Gender Difference, National Identity and Professing History: the Case of Alice Stopford Green

ISSN： 1363-3554

Source： History Workshop Journal, Vol.53, Iss.1, 2002-01, pp. : 118-127

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Abstract

This article explores the relation between the work of history and a changing sense of national and gender identities in the life of Alice Stopford Green. Born within the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, she began such work as assistant to her husband, J. R. Green, one of the pioneers of social history. When he died a few years after their marriage, she found her own calling as a historian, a calling she understood in terms of the world of letters, rather than that of the 'professional' historians then emerging within universities. For her history was, and remained, a clearly political undertaking, especially for the part she believed it must play in any education for citizenship. In her widowhood, however, there is evident also a shift in her own national and gender identities. Her work on English history was within a few years entirely abandoned for the pursuit of Irish history, as she came to see herself as Irish rather than English. While thorough in her scholarship, she also began to think about the particular contribution that 'woman' might make to the world of letters, a contribution that she often conceptualized in terms of an emphasis on the 'picturesque' in history. The practice of her calling came increasingly, therefore, to refelect a sense of herself as a woman, and more especially, as an Irish woman.