite, ‘the practical past.’
The practical past refers to: (a) notions of the past that people hold in every-
day life; (b) the sphere of memory, dream and desire; (c) ideas to which we
appeal, at will or not, to face practical problems in present situations – ‘in
anything from personal matters to grand political programs’ – and for creating
tactics and strategies for negotiating personal and collective life.
It is important to pay attention to some of the clarifications that White
offers. Firstly, he wants to distinguish between the past (which he describes ‘as
a constantly changing whole or totality of which the historical past is only a
part,’) the historical past and the practical past. Secondly, White claims that the
practical past is different from the historical past because the former cannot be
handled according to the principle so dear to the professional historian – ‘first
the facts, then the interpretation’:
Since such pasts are invested less in the interest of establishing the facts of a given
matter than that of providing a basis in fact from which to launch a judgment
of action in the present (…) in inquiries into these kinds of past, what is at issue
is not so much ‘What are the facts?’ as, rather, ‘What will be allowed to count as
fact?’ and, beyond that, ‘What will be permitted to pass for a specifically “histor-
ical” as against a merely “natural” (or for that matter, a “supernatural”) event?’
(White 2014, 15)
Finally, White states that he does not see them as two different ontological or
epistemic pasts but rather, as two different kinds of intentions that motivate
 Rethinking History   399

questions concerning the past. While the historical past is of little or no value
for understanding and acting on the present or foreseeing the future, the prac-
tical past does fulfill this function. Thus, interest in the practical past is relevant
for White because we draw on it when we need to answer the question ‘What
should we do?’ – whereas the information provided by the historical past would
offer no justification for inferring what we, in our situation, in our time and
our place, should do.
With this opposition, White seems to be rejecting academic historiography
altogether and claiming – as he has been doing since Figural Realism – that the
relevant form of historical writing for our present is to be found in modernist
literature (White 1999, 2006, 2010, 2012). Thus, he claims that:
The practical past, however, is amenable to a literary – which is to say, an artistic
or poetic – treatment that is anything but “fictional” in the sense of being purely
imaginary or fantastic in kind. A literary treatment of the past – as displayed in
various instances of the modern(ist) novel (but also in poetic and dramatic dis-
courses) – has the real past as its ultimate referent (what, in discourse theory, is
referred to as “the substance of its content”), but focuses on those aspects of the
real past which the historical past cannot deal with. (White 2014, xiv)
So, White’s life-long reflection on the relationship between history and literature
ends up with him preferring modernist literature, the kind of literary writing
that Woolf, Proust and Joyce have explored, as the kind of historical writing
that our twentieth-century historical condition demands.

The political present: Joan W. Scott on feminism and historical

writing
One way to challenge White’s distinction between the historical and the practi-
cal past – or at least its conclusion of abandoning all academic historiography
– is to recall the theoretical and political experience of feminism in history.
Since that is a broad topic, I choose to follow Joan Wallach Scott’s reflections
on feminist historical writing. My aim is to examine Scott as a highly respected
historian, feminist and thinker, and compare her reflections regarding the pro-
ject of women’s history with White’s criticism of professional historiography.
In Feminism and History, Scott introduces a volume with different perspec-
tives from feminist historians. In that introduction we find a narration of their
historiographical practice. Although there are antecedents in the previous cen-
turies, Scott relates how historians, inspired by the feminist movement of the
1960s, decided to counter women’s subordination as it was reproduced by their
invisibility in historical accounts: they ‘set out to establish not only women’s
presence, but their active participation in the events that were seen to constitute
history’ (Scott 1996, 2). If this invisibility contributed in part to reinforce wom-
en’s oppression in the past and the present, then making them visible, showing
them as subjects and agents of history, would help in their emancipation. Thus,
400    M. I. La Greca

