Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg is the Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies, Emerita, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is known for her path-breaking scholarship in US women’s and gender history, and for her significant contributions to developing interdisciplinary programs and international scholarly networks addressing women’s history, gender studies, the history of sexuality, and cultural and Atlantic studies. Her groundbreaking article, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” established the legitimacy of lesbian history as it helped move women’s history from the margins to the mainstream of historical scholarship, creating “a template for how feminists could literally make history” (Potter, 2015). Her first publication in this area, the article “Dis-covering the Subject of the Great Constitutional Debate,” was awarded the Binkley-Stephenson Award by the Organization of American Historians in 1993. Her book, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity, won a Choice Award for Distinguished Scholarly Book in 2011.

Early life and education

Smith-Rosenberg was born in Yonkers, New York, 15 March 1936 to Carroll Smith and Angela Haug Smith. She grew up near Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx neighborhood described by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities; her heritage included a Caribbean grandfather, two centuries of slave-holding ancestors, and “on both sides, Irish grandmothers who didn’t speak to one another” (Smith-Rosenberg, 2007). She obtained a BA from the Connecticut College for Women (1957) and her MA (1958) and PhD (1968) from Columbia University, where she worked with Richard Hofstadter and Robert Cross (Smith-Rosenberg, 1971). From 1972 – 1975 she held a Post-doctoral Fellowship in Psychiatry at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she also taught.

Scholarship

Smith-Rosenberg has described her scholarly career trajectory as “built around forty years of university teaching, scholarly friends around the world, and… an increasingly progressive political vision” (Smith-Rosenberg, 2007), all of which have informed her approach to scholarship. Though she was trained in the tools and assumptions of conventional history, the political feminism of the 1960s led her to reshape the questions she asked and to push the boundaries of both the methods and the conceptual frameworks of traditional history (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 11). A principal goal was “to so redefine the canons of traditional history that the events and processes central to women’s experience assume historic centrality, and women are recognized as active agents of social change” (DuBois et al., 1980, pp. 56–57). She began by exploring women’s voices as inscribed in their private letters and diaries and integrating them into ongoing conversations with larger social, political and ideological movements.

Smith-Rosenberg’s early scholarship focused on problems of urban poverty in Victorian America and the ways in which an emerging bourgeois elite attempted to understand and contain them Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 20). This work, reflected in her first book, Religion and the Rise of the American City (1971), included study of the American Female Moral Reform Society. Intrigued by this “uniquely female institution” (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 11), she began seeking new sources of research material addressing the socialization of female and male roles, which in turn led her to the discovery of a passionate 40-year correspondence between two women. Suddenly, Smith-Rosenberg has recalled, “everywhere I looked, the private papers of ordinary women beckoned” (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 27).

The result was her groundbreaking article, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Presented at the second Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (Melosh, 1990), and published as the lead article in the first-ever issue of Signs, the Journal of Women in Culture and Society (1975), the article is among those most frequently cited in the scholarship on women’s history and is seen as one of the first and most influential explorations of the history of lesbianism, notable for placing female sexuality within the larger context of gender construction (Melosh, 1990). Until the article’s publication, to the extent it was addressed at all, the separation of gender roles between women and men and resultant sexual patterns was generally described only in terms of subordination and victimization. Smith-Rosenberg’s article, however, “offered a striking reinterpretation of the possibilities of separation” (Kerber, 1997, p. 166). As Smith-Rosenberg later noted,

In hundreds of cultures around the world and across time, women have lived in highly sex-segregated communities; spending their time with other women; developing female rituals and networks; forming primary emotional, perhaps physical and sexual, ties with other women. Such women develop visions of the world, values, indeed, I would argue, even symbolic and cosmological systems different in highly significant ways from those of the men with whom they shared sex, food, and children (DuBois et al., 1980, p. 61).

The article was so influential to the development of women’s history that, more than 40 years after its publication, it continues to be widely cited and discussed in major scholarly forums. As historian Claire Bond Potter pointed out to the Organization of American Historians (2015), “when feminist scholarship began to move definitively away from a movement context and women’s history became a multi-generational project, this article traveled in a way that few have” (see also Rupp, 2000).

Smith-Rosenberg went on to publish numerous articles addressing sexuality and gender relations in nineteenth century America, many of which were collected in her second book, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1985). Discussing the collection in the New York Times Book Review, Elizabeth Janeway (1985) wrote that “few historians have used the stream of myth and history so productively”; the book, she noted, “suggests a restructuring of the way we see history by presenting the reactions of men and women to the shock of industrial upheaval, and the interplay between their variant visions.”

