Carol Berkin, Professor:
Stories of Women in
History
By Dorothy Davis
Posters of Mick Jagger
and Sigmund Freud frame the entrance to Professor Carol Berkin’s
office. Fluttering on her door are two newspaper clippings:
she and her students go to silly movies, her son carries
his Trevor Day School basketball team to victory in overtime.
Berkin, the prize-winning
Baruch College and CUNY Graduate Center professor, sits at
her tidy desk. With an alert, amused gaze and stylish suit,
she appears more 40-something than 60-something. Her son,
the basketball hero, is now a college student. He towers
over his 5’ 1/2” mother. She shows off a
photo of herself with him and her daughter. Both look like
giants next to her.
But she’s an
intellectual giant. Her academic resume
lists eight pages of achievements. She’s often on TV—PBS,
the History Channel, C-SPAN, A&E, CNN, FOX. CNN asked her
to be a regular, but she said no. “I’m not an expert
in current events. If
you want to know anything about the 18th Century I’ll
be glad to talk about it.”
Knopf just published her eighth book, Revolutionary Mothers: Women
in the Struggle for America’s Independence. Molly Pitcher doesn’t appear (she’s
a myth). Neither does Betsy Ross sew the flag (she was a
successful upholsterer). Berkin tells about laundresses,
slaves, wives of winning generals and of hunted Loyalists—the
horrendous problems they faced and how they overcame them.
It’s gritty, true, riveting.
Berkin
overcame problems as a woman academic in the 1960s with optimism,
intelligence, and hard work. Her mentors include Richard
Morris, her Ph.D. adviser at Columbia University. “He couldn’t
imagine women’s history, but he treated his women graduate
students equally with his male graduate students. Annette
Baxter, Virginia Harrington, Norman Cantor and Sidney Burrell—all
wonderful history teachers at Barnard College. Barnard instilled
in you the idea that being female was not a handicap. There
is sexism but you can go around it. Barnard was the decisive
factor in my life.”
Her
advice for young women history majors? “Give serious thought to whether this
is something you love, because you’re not going to
get rich or famous doing it. Putting together the puzzle
of the past has to satisfy your intellectual curiosity. To
be a good historian you have to be a person who has empathy
and is able to suspend your own judgments and view the world
through someone else’s eyes.”
Are
things different now for young women historians? “The world is wide open
now for studying women’s pasts. You can write about
anything if you can bring intelligence to bear.”
Why
did she pioneer women’s
history? “One of the reasons was because I had a daughter.
I didn’t want her to look into the past and not be
able to see her face.”#