the first task that feminist history undertook was to recover stories of women’s
action to put forward ‘another way of seeing and understanding what counted
as history’ (Scott 1996, 3). To quote Scott:
For if women were present and active, then history was neither the story of ‘man’s’
heroism nor the means by which exclusive masculine agency (rational, self-de-
termining, self-representing) was affirmed. As a corrective to the phallocentric
themes of most historical accounts, women were portrayed as makers of history.
Scott claims that feminist historians were able to ‘unearth new facts’ – to provide
new information about women’s behavior but also knowledge for understanding
women and history anew. Nonetheless, the use of the metaphor of visibility
brought some contradictions to the feminist historians’ task: according to Scott,
by equating visibility with transparency, they understood their task simply
as the recovery of previously ignored facts. But when questions of why these
facts had been ignored and how they were now to be understood were raised,
women’s history became more than the search for facts. For this reason, ‘making
women visible’ needed to be reformulated: it had to be understood as not just
a matter of providing new information from previously ignore facts, but as a
matter of ‘advancing new interpretations which not only offered new readings in
politics, but the changing significance of families and sexuality’ (Scott 1996, 3).
So, it seems that right from the start the project of feminist history had to
face the very limits of historical imagination. This project would not aim solely
at making women in the past visible. It was not enough to ‘add’ women’s history
to the discipline, to write it as a complement or corrective of previous historical
accounts. It was, instead, soon understood as a critical stance concerning the
whole idea of what history was and how to write it – and one which implied
changing the Western phallocentric notion of what could count as historical
(men’s actions) and what could not (women’s actions). By challenging the idea
of history that pretended to represent humanity in time but in reality was
promoting a biased idea of history as history-of-masculinity, feminist histo-
rians introduced sexual difference or gender as key components of historical
accounts.
It would not be necessary to recap Scott’s account fully in order to see that
for feminist history the historical past had always been a practical past, and vice
versa. The whole project of writing women’s history aimed at freeing women
from an oppression that included their being ‘hidden from history,’ being denied
a historical past of their own. Already at the beginning of Scott’s account, we
can see that historical writing for feminist historians was driven by the search
of more and better knowledge of the past as much as it was driven by a need to
draw from it new strategies for their present situation, for negotiating personal
and collective women’s life and providing themselves a better present and future
against past and present oppression. Having a history meant having a histori-
cal past, and not just ‘a past.’ Having a history meant having a historiography
that accounted for them as subjects of history and that produced legitimate
 Rethinking History   401

knowledge about women’s experience through time. The feminist project was
both practical and historical at once.
As we saw, White claims that inquiries into the practical past are less driven
by the question of ‘What are the facts?’ than by questions of what will be allowed
to count as fact and to pass for a specifically ‘historical’ as opposed to a merely
‘natural’ event. Well, feminist history, as Scott tells it, began as a struggle to
demonstrate that women actions in the past were not permitted to count as
facts even though they should have. Moreover, feminist history, in accordance
with the notion of ‘the practical past,’ was set to show that women’s oppression
was not a ‘natural’ event, but a ‘historical’ one – contingent, changeable and
not necessary. We could thus say that, in light of White’s distinction, feminist
history began as a practical past. Scott’s claim that it was inspired mostly by
the feminist movement of the 1960s would confirm that. However, if it started
from an interest in the practical past, in White’s terms, then feminist history
quickly transformed itself into an interest in the historical past as well. Or
better put: feminist history could be seen as an example of a kind of historical
writing that productively confuses a historical and a practical interest in the
past. It made the supposed historical past practical too. It was at the same time
a claim to knowledge and the search for a political strategy. Why could these
aspects not go together?
But my argument does not stop here. I do not claim that White’s distinction
is useless. Instead, it is a symptom of something else. My own interpretation –
which I have presented in more detail elsewhere – is that the topic of the prac-
tical past expresses the same desire for a progressive historiography originally
stated in Metahistory, albeit now, forty years after, in a pessimistic tone – and
that pessimism tells us something worth listening to (La Greca 2014b).4 One
might even say that White’s permanent interest in the relationship between
history and literature ends up as a preference for literature against history
because he does not see a way out of the conservative and non-practically
oriented self-perception of this academic discipline. White’s desire to empower
historical writing with every resource of imaginative writing – tropes, figures,
plot-­structures, and so on – appears as unfulfilled, and underlies his reflection
on the practical past. But I believe that feminist history does fulfill White’s
desire. To put it more precisely, the kind of linguistic self-consciousness and
imaginative ability that White urged historians to assume has been assumed
by feminist historians (and thinkers) like Joan Wallach Scott.
White claims that the principle of ‘first the facts, then the interpretation’
characterizes what he is critically referring to as ‘the historical past.’ And already
in Metahistory, he attacked such a principle with his hypothesis of the necessity
of a prefigurative act, poetic and linguistic in nature, in any historical work.
This idea of prefiguration implied that a particular metahistory, or philosophy
of history, sustained every historical narrative – whether ‘proper history’ or
some nefarious speculative philosophy of history. In what follows, I will return
402    M. I. La Greca

to Scott’s reflections on the peripeteia of feminist history in order to show how