In the 1980s Smith-Rosenberg was one of the principal organizers of the New Family and New Woman Research Planning Group. The Group brought together feminist scholars from the U.S. and Europe at a time when feminism was just developing as a political movement and a scholarly endeavor in many European countries. Feminist scholars from Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy as well as the United States attended. The planning group “believed we had a historical mandate to identify new domains, create new institutions, or try to carve out places for ourselves in areas that had previously excluded, devalued, and ignored us” (Friedlander et al., 1986). The group’s activities resulted in the volume, Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change (1986), edited by Judith Friedlander, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Smith-Rosenberg.

In her subsequent scholarship Smith-Rosenberg has continued to explore the roles and relations of traditionally marginalized populations in U.S. history and has increasingly turned her attention to the ways political, racial and national identities take form, culminating in her recent book, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (2010). The book explores the question, “Why did a nation of immigrants, a people who see themselves as a model for democracies around the world, embrace a culture of violence?” (Common-Place, 2011). Smith-Rosenberg traces this culture of violence “to the very processes by which the founding generation struggled to create a coherent national identity in the face of deep-seated ethnic, racial, religious, and regional divisions” (Ibid.) She describes how the country’s founders consolidated a national sense of self by describing a series of "Others," including African Americans, Native Americans, women, and those without property, whose differences from the country's founders overshadowed the differences that divided the founders themselves (Smith-Rosenberg, 2011). The result, she argues, is an American national identity subject to xenophobia, racism and paranoia. Reviewers have noted that, although its focus is on early U.S. history, the book speaks powerfully to U.S. political and cultural issues in a post 9/11 world (see, for example, Hansen, 2011; Jeffers, 2011).

Her latest book project both continues Smith-Rosenberg’s interest in American “Others” and reaches back to her own Caribbean heritage. The project explores the concept of modern citizenship as emerging from intense interactions among four violent events in the Atlantic world: the U.S., French, Haitian and Irish Revolutions. It “focuses on the complex triangulation of race, slavery, and gender, using them to examine the contradictions and ambivalence lying at the heart of both citizenship and, most especially, of liberal political thought” (Aspen Institute, n.d.).

Teaching

Smith-Rosenberg began her teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching initially, in the 1960s, when few women found positions in Ivy League Institutions, as an adjunct in the School of General Studies. In 1972 she became an assistant professor in both the Psychiatry and the History departments of the University. At Penn she founded and served as an early director of the University’s Women’s Studies Program (1982–1995). From 1996 until her retirement in 2008 she taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is the Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies (emerita). At Michigan, she served as graduate chair of the American Culture Program and director of the Atlantic Studies Initiative, which she helped to establish. She has also been a visiting scholar at a number of academic institutions, including Columbia University, New York University, the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes des Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Major publications

Bodies. In Catharine R. Stimpson & Gilbert Herdt (Eds.), Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, 21 – 40. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

This violent empire: The birth of an American national identity. Williamsburg, VA: Omahonda Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Surrogate Americans: Masculinity, masquerade, and the formation of a national identity. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 119 No. 5 (October 2004).

Black gothic: Race, gender and the construction of the American middle class. In Robert St. George (Ed.), Possible pasts: Becoming colonial in early America, 243 – 269. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Political camp or the ambiguous engendering of the American Republic. In Catherine Hall, Ida Bloom & Karen Hagermann (Eds.), Gendered nations: Nationalisms and gender order in the long nineteenth century, 271–292. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2000.

Captive colonizers: Ambivalence and an emerging “American identity.” In Catherine Hall (Ed.), Gender and History: Special issue on gender, nationalism and national identity, 177 – 195. Gender and History 5 (Summer 1993).

Dis-Covering the subject of the “Great Constitutional Discussion.” Journal of American History 79 No. 3 (December 1992), 841 – 873.

Discourses of sexuality and subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870 – 1936. In Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, & George Chauncey, Jr. (Eds.), Hidden from history: Reclaiming the gay & lesbian past, 264 – 280. New York: New American Library, 1989.

The body politic. In Elizabeth Weed (Ed.), Coming to terms: Feminism, theory, politics, 101–121. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.

Domesticating virtue: Rebels and coquettes in young America. In Elaine Scarry (Ed.), Literature and the body, 160 – 184. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Judith Friedlander, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Alice Kessler-Harris, & Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (Eds.) Women in culture and politics: A century of change. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Disorderly conduct: Visions of gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Ellen DuBois, MariJo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lerner & Carroll-Smith Rosenberg, Politics and culture in women’s history: A symposium. Feminist Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980), 56–57.

The female world of love and ritual. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1, 1975, 1 – 30.

Religion and the rise of the American city: The New York City mission movement 1812 – 1870. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971.

