In a reprise of yesterday�s orange juice offensive, AJ staged a bedtime coup. It took us nearly three hours to get the boy to sleep, including a particularly extended bath time and several switches back and forth between big boy bed and crib. I had been planning to do some work last night, but was too exhausted to do anything beyond grab a drink and a magazine and sit on the porch under the stars. It would have been absolutely idyllic had it not been for the 35 mile an hour winds. I put the magazine back inside and stuck with the drink.

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I have been wrestling with the political nature of my work this week. I�ve read several academic publications this week in the field of women�s studies of one sort or another which all go off on arguments for women�s rights in a way that doesn�t quite seem, well, academic. I�m extremely sympathetic for the causes and I totally understand the problem. It is difficult to work on chronicling the history of a woman or women without getting swept up into the politics of it all, without being slapped in the face with the boldness of injustices past. When confronted with the tools of historical research, it becomes incredibly clear how much of the record of women�s contributions, indeed of their very existence, is missing. It was not important in the past to retain written records of women�s contributions. Researchers looking for biographical material on male musicians, even fairly minor ones, can often find details on the music pages of period newspapers. I�m forced to get what little information I can find from the society pages, more often than not: wedding notices and obituaries. I am extremely grateful to the few women who ensured their place in history by preserving the artifacts from their present. But most were discouraged from doing so. And what would have encouraged them? There is little I have found to have given them hope that anyone would have been interested.

Despite the fact that such research inequities tend to get my dander up, somehow I feel that the academic work itself should be the political statement, without the necessity of detailing within a monograph of an author�s political motivation. Having overt author statements in that particular context troubles me, because it makes the work seem somehow less serious and less objective. Of course, the idea of objective history is something of a fallacy at any rate. But the illusion of objectivity is necessary, I think, for scholarly gravitas. Political rants tend to undermine the author�s point.

I hope that doesn�t make me sound anti-feminist. I think the work is crucial. It�s the discourse I find troubling. This sentence I came across today sums it up rather well: �The type of society we shall have in the future depends to a great degree on the type of history which is current today.�

What the author means is that if we don�t remedy the holes in our history, how can we be expected to go forward with a changed society? The author was talking specifically about rewriting history to include the contributions of women, but the same can and should be said for numerous other groups � minorities, third world countries. I�d like to hope that the inverse is true: by remedying the way in which we tell history that we can inspire positive social changes in the future.

Part of why I�m feeling sensitive about this is my struggle to be fair-minded in my dissertation, but a lot of it has to do with feeling the need to apologize for the behavior of my country�s government and the great ignorance on which it is based. The combination of the bombing in Falluja and the triumph of Brazil in the WTO talks about farm subsidies has sharpened the point and made it very clear to me how much we all can choose to ignore. I feel powerless. I don�t know what to do to amend the situation beyond casting my vote for the opposition in November and continuing to work on my little historical project � minutia in the face of it all. No wonder others feel the need to be more overtly political. Most of us do not have power to influence many others. I do not have significant financial support to withhold. All I have is my work, my family, the small amounts I donate to the causes I believe to be most important and this blog. And I�m not sure that�s enough.

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