it manifests the validity of this celebrated insight by White: that the way we
describe the historical field does not ‘transparently’ reflect it, but poetically
constitutes it, that this poetics of history amounts to the implicit philosophy
of history of historical works, and that it is this different and irreducible way of
speaking about the past as a historical field that historians discuss when facing
alternative accounts of what they considered to be the same historical processes.
As we saw, the founding metaphor of visibility in feminist history was inter-
nally challenged by the very development of feminist history. The twofold suc-
cess of feminist historians’ work created a dilemma for feminist history and
politics. As different accounts of women’s lives and actions in different centu-
ries and countries were offered, feminist historians were faced with empiri-
cal evidence for the irreducible differences among women. At the same time,
the very practically-oriented project of writing the history of women implied
presupposing a coherent, singular and even timeless category of woman, a
particular subject of history with some kind of essential identity that would be
the same across places and times. Thus, showing women’s place and relevance
in history would have functioned as an argument against past and present-day
oppression. But this very presupposition, the one that allowed feminist pol-
itics to be unified under a single identity, was challenged by the spectacle of
differences between women that historical research yielded. Let me illustrate
this by quoting from Scott:
Feminism’s search for a common ground for ‘women’ repressed differences but
it did not eliminate them. We can read the history of feminist movements in
terms of a tension between unity and difference. In the United States, feminists
divided over questions of slavery and race. Not everyone accepted Soujourner
Truth’s argument in 1851 that she, too, was a woman having borne and nursed
thirteen children. In fact, claims for women’s rights often came from feminists
who did not include African-Americans when they spoke of ‘women’ in univer-
salist terms. Early in the twentieth century a meeting of French feminists divided
over the question of class. When the majority defeated a resolution calling for
a day off for domestic servants (some delegates argued that girls with free time
might become prostitutes), socialists among them denounced feminism as a
cloak for middle-class women’s interests. Some argued that there could never be
solidarity among women across class lines. Defending feminism as a movement
for all women (and ‘women’ as a homogeneous category), Hubertine Auclert
replied, ‘there cannot be a bourgeois feminism and a socialist feminism because
there are not two female sexes’. (Scott 1996, 5–6)
Scott (1996, 4) shows that it was the very creation of women as subjects of
history that – by placing them temporally in the contexts of their action, and
explaining the possibilities for such action in terms of those contexts – allowed
feminists to acknowledge examples of fundamental differences ‘in experience
and self-understanding among women, potentially undermining the political
task of creating an enduring common identity.’ She presents this dilemma as
pointing to essentialist tendencies in feminist politics that soon became the
 Rethinking History   403

focus of internal debate. The axes of race, class, ethnicity, religion and sexual-
ity complicated the notion of a singular and coherent identity of women. The
appearance of radical feminism, as Scott tells us, revealed ‘serious fractures
in feminist solidarity.’ Considering heterosexuality as the source of women’s
oppression, Monique Wittig, for example, claimed that lesbians ‘were not
“women” since they were outside the symbolic economy of heterosexual rela-
tionships.’ (Scott 1996, 6)
Scott goes on to explain that as differences among feminist activists became
increasingly visible and contested, feminist historians (many of them activists as
well) sought to understand difference by historicizing it. But, she adds, ‘peopling
women’s history with the complexity and diversity that characterizes standard
histories focused on men’ did not mean avoiding essentializing the different
descriptive labels of ‘working-class,’ ‘African-American,’ ‘Islamic’ women and
others. However, as the metaphor of visibility ‘assumed and contradicted the
transparency of the social category “women,” so histories of different groups of
women implicitly raised questions about the relational and contingent nature
of difference’ (1996, 7–8). Questions regarding relationships between the dif-
ferent axes that intersect identity became possible, about priority of class over
gender, or vice versa, the ways in which they connected with each other and
the ways in which they were contradictory or opposed. Scott believes that in
the late twentieth century ‘difference’ became an important analytic category
for feminism, demanding that feminist scholars, activists and historians study
how those differences were constructed. Again, these histories of difference
were both consolidated as categories of identity and shown to be relative to
specific historical contexts. Thus, the centrality of historicizing difference also
became controversial: some scholars feared the theoretical and political impli-
cations of constructionist or relativist approaches, arguing that attending to the
construction of categories of difference would distract them from the activities
of real women. For others, any relativism would undermine the possibilities
for political action. There were also arguments about the differences between
women and men as well as among women being self-evident and, consequently,
claims that abstract theoretical analyses of them would lead to unnecessary
complications. Scott describes these controversies among feminist historians
as responding, in part, to different philosophies of history:
those with a more or less positivist outlook who want to report what really hap-
pened (in the case of feminists, to correct the biases that masculinist views have
imposed on our knowledge of the past) are in conflict with those who insist that
history cannot recover an unmediated past, but rather actively produces visions
of the past. (Scott 1996, 9)
In this way at least, the feminist historians’ debate manifests the kind of self-
consciousness that White wanted from historical writing. The standpoint
embracing the impossibility of recovering an unmediated past would be a
‘philosophy of history’ more attuned to White’s desire for a progressive history
404    M. I. La Greca

