A Discussion with Dr. Wiesner-Hanks
[Originally published 11 August 2021]
August 2021
Interviewer: Dr. Katherine McKenna Discussant: Dr. Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Welcome back to the SSEMWG Blog and the Founding Mothers project page. Founding Mothers is an open-access digital history project dedicated to exploring the Society’s origin and evolution. It also aims to illuminate the larger disciplinary history of Renaissance women’s studies in the American academy while forging lasting connections between premodern scholars at all career levels. In this post, Blog Editor Katherine McKenna interviews Merry Wiesner-Hanks about the Society’s formation, her seminal contributions to the field of women’s history, activism in the academy, and the state of the humanities today. Dr. Wiesner-Hanks is a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and the 2017 winner of the Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. This dicussion represents one of the project’s inaugural set of interviews.
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McKenna: Dr. Wiesner-Hanks, thank you for volunteering your time and stories as a contributor to Founding Mothers. Like many of our readers, I have followed your scholarship on early modern Germany, religion and gender, and, more recently, classroom pedagogy since I first joined the Renaissance Studies community as a graduate student. Your foundational monograph Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe has motivated countless students to develop a deep interest in the lives of premodern women (and graced many a comps list!), while your work on the Attending to Early Modern Women Conference has cultivated a critical space of community-oriented intellectual exchange for the field. It is an honor to speak with you today.
To start, I’d like to ask you to reflect on the Society’s early history. You were a member of the SSEMWG’s organizing committee and attended its inaugural meeting on April 23, 1994. What inspired the formation of this professional organization, and how did you first become involved? Why dedicate a group to the study of early modern women specifically?
Wiesner-Hanks: The Society developed from discussions held at the first Attending to Women conference in 1990, at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference (SCSC) and at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), and from groups that met at the Folger, in New York, and at other places on the East Coast. The first Attending to Women focused on England, so I didn’t attend, but I got pulled into discussions shortly after that, as someone who works on continental Europe and also as someone from the Midwest. All the organizers of the first Attending to Women and most of the organizers of the then-SSEMW were from the East Coast; most worked on England and the majority were in literature, so I represented all kinds of diversity, in one person. This was just as people were beginning to get email, so much of the organizing was done through phone calls, and even letters (!)
The two main U.S. early modern scholarly societies (SCSC and RSA) were open to scholarship on women, and by the early ‘90s, they had quite a few women officers and council members as well as members. Elizabeth Gleason was the president of SCSC in 1990-91 and I was in 1993-1994; RSA had female presidents about then as well. (That was decidedly not true earlier; my first SCSC was in the late ‘70s, and there were only a handful of women then.) So, the issue was not that what existed was unfriendly, just that there was clearly enough interest for both a conference and a society that focused on women as well as for sessions on women at more general conferences. The original Attending in 1990 had about thirty sessions and the 1994 one had forty, from many different disciplines, so there were plenty of people in the field. The various East Coast discussion groups were active. Mary Beth Rose had organized a conference at the Newberry Library on Renaissance women in the late ‘80s, and we were talking about organizing some kind of group at the Newberry as well.
So first there were informal groups, then Attending to Women, and then the Society. After it was founded, the SSEMW held its annual meeting at Attending in the years that there was one, though the two have no legal relationship with one another. From 1990 to 2009, Attending was held at the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at Maryland. When the Center was closed in 2010 by a short-sighted administration seeking to save money, the organizers there thought that would be the end of the conference. But I had a dean who owed me a favor (long story), and I was able to get support for three Attending to Women conferences at UW-Milwaukee, for 2012, 2015, and 2018. The dean supported a graduate PA (project assistant) and the conference otherwise more or less broke even (I covered some expenses from my research budget). I decided to offer membership in SSEMW along with conference registration, and the majority of conference attendees opted for that, so SSEMW membership went up every year that there was an Attending to Women. That ended up making the relationship even more fuzzy, as the money for memberships was transferred each year the conference was held from the UWM conference account to SSEMW. This turned out to be a benefit, however, as after the last Milwaukee Attending in 2018, I had a surplus, and I transferred it to SSEMW, rather than risk it being swallowed up in the maw of UWM accounting. I assume it’s somehow still designated for Attending in the SSEMW account books, and the next conference organizers have this to use if they need it. (The next Attending will be in 2022 at the Newberry, and the one after that most likely at Georgetown.)
McKenna: You also served as the Society’s third President. Could you walk me through that experience and any projects you lead or participated in during your tenure on the executive board?
Wiesner-Hanks: This was a long time ago, and I’m not very good at archiving my own career, so I don’t have any documents left from then other than the Attending programs. What we did in the early years was to plan sessions at conferences, publish the newsletter (this had been the newsletter of the New York Women in the Renaissance group), network, try to advocate for graduate students and junior faculty, and support each other’s scholarship. I was President from 1996-97, and the third Attending to Women was in 1997, so there was planning for that.