Beauty, the beast, and the militant woman. American Quarterly 23 (1971),

Academic appointments

University of Michigan, Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture and Women’s Studies (Emerita)

University of Cagliari, Italy, Visiting Professor, 2011; 2015.

Columbia University, Institute of African Studies, Visiting Professor, 2013

New York University, Visiting Professor, Fall 2010

Graduate Center, City University of New York, Visiting Professor, 2006 – 2010

Director, Atlantic Studies Initiative, University of Michigan, 1999, 2006, 2007– 2008

Graduate Chair, American Culture Program, University of Michigan, 1997 – 2002, 2006

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Visiting Professor, Winter 2004

University of Pennsylvania, Department of History and Psychiatry Department, 1971–1995

Trustees’ Council of Penn Women, Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, 1985–1995

Director, Women’s Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, 1982–1995

University of Canterbury, New Zealand, Visiting Professor, 1989

Frie Universitat, Berlin, Visiting Professor, 1979 – 1980

Research fellowships

• Michigan Humanities Fellowship, University of Michigan, 2000
• Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside, 1998
• Fellow, Rockefeller Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy, 1993
• Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, 1990–1991
• American Council of Learned Societies, Research Fellowship, 1989
• Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, 1987–1988
• Rockefeller Foundation, Research Fellowship, 1981
• American Council of Learned Societies, Research Fellowship, 1981
• American Antiquarian Society, Research Fellow, 1976–1977
• National Endowment for the Humanities (international conference director), 1975–1977
• Radcliff Institute, Harvard University, Research Fellow, 1975–1976
• Ford Foundation, Research Fellow, 1975–1976
• National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Psychiatry Fellow, 1972–1975
• The Grant Foundation, Research Fellowship, 1970–1972
• National Institute of Mental Health, Research Grant, 1969–1970
• Social Science Research Council, Pre-doctoral Research Training Fellowship, 1961–1962

Awards and prizes

Top 25 Academic Books Award for This Violent Empire, 2011

John D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities, University of Michigan, 2003

The R. Jean Brownlee Award, for Distinguished Service, University of Pennsylvania, 2003

Organization of American Historians Binkley-Stephenson Award for "Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion.’" Journal of American History, 1993

Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Prize for the best article for "Domesticating Virtue," 1988

Organization of American Historians Binkley-Stephenson Award for "The Female Animal,” 1973

Prize for best article, "Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman," American Quarterly, 1971

Phi Beta Kappa, Connecticut College for Women, 1957

References

• Claire Bond Potter, “The female academic’s world of love and ritual: Women’s history and radical feminism.” Paper presented to the Organization of American Historians, St Louis, MO, April 17, 2015.
• Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, remarks at the 50th reunion, Connecticut College, June 2, 2007
• Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the rise of the American city: The New York City mission movement 1812 – 1870 (Cornell University Press, 1971).
• Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly conduct: Visions of gender in Victorian America (Oxford University Press, 1985).
• Ellen DuBois, MariJo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lerner & Carroll-Smith Rosenberg, “Politics and culture in women’s history: A symposium,” Feminist Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980).
• Barbara Melosh, Recovery and revision: Women’s history and West Virginia, Volume 49 of West Virginia History, 1990. Volume 1, No. 1, Autumn 1975.
• Linda K. Kerber, “Separate spheres, female worlds, women’s place: The rhetoric of women’s history,” in Kerber, Toward an intellectual history of women: Essays (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 166.
• Lila Rupp, “Women’s history in the New Millenium: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s ‘The female world of love and ritual’ after twenty-five years,” Journal of Women’s History vol. 12 no. 3 (Autumn 2000), 8.
• Elizabeth Janeway, “New women, new problems,” review of Disorderly conduct in the New York Times Book Review, August 25, 1985.
• Foreword to Women in culture and politics: A century of change, edited by Judith Friedlander, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (Indiana University Press, 1986).
• Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This violent empire: The birth of an American national identity (Omahonda Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
• “Ask the author,” Common-Place, vol. 12 no. 1, October 2011.
• Reviews of This Violent Empire by Jonathan Hansen, American Historical Review, April 2011; Joshua Jeffers in Essays in History, 2011.
• The Aspen Institute, ADS Works: Carroll-Smith Rosenberg (http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-works/fellows/carroll-smith-rosenberg)
• University of Pennsylvania (http://www.sas.upenn.edu/gsws/content/carroll-smith-rosenberg)
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (http://www.las.umich.edu/history/people/ci.smithrosenbergcarroll)
• Philip Deloria, comments at “Taking the Atlantic World Turn: A Symposium in Honor of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg,” December 4, 2002.