and an interest in the practical past – whereas the more positivist outlook that
Scott presents as another philosophy of history would be part of what White has
criticized as a lack of linguistic self-consciousness and, recently, as an interest in
the historical past. As Metahistory showed, while historians pretend to be sim-
ply describing the historical field, they are actually prefiguring it. Prefiguration
meant following one tropological mode of description rather than another to
establish by linguistic means the form of the objects and relations between objects
in the supposed historical field (White 1973, 1978). This linguistic constitu-
tion of the historical field highlights similarities or differences according to the
particular way that each of the four master tropes would integrate or disperse
the entities in the field. I recall this because I believe that we can read Scott’s
account of the tension between identity and difference in conceptualizing the
category ‘women’ as the challenge that feminist historians face when trying to
describe, that is, to prefigure, their historical field.5 This reading allows us to see
feminist history as a historical writing practice that was not only born out of
a practical interest in the past but had also undertaken a critical examination
of the competing interpretations it has offered regarding women’s history that
at least in part manifests a linguistic self-consciousness regarding how the way
to describe the historical field conditions the historical interpretation of their
object of study. This awareness on how the linguistic, epistemological, ethical
and aesthetical dimensions of historical discourse are always in play in different
degrees, without being reducible to one another, marks the critical writing of
feminist history.
If the reader is convinced by my argument, we can conclude that the case of
feminist history allows countering White’s pessimism and claiming, instead,
that there is hope for the kind of progressive historiography that he has been
asking historians to engage in since the 1970s.6 Linguistically self-conscious,
ethically and politically driven, feminist history would be the way to go. But
I believe that my argument also permits the identification of another kind of
pessimism that it is important to pay attention to, one that even feminist his-
tory has come to face: pessimism towards the capacity of academic history to
contribute to positive change in the social world.

An open future: rewriting the narratives of feminism and

historical studies
I already quoted Scott’s analysis of the tensions within feminist history between
its political imperatives and the relativizing effects of showing the historical and
contingent nature of the very identity of ‘women.’ For Scott, this is a tension
worth living with: although differences between women challenge the possi-
bility of establishing a common agenda and political agreements are produced
by intense negotiations, ‘it is this political process that identifies “women;”
they do not exist as identical natural beings outside of it’ (Scott 1996, 7).7 But
 Rethinking History   405

the optimistic spirit of Feminism and History has been challenged, as Scott
notes in her 2011 book, The Fantasy of Feminist History. Here, almost twenty
years later, Scott again takes stock of what she now terms feminism’s history.
Her new narrative does not highlight the emergence of women’s history and
the theoretical and political tension brought about by its success: now the key
question is how the incorporation of feminist studies as a legitimate research
area in academia threatens feminism’s critical drive.8
As I cannot reproduce Scott’s new narrative fully here, I will mention some of
the key issues she raises. She recounts the progress toward feminism’s goals regard-
ing history writing. Although she believes their accomplishments to be uneven, she
claims that since the 1970s feminists have gained a rightful position in history as
shown by ‘an enormous written corpus, an imposing institutional presence, a sub-
stantial list of journals, and a foothold in popular consciousness’ (Scott 2011, 24).
They have clearly been successful in incorporating women into history – but not as
successful in reconceiving history in terms of gender. Although feminism aimed at
‘taking over history’ and changing the way stories would be told, women historians
and women’s history are not yet equal players in the discipline.
However, what is most interesting in Scott’s recent reflection is not how
much has been gained and how much is still left to achieve but, rather, the
uncomfortable feeling that she registers in academic feminism because of its
success in its aims: ‘legitimacy, for those who began as revolutionaries, is always
an ambiguous accomplishment’ (Scott 2011, 25). And she continues:
The realization of at least some positive change since the early 70’s (…) has pro-
duced some ambivalence and uncertainty about the future. Have we won or lost?
Have we been changed by our success? What does the move from embattled out-
sider to recognized insider portend for our collective identity? Has our presence
transformed the discipline, or have we simply been absorbed into it? (…) Does
women’s history have a future, or is it history? How might we imagine its future?
Scott reflects on how, no longer being insurgents, feminist historians have
become disciplinarians, which amounts to ‘something of a letdown in this
change of identity,’ given that it is not the same thing to criticize disciplinary
power from the outside as it is to do so from the inside, that is, by being com-
mitted to teaching established bodies of scholarship. Moreover, Scott also claims
that academic feminism, having gained institutional credibility, seems to have
lost its close connection to the political movement that inspired it.
For a comparison of White’s and Scott’s reflections on their disciplines, it is
interesting to note how they arrive at a similar crossroads from opposing starting
points: White writes about a historical profession in crisis, the risk to which is
to become (or remain) conservative and detached from the need for historical
self-understanding in everyday life – thus, he invites historians to revolutionize
the discipline; whereas Scott writes about a revolutionary attempt in social life
that aimed at transforming the way history was written (and hence the historical
profession), the risk to which now seems to be that of becoming conservative
and detached from social life, because of having become an academic discipline.
406    M. I. La Greca

