Doing Justice with Rachel

Abstract

Doing Justice with Rachel Sharon Block (bio) I am honored that the scholars in this Forum took time away from other commitments to respond to my article. I am especially grateful for the ways their generative and generous responses have offered me the gift of further reconsideration. Credit also goes to William and Mary Quarterly editor Joshua Piker for putting together a wonderful group of multigenerational interlocutors—their Ph.D.s span almost three decades. Martha Hodes is able to reflect on the early development of the history of sexuality. Lara Putnam entered the profession around a decade later at the turn of the century and brings her expertise in microhistory and digital humanities methods. Midcareer scholars Marisa J. Fuentes and Christine DeLucia address the need to incorporate ethics into history-making grounded in Black feminist studies and Indigenous studies, respectively. Finally, SJ Zhang, an early career literary scholar, brings emotional resonance to her vibrant intellectual analysis of chronology and community. Hodes's reflections include a full-circle moment. My first publication appeared in the Sex, Love, Race volume that she edited.1 There I compared Rachel Davis and Harriet Jacobs to elucidate how slavery and race structured the possibilities of raped women's experiences of and responses to sexual violence. I struggled through scores of drafts of that essay while on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Omohundro Institute (OI), trying to compensate for the fact that my dissertation ended up focusing more on power and patriarchy than individual women's perspectives: their lives had been subsumed under the need to make rape a legitimate topic for historical study. Looking back, I suspect I had neither the skills nor the training to imagine methodological possibilities that seem obvious today. As a new Ph.D., I struggled to fit myself [End Page 715] into the constraints and commands of the historical profession. I wanted my work to be legible to those in positions of authority (especially those on hiring committees), and I was less sure that I should make myself fully legible. My commitment to confronting inequities, my personal pain for the people I studied, my fear that claims of meritocracy were not meant for me—all of these seemed far too personal to share with a profession that sometimes seemed less than welcoming. It felt far safer to be a historian of rape behind the privilege of an Ivy League Ph.D. and a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship. Several of the Forum writers picked up on my discussion of the contested role of advocacy in historical study in "Rewriting the Rape of Rachel." As I noted, when I was first writing about rape, senior colleagues would publicly warn me about the dangers of what they labeled advocacy history, under the rationale that not-white-male historians were unable to write objectively about their group's history. Even today, when more professional historians embrace historical advocacy to bring the past to bear on the present, there can still be skepticism about advocating for the present to outrightly inform the past.2 In a 2023 New Yorker article, historian David Blight is quoted stating that "there are tendencies these days among younger historians, but not just younger historians, to sometimes put advocacy ahead of scholarship," as if the two are necessarily in tension.3 DeLucia offers a valuable corrective, sharing with WMQ readers just a few of the impactful social and economic justice efforts that operate near the setting of Rachel's life. As critical university studies scholars have shown, "the great majority of mobilizing arises from community imperatives and lived needs for existence and well-being, not as outcomes of university committees or scholarly monographs." How can we better enable connections between, in DeLucia's words, the "work of historical scholarship and future-facing justice transformations"? Likewise, Zhang asks scholars to "[combine] a desire to know what happened in the past with the urgent creative relation-making necessary to our present survival."4 [End Page 716] Zhang's evocative essay leaves me grateful that a new generation is far less bound by perceptions of archival limitations that wedged historians toward narrowed narrations and blinkered habits of engagement. She advises building on the...