McKenna: You mention the importance of community and supporting one another’s scholarship. May I ask who some of your mentors were when you were coming up in the field? I think it’s fair to say that the university as institution is hierarchical and notoriously change resistant; I wonder what kind of advice/support you received in terms of (for example) navigating salary negotiations, challenging gendered service expectations, and generally claiming space in areas traditionally reserved for white men?
Wiesner-Hanks: The first job that I had was at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL, a Lutheran school, and salaries were not something anyone talked about, much less negotiated. (The only thing Lutherans like to talk about less than money is sex.) When I moved to UWM, salaries were a matter of public record, but the sense was that it was up to the department, not the candidate, to do salary negotiation. So in terms of salary advice, I never really had any. (Other than what remains the best advice, sadly: get an outside offer.) In terms of models to follow and mentors, the very few women who were in the field of Reformation/early modern German history when I first came into it were all wonderful. Miriam Chrisman was really the first in the U.S., and the men were awful toward her. She was the American editor of the Archives for Reformation History, and many of the German men still wouldn’t talk to her. But her express advice was “never let them get to you.” When Susan Karant-Nunn, Barbara Diefendorf, and I had a plenary session at SCSC in 2017 on the early years of scholarship on (and by) women in the sixteenth century, we dedicated it to Miriam and put a photo of her on the table in front of us. I met Natalie Davis when I was still a graduate student, and she has helped me—and so many others–with many things over the decades, from introducing me to theory (which in those days came from anthropology, not literary studies) to suggesting my name to people looking for chapter authors in collections to introducing me to people doing interesting work.
McKenna: In recent years, the Blog has dedicated multiple posts to the discussion of social justice, feminism, and advocacy. Were there links between the fledgling SSEMW and early advocacy efforts in higher education, politics, or the larger public sphere?
Wiesner-Hanks: By the time the SSEMW formed, there were a fair number of women in tenured and tenure-track positions, and courses on women were part of the offerings of many departments; however, I think it’s important to recognize that this had only happened very recently, and it was still not clear they would stay. When I wrote the proposal for the first edition of Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (published 1993), the Syndics of Cambridge University Press—their editorial board is called the Syndics—were somewhat hesitant about this “faddish” women’s history, wondering if the book would sell. (That it’s now in its fourth edition answers that question, and those guys are now all probably dead anyway.) So organizing sessions at conferences, networking, circulating syllabi and bibliographies, helping grad students meet each other, identifying funding opportunities, etc., were all to some degree “political” at the time. Barbara Lewalksi, the SSEMW’s first president, was the first woman to be tenured and hold endowed positions in English at Brown and Harvard University. Retha Warnicke (SSEMW’s second President) was the first woman hired in the History Department at Arizona State University. I’m 14 years younger than Retha, (thank you Wikipedia for that info) but when I was in grad school in the late ‘70s, there were two women and fifty some men in the History Department at UW-Madison. Thus, simply by being visible as women scholars and by studying women, we were engaged in feminist advocacy. I think that’s still true in this era when there has been both a backlash against feminism, and against scholarship on women and gender. As I said in the blog post about Intersectionality and Activism from 2017, Powerpoint lectures can be activism, just as protest signs can.
I don’t recall SSEMW as a group taking public stands on issues, but then learned societies have only begun to do that within the last several decades. However, most of us who were involved in the Society were fighting various equity battles on our own campuses. I was Director of Women’s Studies at UWM in the ‘90s, a point at which the university was under a conciliation agreement with the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). The Department had found a pattern and practice of discrimination against women and minority faculty on campus as well as a hostile working environment and a lack of accountability (none of it a surprise to women on campus). I was involved with various task forces and committees charged with dealing with discrimination and harassment issues, as were many other people on their own campuses. We picked up tips about tactics and strategies from each other. No wonder we’re all so interested in women’s networks in the early modern period.
McKenna: For most of its history, the Society was called the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Members voted to add “Gender” to the Society’s name in 2018. How does this shift mirror the evolution of the field? That of your own scholarship?
Wiesner-Hanks: The name change came long after the field had already shifted, and to me at least, it wasn’t a big deal either way, as the SSEMW had already been doing gender for years, whatever its name was. It had also been doing sexuality as well. Back in the ‘80s, at the height of the “cultural/linguistic turn,” deciding to opt for “gender” over “women” seemed both a bit more avant-garde (oooh, theory!) and less political than “women,” which carried connotations of links to second-wave feminism. For a while, you could get funding for projects titled “gender” more easily than for those titled “women.” So lots of Women’s Studies programs changed to Gender Studies. Then the trend seemed to be “Women’s and Gender Studies,” as dropping the “women” turned out to be not such a good idea. For a while, people who did sexuality studies in some places hoped to get their own programs, but with cutbacks it was clear this wasn’t going to happen, and WGS became “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” in many places.
In my own scholarship, I’ve done all of them: My first book (1986) was on women; Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe first came out in 1993, and the first edition of Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World came out in 2000. Matt Kuefler and I are currently editing the four volume Cambridge World History of Sexualities, and we come from the two fields in which the history of sexuality took root: gay and lesbian history and women’s and gender history.