A comparative reading of White’s distinction of the practical past and Scott’s

reflection on the past, present and future of feminist history (or feminism’s his-
tory) point, to me, to the same problematic: the value of history as an academic
discipline for life. It is clear in White’s Practical Past that he views the disci-
plinization of historical studies as a loss of the political potential of historical
reflection. While, in the 1970s, he was moved by a desire to liberate historians’
writing in order to regain the power of imagining history, he is now, in 2014,
pessimistic about any change coming from academia and hopes that literature
might free us from the burden of history (White 1999, 2006, 2012, 2014).9 In
Scott’s case, a historiographical project – that had also always been a critical and
politically oriented one – takes stock of itself now, after winning a legitimate
place in academia, and wonders if this is a gain or a loss. What Scott laments
is that the original project aimed at a complete transformation of our idea of
history yet it seems that this has not been achieved. What we can read in Scott
is the question of how to articulate a power position in academia – how to
produce feminist interpretations of the past as legitimate knowledge – without
sacrificing the original aim of a deep transformation in our notion of history.
The practical, the political, and the future appear here again as a question of
what should be done (and how to do it). In this sense, there is a coincidence in
White’s and Scott’s reflections: how are we to redefine the relationship between
historical knowledge and agency, and the possibilities of real transformations
in the world, once we have acknowledged the two ‘facts’ of historical writing?
– its dependence on a social place, as De Certeau would say, from which the
legitimacy of historical interpretation springs, that is, academia or professional
historiography, and its dependence on discourse, the poetic and performative
role of language, as a tool – but not an easy one to handle.
Returning to Scott, she tells us that efforts in the 1990s to rebuild ties to polit-
ical activism have foundered, but she also believes that the supposed opposition
between academic and political feminism has always been a mischaracteriza-
tion. Rather than the alleged retreat of feminist scholars to ‘ivory towers,’ she
considers that the reason behind that failure is the fragmentation of the political
movement itself into specific areas of activism. However, against any claim that
feminism is dead, Scott (2011, 27) maintains that ‘Discontinuous, individually
coordinated strategic operations with other groups have replaced a continuous
struggle on behalf of women represented as a singular identity.’ Moreover, she
believes that for a younger generation discontinuity and dispersed strategic
operations have become a familiar and eminently political way of operating.
Yet, the ‘loss of the continuity that came with the notion of history as inevitably
progressive helps explain the difficulty an older generation has in imagining a
future’ (2011, 27). This highlights an interesting point: Scott takes this change
to be due to the loss of the grand teleological narrative of emancipation that
informed feminism. It was that grand narrative that allowed feminists to expect
cumulative effects of their efforts, to see freedom and equality as ‘inevitable
 Rethinking History   407

