Unveiling Relations: Women and Women--On Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's Research.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women has offered two critiques of history and feminist theory. On the one hand, it is an example of herstory, while, on the other hand, it speaks to contemporary feminist theories that criticize the category of gender and the binary identity it has reproduced and reaffirmed. In her 1975 article, the major theme--friendship and love between women--appeared as a challenge to women's history, as scholars were trying to assert the importance and validity of the field within traditional historical discourse.(1) If Carroll Smith-Rosenberg` had not inscribed this relationship in history, it would have disappeared and dissolved. In this perspective, social representations, wrought in significations and values, institute the reality and construct daily human images and historical practices, which turn out to be atemporal and universalizing.(2)

Therefore, history that obscured or forgot women's relations--or women themselves--reinforced the dichotomous division of sexes and buttressed a masculine hegemony deprived of all nuances. As Smith-Rosenberg inquired into the myriad relationships among women, she unveiled the historian's voluntary or involuntary forgetting that has blurred women's presence in the past. Her article intersected at two main axes: the impossibility of getting away from human historicity, which splits into peculiar cultural configurations, and the "possible," which represents the fundamental hypothesis of her research.(3)

As she inquired into the perspective of an unlimited possibility of social relations, Smith-Rosenberg came close to present-day inquiries and blurring of sexual and sexed identities. Thus, a feminist reading of Smith-Rosenberg's article reveals resistance to monotonous gender roles that reflect imposed and obligatory heterosexual …