McKenna: What do you hope to see the Society accomplish in the future?
Wiesner-Hanks: I think various projects that the SSEMWG has started over the years are good ones, including travel grants to conferences and other support for grad students, book and article prizes, the blog, and a reasonably active list serve. (The EMW list-serv is not officially the SSEMWG’s, but it might as well be.)
The fact that the journal is now an official SSEMWG publication is fantastic, and should help make sure that future editorial teams continue to represent the broad interdisciplinary base that has made both the Society and the journal so strong. And now the journal has just adopted Editorial Manager as its submission system, bringing it finally into the twenty-first century.
So I think the Society should just keep doing what it’s doing, and wait and see a bit what the financial impact of having the journal will be. No one knows what impact COVID and European pressure about Open Access is going to have on scholarly journals (I speak as the senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal). I wish the group hadn’t decided to switch the annual meeting from the SCSC to RSA, but that was the vote, so there it is. Those of us not in literature might decide to go to RSA occasionally. Next year RSA will be Dublin, and that’s a nice place.
McKenna: As I write, we have now all weathered a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time the already-beleaguered humanities have been hit hard by financial difficulties, the suspension or closure of graduate programs, and the rapid shrinkage of the academic job market. What advice do you have for young scholars who are just contemplating enrolling in graduate school or who are wrapping up their PhDs and wondering where to go from here?
Wiesner-Hanks: I wish I had a good answer for this. The job market was awful the year I finished (1979) compared with what it had been in the early 70s; I was one of a handful of people out of the several hundred PhD students in History at UW-Madison (yes, several hundred) who got a job, and I got it not because I was better than other candidates, but because I was blond, Lutheran, and the man primarily doing the hiring had two daughters, so he thought it would be a good idea to give a woman an opportunity. But it is more awful now. The shrinking of graduate programs is grim, but it’s realistic. What I tell students (my own and people who ask, and also my own son) is that you should NOT go into debt for a PhD. If you don’t get support, don’t go. This is very, very hard for some students to hear, but it’s a reality, and the shrinkage of programs may have actually been several years too late. I don’t need to tell you that academia is a world of high risk and uncertain journeys right now. (Sort of like the early modern period.) We’re most familiar with it in the humanities, but it is also true in the sciences—as a physicist friend of mine told me, in 2019 (thus before the pandemic) there were only about 20 tenure track positions in physics in the entire U.S. So STEM is not much better, though there are industry and (now that Trump is out) government jobs as possibilities for some specialties. At least the learned societies, ACLS, and the NEH all recognize that the academic job market is in crisis, and are trying to support junior scholars as best they can. But there’s a limit to what they can do. I guess my basic advice is vote for people who believe there is such a thing as a public good, and believe in education. (I believe those people are called Democrats.)
McKenna: Hear hear!
Dr. Wiesner-Hanks, it has been a pleasure to learn more about your career and to speak with you about the interplay between the Society’s origins and the evolving landscape of Renaissance Studies. In a year characterized by separation and social distancing, it is a joy to meet scholars like yourself in the virtual world and to engage in conversations about the field through this blog as well as the SSEMWG’s online events. It is exciting to see the Society develop new modes of community-building in order to perpetuate the tradition of scholarly support you discuss above; thank you for taking the time to share your experiences with us today and for the work that made this fantastic organization possible.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Merry Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the long-time senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal, former editor of the Journal of Global History, and the editor-in-chief of the seven-volume Cambridge World History. She is the author or editor of thirty books and many articles that have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean. These include most recently: What Is Early Modern History? (Polity, 2021); (with Teresa A. Meade) Blackwell Companion to Global Gender History (Blackwell, 2nd ed. 2021); Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (Routledge, 3rd ed. 2020); Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 4th ed. 2019); (with Urmi Engineer Willoughby) A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History (Duke, 2018); Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam, 2018); A Concise History of the World (Cambridge, 2015). Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, among others. She was the Chief Reader for Advanced Placement World History, is on the board for the Society of History Education, and has also written a number of innovative source books and textbooks for use in college and high school Advanced Placement classroom. She is currently editing, with Mathew Kuefler, the four-volume Cambridge World History of Sexualities.
Katherine McKenna is the Editor of Founding Mothers and the SSEMWG Blog. She completed her PhD at Vanderbilt University in 2019 and is excited to be at Visiting Assistant Professor in History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Oberlin College for 2021–2022. Her research focuses on Renaissance social networks and the interplay between civic mythology, print culture, and gender in early modern Venice. Her work has been supported by the Mellon and Ahmanson Foundations, among others. Her work has been published with Routledge and EMWJ, and she is thrilled to have a chapter on Lucrezia Marinella’s epic poetry forthcoming with Classiques Garnier. When she is not grading, writing, or obsessively revising her book manuscript, she moonlights as a pizza aficionado and fledgling yogi.