outcomes of human struggle,’ outcomes that gave coherence to their actions

and defined them as participants in a progressive movement.
Feminism’s success in achieving academic acceptance and a legitimate
claim to knowledge production, although empowered by that teleological
grand narrative, finds itself unable to imagine its future with the loss of
validity of any grand narrative. Scott, however, is not satisfied with pre-
senting this diagnosis: she wants to offer a way to imagine a future for
feminism. Summing up an interesting argument, her strategy is to convince
readers – other feminist scholars, mostly – that this difficulty in thinking
the future is a symptom of melancholy towards the idealized past of fem-
inist scholars as revolutionaries. She claims that what has been lost is ‘the
satisfying cohesiveness of the movement – women as subjects and objects of
their own history’ (Scott 2011, 32) since, having acknowledged differences
among women to be axiomatic, the scholarship that is now produced is no
longer uniquely focused on women as a singular category.10 But because
her aim is to foster imagination concerning feminism’s future, Scott casts
doubt on the cohesiveness that feminist scholarship thinks it had and claims
that this view may, instead, have been retrospectively imposed on a diverse
set of feminist positions. If we accept her interpretation, the difficulty in
imagining a future comes to involve a melancholy for a cohesiveness that
may never in fact have existed. It may well be, argues Scott, that our sense
that we already know what feminist history is blocks the ‘inspired arousal
that is precisely an encounter with the unknown’ (2011, 33). Letting go of
that melancholy, she proposes, will lead to understanding feminism as a
critical activity, a ‘relentless interrogation of the taken-for-granted,’ moved
by desire towards the yet-to-know, from object to object, from present to
future: ‘What if we rewrote feminism’s history as the story of a circulating
critical passion, slipping metonymically along a chain of contiguous objects,
alighting for a while in an unexpected place, accomplishing a task, and then
moving on?’ (Scott 2011, 33)
Scott’s attempt to reimagine a future follows this route of restating feminism’s
desire: she claims this desire is best understood as ‘a doubly subversive critical
engagement, both with prevailing normative codes of gender and with the con-
ventions and – since history’s formation as a discipline in the late nineteenth
century – rules of historical writing’ (2011, 33). Scott asks us to see feminism as
a mutable endeavor, ‘a flexible strategic instrument not bound to any orthodoxy.’
And, almost as if she were foreseeing the argument of this paper, she claims:
The production of knowledge about the past, although crucial, has not been an
end in itself but rather – at certain moments, and not always in the service of an
organized political movement – has provided the substantive terms for a critical
operation that uses the past to disrupt the certainties of the present and so opens
the way to imagining a different future. This critical operation is the dynamic
that drives feminism. (Scott 2011, 34)11
408    M. I. La Greca

We might also say that this is the same drive that White hopes historical writing
in general would discover. It is hard not to see the similarities between Scott’s
call for a feminism that embraces an open future and White’s call for a histori-
ography that embraces its poetic abilities. But I want to make a stronger claim:
what White and Scott are also doing is rewriting the history of their disciplines
to transform and empower them. In my view, The Practical Past continues
the rewriting of historical studies’ history that Metahistory and all of White’s
work has carried out: a new history that points at the necessary relationship
– in virtue of their common origin – between historical writing, rhetoric and
literature for imagining and endowing reality with meaning. Scott is similarly
rewriting the history of feminism’s history by challenging the highly selective
story of ‘those accounts that insist that women are, have been, and must ever
be the sole subject or object of feminist history’, which obscures the dynamic
that makes thinking the future possible. She re-emplots feminism’s history to
keep ‘the feminist critical spirit’ alive, and to let the ‘feminist critical desire keep
on moving’ (Scott 2011, 40). Scott is rewriting feminism’s history, on the one
hand, by claiming that the romantic narrative feminism has told about itself as
a cohesive movement united by a common notion of womanhood was a retro-
spective imposition that excluded a more dynamic and diverse experience of
both the social and the academic movements; and, on the other, by offering a
new narrative (a satire?) of feminism as a critical desire that is not discouraged
but nurtured by the unknown. I believe that this discursive strategy aimed at
invigorating feminism’s present and moving it out of melancholy to discover a
renewed desire tell us something of the value of narrative and academic history
to contribute to positive change in the social world.

Conclusion
For me, White’s provocative rejection of the historical – academically con-
structed – past is symptomatic of a question, a doubt that haunts contempo-
rary humanities: do we still have something to offer to the transformation of
social life? Tired of waiting for the historical profession at large to embrace
this question, White escapes to literature and the practical past to say: Yes,
we have something to offer. This something involves history if we understand
history as the task of building interpretations of the past as tools for a better
future. And, because it has to do with rethinking how the past, present and
future can be reconnected in some kind of practical or political program, in
my opinion what needs, in the end, to be recast is not the relationship between
a historical versus a practical past, but the relationship between academic and
political practice.
If the humanities are to offer something, it might well be critical thinking
built on thorough research and theorization. This was what feminist theorists
aimed at providing. And this must now be recast in some way.12 Although
 Rethinking History   409

White’s romanticizing of the practical past may inspire us, there is at least one
problem: there is nothing in the practical past understood as ‘notions people
have in everyday life’ that can prevent its user from appealing to the most
oppressive stereotypes or exclusionary narratives to solve his or her problem
– a point made by Gabrielle Spiegel in her reflection on White’s distinction
(Cf. Spiegel 2013, 504). Not every solution to a social issue is in itself an ethi-
cally good or acceptable solution. For example, faced with the issue of women
rejecting their traditional inferior roles, a society may respond by accepting
this rejection and promoting equal opportunities or it can by reinstating male
chauvinist violence to make women again accept their oppressed status. What
I am trying to say is that without returning to the old – and well-criticized –
paternalist idea of academia as offering enlightenment to the laity, many of us
have found, in our journey through higher education, alternative narratives
for who we were supposed to be in a male-dominated society as well as strong
arguments for legitimately choosing them. So maybe there is still something
that a humanist education has to offer.
Not just any use of the practical past would be right, then. Moreover, some
experiences of the social world are experiences of a place in which one feels
uncomfortable and oppressed – a place that comes with a horizon of expecta-
tions regarding what one can or cannot do that may be a cause of sheer anguish.
That horizon of expectations may be framed by a potentially oppressive practical
past that we did not choose but was received ‘in everyday life.’ In the case of
women’s oppression, criticizing the naturalized and unjust practical pasts that
constitute their facticity has been the aim of feminism and particularly, of fem-
inist history. This task involved a double movement: showing the contingent
status of the received practical past and offering a new empowering narrative
of women present and future possibilities.
Then, there is something slippery in relying too readily on any practical past
as ‘notions in everyday life.’ We need a narrative to choose a past and envision
‘a future to inherit, rather than one to endure,’ as White tells us regarding the
practical past (Domanska 2008, 19); but we also need a narrative constructed
from a critical stand-point with regard to how ‘those notions we draw on to
solve our present situation’ may reproduce the oppression of our present sit-
uation. We can see this in White and Scott: in order to offer the strong criti-
cism that both of them offer, they also provide a new narrative of the past of
their disciplines. Thus, we cannot imagine any future without rewriting or
renarrating the past. Some narration of the past from the present is needed to
move ourselves into the future. But ‘some’ is not the same as ‘any’: oppression,
inequalities and injustice in the present require a critical narration for us to be
able to move toward a better – and not just any – future. We need the destruc-
tive power of criticism and the constructive power of narrative. These are not
easy-to-handle potencies, but they work hand-in-hand in imagining social
change and futures to be desired. Feminist history broke the male-dominated
410    M. I. La Greca

status quo by rewriting the past, by claiming that another version of history
was possible. We have seen, through Scott’s account, the limits those original
narratives of women’s history met and the internal criticism the whole project
has undergone. As White has shown, since there can be no narrativizing without
moralizing effects, a continuous critical revision of the constitutive narratives
of our social life is needed (White 1987, 1–25). However, moralizing effects
can serve to legitimate the status quo or function as profound criticism, that is,
narratives can work to reproduce inequality as well as fight it. White’s critical
reflection revealed that narrativization is never ideologically neutral: it is an
instrument not easy to handle. But once we break the horizon of expectation
that was part of a narrative legitimizing an oppressive present, an alternative
narrative of the past is all we have for imagining the future.
Following from her reflection on White’s preference for the practical past,
Gabrielle Spiegel concludes:
I agree with White that the greatest issue facing the practice of history today is
to understand its relationship to ethical goals long banished from professional
historiography. In the end, what is at stake in these discussions is not an episte-
mological question of ‘truth’ but an ethical response to the catastrophes of the
last century and, in a more general sense, a turn from epistemological to ethical
commitments in the study of the past, creating a place (and a plea) for a new
historical ethics that need not – and probably cannot and should not – mean
abandoning the search for evidence, the responsibility to seek to ‘get it right’ in
our investigations of the past, or the insistence on a critical approach to knowl-
edge in all its manifest forms as the fundamental practice of the historian. For the
last 40 years and more, White has sought to bend that practice to human needs
and aspirations. No one has argued more forcefully for an ethically responsible
and morally meaningful approach to the past. But I would make the plea that
this should take place within our historical practice, rather than in the choice of
a practical past. (Spiegel 2013, 505)
I agree with Spiegel that abandoning the historical profession completely may
be not be the best solution – if for no other reason than for the power position
the discipline still holds as the legitimate voice of historical interpretation. But
‘the body’ of this ‘voice’ cannot remain the same – and that is the source of
White’s pessimism.
What is still needed is a transformation that would optimistically render the
pessimistic opposition between a historical past and a practical past useless.
After all, what is the value of history for life but that of being all we have for
understanding ourselves in a post-metaphysical world?13 This may look like
the kind of radical transformation that feminist historians pretended to effect
for history. It may even be an interdisciplinary endeavor.14 We cannot know
yet. So perhaps an appropriate end for this article would be a question to help
us envision such needed transformation: have we really overcome the idea of
history as the story of man’s heroism, the affirmation of an exclusive male agency?
 Rethinking History   411

Notes
1.  Cf. Ankersmit, Domanska, and Kellner (2009); Doran (2010, 2013); Kansteiner
(2006, 2009); La Greca (2014a, 2014b); Partner (2009); Paul (2011); Tozzi (2009).
Gabrielle Spiegel correctly recalls that the influence of existentialism in White’s
work was first pointed out by Kellner (1980). (Cf. Spiegel 2013).
2.  Some examples of this kind of criticism of his work may be found in Golob
(1980); Hobart (1989); Mandelbaum (1980); Marwick (1995); Norman (1991);
Pomper (1980).
3.  Gabrielle Spiegel provides a useful analysis of Oakeshott’s original distinction
in Spiegel (2013), 502. For another critical assessment of White’s use of these
notions, see Lorenz (2014).
4.  In Domanska (2008), 18, White claims that a progressive historiography would
be interested in the practical past.
5. I am not claiming that the feminist debate over the universality or not of the category
of women can be accurately reconstructed as following the four master tropes
(although I confess it is a hypothesis that I may want to test in the future). What
I want to show is rather that the feminist debate has been, in part a least, a debate
on how to name or how to describe the relationships between women depending
on the degrees of similarities and differences between the entities and relationship
between entities of the historical field (women’s history). This issue is what White
analyzed in Metahistory as the question of prefiguration in the historical work.
6.  For an interesting approach regarding this idea of progressive historiography
as relating Hayden White to ‘liberation historiography,’ see Domanska (2015).
7.  This is a controversial claim shared by several feminist intellectuals. An almost
paradigmatic example of debate over this issue can be found in Butler and
Scott (1992).
8.  For a different view on contemporary feminist history as failing to remain a kind
of ‘oppositional history’ (that engages Scott’s work also as I do), see Pihlainen
(2011).
9.  Spiegel (2013) also reads this final rejection of historiography in White’s latest
work.
10. Regarding the contemporary discussion on this issue, Scott adds: ‘Now a received
disciplinary category, gender is being critically examined by the next wave of
feminists and others, who rightly insist that it is only one of several equally
relevant axes of difference. Sex doesn’t subsume race, ethnicity, nationality, or
sexuality; this attributions of identity intersect in ways that need to be specified.
To restrict our view to sexual difference is thus to miss the always complex
ways in which relations of power are signified by differences. The newly safe
terrain of gender and women’s history is now itself defamiliarized, as queer,
postcolonial, and ethnic studies (among other fields) challenge us to push the
boundaries of our knowledge, to slide or leap metonymically to contiguous
domains’ (Scott 2011, 36–37). This issue is related to what Scott (2011, 40) calls
‘feminist scholarship’s hallmark’: interdisciplinarity.
11. Scott also claims that this new way of thinking the history of feminism’s history
‘detaches it from its origins in Enlightenment teleologies and the utopian
promise of complete emancipation’. (2011, 35) For an opposite stand on the
relevance of its origins in the Enlightenment for feminism’s history and present,
see Amorós (1999).
12. An interesting contemporary attempt to rethink the humanities’ relevance to
political and social debates in the public sphere can be found in Butler (2004).
412    M. I. La Greca

13. This is a point repeatedly made by Hayden White.

14. See note 10.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor
María Inés La Greca is a philosophy PhD and holds a postdoctoral research
scholarship from the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research
(CONICET); she is an adjunct professor of Research Methodology at Tres de
Febrero National University and an assistant professor of Philosophy of History
at the University of Buenos Aires. She has published articles on Hayden White,
narrative theory and the philosophy of history in various anthologies and in
journals including Storia della Storiografia and Journal of the Philosophy of
History.

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